Bullet Points @ timlongo.com

I wanted to share a pretty neat series of events that I recently experienced during the first week of a launch for a friend of mine’s game. Nothing can beat the feeling that you are witnessing someone’s dream come true in real time and you are even able to contribute to that dream with your own monetary support. Game Development is hard enough as a medium even when you have the backing of a big publisher. But when you can find a way to make a game under smaller more controlled circumstances and make it work for you and your team and actually have some success under that model, in this day and age, it gives you some hope for the future. The independent games movement is the obvious example here. No longer is there an explicit need for a removed executive group’s opinions on what sells needed to rule the destiny of a creative endeavor. There are other ways. Here is some potential proof.

• 11:45pm on March 16th I turned on my Wii.
• I immediately go to the Nintendo Channel to see what kind of news in there.
• The first montage video of all upcoming games shows a mysterious gameplay video of a retro game called Bit.Trip Beat. It is surrounded by other first party titles as big as the new Punch Out. Cool!
• I then go to the shopping channel to buy the game I saw on the Nintendo Channel, the game I know was released today. Luckily I have left over points from my R-Type purchase. Perfect!
• Within minutes I have a new game on my Wii menu. The animated channel icon shows an 8-bit pong-like paddle and the simple word “beat”.
• I click on the game and see Commander Video for the first time ever on my TV screen. Apparently he is only a man, or something.
• I lose. The game is damn hard!
• It is late so I go to bed and dream in 8-bit.
• The next day I read a review on IGN giving the game 8/10. They have valid points.
• I listen to one of my favorite podcasts on Friday of that week and they discuss Bit.Trip Beat and speak positively about it. They rarely speak of Wii Ware games. It was a nice surprise.
• The next week I go to the Nintendo Channel and a behind the scenes video of the developers of the game, Gaijin Games, is now on the front page. NOA loves the game and considers it a perfect use of Wii Ware so they sent a film crew to talk to them.
  
• I am at the Nintendo keynote at GDC and the NOA speaker is announcing the new SanDisk feature and scrolls over about 50 games he has on the disk and other than Zelda 2 he makes sure to point out that Bit.Trip Beat is on the Wii as well. In good company.
• Later that night I go home and play the game. It is still freakin’ hard.
• A good friend and his partners have finally taken their game developer destiny into their own hands and in only 4 months created a game worthy of the Nintendo partnership. Commander Video has become a reality.

The three guys at Gaijin Games have officially made me jealous. To watch them from afar go through this process over such a short time and have so much fun doing it makes it hard to come to work on some days and worry about the large scale of many projects today. I knew that there would be a light at the end of the tunnel with small scope gaming, but I hadn’t anticipated that it would be so close to home. Congratulations to Alex, Chris and Mike. We have lots to live up to.

P.S. And yes, I still owe those guys a freakn’ Tomb Raider slot machine. I have no idea how I will ever manage to pay up.

Plus, look at this crazy stuff…see what you can do when you don’t have PR breathing down your neck.