The Simon Carless Experience

wha?

I’m Simon Carless - pleased to meet you. I’m a publisher, editor and writer, and a former video game designer. I originally hail from South London, England, but am nowadays living and working in the Bay Area of California, alongside my wife Holly and our trusty badger-hunting dachshund Rollo.

publishing/writing?

I’m currently the Global Brand Director at UBM Techweb’s Game Network, meaning that I oversee products such as Game Developers Conference - both the San Francisco mothership and satellite shows in Austin, Germany, China and Canada - plus the double Webby award-winning Gamasutra website and the Maggie award-winning Game Developer magazine, as well as a host of other websites.

I’m also Chairman Emeritus of the yearly ‘Sundance Festival for games’, the Independent Games Festival, which holds its awards at Game Developers Conference yearly. I also chair the committee for the Game Developers Choice Awards, and help program the Independent Games Summit and several other summits at the show.

As for other notable affiliations, I’m an Associate Member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, which means that I’m one of the judges for the yearly Webby Awards. I’m also the sole Western judge for Sense Of Wonder Night, an independent games showcase held at Tokyo Game Show every year by the Japanese game industry association CESA.

In addition, I’ve spoken on video games, indie game opportunities and digital distribution at venues including Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, the Digital Distribution Summit in Melbourne, and Ars Electronica in Austria.

previous journalism work

Previously to that, I was an editor at techgeek site Slashdot from under the moniker of, uhh, Simoniker, working on both the main page and the Slashdot Games section, which I originated. But I’ve also been writing for various paper-based magazines and websites since the early ’90s, including Wired magazine, PC Gamer UK, Official Xbox Magazine, and Amiga Format.

I also wrote/edited a book, Gaming Hacks, for leading technical publishers O’Reilly & Associates. The book, billed as ‘100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools’ related to video game hardware and software, includes input from a host of expert game-related contributors, was released in late 2004, and Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow commented of it: “I can’t remember when I’ve had more engrossing fun with a technical book… the perfect mix of informative, enjoyable and fascinating.”

Gaming Hacks has been translated into French (as Jeux Video a 200%), and Finnish (as Pelaajan Niksikirja), and since then, I’ve also contributed to the Chris Kohler-edited Retro Gaming Hacks pseudo-sequel, and O’Reilly’s Make Magazine.

net music/demoscene stuff?

Some of you who come to the site know me best from running the now dormant net.music.label Monotonik. After a few years in the Commodore Amiga-based ‘demo-scene’ as a musician, I set up Mono in 1996 to release the best open-source electronic .MOD tracks for free download, from great musicians I knew who weren’t getting enough exposure. We have released .MP3s, and have put out more than 500 geektronica releases over the 13 years we’ve been online, with millions of our freely distributable tracks downloaded. We were invited to exhibit at Ars Electronica festival held in Austria in 2000, have been featured in ‘Spin’ and a host of other magazines, played on radio stations from Slovenia to Australia, have more than 2.4 million Last.fm plays, and are part of the Webby-nominated Spamradio site. I’ve also helped out the netlabel community in general by setting up the Internet Archive Netlabels collection at the Internet Archive.

video game design?

My former career - up to early 2003, I spent most of my time as a full-time video game designer, firstly in my native England, and more latterly out in Silicon Valley. I started out as one of the first designers hired at Kuju Entertainment, then called Simis, and worked on ‘Terracide’, a ‘Descent’-style shooter for the PC that was one of the first 3D-accelerated games, and on ‘Tank Racer’ for the Playstation, a post-pub knockabout, uhh, tank racing title. After working on the early stages of ‘Lotus Challenge’ for the PS2/Xbox, I moved to San Jose and worked on two titles for Infogrames/Atari, including ‘Superman’ for Xbox, a sekrit PS2/Xbox prototype, and my favorite, ‘Looney Tunes Racing’ for the Playstation, a kart racing game with some fun gameplay mechanics that was pretty well-received.

digital archiving?

In late 2003, as a personal project, I set up the LegalTorrents website, to show that P2P (and specifically BitTorrent) can be used for positive, legal distribution as well as exploiting the inevitable piracy angle. The site, which I’ve now handed off to third parties, features Creative Commons-licensed movies, music, books, and software. It’s featured prominently in the book BitTorrent For Dummies, and has been mentioned by Wired News, Slashdot, USA Today, and Reuters.

I’ve also been helping out the non-profit Internet Archive in San Francisco, the gigantic digital archive, firstly as a technical advisor for their DMCA exemption requests regarding archiving classic software, but more recently as the founder of the Archive’s Net Labels collection (more than 10,000 freely available music EPs/albums) and the Game Videos archive (over 3,000 in-game movies, press kits videos, machinima, and replay videos preserved for posterity).