[Pictured - Jean Jackson's 'The Hoot Players', after Maxfield Parrish's 'The Lute Players', one of the two three pictures I now own from this amazing 'outsider art' collection - the others are 'Crow Wood' and 'Servo Throwing Dome At Crow'.]

After talented artist and fan Jean Jackson sadly passed away in January 2013, her family auctioned off for charity her wonderful set of original paintings that added characters from cult TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000 to famous pictures through history.

Since the original MST3K pictures have now mainly been split up among multiple (grateful!) buyers, including me, and there are no hi-res versions of the originals anywhere online besides the Wayback Machine, I thought I’d host [on Flickr] the photographs of the paintings used in auction for posterity.

Some of my favorites include ‘Sunday In The Park With Frank’, recasting Seurat’s pointillist masterpiece with bonus evil sidekick, and ‘Degalala’, where-in Degas’ ballerina portrait ‘The Star’ gets a bit, uhh, Tom Servo-ed. And this mash-up of N.C. Wyeth’s ‘The Giant’ and the MST3K-riffed ‘Amazing Colossal Man’ movie, ‘The Amazing Colossal Crow’, is especially haunting.

There are a few missing paintings that were not offered in the auction and can be seen pictured in low-res on Jean’s Flickr page -  – these include ‘Cezanntillite of Love‘, ‘Two Loose‘, ‘Paleobotic‘, ‘Starry Nanites‘, her best-known work ‘Nightmads‘ (spoofing Hopper’s ‘Nighthawks‘), ‘Crowcasso‘ and ‘Botko‘.

Various images of the paintings (including a few more pics not available anywhere else!) are also available on the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, which archived multiple versions of Jean’s pages from the mid-2000s, when she sold art prints of them.

[NOTE: I don't claim ownership or any control over these photos. I just wanted to make sure they were saved and accessible - and I think they are some of the most remarkable 'pop art' creations I've seen. The witty restyling of some of the titans of vintage and modern American and European art with bonus 'bots makes me grin every time.]

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?

STORYBUNDLE’S VIDEO GAME BUNDLE SHOWCASES 9 ACCLAIMED DRM-FREE BOOKS ON THE CULTURE AND HISTORY OF GAMING FOR A ‘PAY WHAT YOU WANT’ PRICE

Continuing its popular ‘pay what you want’ ebook bundles, StoryBundle  - http://storybundle.com – is proud to present the Video Game Bundle. The specially curated set of ten full-length game culture & history books/magazines spans such notables as Prince Of Persia’s Jordan Mechner,  Kill Screen Magazine, ‘father of games’ Ralph Baer, Generation Xbox and acclaimed game-related fiction from Leonard Richardson. In total the bundle features almost $100 worth of books for a fraction of that price.

The Video Game Bundle, curated by Independent Games Festival chairman emeritus and game industry veteran Simon Carless, includes multiple titles that are making their ebook debut, plus a host of other rare and sought-after titles. It’s the first video game-themed bundle for a site that has already sold more than a hundred thousand books through its popular horror, sci-fi and fantasy book bundles.

Highlights from the initial set of five books and two magazines include Jordan Mechner’s extensive diaries on the making of seminal ’80s platform game Karateka (“Jordan’s journals are remarkable… a great inspiration” – Will Wright, SimCity/The Sims creator), as well as Jamie Russell’s painstakingly researched ‘Hollywood and games’ non-fiction book Generation Xbox, which spans the Super Mario Bros movie through Spielberg’s LMNO and beyond.

Other notables include two full electronic issues (‘Back To School’ and ‘Change’) of literate, acclaimed game magazine Kill Screen – spanning almost 200 pages of writing from a who’s who of video game critics, and Leonard Richardson’s fictional novel about “space aliens and video games and love and computer programming”, Constellation Games (“AN AMAZING BOOK… one of the smartest, most passionate, most principled science fiction novels I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading.” – Cory Doctorow, New York Times best-selling author & BoingBoing co-editor.)

Also packed into the base set of books are Killing Is Harmless, a surprising book-length journey by critic Brendan Keogh through the surprising narrative twists and turns of 2K and Yager’s thought-provoking game Spec Ops: The Line, and Confessions Of the Game Doctor by the late Bill Kunkel, a borderline gonzo memoir of the ’80s Electronic Games Magazine editor. Game Informer magazine notes of Kunkel’s ‘Game Doctor’ that it “details the slings, arrows, sex and drugs of outrageous fortune… as a warts-and-all autobiography, it’s unmatched.”

Must-have bonus books include the world eBook premiere of Ralph Baer’s ‘In The Beginning’ – a vital autobiography on the Odyssey creator’s role in the creation of video games – plus Jordan Mechner’s acclaimed Prince Of Persia diaries (“A fantastic read.” – D.B. Weiss, co-creator; HBO’s Game of Thrones), and IndieGames.com editor Mike Rose’s essential book-length rundown of ’250 Indie Games You Must Play’.

The initial titles in the Video Game StoryBundle (minimum $3 to purchase, and worth over $50 when bought separately) are:

• The Making of Karateka – Jordan Mechner

• Generation Xbox: How Videogames Invaded Hollywood – Jamie Russell

• Kill Screen Magazine Issue 2: Back To School + Issue 6: Change – Kill Screen Editors

• Constellation Games – Leonard Richardson

• Killing is Harmless: A Critical Reading of Spec Ops: The Line – Brendan Keogh

• Confessions of the Game Doctor – Bill Kunkel

If you pay more than the bonus price of just $10, you get all seven of the regular tomes, plus three unmissable extra full-length books (bringing the total bundle value to $100):

• Videogames: In The Beginning – Ralph H. Baer

• The Making Of Prince Of Persia – Jordan Mechner

• 250 Indie Games You Must Play – Mike Rose

The Bundle is available for a very limited time only, via http://www.storybundle.com, and allows easy reading on computers, mobile devices and Kindles via file transfer, email, or other methods, with multiple DRM-free formats (.epub, .pdf, .mobi) available for each book.

It’s also super easy to give the gift of reading with StoryBundle, thanks to our gift cards – which allow you to send someone a code that they can redeem for any future StoryBundle bundle – and timed delivery, which allows you to control exactly when your recipient will get the gift of StoryBundle.

Why StoryBundle? Here are just a few benefits StoryBundle provides.

• Get quality reads: We’ve chosen works from excellent indie authors to bundle together in one convenient package.

• Pay what you want (minimum $3): You decide how much six fantastic indie books are worth to you. If you can only spare a little, that’s fine! You’ll still get access to six thrilling titles.

• Support indie authors: StoryBundle is a platform for indie/small publisher authors to get exposure for their works, both for the titles featured in the bundle and for the rest of their catalog.

• Give to worthy causes: Bundle buyers have a chance to donate a portion of their proceeds to charity. We’re currently featuring Mighty Writers and Trees for the Future.

• Receive extra books: If you beat our bonus price, you’re not just getting six books, you’re getting nine!

StoryBundle was created to give a platform for independent authors to showcase their work, and a source of quality titles for thirsty readers. StoryBundle works with authors to create bundles of ebooks that can be purchased by readers at their desired price. Before starting StoryBundle, Founder Jason Chen covered technology and software as an editor for Gizmodo.com and Lifehacker.com.

For more information, visit our website at storybundle.com, Twitter us at @storybundle, Like us on Facebook, and Plus us on Google Plus. For press inquiries, please email press@storybundle.com.

[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).

George and I have a long history of creating/coding our own games, back when one person did it all (multi-person teams really didn’t become a given until the late 80′s), plus we were involved in the game industry in other ways, such as arcade managers and professional writers. We even tried to start a gaming league for the top players in the early 80′s, which would organize tournaments like the PGL, but then the arcade industry had its first crash in 1983 and that killed our effort.

Basically, George and I *are* developers–game designers, more specifically–who happen to own a business. We’ve both been playing and designing games since 1978.

Simon: Should companies employ separate game designers, or does the role integrate nicely into existing job titles?

SM: We don’t employ dedicated game designers, but that’s not to say that they’re not necessary at all game companies. Our approach is to settle on a game concept, and every developer on the project gets to have their influence on the design of the game.

We have project leaders, such as George on the Duke games and Paul Schuytema on Prey [Editor's note: not to come out until 2006, after at least one complete reboot!], who help filter the appropriate ideas and shape them into a usable form–not every idea from every developer can be used, after all.

(We invented a phrase several years ago, “shit filter,” which refers to a person’s ability to recognize good ideas from bad ideas. People with bad shit filters let bad ideas get into their games.)

So, at 3D Realms, a project leader is the closest thing to a dedicated game designer, but really the roles are quite different.

Simon: Does having a major Apogee/3DRealms external developer like Remedy such a darn long way away (Finland!) make things tricky? How have you tried to get round this problem?

SM: It’s not too tricky, thanks to the Internet and email. Plus, they’ve come to visit several times and we meet at every E3. The Internet has compressed the world into a much smaller space. We get milestone CD burns from Remedy every month, and have a round of discussions based on the current state of the game. Mark my words: Remedy will soon be recognized as one of the world’s leading independent PC developers.

Simon: Do most publishers know anything about games? (heh, is this a leading question?)

SM: A better question is this one: Do the key decision makers at most publishers know a good game from a bad one? My answer is “no.” For example, you recently interviewed a CEO who, when you asked if he had time to play his own company’s games, said: “Not really. I do a few hours of each game, but that’s it.”

Is there any wonder why this CEO’s company releases such hit and miss games?

The problem with most large publishers is that the CEOs and VPs are not from a developer background, they’re most likely business, marketing and financial people, and don’t have a long track record of game development and playing games.

We had one of these VPs visit us right before Duke Nukem 3D was released, looking at our games to see if we had anything worth porting to consoles. This guy passed on Duke, not seeing its potential, and thinking it was just another DOOM clone. He simply didn’t understand all the new innovations Duke brought to the genre. He no longer works for this company.

Simon: Do you think there’ll be ‘copycat’ new companies trying to emulate G.o.D (the new ‘publisher’ conglomerate that 3DRealms/Apogee have pledged support for)? Or do you think the rest of the industry will have trouble breaking away from their current business model?

SM: I think established publishers will not attempt to copy g.o.d.’s business model, simply because a key element of this model is a board of directors mostly comprised of developers. The board’s job will be to maintain a priority on developer concerns, such as royalty rates, developer ownership of intellectual property rights, and pushing the developer’s name ahead of g.o.d.’s name.

Simon: It’s noticeable that not that many companies have tried emulating Apogee’s innovative business model.

SM: The reason few developers have copied Apogee’s shareware marketing and direct sales methods is because most publishers do not allow developers to do what we do, because it cuts the publisher out of a good portion of the game’s revenue. G.o.d., though, will help developers with selling their games via shareware, by having its own order taking and fulfillment division.

Simon: If you could steal one coder for your company, who would it be?

SM: I have the utmost respect for John Carmack as a coder. He amazed me back in 1990 when Apogee first brought id into the shareware industry. Over the years that we worked together I spent a lot of time talking to John picking his brain and trying to figure out how he came upon his innovative solutions to problems other coders couldn’t solve–trying to understand his genius.

He was always three steps ahead of anyone else in the industry. His strength is not in his programming skills–it’s in the fact that he’s very accurate at predicting which future technologies are most important and appropriate to pursue. John probably has better binoculars than anyone else in this industry.

Simon: Do you think you started promoting “Prey” too early?

SM: Not at all. Prey is actually two projects. The first one was cancelled after a year of struggling with which direction to take it. The second and current Prey incarnation has very little to do with that first project called Prey, because it has entirely different objectives, and a new staff running the show.

When Prey is released, it will have been a two year project, which for a game as ambitious as this, is not too long. Plus, unlike some games long in development, like Stonekeep and Descent to Undermountain, Prey when released will be a cutting-edge game in both gameplay and technology.

Simon: And finally.. give us your “State Of The Gaming Nation” speech. What’s been good, and what will continue to suck?

SM: If you’ve got money to burn, things are good because advancing hardware technology will mean incredible new games (at least, great looking games) are around the corner. If you don’t have the money to keep up, you might not be able to play coming new games. Progress is a double-edged sword.

Finally, I think more and more developers and publishers are realizing that they cannot rush out a game without months of polishing the gameplay, and this will result in better games for us all.

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…

In 1999, when we started putting out .MP3 releases of melodic, mellow electronica up online for free, bandwidth was still relatively limited. The idea of downloading (let alone streaming!) entire albums was a little mind-boggling.

But nearly 15 years later, however, there’s plenty of room on the Internet for full streaming & downloadable albums. So I’m starting a series of album re-issues, compiling the best of Monotonik in sequential order with fixed ID3 tags and easy listenability (and a Creative Commons license.)

The first of these is called, somewhat sensibly, ‘Monotonik Vol.1: The Early Years‘, and it’s available now on the Internet Archive for streaming and downloading. (If you dig it, the entire .MP3 catalog of the label is also up for free stream and download.)

Past the cut, there’s an embedded stream of the entire album (press play and hear the whole thing), and below that, there’s the description of the release:

“In the late ’90s, Monotonik – an online free to download ‘net.label’ founded in 1996 and largely releasing .MOD ‘tracker’ files made in Amiga and PC formats, expanded to release in a brand new format – the MP3.

Drawing from artists worldwide linked by the Internet, and influenced by the rise of melodic, downtempo electronics from labels like Warp, Rephlex, and FAX, this first  compilation picks some of the best releases originally available via Monotonik in 1999 and 2000.

Spanning classic early Monotonik artists like Finnish ambient-electronics artist Lackluster (aka Distance), Australian electronica pioneers like Thug, Super Science, and Pretty Boy Cross Over, plus British stars of earlier Mono releases such as Hoffman and Vim!, the entire 19-track compilation whirs and hums with a quiet sinewave beauty that belies its increasing age.

This is the first in a series of compilation spanning the entire catalog of Monotonik, all Creative Commons licensed and free to download and stream.”

[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.

So I lost my enthusiasm for computers pretty quickly. I played pinball. A year or so later, a friend of mine bought a Mac which played a little starship tailgunner game that was really unimpressive. My own computers were little more than glorified typewriters until a few years ago, when I played Myst while visiting some friends on Long Island.

I became obsessed. I went into Manhattan to visit my agent and told him I wanted to work on computer games. When I got back to San Francisco I bought a Pentium 60 with a color monitor specifically so that I could finish Myst. (That same P60, my only home computer, is now useless for playing Riven.)

My agent soon landed me a great gig writing a tie-in novel for Haruhiko Shono’s Gadget CD-ROM, but that only fuelled my enthusiasm to become part of a game-design team, rather than a peripheral.

Simon: What was/is the attraction for you in making games?

Marc: I’ve been aching to do something pioneering. Storytelling is such an ancient form that it’s rather hard to break new ground in terms of content-but presentation is a different matter. Our means of relaying stories keeps changing over the ages-from oral traditions to written glyphs and characters, to films and now…computer games.

I think we are now passing into something like the “silent movie” era of computer game storytelling. The opportunity for making classics is very exciting. Twenty-five years ago I was writing about and trying to envision forms of 3D entertainment in my earliest science fiction stories; now I’m actually working in a field that I liked to dream about before it existed.

Simon: Does it give you something that writing could never do?

Marc: Writing is a solitary activity. I like working with people, being around people, doing stuff in a creative team. Seeing worlds take shape in Worldcraft and then in the game engine is a buzz akin to that of bringing things to life on paper. It’s a wonderful feeling when you make a map that mirrors something you’ve seen in your mind, then send it over the internet to someone else, and five minutes later they’re running around in your mind-scape.

Building maps in particular is a nonverbal activity, and sometimes my brain just gets tired of words and wants to think about geometry and spatial relationships instead of structuring sentences.

Simon: When did you first see ‘Quake’, and what did you think of it?

Marc: I first saw Quake at the offices of id when I was working on a piece for Wired Magazine. I was supposed to do an on-site-at-id feature, and it turned into a “Making of Quake” feature. Quake was very strange when I first saw it-some dark and moody corridors inhabited by blank grey entities that resembled Hoover uprights.

American McGee and Michael Abrash were deathmatching with these vacuum-cleaner monsters which were quite eerie, actually, because they didn’t have any of the cliche monster features, but they screamed when you shot them. None of the monsters had been imported into the game yet.

I was impressed less by the look of Quake than by the tools with which it was actually made-the insider’s/designer’s view of the levels-the ability to noclip and travel in and out of your world and watch it unfold as you created it. That to me was the most exciting part of my first glimpse of Quake. I caught the mapping bug right then, especially seeing the stuff American was up to. Later, when Tim Willits arrived, he helped point me in the direction of actually starting to make maps.

Simon: When you were growing up you wanted to be a….?

Marc: Writer. Director. Cinematographer. Magician. Cartoonist. All of which, in a way, I’m doing now, rolled into one package.

Simon: What’s your job on ‘Half-Life’ currently entail?

Marc: I’m the designated writer, which means I’ve been wrangling with a lot of story elements that existed in the game long before I got here, and helping reshape them into something with the structure and feel of an actual story-one’s that not as obvious as it might appear on its face.

For instance, we start with the Doom-style gimmick of the dimensional portal through which horrors are pouring. But…you can’t just stop there. It was old when id did it, after all. Call it…a timeless theme. Anyway, you have to start looking for ways of handling these elements that no other designers would dream up.

I won’t take credit for the basic story, but if you finish playing the game and feel like what just happened made a strange kind of sense, then I would hope that’s because of some of the things I’ve been doing. In a creative group like the one at Valve, there’s no shortage of great ideas, and it often seems to me that other folks come up with the really wild ideas and simply use me as a sounding board and to see if their wild notions can get worked into the story somehow.

(As an aside, I was hired to get in early on the creation of Valve’s mysterious yet-to-be announced Second Game, so I’ll be taking more blame for that storyline.)

Simon: Do you feel at all overwhelmed in fitting into a job alongside people who’ve designing games for years?

Marc: Overwhelmed? No. Inspired and instructed? Yes. I’m always looking to the others to see what they think will work in a game. A game is not a novel, after all. I could come up with the coolest plot twist in the world, but if it doesn’t add to immersive gameplay, then it doesn’t belong in the game any more than jumping puzzles belong in a book.

Many of the folks here have a much better idea than I of what it takes to make a great game, and I rely on them to teach me. Gabe Newell, for instance, can sit down and look at a room and instantly come up with three ways of turning it into a place for fun gameplay.

I might look at the same room and think, “This is where our hero suddenly realizes that his domineering mother and passive-aggressive father ruined his chances of ever settling down and conquering just one world.”

On the other hand, I’m learning constantly-that’s one of the joys of this job. By the time we’ve shipped Half-Life, I expect to have a pretty good grasp of what makes good gameplay.

Simon: Do you think computer games will become widely accepted in the future as a valid artistic form?

Marc: It’s already happening. “Wide acceptance” is a double sword, though, because a lot of things get watered down when they find “wide acceptance.” One of my favorite games was “Gadget,” which was not actually a game, but a point-and-click movie. It was art of a very pure sort. But it did not find a “wide” audience. It’s a cult favorite, not a blockbuster. The size of Gadget’s audience or the width of its acceptance are irrelevant to whether it’s a work of art or not.

But Half-Life is a very different beast. It’s first and foremost a game. Whether this sort of game will considered “valid art” when the critics of the future look back on our primitive era, who can say? Do I care what their opinion might be? No. Am I using all the artfulness in my power to try and make this a really amazing game? Sure thing!

Simon: Valve are the only developers making Quake-engine games who have any degree of subtlety. Discuss?

Marc: If you mean that Half-Life is the only game with any subtlety, I don’t know enough about what the other Quake-engine games are actually aiming at to comment on this. If you mean that the company appears subtler than others licensing the Quake engine, then I’d have to say I’m not well placed to judge ourselves or other companies.

Maybe one reason we may appear to the outside world to have an iota of subtlety is because we don’t do plan files. The subtlest designer in the world can suddenly turn into a blathering idiot if you give him a soapbox of his very own. I’ve often made an idiot of myself in small forums (such as this one); and for this reason, plan files terrify me.

Yet I admit I am addicted to them. I read almost every plan I can get my hands on; I don’t want to look, but I just have to; it’s like rubbernecking as you pass a really bad traffic accident.

But seriously, long before I joined Valve I was impressed with something like what you’re calling subtlety. For months and months there was nothing on Valve’s website but a little map of the Seattle area. Long before Valve did any PR or made any public appearances, it was working hard on having a game worth promoting once the inevitable engines of hype kicked into gear.

And I have to say that a lot of the story and design decisions that have been made (and are being made every day) in the process of creating Half-Life are really interesting, risky, and even subtle ones. All this will lead to a more entertaining and unpredictable game, I believe. Of course, Half-Life itself will be anything but subtle. “The First Subtle Shooter” will not be a bullet point on our box!

Simon: What’s the part of Half-Life that you’re most proud of thinking up/designing?

Marc: Right now, I’m happiest with our plans to turn the player into a real character in the game, without making a snarling asshole out of him. The player is going to be important-and not only as a target. He’s going to feel he’s doing things for a variety of good reasons, including sheer survival.

As for things I had absolutely nothing to do with creating, I love the monsters. Half-Life contains more incredible creatures, with incredible creature behavior, than just about any science fiction movie or book I can think of. We could put together the best zoo in the universe.

Simon: What advantages and insights do you think your cyberpunk literary background gives you in games? Are you coming at it from a slightly different angle to everybody else?

Marc: Well, I am familiar with all the science fiction tropes and cliches, and I don’t have to think for more than a fraction of a second to figure out whether some idea has been done to death or whether it’s fresh. That gives us a bit of an edge in this industry, I think, where a lot of game content seems to be derived from Hollywood’s brain-dead notions of science fiction rather than from the real living core of science fiction, which is its literature.

Sometimes I try to picture the game as if it actually were something in a futuristic novel-a really popular form of entertainment in the future-and then try to go about creating that game. It’s sort of funny that I was a cyberpunk, because in the typical cyberpunk scenario, the written word is dead-society is postliterate.

So far, I’m the first postliterate cyberpunk…abandoning text…a traitor to my class. But I may prove a turncoat twice, if I ever get back to writing anything apart from email and design documents.

[Original interview cut down slightly for modern relevance. Thanks to the long-defunct Videogamedesign.com for posting it in the first place!]

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:

- Do the deal with the people who _made_ the game.
The first rule may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised on the amount of other ‘indie’ bundles resorting to signing games via mass publisher deals. These are deals where it’s easy to pick up a big chunk of Steam keys, but the amount of the money flowing back to the creators is unclear.

IR has done a couple of deals through publishers, where we felt it necessary to get an outstanding title – for example, the enchantingly macabre Russian indie The Void. But we did check with the game’s creator Ice Pick Lodge to ensure they were fully aware and approving.

(And ultimately, well-labeled exceptions are just fine. This isn’t particularly a Humble THQ Bundle slight, given how much that bundle did for charity alone, and the fact they intentionally dropped the word ‘indie’ for it.)

- Use the games that players think they want, to expose them to others they should want.
One thing Indie Royale has always done is to pick non-Steam titles which we felt deserved a lot more exposure. I think some thought we were trying to stealth promote Desura, which added the non-Steam games. Well, not really – we were just seeing a lot of great underexposed indie content out there.

In particular, I’m proud of titles like Michael Molinari’s lovely, poignant Basketbelle, which had sold less than 200 copies before IR, and added another 9,000 during the bundle. Vertigo Gaming’s The Oil Blue is another unique title that sold 10x or more its lifetime sales during a bundle. And I’m sure there will be a lot more to come.

- Look outside of already-released PC titles to find those who benefit even more from bundles.
We haven’t just stuck to games you can get right now – an area that Indie Royale has done particularly well in is Xbox Live Indie Game to PC conversions. Our exclusive ‘first time ever on PC’ debuts have been topped by DLC Quest, which got TotalBiscuit-ed all over the place, and actually got more copies of the XBLIG version sold, thanks to post-IR word of mouth.

Other smaller in scope XBLIG to PC titles that got a bunch more profile (and hopefully $!) than they would have otherwise include the subsequently Steam-approved Dead Pixels, all three awesome Magical Time Bean-created games (Soulcaster I, II, and Escape Goat), and the Unity-adapted versions of RadianGames’ excellent shooters – his top revenue source for 2012.

- Price is important, and too much price erosion is bad.
This may sound a bit rich, but at this stage, I think Indie Royale is the only bundle with a reasonably ‘large’ minimum price. Even after that, our average payment per bundle is around USD $6.50 for about 5 games.

Of course, It’s possible to have a low minimum price and a high average by doing things right, as Humble Bundle continues to do by using ‘above average’ bonuses alongside top-quality games (a smart move from the originator, and still the leader!)

But where you don’t have the titles to back it up, and you try to replicate the Humble ‘$1/no minimum’ style, you’ll start dipping below the ‘$1 per game’ threshold that I think starts to get a bit destructive for game value. The other bad thing with too-low averages is that the Steam key resellers start coming out in force.

Interesting, I think there’s some argument – based on what I see in forum commentary – that people see two games they really want in many Indie Royale bundles. So they’re really seeing the act of buying the bundle as a ‘$3+ per game’ transaction – with some free bonuses. That’s somewhere a little above the threshold where I worry about value destruction – YMMV, of course.

- You shouldn’t (exactly) follow the leader, but be prepared for backlash when you don’t.
Obviously, Indie Royale was the first game bundle site to come out after Humble, clearly one of our biggest inspirations. But we thought it important to put our own twist on things – thus the variable price, the higher minimum, the loyalty bonuses, and a number of other changes.

But some of our differences – particularly not forcing devs to have a Mac or Linux build, and not all titles being on Steam – got us a bit more of a messageboard kicking than we expected at times. We also didn’t include charity contributions as default – instead opting for a separate All-Charity Bundle that netted $25,000 for charities including Amnesty International and UNICEF – another point of controversy at times.

But seriously – why even bother if you’re going to clone directly? Having its own ‘flavor’ is one of the reasons people appreciate Indie Royale, and part of the flavor is in the mechanisms, models, content choices and aesthetics (big shout-out to Jessica Chan for the last of these!) I’m proud of what we’ve done with those to date.

- Do deals with game creators at the correct, respectful time in their product lifecycle.
This is a little tricky to manage at times, particularly when games haven’t launched as successfully as their creators have hoped. But game bundles are meant to be part of lifecycle management for your title’s sales.

So launching a big title almost immediately on a bundle might not be good for you and your customers who already bought at full price – see the Botanicula and Humble Bundle issues. (Of course, if we or others have given you an ‘offer we can’t refuse’, go for it – just make sure your fans are clued in ahead of time.)

Anyhow, the shrewdest developers get this – for example Dave Gilbert of Wadjet Eye Games, who we’ve partnered with for a whole scad of awesome adventure titles (from the Blackwell Trilogy to Gemini Rue and beyond.) He has a time threshold beyond which his game sales are getting ‘long tail-y’, and he’ll bundle with us – smart guy!

- Go outside games – but within game culture – for value adds.
This has become a bit more of a trend of late, but my love of chiptunes and electronica have come in handy on Indie Royale, having run net.label Monotonik for a fair few years. Thus was birthed the concept of having a ‘pay X and get a neat music album’ concept.

In the same way that awesome game curation matters, having great quality gamer-friendly music – unrelated to the OSTs – has been a great differentiator for us. Some of my favorite bonus albums to date are the amazing ‘Insert’ by Prof. Sakamoto or Yoann Turpin’s supremely jazz-funky ‘Rhythm ‘N Bits’, the latter made possible by a recent hookup with Ubiktune.

And now we’ve handed over the reins partially on Indie Royale, I may (or may not, hah!) have time to pursue Triselector, which is a long delayed personal project that’s an attempt to take music curation a step further. But good quality IR bonus albums will continue as well, naturellement.

—

Anyhow, I’m really looking forward to seeing what the future holds for Indie Royale (and indie bundles in general!) As for the bundle naysayers – it’s true there’s elements of fatigue out there in bundle-land. Heck, sites like The Backloggery wouldn’t exist if there wasn’t.

But I still believe that limited-time bundles are a smart and useful part of managing your indie game’s publicity and long-term lifecycle – the continued success of Humble Bundle and recent IR bundles like The Fall Bundle show their net positive effect on the landscape.

And I’ll still be involved in consulting on the kind of neat content for Indie Royale, hopefully for months/years to come. Thanks again for your support of the concept so far, and I hope you’ll all keep supporting IR and related products into the (far!) future.

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.

Pacific Pinball Museum – Alameda, CA – a grand total of 85 pinball machines in the current storefront East Bay location, with more than 50 machines also recently donated by the co-founder of Rhino Records. $15 gets you unlimited free play, and there’s an awesome collection of ’50s and ’60s pintables in this place – less ’90s and ’00s though. Gets a bit hot in summer, but a blast. The museum also runs the yearly Pacific Pinball Expo in Marin.

Playland Japan – San Francisco, CA – a tiny new arcade in Japantown, in the main mall area. Looks like it has some rare/custom Japanese arcade games, including Taito’s table-tipping game? (You can twin your visit there with some of the other awesome local stores, including a big Kinokuniya bookstore and the neat New People store.)

Playland Not At The Beach – El Cerrito, CA – fairly low-profile and only open on weekends, this East Bay venue (located just north of Berkeley) is actually a lovingly crafted tribute to amusement parks and circuses. It includes skill games, early Musee Mechanique-style dioramas, and a good selection of pinball machines old and new. One price gets you unlimited plays, although its v.kiddie-replete compared to most of the other venues here.

Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk – Santa Cruz, CA – OK, quite a long way away from San Francisco (almost 2 hours, and you’ll need to take Highway 17 across the mountains), but the arcade is open pretty much year-round. In the main area, there’s a retro corner with about 15-20 classic machines, and a great deal of other arcade games, many of them big sit-downs. Worth a visit.

[CLOSED: Southtown sadly shut down in November 2012.] Southtown Arcade – San Francisco, CA – a small but v.lovable ‘Japanese arcade experience’ crammed into a tiny place below the Tunnel Top Bar near SF’s Union Square. Very fighting game focused (with regular tournaments), but the gradually rotating line-up includes other awesomeness like Arika’s Tetris The Grand Master 3 or even Blazing Star on the Neo Geo MVS.

One-liners on a few other smaller notables:

Malibu Grand Prix (Redwood City, CA) – your standard go-karting/arcade kind of place!
Rack N Cue (San Francisco, CA) – pool joint at San Francisco State Uni, v.student-y, but 20+ decent arcade games.
Starbase Arcade (San Rafael, CA) – a seriously vintage arcade in the North Bay.
Subpar Minigolf (Alameda, CA) – brand new, with a 9-hole indoor mini-golf and a smattering of arcade/pinball machines.

[Photo of Southtown Arcade above taken by Xpress Magazine, which did a neat article on the venue.]

Yep, multiple long transcontinental flights can be boring at times – if enlivened marginally by lots of Kindle reading (yum, Angry Robot Books) and a little bit of Jetpack Joyride for iPad. And I’m sure lots of you – including myself – have lazed your way through long flights with nary a care in the world. And I’m certainly not looking to spoil your fun.

But since I managed to pick up a blood clot in my leg (aka ‘deep vein thrombosis’, or DVT) on my last long-haul flight (Frankfurt to SFO on May 6th), I’ve been reading a great deal about this relatively unsung danger – sometimes known somewhat incorrectly as ‘economy class syndrome’.

What happens? As a DragonAir page on DVT explains: “The deep veins of the lower legs are situated in the muscles of the calf. Compression of the veins by muscular contraction.. [aid] the return of blood to the heart. If the muscle pump is not working (due to immobilization), the blood flow in the veins may decrease [and] may sometimes [cause clots that] link up to produce a large obstructive thrombus. Immobility in a seated position is an obvious predisposition to DVT as the veins of the legs can get compressed and cause stasis.”

So I figured a friendly blog post to explain what happened, and to alert people why to be careful – but also why not to be too concerned/freaked out – was in order. So here goes:

My Story

Having had a bit of a crazy travel schedule in the week leading up to my problem flight (San Francisco to New York for a day, NY to Frankfurt w/train to Cologne, then a 3-hour train ride to Amsterdam, then back to Frankfurt and San Francisco via plane), I confess I wasn’t paying much attention on that final Sunday flight.

As a result of basically not moving around at all – and likely not hydrating enough – during that 11 hour flight, I got a pain in my left calf on the Monday morning. It simply felt like a calf strain – but I couldn’t remember straining my calf when walking around Amsterdam on the Saturday.

The pain went away after I walked to BART to commute into work, but when I commuted the next morning, it didn’t go away and was getting a bit more painful. I could get around, but when I got suspicious and Googled ‘calf pain after long flight‘, I noted that a blood clot was fairly high up the list of possibilities.

Although I didn’t have a swollen leg (yet) and it was quite soon after the flight, my doctor referred me to have an ultrasound on the leg at my local hospital, ‘just in case’. The diagnosis – which can be made in real-time – was a small (but still potentially potent) blood clot blocking a deep vein in my left calf. Oops.

(Side note: as Wikipedia reveals, and I had no idea: ‘There is a strong tendency for DVT to develop in the left leg – about 70 to 90% of the time – “possibly because of exacerbation of the compressive effects on the left iliac vein due to its being crossed by the right iliac artery.”‘ So now you know!)

After some brief panicking, I realized that things were likely going to be fine. The big issue with DVT is that you have blood clots that could potentially move around your bloodstream if detached, and this can lead to pulmonary embolism, where a clot gets stuck in the artery leading from your heart to your lungs. (This condition is how rapper Heavy D died in 2011.)

But my DVT was small (as I could see on the ultrasound) and wasn’t traveling up my leg. And so I got straight on the treatment for DVT, starting off with self-injected heparin every 12 hours, and moving swiftly on to warfarin, which is also used as a rat poison, yum. The goal of these anti-clotting medications is to prevent any further increase in the thrombosis so your body can break it down. But you need regular blood tests to make sure your clotting hasn’t gone _entirely_ to pot – nasty things happen at that point.

Anyhow, my prognosis seems to be just fine. I’ll need to be on warfarin – which isn’t the loveliest drug in the world – for a few more months. But the pain in my calf went away about a week after the medication kicked in, and after two canceled trips – including a European holiday, sigh – my doctor has cleared me to fly longhaul again in a couple of weeks.

(In fact, if you’re taking anti-clotting medication, you’ll be one of the safest people on any flight. But I wouldn’t recommend getting a DVT and getting medicated as a method to avoid subsequent DVTs!)

What You Should Know

So let’s go through some of the things that you – yes, you! – should be doing on every flight you take, and let’s see how I scored. (I know you’ve probably been told to move around, or have the concept at the back of your mind, but let’s bring it closer to the front!)

I’m going to pick a basic anti-DVT checklist for the higher risk at the UK National Health Service’s website, mainly because of the awesome photo they picked to accompany it, also used at the top of this post.

Here we go:

- Walk around whenever you can. [My score: 0/10.]
(I completely failed on this count – having a window seat and a couple sitting next to me, I decided to not get up basically for the entire flight. Bad move – aisle seats and getting up every couple of hours for me from now on.)

- Store luggage overhead so you have room to stretch out your legs. [My score: 4/10]
(I did check my medium-sized luggage, but I had my laptop bag with me. That on its own might have been fine, but the passenger in front of me reclined his seat for the entire flight, and I’m 6 foot 2 and a half. So.. that didn’t help.)

- Do anti-DVT exercises. Raise your heels, keeping your toes on the floor, then bring them down. Do this 10 times. Now raise and lower your toes 10 times. (Repeat.) [My score: 2/10.]
(I actually did flex a _bit_, but not in the right ways, and the above-mentioned legroom issues kicked in.Those with non-long legs should do this, even if they’re not getting up quite as often as they should.)

- Drink plenty of water, don’t drink alcohol or take sleeping pills. [My score: 3/10]
(I didn’t drink any alcohol/take sleeping pills on the flight, or indeed arrive on it particularly dehydrated, but I also stuck to Diet Coke during the flight itself. The attendants give you lots of chances to drink water, so change your normal drinks preferences just for the flight – it makes a difference!)

- Wear loose, comfortable clothes + consider buying flight socks (compression stockings). [My score: 5/10]
(I tend to wear T-shirts and looser clothes for these flights, but I’ll now be sporting knee-high compression socks for my long-haul flights. There are some reasonably stylish brands designed more for athletes like CEP, if you’re worried about looking like an idiot.)

Anyhow, that’s, what, 14 points out of a possible 50? Not good. There’s various statistics on the chances of developing a DVT, and even if “there is about one DVT for every 6,000 journeys that last four hours or more”, why would you catapult yourself up the leaderboard for possible problems? So go ahead, beat my high score, make me happy.

[NOTE: Since my friends have been reading up DVTs, there has been a _little_ bit of paranoia. So let's not get carried away. As the above Patient.co.uk pages notes: "Slight painless puffiness of feet and ankles is common after a long journey and is not due to a DVT."

Slight gimpiness in your muscles after being immobile? You're probably just sore. Worsening limp or calf swelling up more than a couple of days after getting back? Might want to go visit your local doctor.]

Other Resources

If you’re looking for a personal DVT story, there’s a (much better written) written one already, and it’s from someone you might not expect – Ian Anderson of ’70s prog rockers Jethro Tull, whose ‘Confessions of a DVT victim and ten steps for survival‘ is essential reading.

Anderson had a much more serious case of DVT than I did, caused by complications from knee surgery after slipping onstage in Peru (!), but exacerbated by long-haul flights. Nonetheless, his advice is sound  — and his humor rather delicious in an understated British type of way.

Other than that, I’m not remotely a doctor, and I would refer you to governmental information sources such as the UK NHS page or the U.S. National Institutes Of Health page, among a _host_ of others, for basic DVT information.

And of course, I’m not saying that you can’t sleep away some of your flight, or have a couple of beers along the way, or even sit in that window seat. Just try to get the majority of the above tips right, and you won’t have a minor but cautionary tale to sport like mine.

[UPDATE: I'm dedicating this blog to Rob Koziura, a work colleague of mine who tragically passed away a few months after I wrote this post, coincidentally through complications from blood clots. Even more tragically, he read my blog before his illness got serious, but wasn't able to get the right diagnosis in time. If your family has a history of blood clotting disorders, or you have shortness of breath in addition to any lasting limb pain, make sure you get help. As has been written about before, the disease can be a silent killer.]

[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.

Headlining the bundle is Hemisphere Games’ dreamlike physics puzzle game Osmos, available for Windows and Mac on Steam, Windows and Linux on Desura, and DRM-free on Windows, Mac and Linux. The game puts the player in the role of a single-celled organism, tasked with growing larger by absorbing all the other organisms around it. A.V. Club called it, “Moving in every sense of the word” and Indiegames.com says, “Osmos mixes puzzle, action and strategy remarkably and all the while does it with great finesse and style.” Blessed with an elegant minimalist electronic soundtrack, you’ll progress from serenely ambient levels to varied and challenging worlds in this peaceful and engaging puzzler.

Next up is Erik Svedang’s interactive fairytale Blueberry Garden, available for Windows on Steam, Desura, and DRM-free. An Independent Games Festival Grand Prize-winning experimental game about curiosity and exploration, you take on the role of a creature investigating a mysterious world. Try various fruits and use their effects to navigate the landscape more easily, and explore this playground of oddities in a living world with a marvelously offbeat soundtrack and multiple endings.

Making its bundle debut is Wadjet Eye Games’ rabbinical 2D adventure game The Shivah, available for Windows on Desura and DRM-Free. In the first title from the creator of The Blackwell Legacy you play as Russell Stone, a Jewish Rabbi at a poor synagogue in New York City. After a former member of his congregation dies and leaves him a significant amount of money, Rabbi Stone is led on an adventure through New York City that will test his faith and uncover unsettling truths. PC Gamer says, “It’s in games like this that gaming really starts to measure up to conventional literature for emotional and intellectual integrity.”

Finally featured is Copenhagen Game Collective’s offbeat local multiplayer party game B.U.T.T.O.N., available for Windows on Steam, Desura and DRM-free. After taking a few steps away from your controller, race back to your controller through physical space, and do whatever it takes to win (or to avoid losing). While the game will display various rules for each round, there is no way to keep track of whether the players obey the rules or not – and unfair tactics are majorly encouraged here in this crazed improvisational party game.

Those who pay $7 USD or their country’s currency equivalent during the All-Charity Pack get three incredible music albums/EPs from leading composers. These include Jake Kaufman’s ‘FX4‘, a virtuoso NES-style jam from the Shantae and Retro City Rampage composer, as well as Fez soundtrack creator Disasterpeace’s acclaimed 2008 concept album ‘Level‘, and a brand new EP from Super Time Force composer 6955, ‘IN1ep’.

You can decide exactly how much money goes to each of the four charities when you donate to this bundle, and your entire donation amount (after third-party credit card/Paypal fees) will be received by the worthy causes picked by these charitable indies. Please give generously!

More information on the limited-time All-Charity Pack, including real-time statistics, its current minimum donation price, and the total amount raised so far for charity, is available at its official website or via its Facebook and Twitter pages.