Resolutions

Today I went on another of those "great, all-morning voyages" of discovery through the internet. Via Jonathan Blow's blog, I found his and Chris Hecker's "New Year's Resolutions for Game Industry Newbies," which quite rightly suggests that anyone aiming to break into the games industry actually get up and make something great, which no amount of chatting with developers or reading industry news can make up for.

Elsewhere on Hecker's site I found his transcript of the original print ad for Electronic Arts, presumably from 1983 or '84. It seems sadly ironic now, more than 20 years later, to think of such noble (and still relevant) aspirations leading to the advent of more than a dozen Need for Speed sequels, the EAspouse debacle, and "one to three feature innovations per title."

I found a strangely moving elegy to the end of Bob Barker's tenure on The Price is Right through, embarrassingly enough, googling my own URL (the writer references "Evelyn" in a post about photography of the dead and dying.)

Finally, via GameSetWatch's most recent microlink roundup, I found SexyVideogameland, the blog of Leigh Alexander. In one of her posts, she profiles an extremely surreal and fascinating Japanese point-and-click flash game called "Guest House," which is worth playing through for its stifling atmosphere and wonderfully realized expression of dream logic (though I'll admit I had to look up a walkthrough to find the stupid coin hidden on top of one of the breaker boxes.)

The post linked from GameSetWatch contains scans and transcripts of Alexander's childhood Phantasy Star II fanfiction, hand-bound with a stapler and lovingly illustrated in glorious colored marker. It reminded me of all the reams of paper I'd filled with video game drawings as a kid, hand-bound with a stapler and illustrated in glorious colored pencil, a few of which I've held onto over the years. My earliest writings were illustrated stories based on Mike Tyson's Punch Out!!, which I was fairly obsessed with at five years old. Then I moved on to drawing my own versions of Contra, Double Dragon, and the TMNT arcade game, including pages of ideas for new weapons and levels. It's funny to think that it took me til halfway through college to realize I wanted to be a video game designer.

The final stop of my journey through the internet today was this piece of critical advice for bloggers, via Duncan's Hit Self-Destruct. It certainly describes my mindset for the first year of Fullbright, where I didn't even have comments enabled or a hit tracker installed. A lot has changed since then, and it's a credo that I need to always keep in mind going forward.