You may remember that I teased this a few weeks back, but Jason Chen and the kind folks at StoryBundle have debuted the Video Game StoryBundle that I curated, and man, I’m happy with the results – 10 DRM-free game culture/history eBooks, going for a song.

No room here to thank everyone individually, but it’s wonderful to twin such diverse authors as Jordan Mechner (whose game diaries from the making of Prince Of Persia and Karateka are wonderful confessional reading) and Leonard Richardson (whose bold video game-tinged ‘Constellation Games’ sci-fi novel was originally commissioned for my own defunct GameSetWatch website!)

If you add 2 entire issues of Kill Screen magazine, ’250 Indie Games You Must Play’, the late great gonzo game mag author Bill Kunkel‘s memoirs, Jamie Russell’s meticulously researched ‘Hollywood & games’ book, Brendan Keogh’s book-length ‘Spec Ops: The Line’ analysis, and video game pioneer Ralph Baer reflecting on his career (plus a sekrit bonus we haven’t unleashed yet!), you get… something I’m incredibly happy with. Consider picking up a copy? Continue reading →

[Back in 1997, I was working in the game industry as a game designer at Kuju Entertainment, but also interviewing a host of interesting game creators via email in my spare time. Following my interview with Valve's Marc Laidlaw, this second reprint in this series is with Apogee and 3D Realms co-founder Scott Miller, a fascinating guy.

Miller started programming games in 1975, and was one of the key pioneers of shareware games with Apogee (which published id's first game Commander Keen.) He was then instrumental in Duke Nukem's success as a 3D Realms (Apogee's alter ego) co-founder, and had a big hand in the rise of franchises like Max Payne and notable 'creator-first' '90s publisher Gathering Of Developers.

Although still being somewhat involved with 3D Realms as it spiraled into Duke Nukem Forever's (near)-infinite loops, Miller's most recent company was Radar Group, which was another attempt at a 3DR/G.O.D style incubator. But Radar never seems to have got off the ground, and even his LinkedIn page seems about 4 or 5 years out of date.

In any case, here's a snapshot interview after Duke Nukem 3D hit big, and his company was majorly on the ascendant - although working on multiple titles (Prey, Duke Nukem sequel) that their perfectionism would end up delaying beyond all sense. But it's super interesting that Scott was an early disruptor of publishers - and now that disruption is back full-force, powered by digital distribution and disintermediation. What goes around, comes around?]

Simon: How much of a say do you think the more senior management of a company (such as yourself in 3D Realms) should have in the design of a product?

Scott Miller: In our company, the two owners, George Broussard and myself, are intimately involved with game development. George is the project leader on Duke Nukem Forever, and I handle games by our by our external teams, such as Balls of Steel by Wildfire Studios (in Australia), and Max Payne by Remedy Entertainment (in Finland).

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I’ve been a fan of ‘electronic media bundles’ since the original Humble Bundle launch, and obviously had a lot of fun co-creating the game bundle website Indie Royale, until I handed our half over to the Tenshi folks at the start of the year.

Although I’m plenty busy in my dayjob helping to run GDC and Black Hat, I was keen to continue working with bundles for fun. After a (never-launched) attempt at something more complex and music-related called Triselector, I got talking to the super-smart ex-Gizmodo/Lifehacker editor Jason Chen about his StoryBundle project, based around another of my loves, the written word, which works pretty much like this:

“StoryBundle is a way for people who love to read to discover quality indie books written by indie authors. Think of us like a friend that scours independent books for undiscovered gems, then bundles these titles together for one low price that you decide.”

Having been a patron of StoryBundle before (plug: their Fantasy Bundle is now running!), I’m impressed at how smooth their site is – all books are in DRM-free .epub and .mobi formats, and you can even easily email the books you buy to your Kindle hardware/software, using their website.

So I thought I should apply the concept to something I know about – and Jason and I have agreed I’m going to be curating a bundle (and maybe more than one, depending on how the first one does!) focusing on video game history and culture, planned for launch in the next couple of months.

So I wanted to both pre-announce the bundle for prospective readers, and ask – if you’ve written a book in this area, you hold the rights to it (or you’ve got your publisher to agree to the concept!) and you’re interested in having it in a ‘pay what you want’ eBook bundle, please contact me and we’ll check it out. Super excited to see what’s out there in game writing that I might not be aware of!

Although I’m also doing an open call for submissions, we already have a bunch of verbal yes-es from authors/publishers for the first bundle, including first-person writing from renowned game industry pioneers, leading critical writing about games of yesterday and today, and even some acclaimed game-related fiction.

So if you’re just a reader – as opposed to an author – you should still keep an eye on this fine bundle of upcoming words. Thanks for reading, and more soon…

[Back in 1997 - when i was all of 22 years old - I was working in the game industry as a designer, at Kuju Entertainment in the UK. But I was also fascinated with writing about game development and design, even before I started contributing to Gamasutra in 1998. So I set out to interview a host of interesting game creators via email about the business.

At that time, I think email requests for interviews were still fairly novel, so I got a fair amount of replies. I'll be reprinting the most interesting ones on my blog over the next few months, to save them from the digital scrapheap - and we'll start out with an interview with Valve's Marc Laidlaw, even before Half-Life was released.

Later on, Marc was kind enough to write the foreword for my O'Reilly book Gaming Hacks. And it turns out my intuition in this interview that Half-Life would have a 'degree of subtlety' in it was correct, given the mighty franchise Valve has built - and currently sits on, Smaug-like. But, onward...]

It’s rare indeed that someone in the games industry has a past outside it. Sure, there’s the occasional architect drafted in for level design duties, but most of the people making games have never done anything but.

Which is what makes Marc Laidlaw all the more remarkable. From leading cyberpunk author and journalist to a writer and level designer at Valve Software, the makers of the forthcoming “Half-Life”, he brings quite a different perspective to computer game design. And it goes like this…

Simon: What was the first computer game you ever played?

Marc Laidlaw: As far as arcade games go, Tempest was my first addiction, but by the time the arcade craze started to sweep the nation I was already too old to really get the reflexes hardwired into my tender neurons. I was pretty lousy at the standards: Asteroids, Missile Command, etc.

At this time, the closest thing I’d seen to a PC was the Colossus in the computer center at the University of Oregon, where for a brief period I dabbled as a programmer, punching instructions on cards with a huge card-punching machine the size of a Geo Metro and then submitting them to the cranky guy behind the counter who would tell me to go away and come back in an hour (or two) to discover that my program had failed because of a punch-card typo in the first card.

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Since the divestiture announcement is now out, I figured it might be good to reflect on the past, New Year stylee, by talking a bit about the beliefs underpinning Indie Royale.

Indie Royale [Wikipedia page] is the independent video game bundle site that I co-created for my employer UBM (GDC, Gamasutra, etc!) in association with download store Desura back in October 2011. I’ve done most of the ‘A&R‘ – game selection/ordering – for Indie Royale to date.

As referenced above, we’ve now sold our half of Indie Royale to veteran UK devs, investors and consultants Tenshi Ventures, the firm headed by former TIGA Chairman Ian Baverstock and Jon Newth. As I noted in the comments to the Gamasutra announcement on this shift:

“Re: Indie Royale, we really love the brand, since we made it, and it’s doing well, but we’re just too busy on GDC, Gamasutra etc to devote the time to it that it deserves. Ian and the folks at Tenshi can totally do that. So – yay!”

So, since I first talked about Indie Royale on this very blog, we’ve featured 28 bundles and more than 100 top-quality PC, Mac and Linux indie games. We’ve distributed over 500,000 bundles and more than 2.5 million games – grossing millions of dollars for devs along the way.

But it’s been interesting to see the field for discounted independent PC games (both singles and bundles) rapidly fill. And in working long-term on the site with wonderful folks like Desura‘s Scott Reismanis and his crew – as well as in-house stars for us such as Bethany Coambs and IndieGames.com‘s John Polson, I feel like there’s some lessons on – well, style – I wanted to get across.

The (magnificent) 7 lessons from Indie Royale have played out a bit like this:

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Having lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for the past decade-plus, one thing I’ve discovered is a awesome trove of locations related to arcade-style gaming.

Whether it be classic amusement attractions, vintage or modern pinball, or arcade gaming, there’s some great stuff out here. And I couldn’t find a good list online. So here goes:

[UPDATE V1.2: Sept. 10th, 2012 - SC Beach Boardwalk added, Southtown Arcade has closed. Ping me via the contact form with updates or suggestions.]

California Extreme – Santa Clara, CA – an event that only happens in the South Bay once a year (next is July 13-14, 2013, as of this blog post!), but MUST be listed here due to the amount and rarity of arcade and pinball titles displayed. Hundreds of games are trucked in to the Hyatt’s ballroom, and I’ve blogged about some of the rarities before. But if you want to see 15-20 vector arcade machines all in a row, or some incredibly rare prototypes (Marble Madness 2?!), you need to make it here for the weekend.

Gamecenter Arcade – San Mateo, CA – Haven’t made it here yet, but the Peninsula ‘Japanese-style arcade’, focused around fighting games, has good reviews on Yelp, and seems to be hewing a similar path to Southtown. Nice to see Virtual On: Operation Moongate and a late-period Beatmania on the list of games, too.

Golfland Sunnyvale – Sunnyvale, CA – Right down in the South Bay, this minigolf/arcade location was the original test arcade for a number of the U.S. arcade companies, including Capcom. Perhaps not what it used to be, but still has plenty of arcade games and a few pinball machines. (There’s a weekly ‘unlimited arcade play’ deal, and three other locations, with variable machine-age, in San Jose, Milpitas, and Castro Valley.)

Musee Mecanique - San Francisco, CA – nowadays over by Fisherman’s Wharf, this long-standing SF institution has a wonderful selection of early amusement machines from a century or more ago. There’s a super-neat mechanical horse, a plethora of awesome dioramas, and all kinds of other neat vintage coin-operated machines you won’t see anywhere else. Recommended. Continue reading →

[Just wanted to post about this one on my personal blog, since I'm proud of the effort and the work that went into it. Since I started Indie Royale as part of my company's video game properties last October, we've really tried not to use charity as a crutch to sell bundles - something that Humble Bundle has been good at avoiding, mind you.

In any case, myself and Bethany Coambs - alongside Scott Reismanis at our tech partner Desura - decided to do things differently for our charity outreach, and so our All-Charity Pack has 100% of the revenue going to some extremely worthy charities.

Almost $25,000 has been raised so far, with a few hours still left to pitch in, and _massive_ thanks must been given to the indie devs and musicians who got involved for such worthy causes, as well as the generous gamers who donated. Official announce, which I co-wrote, is below...]

Indie Royale is proud to present a very special game bundle – the All Charity lightning pack – featuring four awesome indie games and three outstanding chiptune albums/EPs, with 100% of the proceeds going to four extremely worthy charities.

The bundle’s generous developers have each hand-picked a charity for their game, including UNICEF’s Haiti aid, vital human rights work from Amnesty International, free speech and privacy advocacy from the EFF, and the global poverty programs of ActionAid.

Continue reading →