Just two days from the end of our Season 7 Kickstarter, it's time for another author Q&A! This time, DDR author Jessica Doyle interviews Matthew S. Smith about his EverQuest book. They discuss MMOs, launch drama, crunch, addiction, and the best ways to play a 25-year-old online game.
Jessica Doyle: You played EverQuest when it first came out in 1999. What was the experience like? And what made you decide to write a book about the game?
Matthew S. Smith: Playing EverQuest on release was like nothing else before or since. Stepping into an online world with no information besides what was available in the manual is something most players just can’t experience today. It was unpredictable, fresh, and exhilarating. Getting lost in a forest after dark (and I did, because my first character was a Human, which lacks night vision), was genuinely scary.
Of course, I didn’t decide to write a book until years later, around 2014 or 2015. At that time I saw some MMORPGs, like Wildstar, come and go, and also saw Bungie launch Destiny, an FPS-MMO hybrid (though it took them a long time to admit the second part). I began to realize many of the trends I was seeing started with EverQuest.
One of the stories you tell about EverQuest’s development is the horrific crunch period that immediately preceded launch—one developer was apparently put off pizza for life. Terrible working conditions at crunch time are well-known in the video-games industry now, but was that true in 1998? And did the crunches continue?
I’ve dug into the development of many mid-90s computer games for my YouTube channel, Computer Gaming Yesterday, including titles like Baldur’s Gate and Homeworld. And what I’ve learned is that, yes, in the 1990s, intense crunch was common.
Something that’s different between then and now is that in the 1990s, though, is that virtually everyone in the industry who wasn’t in an executive position was young (usually in their 20s — often, early 20s, and sometimes even late teens, though I don’t think that was true with the EverQuest team). They were energetic, didn’t have much on-the-job experience, and had less commitments in their personal life than older employees would, which made them prone to throwing everything into the game they were working on.
To be fair, in some cases, that worked out really well for them! Some of the people who worked on EverQuest made a decent living out of it, or went on to high-paying roles at other studios.
But the crunch also had its consequences. A lot of the EverQuest team was burnt out and wanted to work on a different game after the original launch. Because of that, there was a definite “changing of the guard” from the original developers to their successors, who in some cases were EverQuest players. But eventually, EverQuest’s development did reach a more reasonable pace. And that was the result of a very intentional effort by the team’s leaders to lessen the crunch, because it just was not sustainable.
You make the point that EverQuest’s launch problems, such as new players not being able to create accounts for hours on end, didn’t get the same scrutiny that a game releasing today might. Why is that? How do you think EverQuest would have been received in today’s gaming-consumer environment?
I think it comes down to the slower pace of news, and lower player expectations, at the time.
Many gamers were still getting their news from magazines at the time, and those that were publishing online had plenty of blind spots in their coverage. There was also less of a sense that fans of the hobby had to be plugged-in to news about games 24-7.
Plus, game reviews often didn’t appear until several months after release! By the time that happened, many problems were fixed.
Much of the criticism, where it did appear, came from the nascent blogosphere of ultra-passionate players: sites like Dr. Twister and Lum the Mad. But even as influential as they were in their niche, I think the vast majority of players didn’t see those sites until after they’d bought an MMORPG and started to look for deeper information about it.
Absolutely, EverQuest would be received differently if it suffered launch problems today. But also, developers were much less experienced in running online persistent games back then, and had far fewer tools to work with. So I think a team with a level of experience and budget has an easier time launching an online game today.
And we are actually seeing that happen: Embers Adrift and the upcoming Monsters & Memories are examples of MMORPGs built by small teams, something only possible with modern software tools and online infrastructure.
I thought one of the most fascinating chapters was on the idea of “EverCrack” and video-game addiction, which was a big public concern in 2000 and really isn’t now, despite statistics showing people play more video games, for longer, than they did in 2000. Are we all just addicted to video games now and not admitting it?
That observation is one reason I wanted to include this chapter. Valheim had just released around the time I was outlining the book, and that’s the kind of game where many people in the community will insist you haven’t really experienced the game unless you’ve spent 500 or 1,000 hours in it. And that viewpoint is hugely disconnected from views on gaming around 2000, where news reports often depict gamers who play for two hours a night as having a problem.
The other reason I wanted to talk about the game addiction controversy surrounding EverQuest is to highlight the real impacts, positive and negative, that can happen when a person becomes obsessive about a hobby.
The story of Shawn Woolley, who committed suicide while playing EverQuest, is one that I highlight in the book, and which I remember seeing in the paper at the time it occurred, as it caused me to reflect on how I was playing games in my personal life at the time. On the other hand, a great many people met friends and even fell in love in EverQuest, and had their lives tangibly improved forever. The EQ Fan Fairies are a great early example of how games can create community. And again, personally, games like EverQuest have brought me plenty of social connections and friends over the years.
To get back to the question - “are we all just addicted to video games now and not admitting it?” - I’m not sure there’s a broad answer to that. What counts as addiction? What’s positive, and what’s negative? It requires a personal look at how a person is playing. And that was a challenge of concluding the chapter. Because I think this debate will continue for literally the remainder of human civilization.
People can still play EverQuest, though they have to jump through some extra hoops to do it now. (That’s often true of Dance Dance Revolution now, too, by the way.) What effects does that have on the player base?
Anyone can download and play EverQuest for free on the official servers, and I think that’s the easiest and most sensible way for most people to jump into the game today. EverQuest’s official servers were also among the first to explore the idea of time-locked progression servers, and those servers become available on a yearly cadence, with the latest launching in mid-2024 as part of the game’s 25th anniversary celebration. The emulated servers, which often target older expansions, require a lot more steps, which makes them less appealing to some newcomers, but they preserve the game’s earlier incarnations.
While the variety of TLPs and emulated servers is mostly good for the game, I think EverQuest does suffer from a divided player base. Contrary to what some claim, there’s at least in the low tens of thousands of people playing EverQuest routinely. But you might not know that from the number of players you see on any one server. It’s a big community that’s spread too thin.
I’m not sure what can be done about that for EverQuest, but it’s something modern developers in charge of an MMORPG should consider as it ages. World of Warcraft is a great example, and once again it’s following in EverQuest’s footsteps. The effort to expand on World of Warcraft: Classic is already causing division inside that community.
What do you think EverQuest’s biggest legacy is? (Is it World Of Warcraft, whose developers loved EverQuest? A change in the way people approached video games? A change in the way people approached role-playing more generally? None of the above?)
I think that EverQuest contributed greatly to a change in how people engaged with video games, at least in the west.
Before EverQuest, the western games industry, and gamers themselves, seemed to subscribe to a “Hollywood” model. A game was released, enjoyed, and finished. If it was successful, it would get an expansion pack. If it was really successful, it would get some sequels. But it was ultimately something designed for a player to appreciate and then move past.
EverQuest was a game that showed, in a wide variety of ways, games can have deeper, sustained relationships with their players, and that players would pay a lot of money over the box price for the privilege. The extent of this impact surprised even the EverQuest developers: they were caught off guard by eBay auctions for in-game items and characters, because they had no idea that people would find their game so enjoyable they’d be willing to pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars to have more fun or get ahead.
There’s a line to be drawn from EverQuest to modern live service games. Of course, that line is interrupted by other games that are more popular today, like World of Warcraft or Destiny and then Fortnite. But EverQuest was a turning point, for sure.
The Season 7 Kickstarter is going strong with just one book reveal left! Today, though, we're learning more about the 2nd book of the new season, Untitled Goose Game by James O'Connor. Below, EverQuest author Matthew S. Smith interviews James about the success of the game, the state of Australian game development, and what other devs could learn from Goose Game. - Gabe Durham, BFB
Matthew S. Smith: James, you wrote the review of Untitled Goose Game for Gamespot. What made you decide you wanted to follow up the review with a book?
James O’Connor: Untitled Goose Game had been on my radar since it was announced, and as an Australian critic, I always enjoyed getting to review locally-developed games (at the time GameSpot had Australian staff that were very good at making sure that local stories were being highlighted).
Around that same time I joined the GameSpot news team, and got to report a few times on the meteoric success of Untitled Goose Game, which well and truly felt like it was taking over the world in the months that followed. I gave the game an 8/10, and liked it a lot. I found that, over the months and years that followed, I'd still often think about it fondly.
When I pitched the book to Boss Fight Books, though, my angle went beyond the game itself. I wanted to discuss Untitled Goose Game in the context of game development in Australia. Launching in late 2019 meant that Untitled Goose Game landed at the end of a turbulent decade of collapse and rebirth, where the local development scene had shifted and changed dramatically. I wanted to put the game into that context, and explore the circumstances that birthed such an enormous hit. Untitled Goose Game is one of many huge Australian-developed games made since 2010, when the local industry felt like it was falling apart in the wake of the global financial crisis.
I was glad to be able to examine the game through this lens, and the more I researched, the more it became clear that Untitled Goose Game is just a perfect fit for Boss Fight Books. I had moved into game development myself since that review was published, and learning more about the process of how this game came to be was very exciting.
Matthew: Why do you think that Untitled Goose Game, in particular, became a meteoric success?
James: I think, every now and then, a game comes along that just makes immediate sense to everyone, despite being something new.
There is just something undeniable about Untitled Goose Game, and as much as I break it down and analyze it in the book, here’s what it really boils down to: a goose causing mischief is really funny. If a goose grabs a man’s keys and dunks them in a lake, I feel sorry for the man, but somehow I’m still on the goose’s side. There’s a comedic tension House House tapped into that is recognizable in a gif, in a screenshot, in a person describing the game to you out loud.
The full answer to this question is, of course, more complicated and interesting, which is why I wrote a book about it!
Matthew: What was happening in Australian game development in 2019 – why was it shifting?
James: 2019 itself isn’t necessarily a point where there was a grand shift, as much as it was a strong year for Australian game development (some other Australian games released that year: City of Brass, Void Bastards, Amid Evil, Frog Detective 2, the excellent expanded Switch version of Assault Android Cactus).
But it’s also a year that, in retrospect, feels like the end of a growth period that had seen the Australian games industry rebuild itself after the Global Financial Crisis had shuttered so many studios – and resulted in the formation of many newer, smaller teams, perfectly positioned to create games for the iPhone App Store. There’s a chapter in the book that digs into this in more detail!
Alongside the local context, game development was a field that was opening up to more people than ever. Teams no longer had to develop their own engines, indie development success stories were piling up, and new opportunities were materializing, like releasing a game on Nintendo’s hugely popular Switch console, or capitalizing on Epic’s hunger for exclusives.
Was Untitled Goose Game a reason for your decision to pursue game development?
James: No, funnily enough! I have worked primarily in games as a narrative designer.
I think Untitled Goose Game is an elegant example of wordless narrative design, but as a writer and a lover of dialogue, the big inspirations for me in the year I transitioned into game development were titles like Paradise Killer and Hades (as well as plenty of older games...Ace Attorney is a series I always point to as a huge inspiration).
Having said that, it was a game that made me excited about being a game maker in Australia and enmeshing myself further in that world. There have been some huge Australian game development success stories, and I think there will be many more in the future, too. This is the first Boss Fight Books title about a game developed in Australia, but I doubt it will be the last.
Matthew: Now that Untitled Goose Game has been out for a few years, are you aware of any newcomers you think might have been inspired by its design, or which build on it?
James: Recently Panic published Thank Goodness You're Here, which feels in many ways spiritually connected to Untitled Goose Game. It's another game about being a bit rude in a quaint English village.
There have definitely been other short games about funny animals, too. Little Kitty, Big City was a good recent example of a game that felt at least Untitled Goose Game adjacent.
But I think developers have known better than to make the "it's Untitled Goose Game but with this specific tweak" games you might expect. Maybe attempts have been made and abandoned!
Matthew: What were some of the lessons that you, personally, took away from Untitled Goose Game, and have you tried to apply them in your work?
James: A big takeaway, for me, is that you should have faith in the ideas that feel good to you.
That's not to say that the funny joke idea you threw out is going to make you wildly successful. I think the lesson here is about artistic and creative fulfillment more than it's about financial success.
But I think it takes a lot of courage, sometimes, to look at your own ideas and say "this one is really good, actually,” and then to pursue it.
Our Season 7 Kickstarter just hit $30k, which means it's time to offer up some interviews with our new authors. Since it's Outer Wilds Week, let's start with that! Below, Untitled Goose Game author James O'Connor interviews Tommy Wallach about Outer Wilds, time loops, "best game ever" convos, and that other game that kinda sounds like Outer Wilds. - Gabe Durham, BFB
James O'Connor: Do you remember the first time you encountered Outer Wilds? Were you excited for it ahead of launch?
Tommy Wallach: I definitely didn't know anything about it prior to launch, but I remember downloading it not too long after it came out, just because the reviews were so effusive. At that point, I wasn't really involved in game design myself, so I came at everything purely as a player/fan. So when I hit that first wall a couple hours in, where you haven't found anything that coheres into a story yet, and the ship is still super hard to control, and you keep falling into the center of Brittle Hollow and getting spat out at the White Hole Station, I just quit. If it wasn't immediately fun, I usually wasn't there for it!
You told me that it took you a few goes to get into Outer Wilds properly. What kept you coming back to it?
Purely word-of-mouth, really. One friend in particular, a musical theater writer named Zack Zadek, kept telling me it was his favorite video game of all time, and he's a smart dude. I'd also begun building escape rooms at that point, so I'd become more interested in game design, which is to say I'd become more forgiving of experiences that weren't immediately (or sometimes ever) "enjoyable" if they were doing interesting things. The more I read about Outer Wilds, the more I realized that it was tackling, and maybe even succeeding, at solving some of the thorniest issues of game design (diegetic "puzzles," integrating narrative and gameplay, creating a genuinely moving experience, etc.).
I love a time loop story. How do you feel about them, generally speaking?
I talk about this in the book, but time loops solve one of the central ludonarrative (i.e. the conflict between narrative and gameplay) problems with most video games. As dark as it is, when Super Mario dies, we're supposed to believe that he's actually, you know, dead. Sure, he may have three lives, but after those are gone, we have to assume that version of Mario is now six feet under, pushing up the daisies. So it's just pure illogic/fantasy when we can start the game over and try again. What's great about time loops is that they turn the traditional gameplay loop (live, die, repeat) sensible; it's now part of the story of the game. In most games, your poor gameplay is punished with death...but death isn't real! Thus the emotional stakes are kinda fundamentally undermined. Time loop games dodge this inconsistency, and can often tell more interesting and grounded stories as a result.
Outer Wilds is one of those rare contemporary games that comes up in a lot of "best games ever made" conversations. Without spoiling anything, do you think there's something particular to this game beyond it being well-designed that leads to this level of excitement from players?
Even if they don't know it, people are desperate for video games to mature. As Tom Bissell put it in his seminal book on gaming, "most games are about attacking a childish world with an adult mind." What's exciting about Outer Wilds (beyond the incredible reconciliation of gameplay and narrative) is that it offers up a far more mature world than any other game I know of. Not mature in the way it's meant when it appears on the cover of a game box, (i.e. get ready for tons of gore, a bunch of gruff men shouting obscenities, and the occasional sex scene taking place at the awkward nadir of the uncanny valley). The game is actually mature. It addresses deep questions in a deep way, which is to say it provides no glib answers or cutesy platitudes. It's genuinely moving. Most games that have achieved this thus far do it only by pressing a particular hot-button issue, meaning it might be incredibly powerful for some and leave others cold. Outer Wilds is universalist in its appeal.
I should also say that the curiosity-based gameplay of Outer Wilds is more or less unique. There are no way points or prescriptive journal entries. No items or powers. No progress beyond the slow acquisition of knowledge through observation and deduction. It's satisfying in a way no other game I've ever played is.
Outer Wilds tells its story in a non-linear fashion. When researching this book, did you encounter any player experiences that wildly differed from your own?
I design and own escape rooms here in Los Angeles, and I never get tired of watching groups go through them. It's staggering how differently certain brains (and combinations of brains) tackle the same set of seemingly simple problems and puzzles. Probably the starkest manifestation of this came when I watched famed game designer Jonathan Blow (Braid, The Witness) play through pieces of Outer Wilds on his YouTube channel. In one segment, he notices a small piece of set decoration that's spiral-shaped, and then attempts to use that spiral as if it were the key to a puzzle. He did that because his own game The Witness is designed in this sort of way--very spatial and arbitrary. He simply wasn't able to understand that Outer Wilds is completely logical, so there'd be no reason that a random piece of a stairway bannister would have some greater purpose.
What's your personal favorite planet in the game?
While it's probably the least interesting from a design perspective, Timber Hearth is definitely the most pleasant place to hang out. And the first time you dive down into one of the geysers and learn the evolutionary history of the Hearthians is revelatory.
We've both written books about games that came out in 2019. Looking at the year, it's easy to imagine books about Disco Elysium, Death Stranding, Control, Sekiro, or many other releases from that year. Do you have any thoughts about why 2019 was such a hot year for interesting games?
Wow. I got nothing. I tend to be skeptical of studying trends. I think the world is chaos and madness, and this kind of thing just happens. (It's sorta like the way people tend to vastly underestimate how often long runs of heads or tails will crop up in a thousand flips of a coin.) That being said, I think Disco Elysium has by far the best writing of any game I've ever played, and I think Sekiro is the high point of the FromSoftware design philosophy (not the flabby-ass Elden Ring!). So I gotta agree...amazing year.
What would you say to anyone who accidentally bought this because they thought it was about The Outer Worlds?
You dodged a bullet.
*
Check out the Outer Wilds book in the Season 7 Kickstarter!
Kyle Orland is the author of a new book about the decades-spanning Windows staple Minesweeper, currently funding on Kickstarter. I caught up with Kyle over email to discuss 90s gaming stigma, unlikely book topics, and his own history with the game. - Gabe Durham
Your book is historical, and only barely touches on your personal history with Minesweeper. Could you tell us about how you got into the game?
I remember first finding the game while I was puttering around on my mom's work computer during one of those summer days where she had to bring me in to work for some reason. I clicked around semi-randomly until I found a mine and got very confused. Then my mom actually explained how the numbers worked -- and some of the basics of working out how to find safe spaces -- and the rest was history.
In the days before the Internet, I remember staring at Minesweeper boards for minutes at a time without making a click, trying to work out if there were any logical rules I was missing that could help me make more progress without guessing (usually there weren't). I remember being very excited the first time I was able to complete an Expert-level board, and quickly falling away from the game after that -- games like Freecell or Rattler Race or Skiefree or Tripeaks became my casual Windows staples for a while.
While I played Minesweeper now and then through the '90s, I got back into the game big time in college, where my college roommate and I got into a months-long high score chase together (hi Danny). Years later, I also had a brief obsession with the Adventure Mode added to the Windows 8 version of the game, which added items and a sense of progression rather than a battle with a ticking clock.
Between those periods of intense interest, though, Minesweeper is a game I'd often find myself drifting to once every few years when bored at a computer. "Oh yeah, Minesweeper. It's been a while. I wonder if I could do any better now." And usually, after a few weeks of obsessive practice, I could.
What made you think of Minesweeper, years later, for the topic of a book?
When thinking of a game to pitch for the Boss Fight Books treatment, I went through a mental list of the titles that I had personally spent the most time with over the year, trying to come up with one that (1) was popular enough to draw some interest in a book-length treatment and (2) hadn't already been written about ad nauseum.
I came up with a lot of candidates that met the first criterion, but Minesweeper was the best game I could think of for that second one. In fact, if you measure games by the ratio of "total aggregate hours played" vs "total aggregate number of words written about," I doubt any game would beat Minesweeper.
I was pretty sure the story of Minesweeper's creation and impact could sustain a book. But discovering the thorough history and documentation at The Authoritative Minesweeper web site cemented my desire to write about this game. There, I learned about the incredible story of how the Minesweeper record-chasing community started exploiting the game's random board generation to play on a record-ready "Dreamboard" where they had already memorized the mine placements. The resulting drama gave the whole book a human angle that really pulled everything else together.
Early readers have been fascinated by the book's portrait of Microsoft in the 90s, a time when some in the company were very against the idea of Microsoft having anything to do with games. What was the stigma around computer games at the time?
When Minesweeper was made in 1990, Microsoft was a behemoth making billions of dollars in annual revenue from its operating systems and massive productivity software like Office and Word. There was a real concern among some in the company that producing games would ruin Microsoft's business-focused reputation and make people think they weren't a serious company worthy of major corporate contracts. And even though there was a growing market for MS-DOS-based games at the time, a lot of executives at Microsoft still balked at the idea that anyone would buy one of these expensive number-crunching machines just to let their kids goof off.
It was the surprise success of Windows Solitaire (which was built-in to Windows 3.0 in 1990) was the wedge needed to start changing that perception in parts of Microsoft. The small Entry Business Unit -- which was responsible for trying to kickstart Windows' home PC business -- saw an opportunity for a collection of simple Windows games that would convince customers there was more to the OS than making work. Minesweeper was included in the first Microsoft Entertainment Pack for Windows that year, and the rest is history.
As you cover in the book, Minesweeper doesn't get brought up a lot in "history of video games" conversations despite for a time being absolutely everywhere. Why do you think games like Minesweeper get left out of the conversation?
Part of it is that the game was so easily accessible for so long -- many players still automatically discount the inherent worth of free-to-play games, even ones like Minesweeper that largely predate things like microtransactions or in-game ads. If Microsoft was giving it out for free, how much value could it really have? A lot of people unfairly think of Minesweeper as "that game you play if there is absolutely nothing else to play" on a given Windows PC (a state of affairs that's very rare in the Internet age).
Part of it is also probably the game's simplicity -- it doesn't have a deep narrative or identifiable characters or complicated mechanics or any of the other markers of complexity that help mark a game as "serious" or "memorable" in people's minds. Yet there are tens of millions of regular Minesweeper players that can testify to the game's addictive appeal. I'd put Minesweeper in the same bucket as Tetris in terms of games where the lack of complexity is part of what makes them special. It seems like one of the primordial building blocks of the very concept of a computer game -- a basic puzzle that can't be broken down any further.
We had a draft of the cover of your book that we were pretty happy with until you got some feedback that wasn't... great. Could you tell the story?
Heh, yeah, we originally used a picture of a dog toy with a bunch of spikes that we felt evoked the look of the underwater mine icon used in the game. When I showed it to some friends and family, though, a few people told me the shape reminded them of the pictures of the microscopic coronavirus that had been all over the news for months at the time.
Once I saw that, I couldn't unsee it, and didn't want it to distract a pandemic-addled public. So we found a similar pet toy with rounded bumps that looked like a mine without evoking the virus quite as strongly.
Since you've been writing about games longer than most of our writers (and since you are the editor of a popular games vertical), I'm curious about how you'd describe the current cultural moment in how people are thinking and talking about video games. And then: What do you want to see more of from writers and content creators?
That's a big question. On the one hand, thanks to the Internet, there are way more people writing about games and aggregate words being written about games than there were when Minesweeper came out in 1990 (when a handful of monthly glossy magazines were pretty much it). The explosion of voices and quality criticism and industry analysis available to a thoughtful reader today is beyond anything I could have dreamed of as a kid in journalism school.
On the other hand, I fear that explosion in the supply of game writing has led to a devaluing of writing about games as a profession. Having so many people creating so much good content -- many of them willing to do it for free -- makes it harder to grab enough attention to stand out and actually make it a vocation, rather than a hobby. There's also been a large, wholesale shift in attention to video makers and streamers that has lessened the demand for writing about games, for good or for ill.
If there's one thing I'd like to see more of, it's reporting on the people making games, especially in a historical context. The people who made some of the earliest titles aren't going to be around forever, and capturing their memories and thoughts for future generations is going to be worth a lot more than some hot take on the latest AAA shooter.
I also love deep dives into hyper-niche groups of players or creators, like the competitive Minesweeper community I talk about in the book. The stories about games I find most interesting these days are the ones about humans playing them in interesting ways, or molding them into completely new forms through playful experimentation.
Bob Mackey is the author of a new book about the PC classic Day of the Tentacle, currently funding on Kickstarter. I caught up with Bob over email to discuss adventure games, animation, comedy, and puzzle design. - Gabe Durham
Could you tell us about how you first discovered Day of the Tentacle? Were you already playing a lot of adventure games at the time?
After playing and falling in love with the Maniac Mansion NES port, I became an adventure game fan with no real access to a PC: the sole platform where the genre thrived. So when Day of the Tentacle appeared at my local game store in 1993 (in its eye-catching five-sided box), I absolutely coveted it—and should have bought it anyway, seeing as it's now an incredibly rare collector's item I don't have the guts to drop several hundred bucks on three decades later. We didn't get a family PC until 1996, and as soon as it entered our home I found myself catching up with 15 years of adventure games. Of course, Day of the Tentacle was one of the first ones I jumped into.
In the book, you hit on the growing pains that the point-and-click adventure genre went through before Day of the Tentacle came out. How did the DotT team benefit from the lessons of the past?
Day of the Tentacle was the first project led by directors Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman, two guys who had previously worked directly under Ron Gilbert on the first two Monkey Island games. This duo of releases essentially codified the rules all (good) adventure games adhere to, and Schafer and Grossman took these lessons learned and applied them to everything within Day of the Tentacle. The result is an experience that feels more refined than everything in the genre that came before it, and one that remains incredibly playable today.
Making a legit funny video game is famously very hard. Why do you think Dave Grossman and Tim Shafer succeeded where so many have failed?
Grossman and Schafer realized the limitations of technology at the time, which is why so much of the DotT's humor isn't reliant on dialogue—in fact, voice acting entered the equation much later during the production. Of course, the dialogue is funny, and they nabbed some great actors to fill the roles, but the awkward pauses between spoken lines in games of this era couldn't necessarily sell jokes as intended. So DotT makes the right choice to rely on its visuals to communicate humor to an extreme other adventure games of the early '90s weren't attempting.
A lot of your work in recent years has been podcasting about The Simpsons and other animated shows, and Day of the Tentacle is often praised for its distinct animation style. Could you tell a little about the DotT team's approach? And how do you think they were able to pull it off with so much less space and frames than their TV & film counterparts?
Day of the Tentacle came about at a time when very few games had any formal sense of art direction. (Hey, 1993 was 30 years ago.) Earlier games featured cartoony visuals, of course, but DotT had an actual mission statement: "Let's make this look and move like a Chuck Jones cartoon." The artists behind the game closely studied classic animated shorts of the era, resulting in the most Chuck-Jones-like production possible at a resolution of 320 by 200. And they were able to make it work on just a handful of floppy discs using the same techniques of classic animation: strong poses and silhouettes that communicate everything you need to know about a character. (Not to mention stylized backgrounds that rely more on file-size-friendly abstraction than photorealism.)
The puzzles in DotT are so goofy and clever. Do you have a favorite? And do you have one that you still have to look up online?
I don't want to completely give away all the steps, but there's a certain puzzle where you have to transform a cat into a skunk via a method that would feel right at home in a Pepe Le Pew cartoon. This isn't my favorite puzzle in terms of design, but it's the most evocative of how Day of the Tentacle is aspiring to be an interactive classic cartoon. And it felt absolutely natural to me as a kid who grew up watching close to 10 hours of Warner Bros. shorts a week on at least four different channels.
After growing up a Day of the Tentacle fan and working on this book project for years, there's absolutely no puzzle for the game I haven't memorized. If you see me on the street, feel free to ask for a hint!
There's been a resurgence of adventure games in recent years, including new games and remasters of old games. Have you kept up with the genre? Any games you'd recommend?
Return to Monkey Island released during the production of this book, and I can't recommend it enough; it stands alongside Day of the Tentacle when it comes to stellar adventure game design. And I also suggest that people don't sleep on the recent remasters of the Sam & Max episodic Telltale games. They've been lovingly remastered by some of the folks who worked on them back in the late '00s, and each episode is just so digestible, fun, and non-frustrating. Does everything I've mentioned so far have DotT co-director Dave Grossman in common? Perhaps.
Mike Sholars is the author of a new book about the 1997 PS1 classic PaRappa the Rapper, currently funding on Kickstarter. I caught up with Mike over email to discuss games writing, demo discs, video game music concerts, and the rapping dog mantras. - Gabe Durham
Why was PaRappa the Rapper THE game you wanted to write a book about? Were there other games you also considered pitching to us?
Short answer? The Chicken Level Song had been stuck in my head for decades, and this was the best way to do something about it. But taking a step back, I had to do a lot of introspection. I've written articles about individual topics, games, whatever. I've written some aggressively long articles. But a book is a conversation, and I wanted to make sure it was a good one. There are games out there I could ramble about for tens of thousands of words, but it would be painful for everyone involved. Something like Super Mario RPG would be a great example of that; lots of thoughts and feelings, but I knew I'd struggle to provide big ideas or new historical research. And I also didn't want to go Full Journalist Mode; I wanted to make sure the reader knew I had passion and a personal connection to the game. My mind went to the Yakuza games; I love them and find their development history fascinating, but my own insight would be at arm's length.
PaRappa felt like the perfect mix; I'm a forever fan, but I felt like its story wasn't common knowledge when compared to something like Doom or Super Mario Bros. At the same time, I knew there was a universal story here: This decades-long arc of a game that invented music games as we know them, but doesn't get the credit. Like Searching For Sugar Man or The Sparks Brothers, but also written by an anxious Millennial who turned his first published book into a running joke about Aerosmith. (And I'd do it again.)
You mention in the book that as a kid you read video game mags obsessively, and as an adult you've written essays for a lot of good video game and pop culture sites. What do you look for in good writing about games? And how has that changed over time?
Despite spending all my formative years as a know-it-all, my favourite feeling in the world is being shown something new. When someone you trust (a friend, a critic you follow, someone on social media) can express not just why a work of art is good, but how it made them feel and think, that's magic. When I was devouring GamePro and EGM issues as a kid, game criticism was mostly surface level; more product review than At the Movies, you know? And there's absolutely a place for that; I have had my mind changed plenty of times because I thought a game was going to play like one thing, and in reality, it was something else. We've never had more options when it comes to objective coverage of video games, and I don't see that changing. So what I look for in good games writing, and what I try to do with my own work, is take that next step, and do my best Roger Ebert impression.
(Did I just spend 100 words paraphrasing that one monologue from Ratatouille? Oui.)
A Marques Brownlee-style approach to reviewing things is incredibly valuable when you're on the fence about committing your time and money to something. But what about after you've watched the movie, read the book, or played the game? When you're sitting there with your thoughts and the end credits scrolling in the darkness, where can you take that energy? That's good games writing, for me; it's something I can take with me and turn around in my brain. It doesn't need to be full of spoilers, but I want it to go deeper. I love when writers are brave enough to explain what they brought into their experience with a game, because it shapes what they took away from it. Because games journalism and pop culture criticism outlets are facing the exact same money-gatekeeper problems that drove me away from mainstream journalism, the biggest change I've seen over time is in how many writers are encouraged and supported in those kinds of deeper dives. You can't write that type of piece around a week-long embargo review period (although everyone does their best, and many of them are miracle workers), and a game will rarely be as click-worthy as it is during its launch window. This type of writing (and these kinds of writers!) are often migrating towards YouTube, creating multi-hour video essays that I adore.
But that's the heart of it: I think games are relevant past their first month of release, and I don't think games writing should be treated like it has an expiry date. You may have noticed this when I wrote a book about a game released in 1997.
You also mention in the book that a demo disc was how you first encountered the game, or at least the first level. Was that true of a lot of people you've talked to? And if so, how did that one demo disc find so many eager players?
I have no way of proving this, but it feels very accurate. Everyone who knows a bit about PaRappa remembers Chop Chop Master Onion. In some ways, I think it's just that the whole world was smaller at that time; console gaming was split between two companies, all games were enjoyed through physical copies, and pirating media was a dark art that few had the resources or desire to master for themselves. And demo discs were cheap/free. There's also certainly a novelty aspect to all of this: On that same demo disc, you can play Cool Boarders 2. We were already at a point where multiple 3D snowboarding simulators existed, and Cool Boarders wasn't even the best one. But a voice-acted cartoon starring a rapping dog? It was fresh then, it's fresh now.
What is something you learned about PaRappa while researching and writing the book that surprised you?
There were so many things, I don't even know where to begin. I learned that a huge amount of the preliminary art was sent via fax machine from Rodney Greenblat (in New York) to NaNaOn-Sha (in Japan). But we're talking mid-90s fax machines here; they were in black and white. So Rodney essentially turned all of his concept art into a paint-by-numbers, which the team in Japan would then decipher and put into the game. One of the most colourful games of its era started in monochrome!
I learned that both Greenblat and Masaya Matsuura were relatively new to game design, and operated without a ton of oversight from Sony. The PlayStation was a gamble, and every option was viable. That wouldn't last long; even by the end of the 90s, the idea of what games were supposed to be like had a big influence on Um Jammer Lammy and PaRappa 2.
Finally, I learned about Ryu Watabe, who might be the coolest person ever? He was the backbone of this project. Bilingual in Japanese and English; left a corporate job to pursue his love of hip hop. He penned all the lyrics on the fly, working with Matsuura and Gabin Itou. He laid down the demo tracks for every character in the game. And that's his voice as Chop Chop Master Onion. Dude put in the work, and I did my best to sing his praises.
I'm obsessed with this YouTube video you shared with me of the PaRappa rappers and singers performing their songs live (along with songs from Um Jammer Lammy). I want to be at this concert! Do you think a cover band who performs songs from the PaRappa/Lammy trilogy would be successful? How much should they charge?
Yo, I want to be at that concert. On a very practical level, that is footage from a Sony marketing event; most of the crowd is games media and/or people affiliated with the games. But the vibes are immaculate (and once again, Ryu Watabe is objectively dope as hell). But...PaRappa is weird when you just consider the songs. Almost every music game that followed it treats player input as the trigger that makes music happen; it you don't press a button, the song stops, or your score goes down. But if you mess up in DDR, the song keeps going. PaRappa and Lammy are more like Simon; the song is built around a pattern that the player immediately repeats. It's fun and intuitive when you play it, but it's kind of ridiculous when you do it live.
Somewhere out there, a punk band an a jazz/hip hop duo are planning out their Lammy and PaRappa projects. I can't wait to hear them.
There is a contagious optimism to the character of PaRappa. This optimism scans as authentic in a way that sneaks past my defenses and warms my frosty heart. Why do you think that is? What's the difference between the cheap sentimentality, sometimes called "toxic positivity" these days, and PaRappa's "gotta believe" mentality?
There's layers to this one. Hip hop culture has always been tied to the energy, perspectives, and creativity of youth; that's why it ages so fast, like comedy. I talk about this in the book, but for a variety of reasons, there is no Aerosmith or Rolling Stones equivalent in hip hop. And once you slip past that cultural event horizon, you come off as corny. The coolest thing in 2003 will almost certainly be the corniest in 2023. PaRappa avoids this because he wasn't trying to meet a mid-90s idea of Hip Hop Cool; there wasn't anything quite like him. He's not Poochie from The Simpsons; there's no sense that a board of shadowy executives crafted him into being by committee. It's too sincere to be fake, basically.
That sincerity is absolutely not going to work for some people, but that's a separate issue altogether. Once you get past his basic visual design and presentation, the surprising thing about PaRappa as a game and a character is how character-focused it is. It's a 6-chapter slice-of-life cartoon about someone working to believe in themselves. PaRappa's insecurity isn't a vague reference; we are shown, in big cartoony cutscenes, that basically all of his anxieties come from a false belief that he needs to be richer/manlier/better in order to deserve love and friendship. And I don't know about you, but I've dealt with those feelings way more than my struggles with saving a Princess from a castle, or my fears of a weapon to surpass Metal Gear. We connect with his positivity because we relate to his negativity, as well.
Finally, I feel like "toxic positivity" is more of a social phenomenon; it's when negative thoughts and feelings are downplayed or denied. When only positive feedback is allowed or acknowledged, it's just an echo chamber with pastel colours. Versions of it are everywhere, especially in the worlds of fans and fandom. PaRappa could have easily fallen into that trap. Then there's artificial sentimentality; when you know your heartstrings are being pulled for maximum effect, and it doesn't feel earned. Think of every action movie that opens with an obligatory Tragic Backstory for its main character; for a game example, play the first hour or so of Watch Dogs. The game is doing everything in its power to make us feel, make us care, but you can't force that. And on the flipside, look at Pixar's Up, and how it wordlessly made millions of people cry in its first 10 minutes. PaRappa could have stumbled here, too.
I think it avoids both by being, for lack of a better word, real. PaRappa is a character riddled with insecurity and anxiety; his motto is about pushing through all of that, or at the very least not letting it define you. His failures are small (but real), and his wins are also pretty humble. There aren't life-or-death stakes in this game, and it trusts its audience to care. So many things about the game's presentation are loud and big, but the victories of everyday life are treated as worth celebrating in their own right.
I could write a book about all this!
This week, we are remembering friend and author Philip J Reed, author of our book on Resident Evil. Blair Farrell's 2020 interview with Philip for the site Electric Bento went offline when the site was shuttered. We are happy to republish the interview here with thanks to Blair and Electric Bento.
1) Blair Farrell: To start things off, let us get to know you. How long have you been writing?
Philip J Reed: Pretty much as long as I’ve been alive. I’ve always enjoyed reading, so it was nothing to pick up a pen and try it myself. I was terrible for many, many years. But that’s important. If you want to write, be terrible for many, many years and be okay with that! You’ll gradually get less terrible, and you’ll probably even get good at some point. I studied literature in college, where I was exposed to many more influences and worked under instructors who deliberately challenged me to further my abilities. I cannot emphasize enough how important and helpful that was.
Professionally, we’re looking at around 15 years of writing. I’ve written for a number of different sites, magazines, and other outlets. Nintendo Life is what brought me into the games criticism fold; I was fortunate enough to be part of the initial wave of writers for that site. I was with them for around seven years before striking out on my own.
2) What is your history with the Resident Evil series? What is it about the franchise that made you want to write a book about it?
My Resident Evil experience goes back to its very first Western release, pre-Director’s Cut. It was the first PlayStation game I ever played, and I hated it. It seemed like a clunkier ripoff of Alone in the Dark, which was already pretty clunky to begin with.
I’m almost certain my friend brought the game over just because he knew it would scare the hell out of me, and not because he thought I’d enjoy it. After he left that night, though, I couldn’t stop thinking about the game. We hadn’t made it very far. I saw the dogs crash through the windows, I got pecked to death by crows in the art gallery, I got crushed by the ceiling...but that was about it. And that was more than enough to get me wondering about what other horrific secrets the Spencer Mansion held.
I popped into and out of the series over the years, most notably when the first game was remade for the GameCube, and my appreciation has grown consistently. I think it says a lot that the original game, which scared me and angered me and frustrated me, still kept me coming back for more.
3) When did you pitch Resident Evil to Boss Fight? Describe what the process was like and how long it took from pitch to final product
I pitched in early 2018, and if I remember correctly it was accepted and I signed the contract in May of that year. Gabe, the head of Boss Fight Books, called me and we chatted about the pitch, about what he was looking for, about timelines and so on. He believed in this book from the start and that was a big source of encouragement.
The first draft, which was extremely rough and mainly consisted of me getting everything on paper that I wanted to flesh out and cover properly, took me a couple of months. From there it was a lot of fact finding, rewriting, discovering new directions for the book to take, and working with Michael P. Williams, Boss Fight’s superhuman researcher. He’d help me dig up just about anything I needed, and he’d do it in the blink of an eye. I’m pretty sure he’s part robot but I don’t want to rat him out. He and I spent probably a year going back and forth on drafts and concepts, and anything I did he was able to find a way to elevate it. I’d take something as far as I could take it, and he’d push me just a bit further. It was a remarkably beneficial relationship.
We landed on a “finished” draft in January of this year, I think, and it's just been a matter of polishing and refining it since.
4) What can readers expect from your take on the source material?
They can expect to be taken on a journey from frustration through begrudging admiration all the way to genuine love. I try to use the game’s trip through the Spencer Mansion as a way of tracing the development of my own understanding of horror in general. It’s amazing how instructive that game can be. Lots of folks remember it for its sillier moments, and that’s completely fair. The game gets quite silly many times over. But if you’re willing to push a little further and look at what it’s actually doing, how it’s accomplishing its particular goals, it’s often masterful. And that’s what the book does. It walks you through all of these moments like little exhibits, and we take a fun little journey of love and understanding together.
5) Resident Evil is an incredibly popular, and long running, series. What will make your book stand out against other creators who have also produced articles and videos about the game? Are there perhaps any teases you can let us in on?
It’s funny, because it seems like so many people discuss the game and the series, but everybody’s point of view is unique. If you watch 50 videos about Super Mario Bros. or Mega Man, you’ll hear a lot of repetition. That isn’t really the case with Resident Evil. The Sphere Hunter will do these great, personal reflections that are just bursting with love and heart. Avalanche Reviews will do a more detached retrospective with an emphasis on technical performance and the game’s ports. SinglePlayerNacho will do an entire lore video about a corpse you find on the floor that isn’t there when you come back. Dante Ravioli will do a video in which he sees if he can kill the chainsaw man with an egg.
My point is that Resident Evil, for whatever reason, is so vastly open to interpretation that new voices nearly always have new things to say. I love everybody I listed above, and my discussion of the game is also nothing like theirs. I approach it as someone who has grown to love horror – the best and worst of horror – over the years. I critique it and analyze its blocking and direction the way I would a film. I even track down the actors and voice actors who made Resident Evil the closest thing to a playable horror film we’d ever had, so that I could construct for the first time the complete story of those recording sessions. That’s something else the book offers that I don’t think any video or article can: comprehensiveness. You get the entire story in one place, and I’m honored I am able to provide that.
As far as teases go, and what also sets this book apart from any other video or article, is the fact that it contains interviews – consisting almost exclusively of new information – with nearly every known actor and voice actor in the game. There are two sad exceptions: one who passed away and one who declined to be interviewed. But otherwise, this is the most complete story we as fans have ever had about Resident Evil's notorious performances.
6) What were some of the more challenging things to research while writing Resident Evil?
This might be an even better question than you realize! There is so much misinformation about this game on the internet. Constantly I would stumble across something that seemed interesting, and I’d try to validate it as fact. So I’d go backward from wherever I found it, trace it through various repetitions over the years, and discover that it originated as someone’s theory on some long-dead web forum. It was never a fact to begin with, but people read it, repeated it, and now they “know” it, even though it’s not true. That was profoundly frustrating for me, and I wasn’t alone. When I interviewed the actors from the game, they took the opportunity to clear up some misconceptions themselves.
Part of this is due to the era in which the game was released; video games were still not taken seriously, and the haunted-mansion zombie game wasn’t going to buck that trend. A lot of definitive records of the development process simply don’t exist because nobody cared enough to keep them. That’s okay, but I think we as people and fans do have a responsibility to separate fact from fiction when we write about the game. Perpetuating fictions does a lot of harm to the folks trying to piece together the facts.
7) Will your book mostly look at the 1996 original, or will it also touch upon the beloved 2002 remake?
Mainly about the original, but I definitely wanted to drill into bits of the remake as well. I think the remake is a genuinely fascinating game in its own right, and the Lisa Trevor stuff is still, to this day, my favorite thing in the entire franchise. It takes something that was touched upon in the original (“These monsters were once real people. See? Here’s someone’s diary…”) and brings it to the saddest, scariest, most unnerving extreme. It’s not just good for a horror game; it’s good horror period.
8) Finally, where can people find your work on the internet, and is there a proposed release window for Resident Evil?
The book is finished, so anyone who pre-orders it through the Kickstarter can expect to receive it in August. There’s the standard COVID caveat that things could change in the interim, but the book is as ready as it can be prior to printing and distribution!
You can find my work at TripleJump on YouTube, where I write for the two funniest guys on the internet. I also have my own site at noiselesschatter.com, which is full of critical essays about film, games, books, and every episode of ALF.
This week, we are grieving the unexpected death of our friend, Philip J Reed, whose book on Resident Evil we published in 2020.
Philip had such a natural conversational writing style, and could find depth in even the most shallow-seeming subject. He loved exploring B-movies, junk TV, and deeply flawed video games. Even when he made fun of the worst of what pop culture had to offer, the jokes never seethed at their subject, but rather pivoted toward the universal, marveling at the combination genius/hack that lives in us all: Isn’t it funny that we’re like this? Aren’t our failures so fascinating and revealing?
Philip wrote regularly for many years on his blog, Noiseless Chatter, often creating critical dares for himself like, “I’m going to play and discuss every level of every Mega Man game,” or, “I’m going write a ten-essay scene-by-scene breakdown of The Life Aquatic,” and then, unlike most of us, he actually completed those projects. (A sad sticking point for some of us is how close Philip came to completing his longrunning episode-by-episode series on Better Call Saul, passing away with just a few episodes to go.)
In the most famous/infamous essay series on his blog, Philip unpacked each and every episode (and numerous spinoffs) of the awful sitcom ALF. “I started the project as a way to write about a topic I didn’t have to take seriously,” Philip wrote when Gabe asked him about it in an interview ahead of Resident Evil’s release. “It’s ALF, for crying out loud. Within a few weeks, I was taking it seriously. I started using ALF as a springboard to talk about literature, music, and movies. And religion. And politics. And basic human decency.”
It’s no wonder Philip saw a kindred soul in Nathan Rabin, another of our great America junk mystics who can report back from the biggest flop with the deepest insight, or that when it came time to find someone to write a foreword to his book, Philip tapped none other than the great B-horror king Lloyd Kaufman.
When we asked Philip what Resident Evil and Kaufman’s work had in common, Philip cited “their willingness to just go for it.” He continued, “You can play Resident Evil or watch a Troma film, and in either case you see artists barreling toward their vision without hesitation. Sometimes it works great, other times you can see where the end product might have benefited from a more deliberate approach, but the fact is that you wouldn’t have gotten those particular moments of greatness if you hadn’t been barreling in the first place. It’s a big gamble to just let yourself fly with artistic abandon, because if it lands it lands brilliantly and if it doesn’t, it falls very flat.”
Though we don’t think he intended to, Philip was also distilling what is so great about his own writing. He gave himself permission to take big swings, confidently barreling forward toward moments of greatness, trusting he could always go back and cut whatever wasn’t working.
Philip’s deep kindness shines both in his Resident Evil book and in the thousands of unpublished words exchanged about it. Throughout the entirety of our iterative research and editing, we got to know Philip through two years of ongoing, open conversation across Gmail and Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and text messages that veered through all the spheres of low and high culture (but mostly low), peppered with so much good humor and fun and friendship. There are dozens upon dozens of emails and hundreds more messages of our ongoing work conversation, full of misdirects, red herrings, jokes, tangents, anxieties about publishing and life in general, all leading toward bringing his manuscript to life.
Gabe has fond memories of working with Philip (always remotely, unfortunately) on his book from the coworking space he used to rent in the Larchmont Village neighborhood of Los Angeles, and of how excited Philip was to watch a great book emerge better and better with each subsequent draft.
For his part, Mike best remembers the detective work that went into the book. Mike worked with Philip to track down an obscure early dub of the Hayao Miyazaki film Porco Rosso, the version shown on Japanese Airlines that featured Resident Evil’s voice actor Barry Gjerde. In our attempts to contact Gjerde, who had been wary of writers making him the butt of their jokes about Resident Evil’s laughably poor dialogue, Mike and Philip hunted through an obscure Norwegian genealogy website to find his living relatives as potential contacts. Philip eventually found a less creepy way to get in touch with Gjerde, and was able to include him in the book in a way that not only respected the constraints on the actor’s performance but also celebrated his work and craft.
Philip was pleased with how his Resident Evil book turned out, and how much it connected with readers and reviewers. People noticed, for example, the care that he put into showcasing the way fixed-cam early PlayStation games allowed for attention to film-like direction and composition, and the achievement of finding and interviewing the English-language voice and live-action casts.
For some readers, though, it was the book’s open-heartedness that stood out most. The book begins and ends with Philip reflecting on his own difficult childhood, and the friends he’d eventually make a clean break from, but who also introduced him to the horror genre as both an art form and a coping mechanism. Philip writes in the book’s final chapter, “It’s nice to focus on monsters you know aren’t real, to distract yourself from the real ones for a little while, from the ones you can’t blast into a pile of smoked meat. It feels good to prove to yourself that you can survive. To remind yourself that you’ve survived already.”
For Philip, art was an essential vehicle for coping, growth, and survival. Philip once had plans to start his own series of short books about “how creative works shape lives” in which Philip was to write his own book about how Mystery Science Theater 3000 shaped his own young life: “It’s seen me through some of the darkest stretches of my life, and it’s bolstered me through some of my most creative.” (We’d read the hell out of that book.)
When explaining the publishing project, Philip wrote that while “we share a lot of opinions,” we “often have trouble articulating the psychological, emotional, visceral response we have to those rare pieces of media that shape who we are, that reconfigure our world views, that begin with us seeing life in one way and end with us never seeing anything the same way again.”
And while that particular project did not come to pass, Philip offered feedback and encouragement to countless friends and colleagues. Philip generously offered Gabe feedback on his Majora’s Mask book, and then did the same for Sebastian Deken’s book on Final Fantasy VI. Philip wrote for the love of the game, and for the joy of connecting with others. For Philip, reading/writing and connecting with others was so often one and the same. Those intertwined passions brought him deeper into our Boss Fight crew, and cemented our friendship with him.
And Philip was our friend, even though we never met in person and rarely spoke on the phone. Our most frequent synchronous contact was tiny flashing dots on messenger apps and when we could watch him livestream holiday specials of shitty Christmas movies for charity. In a strange digital age, this is a familiar kind of friendship for us, but the death of a friend in this era is fundamentally weird. We don’t have the rituals to mark his passing. We don’t have the tools to shape our grief. We don’t have photographs of us together or voice messages from him. Just so very many words on digital paper.
We can’t reread them all. We won’t delete them either. They will subsume into a cosmic digital radiation that a future culture writer will one day discover. They will write perhaps one day on Better Call Saul, or The Life Aquatic, or even ALF, will find a clue that opens up a window into Philip’s expansive writing, incisive criticism, and generous heart, will memorialize him for a new audience of inspired weirdos, and compel them to create something strange, and sad, and lovely.
*
Philip used to fundraise for The Trevor Project, a charity providing mental health resources and free crisis prevention for LGBTQ youth. If you’d like to make a donation in his name, you can do so here.
Alyse Knorr is the author of the next book in the Boss Fight series, GoldenEye 007, as well as a previous book, Super Mario Bros. 3. The GoldenEye book is currently being funded in a Kickstarter campaign and comes out later this year, first as a paperback and then as a special edition hardcover. I caught up with her today over email, and she graciously answered my questions as one of her editors on the book. - Gabe Durham
What did you learn from writing the Super Mario Bros. 3 book that you then brought into writing about GoldenEye?
So many things! From a research perspective, I learned that writing about games well requires exploring a huge range of sources: interviews with the developers, interviews with super-fans, interviews with cultural critics, research into academic game theory, and research into the contextual history of the era. You need to talk to people, comb through old copies of The New York Times online, stalk old buildings on Google Maps, and simplify then apply complex theoretical ideas from games criticism. Sometimes the most exciting research finds are articles that were written just at the time the game originally came out--comparing the historical criticism alongside today's commentary is so fascinating.
When it comes to writing, I learned from Super Mario Bros. 3 that my job is to weave together all of these different sources on all of these different topics to tell a clear and compelling story. Anyone can find a cool listicle online called "10 things you didn't know about GoldenEye," but when you tell a story, you have to work things out like narrative arc, scenes, character development, and what's at stake emotionally. Writing Super Mario Bros. 3 taught me that you need a clear throughline for your book--a guiding question, hypothesis, or argument--to bring everything together. That's what makes it a cohesive and satisfying experience for a reader (I hope!)
In a recent video, you do a great job of describing what GoldenEye's multiplayer mode meant to you when the game came out. What other games have you loved playing with others, either local or online?
The three games I played most with friends through high school and college were Mario Kart 64, GoldenEye, and Super Smash Bros. for the N64 and then GameCube. They are such hilarious, silly games. They are designed to create so much emotion--I mean, there's nothing like the anger you feel when your buddy red-shells you just INCHES before you cross the finish line in Mario Kart 64. But it's a hilarious kind of anger. Of course, I also still love playing Super Mario Bros. 3 with family and friends, and I have a lot of memories of growing up and playing it with my dad and brother, which I wrote about in my Boss Fight title on Super Mario 3. I still think it's so fun to introduce that game to little kids--I played some with a 10-year-old the other day and he was shocked at how hard it is. "It's old-school hard!" I told him.
What about the history of GoldenEye surprised you or ran counter to what you had assumed going into your research?
My biggest surprise was just how organically this game was made, through iterative design and a profound trust between each of the developers as well as between the developers and Rare management. Early on, GoldenEye was meant to be an on-the-rails shooter--a fundamentally different type of game than the open 3D world in the final version. The multiplayer was thrown together in six weeks right at the end of development, pretty much just to see if it could be done.
Because almost none of the developers had ever worked on a game before, they didn't know what the rules were, and so they could easily break them all. This, along with the work culture of Rare at the time, allowed unparalleled creativity and freedom. These were such brilliant, adventurous, and ambitious designers, and so it's no wonder that, given the time to experiment and innovate, they came up with something as beautiful as GoldenEye.
The year is 1997. You're playing GoldenEye multiplayer with three friends on a big boxy 4:3 TV. You're going to play multiplayer for the next 3 hours, but the twist is: You have to keep the same weapon/play mode specs the whole time! What are they?
Power Weapons, Facility, 10 minutes! I think I've done these very settings for 3 hours, haha.
What's your relationship with the Bond franchise like outside of this particular game? Do you have a favorite Bond actor and a favorite movie?
Like many Millennials, I really didn't care much about Bond until GoldenEye the game, which was really the first meaningful interaction with Bond I ever had. So GoldenEye the movie is my favorite Bond film, and for me, Pierce Brosnan will always be Bond. No offense to Daniel Craig fans, but he's too bulky and sweaty to be my Bond! The women actresses in GoldenEye are also amazing. I really love Judi Dench as M, especially when she calls him a "misogynist dinosaur"! I also love the fact that Famke Janssen (who plays Xenia Onatopp), was so hardcore that she sent an actor to the hospital during filming because she "got carried away," and she herself broke a rib after Brosnan threw her across a room. What a badass!
You're very good at pitching books, and I remember appreciating that you put just as much work into your 2019 GoldenEye proposal as you had the first time around with SMB3, even though we already had a working relationship. But more than that, I remember what a great impression both proposals made on Mike and me. How do you approach a book proposal? What advice would you pass on to people who have a nonfiction book idea that they want to pitch to a press or an agent?
This is such a nice thing to say! Thanks, Gabe. I wanted to give you and Mike just as polished and professional a proposal for GoldenEye as I did for Super Mario Bros. 3 because I respect the hell out of you both, and the work you do for Boss Fight. You deserve only the best.
I think a book proposal is like a combination of a job interview and a date. It needs to be meticulous, persuasive, and professional, to prove that you are ready to do this job, but it also has to be fun and exciting, and give a sense of your voice. You hope that your proposal will make the editor say "Holy smokes this is so cool! I need to hear this story. And I'm totally confident this is the author to tell it." Editors have to invest a lot of time, money, and trust in their authors, so I believe that we authors owe it to editors (not to mention readers!) to show up and do the job well.
From a technical standpoint, I try to center my proposal on a clear, concise thesis so that it will stick in the editor's mind all day and be very memorable. I only write the proposal after I've already done a lot of research, seen what's out there, figured out my approach, and written a sample chapter. That way I can really prove to the editor not only that the book itself is worth getting behind, but that I will write it on time and write it well. The pitch is in part saying: listen, I've done my homework already, I've got a plan, and this is why it's a great plan. In this way, writing the proposal is basically like getting started writing the book itself.
This is the fifth and final installment of our author-vs.-author Boss Fight Q&A series. Both Philip's book on Resident Evil and Gabe's book on Majora's Mask are funding now on Kickstarter.
What was the initial kernel of an idea that made you pitch Resident Evil to us as a subject?
I had a friend who really wanted to submit a pitch. I encouraged him, and he encouraged me right back. I think he didn't want to go through the process alone. I wasn't sure what I'd want to write about, so I brainstormed a bunch of weird and obscure games. I figured I could pitch some truly bizarre title nobody else would dare pitch, and that that would help me stand out a bit.
A different friend of mine -- both of these friends are named Matt, for maximum confusion -- had recently rekindled my interest in the first Resident Evil game. That's certainly not obscure so I didn't give it much thought, but it kept creeping back into my mind. I knew I'd have a lot to say about it. It was the first PlayStation game I played. I have vivid memories of that night, playing it for the first time with two friends. I remember comparing it to Alone in the Dark, a PC game from a few years prior that I had also played. I knew I could walk through the entire game like a museum exhibit and talk about what every little thing is doing and how it's contributing to the overall atmosphere...
There were a lot of angles I could take, but I didn't want to pitch Resident Evil because I was certain hundreds of people had already pitched it. My friend Matt -- the first one -- told me to stop worrying and do it anyway. I did, and I learned later I was the first person to pitch that game to Boss Fight! There's probably a moral to this story but I'm not sure I learned it.
How did the book change as you wrote it? What surprised you, either from the research or the writing itself?
I have two answers! From the research side, it was the sheer amount of misinformation out there. It drove me crazy. I’d find something I thought was an interesting fact and I’d try to validate it. Article A cites Article B, so I look at that to find Article B citing Article C, so I look at that to find Article C citing nothing. To be fair, a lot of the time I'd follow a trail that led to something being specifically presented as unverified. Somebody would write a theory about how the game was made, or something, and it was clear they were theorizing. Of course the internet being what it is, other sites would quote it or report on it without being clear that it was conjectural, and then other people would cite their reporting, and then readers accept it as fact.
It’s major stuff, as well. Somebody will say, incorrectly, that the characters were voiced by the same actors who played them in the live-action cutscenes. People pick up on that and it becomes gospel, even though it’s not true, there's no evidence for it, and you can disprove it the moment you try researching it yourself. Fred Fouchet, a very active Resident Evil fan who has dedicated himself to identifying the actors, vented to me about how frustrating it was. Bad information constantly ends up leading him in the wrong direction and wasting his time. He’s acutely aware of how false information has made his job harder than a complete lack of information would have.
From the writing side, I ended up learning that one of the friendships I was writing about -- the friendship that was pivotal to me discovering Resident Evil -- was toxic. I started writing about our relationship, which made me think about it in ways I never had before, I guess. Between two drafts I went from wistful to wondering why the hell I kept him in my life as long as I did. It's the sort of emotional journey you hope a reader will have, and I got to have it as a writer.
One really fun aspect of the book was how you successfully interviewed the voice actors and live cutscene actors -- many of whom have spent their lives not knowing they were in the game at all. Could you tell me about your process of finding and talking to these people?
There's about a fifty-fifty split between the actors who have been identified and the actors who have not. It's really strange. There's an entire chapter in the book that explains why the actors in Resident Evil didn't know until recently they were in Resident Evil. In the cases of those who are still not identified, I did what every fan does and tried to track them down myself. Then I did something that nearly every fan does, which is fail at doing that.
As for the others, I had a lot of invaluable help from the fan community, which was so warm and welcoming to me. Specifically, Monique Alves and Fred Fouchet helped me establish contact with the actors. Sometimes directly, sometimes just by nudging me in the right direction. My process involved reaching out honestly and sincerely, being clear about what I was doing, and hoping they'd be willing to be part of this book. Every one of them was, which still blows me away. Barry Gjerde -- who voiced Barry -- has been bullied relentlessly for his performance in Resident Evil and was the only one who didn't reply to my requests. I tried so many times to get in touch with him, as Barry is an integral part of the game's legacy, but I got nothing. Ward Sexton -- the narrator who growls "RESIDENT EVIL" at you when you boot the game up -- is friends with Gjerde, though. When he heard that I had difficulty getting Gjerde's attention, he reached out to him and assured him that this wasn't a hit piece; this was a chance for Gjerde to set the record straight and be treated with respect. That's all Gjerde needed to hear, and he gave me so much great information for the book. Thanks to him, and the rest of the actors, I get to tell for the first time the true and complete story behind those infamous performances.
With only two exceptions -- Scott McCulloch, who voiced Chris and has passed away; and Lynn Harris, who voiced Rebecca and prefers not to be interviewed -- we hear from every known Resident Evil actor in this book. I am both humbled and honored that no other singular source can make that claim!
Beyond the first game and its remake, what other games in the Resident Evil series have you enjoyed most?
I’ll always have a soft spot for the first game, and I believe its remake is one of gaming’s great masterpieces, for sure. Outside of that, the one I enjoyed most is probably a controversial choice; it’s Resident Evil: Revelations.
I bought it because at the time there was very little else worth owning on the 3DS, and I couldn’t believe how great it was. It’s not as scary as most of the other Resident Evil games, but it’s definitely one of the most effective. The game is mainly set on an abandoned, drifting cruise ship, which is such a perfect setting for Resident Evil. And by that I really do mean I can’t think of a better setting at all. Jill is in it, which is always a plus, a lot of the new characters are great, and it’s just so much fun. My only complaint about Revelations is that the subseries died so quickly. Capcom did a sequel, which was also good, and that was it. I would have loved to see those games continue.
Elsewhere, Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 4 are both brilliant, and I want to show some love to Code Veronica, which is among the very best in the series and doesn't get nearly enough recognition.
You got the infamous B-horror director Lloyd Kaufman to write a great foreword to the book. What do you think Resident Evil and Kaufman's work (like The Toxic Avenger) have in common?
I’m almost certainly oversimplifying things, but the first thing that strikes me as a commonality is their willingness to just go for it. You can play Resident Evil or watch a Troma film, and in either case you see artists barreling toward their vision without hesitation. Sometimes it works great, other times you can see where the end product might have benefited from a more deliberate approach, but the fact is that you wouldn’t have gotten those particular moments of greatness if you hadn't been barreling in the first place. It’s a big gamble to just let yourself fly with artistic abandon, because if it lands it lands brilliantly and if it doesn’t, it falls very flat.
I think it’s that willingness to “go for it” that gives certain works their specific identities. A more carefully crafted Resident Evil wouldn’t have had the staying power. (I know, because that game was Alone in the Dark.) A more carefully crafted Toxic Avenger or Class of Nuke ‘Em High or Poultrygeist would have just been a competent B-movie. It takes bravery to run headlong into your craziest ideas instead of conferring with your team and trying to decide whether or not you can even pull it off.
That’s from the production side of things, but from the audience perspective I think there’s a perceptible earnestness behind both. Shinji Mikami and Kaufman are both punching above their weight, and people like seeing that. It’s transfixing and hypnotic. We laugh when things fall apart, as they inevitably do at certain points, but when something works -- when we get an image or a line or a sequence that sticks with us -- we never forget it, because on some level we are aware of the sheer gall it took for them to try in the first place.
As a writer, one of the projects you're best known for is your review of every episode/special/movie of ALF, a very bad sitcom. Could you tell me about what drove you to complete a project most would've abandoned, and what you got out of that process?
One thing I got out of that process was the reminder that you never know what an audience is going to latch onto. I've written a lot of things across various outlets that I put my heart into, truly expecting them to take off. One October, for instance, I spent the month writing about Christian horror films, which I thought was such a fascinating topic. Nobody cared. But I write angry jokes about ALF and I'm flooded with readers from all over the world.
I started the project as a way to write about a topic I didn't have to take seriously. It's ALF, for crying out loud. Within a few weeks, I was taking it seriously. I started using ALF as a springboard to talk about literature, music, and movies. And religion. And politics. And basic human decency. I was writing tens of thousands of words about each episode at one point. The most flattering comment I ever got was that reading my reviews -- of ALF, mind you -- was like attending a series of lectures on television history with a very passionate professor.
I want to say it was the readers that drove me to complete the project, and without question there's a lot of truth to that. Mainly, though, I was proving to myself that I could do it. I could take a topic literally no human being cares about and write something worth reading. Each episode was like a writing prompt from hell, but it forced me to either find things worth discussing or to take things that weren't worth discussing and find a way to make them entertaining. It's not my place to decide whether or not I succeeded, but I can say with confidence that I've written more about ALF than anybody else in human history.
This is the fifth and final installment of our author-vs.-author Boss Fight Q&A series. Both Philip's book on Resident Evil and Gabe's book on Majora's Mask are funding now on