The Simon Carless Experience

Wow, well firstly, thanks for all the comments on my announcement of my net.label Monotonik going on hiatus. I know there were a lot of people out there who cared about it and the musicians on it, but it was great to see feedback from artists and fans alike.

Anyhow, one of the (many) reasons Monotonik is shuttered for now would be my day job, since I’ve just been promoted and will now, well, quoting extensively: “take leadership of Think Services’ Game Group, a division of London-headquartered United Business Media, as Global Brand Director.”

Furthermore: “In his new role, Carless will be responsible for the strategy and vision for the group’s portfolio of products, which currently include the industry-leading Game Developers Conferences (GDC, GDC Europe, GDC Austin, GDC China, and GDC Canada), as well as renowned game website Gamasutra.com, the Gamasutra Network of websites, and Game Developer magazine.”

So, I’ve been involved in some of this already, obviously. But I’m now also officially overseeing the awesome GDC shows, as well as our magazine and websites. As I mention, I’m jazzed to be both keeping up our current lines and expanding the Game Group to help game creators in new ways. Or that’s the plan - watch this space!

Otherwise, I’m just back from a random trip to New York, fortunately not very work-related, and I’m recovering from a cold and digging in for the hectic pre-GDC 2010 season, while keeping up with all the regular fun and games. Happy holidays to all!

So, it would appear to have come to ‘End Of An Era - Pt.II’ for my electronic music net.label Monotonik, which I’ve been running since 1996 in .MOD and .MP3 form. In that time, we’ve put out over 350 free-to-download releases, initially spanning all forms of electronic music, but settling down into what you might call idm.

There’s a lot to be proud of in our history, which started with the label being called Mono, then a split into two ’sister labels’, Mono211 and Monotonik, and then a concentration on Monotonik for the last few years. For starters, there’s the fact that our discography has almost 2.5 million plays on Last.fm and the MP3 releases are fully documented on Discogs.com by fans and collectors.

And between the main site and the Archive.org collection, there’s been millions of downloads of our music over the past 13 years. (If you want to start somewhere, try Christopher Whaley’s ‘10 Years Of Monotonik’ mix.)

While I’m not saying we wouldn’t do _something_ with Monotonik in the future, I’ve been building up a backlog of releases for much of this year, to little releasing effect. So I’ve decided to debut almost a year’s worth of great content - six releases - at once, and go on hiatus with the label. The releases we’re putting out now are:

- MTK214: Malty Media - ‘Buk Buk Buk EP’ - a New Zealand duo’s Orb-esque sample-strewn frippery.
- MTK215: Casimir’s Blake - ‘The Silence In Fragile Space’ - a UK artist’s full drifting album-length stellar odyssey.
- MTK216: Clark Vent - ‘Scene Sexshun’ - bleepy super-swift idm goodness from another pseudonym of Finnish artist Flutterspot.
- MTK217: Kuu - ‘Pixels EP’ - veteran Monotonik artist Substance returns with uptempo idm/breaks gorgeousness.
- MTK218: Dead Eros - ‘Bone Mountain’ - another stalwart Mtk releaser ends things out with spiky U.S. electronic goodness.
- MTK219: Mike Kidd - ‘Impermanence EP’ - nothing lasts forever, as this drum and melody-strewn debut exhibits gloriously enough.

We don’t intend to release anything else for the foreseeable future and are closed for demo submissions. And in case this really is the end, some things I’d like to highlight as particularly memorable or important to me over the years of running Mono:

Read more…

Whoa, it’s been a while, and I’m just back from almost 4 weeks away from the Bay Area (and a couple of trips before that!) - all kinds of strange but edifying fun. So let’s go through what I’ve been up to:

- It was my first time at Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle (Flickr gallery). I sat on a panel with Spelunky’s Derek Yu and Dishwasheri’s James Silva, and wrote a piece for Gamasutra about why the show is such a delight.

- Next, GDC Austin in Texas (Flickr gallery) was held in mid-September, and I co-organized the two-day Indie Games Summit there, as well as helped report on the full show. We also co-organized a couple of game documentary showings at the amazing Alamo Drafthouse during that week, including the v.interesting ‘Into The Night’ doc with Jason Rohrer and Chris Crawford.

- Then it was off on my Eastern jaunt, starting with Tokyo Game Show (Flickr gallery), which was another chance to check out Tokyo and a slightly consolidated, but still fascinating TGS. The ‘Sense Of Wonder Night’ experimental game showcase, which I help judge and also documented, was a highlight again - the presentation videos from it are up now.

- Next, we were off to Melbourne, Australia (Flickr gallery), where I spoke at the Digital Distribution Summit, thanks to the nice folks at Film Victoria, who announced local government grants for XBLA, PSN, and other digital titles at the Summit. After that, Holly joined me and we took some holiday in Melbourne and then Sydney, where we also took a jaunt out to the beautiful Blue Mountains, dodging deliciously inclement weather along the way!

- Finally, it was to GDC China in Shanghai (Flickr gallery), where I helped to present IGF China, for the best Asia-Pacific indie games, topped by Farbs’ rather fascinating Captain Forever. I also spoke about tips for success for Western digital distributed/indie titles, which I’m hoping was helpful for all.

And that’s the end of that slightly insane travel schedule for now, phew. The good news (for my jetlag!) is that, since the Independent Games Festival deadline is at the beginning of November and there’s lots of work to do on that, I won’t be traveling quite so much, leading up to GDC 2010. Until next time…

Still a little jetlagged from our trip to Cologne, Germany to GDC Europe, which was held ahead of the big GamesCom consumer event, and was a real blast for me and my colleagues (who organized GDCE!) in its first year.

Here’s our full Gamasutra coverage of the event — mainly done by me — and you’ll see some really neat lectures from Lionhead’s Peter Molyneux, Quantic Dream’s David Cage, and CCP’s Hilmar Petursson, whose announcement of the Dust 514 console MMO was one of the neatest surprises of the week.

Naturally, there’s a Flickr gallery of my Cologne visit which includes bits and pieces from GDC Europe, GamesCom, plus the rather delicious Chocolate Museum. Browse it at your own calorie-related risk.

Otherwise, we’re keeping on - Game Developer mag EIC Brandon Sheffield compiled an awesome ‘dirty coding tricks’ piece that we reprinted on Gamasutra this week to gigantic page views, so wanted to point that out. And just saw District 9 - man, what a great movie - and it’s time to wander off for dinner. After that, a full work week and then the GDC 2010 Advisory Board meeting in Napa - hoping to blog about that to give an idea of the behind-the-scenes effort. Hurrah!

Well, it’s a busy (and also air conditioning-compatible!) summer down here in San Jose, and I haven’t been going full-bore on our various projects _all_ the time.

So I’ve been trying to break up work with a modicum of leisure - hence the attached picture from San Jose’s Obon Festival, a fun yearly local event in our little Japantown - which even has a ukelele store, nice. For further relaxation, me and Holly are off to Yosemite next weekend - should be fun.

Other than that, some random notes - since more and more people are using Twitter and Facebook to keep up with the news, we just added a Gamasutra Twitter feed (and a Gamasutra Jobs one) and fixed up the Gamasutra Facebook page with proper updates, hurrah.

After Yosemite, there’s a couple of weeks and then I get into a pretty unprecedented travel period, which includes GDC Europe and GamesCom in Cologne, Germany, then Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle (where I’m on a panel about indie games, I do believe), then GDC Austin, then… Japan, Australia, China?

We’ll see if I actually make it to all of those, or whether I short out from jetlag like a grinning loon. More soon…

Time for a little update, then, and the most important thing that’s happened since my last post was the 2009 E3 Expo in Los Angeles, of course.

(Forgot to bring my camera, doh, but Vincent Diamante took the above picture, and has a great gallery on Flickr for those who want to check out visuals of the game industry’s big publisher-side showcase.)

Anyhow, the E3 week at the Los Angeles Convention Center (and the subsequent GDC Board Meeting in Century City) were both a lot of fun, but now it’s back to the grindstone!

We just announced that we’ll be doing an Indie Games Summit and an iPhone Game Summit at GDC Austin this September, and I’ve been grading submissions and dealing with invitations for those two events of recent - v.excited to see the indie/iPhone spirit get added to GDC Austin’s awesome existing focus.

Other than that, we’re still plugging along with all the awesome magazine, websites and events that we generally run, and we’re ramping up for an interesting announcement soon (hopefully!) about a new partnership. In the meantime, I’m off to the Great American Food And Music Fest this weekend, so if I turn up in a meat-related coma afterwards, don’t blame me!

As we wander into May, we’re having fun and ramping things up for summer. Oh, and first, let’s mention the awesome Katamari Damacy thrift store painting mash-up we picked up on Etsy recently (see pic!) - thanks to loudxmouse’s painting Katamari-zation services for that!

What else is happening? Me and Holly wandered off to Sacramento the other week to do the tourist/relaxing thing. There’s some pics up on Flickr, of course, but we didn’t see Mr. Schwarzenegger - I think he retires to the OC at weekends. Oh, and it was blissfully rainy.

Otherwise, work is going great - our dynamite team on Gamasutra, including Leigh Alexander, Kris Graft, Chris Remo and Christian Nutt, are doing an amazing job of providing incisive news and article writing/procurement. I’m also really delighted that Eric Caoili, formerly a Gamasutra editor, is co-editing our alt.weblog GameSetWatch nowadays, really helping bulk it up with interesting and alternate game links. Back soon.

Phew, so it’s a couple of weeks past Game Developers Conference 2009 now - and it really turned out amazingly, I think. You can check out full show coverage at Gamasutra’s GDC 2009 event page, to give you a good idea of the breadth and depth of content.

Some of the highlights - the Independent Games Festival and accompanying Indie Games Summit, which I’m obviously intimately involved with, were a major success, I think, with packed IGS rooms (pictured!) and some great alt.press coverage, such as from The Onion’s AV Club.

There are even some impending documentaries about indie games that were filming at GDC, so looking forward to seeing those. And there are so many other things I could say about GDC this year - but I think Vincent Diamante’s Flickr photo set gives a really neat visual overview - so why not go check that out?

Otherwise, my regular work and non-work projects seem to be going great - feel free to follow me on Twitter if you want regular microblog-ish updates on, uhm, random semi-inconsequential things. Oh well, the Internet, whaddya gonna do?

Trying to update this weblog every few weeks with ‘exciting news’, or at least, some of the major, not totally irrelevant stuff happening in my life.

Well, as trailed in the previous blog post, we did indeed visit England and Barcelona as well, and it was pretty darn neat - extremely cold (and snowy!) in England, and a bit chilly in Spain, but that’s what you want if you’ve lived in California for almost 10 years.

The other big thing that’s happened since the last post, of course, is that we’ve relaunched Gamasutra with a major graphical and functionality upgrade - go check out the new site now. As we noted in the relaunch post, the major additions include discipline-specific section, an enhanced contractors area, and most importantly, blogs for all Gamasutra members.

This has already led to some really amazing posts, both in the invite-only Expert and regular Member blog sections, such as Mark DeLoura’s game engine survey, which is pretty much unprecedentedly good, as well as a whole host of other neatness. We’re going to continue to refine and improve things as we move towards Game Developers Conference 2009, in just 2 weeks - so expect another blog after I’ve recovered from that.

2009 has started out just as crazy as 2008 for me, in largely good ways, despite the economy starting to take a decided turn for the worse.

For starters, indie games seem to be getting all kinds of great mainstream coverage, from New York magazine to MSNBC and beyond, and the Independent Games Festival is really blasting it this year, too. We just announced finalists in various categories, and the awards and Indie Games Summit are taking place at GDC in San Francisco this March.

Despite the downturn, the various bits of the business I run - Gamasutra, Game Developer magazine, and associated Gamasutra Network sites - are still outpacing our competitors and holding their own.

We’re also doing some interesting things with Game Developer Research - for example, our new iPhone game report, surveying developers on that fast-growing market, is getting plenty of attention.

Oh, and we visited the California Academy of Sciences, hence the pictured T-rex - great place. Plus, me and Holly are off to visit my parents (and my new niece) in the United Kingdom in a couple of weeks, with a sidetrip to Barcelona to enjoy the Spanish sun in February. Hurray.