Gamedeveloper.com Publisher Kris Graft joins the panel to cover NEWS regarding BANANAS, light fishing and archaeology, and Hades Kart. Original music by Kurt Feldman.
Questions this week:
Let’s talk about the rebranding of Gamasutra to Game Developer. (03:43)
What are the best video game postmortems? (10:41)
What are the most common mistakes when someone first gets into video games? (15:24)
Which video game characters have the most complicated morning routines? (20:46)
What video game or game adjacent companies should be renamed? (25:54)
Dirtbag MoxBagel asks: Is it possible to have fans take games less seriously as an identity and more seriously as creative endeavors? (31:42)
Why don’t you design a new item for Mario Kart? (38:26)
Toys for Bob are currently toiling in the COD mines, but in recent years they were working on a successor to Star Control that got waylaid by an ugly rights dispute with the jackass CEO of Stardock, who bought the trademark from a dubious Accolade auction and basically tried to harass them into killing their project and/or handing over the full rights to the series because his own in-name-only sequel flopped and he felt threatened by their game.
@gsk no joke could @gsk ever be a guest on the show? and would they be interested?
the encyclopedic knowledge you display here and on retronauts never ceases to amaze me. i’d love to hear more about your methods of research. but at the very least, please let me say thank you. big fan of your contributions. i’ve learned so much from you.
@gsk Just incase you didn’t know (and for anyone else), Fred Ford and Paul Reiche III are back at it and working on the game. They are sporadically posting updates to https://www.dogarandkazon.com
After seeing Karl Jobst’s video on the $2mil SMB sale I was interested to hear Frank’s opinion on the matter, and I fear he was a bit terse or dismissive because nobody else on the cast had seen the video. His dismissal that “people have just discovered capitalism” it a half-truth; the behaviour, in other industries, could quite possibly fall under the category of “securities fraud”.
“There’s a pandemic and rich people got bored” is certainly true, but that doesn’t mean what they were doing was legit capitalism. If there is even such a thing. No ethical consumption, you know the drill.
Maybe, but that video isn’t quite the slam-dunk it presents itself as, evidence-wise. For every damning morsel of verifiable information it has about 10 rumours, innuendos and leaps of logic. I’m afraid that if it becomes the orthodox take on the subject we’ll be further away than ever from a proper understanding of those absurdly expensive game auctions.
@goonbag Oh, for sure. I’m not here defending it as a pulitzer-worthy piece of investigative journalism, however I do think there is a kernel of truth here.
That being said, as an onlooker and an enthusiast in other hobbies that often end up involving auction houses, Heritage have always seemed like a rather backwater auction house not really worthy of paying any attention to in any case. They may be inflating their own bubble, but I’m not sure any/many people will actually pay much attention. If I had to guess, they are aiming at the nouveau riche crypto-kids that both do not know any better nor care.
i enjoyed discussion on the video on retro game price manipulation but i kind of think there are a lot of facets to this particular issue. i watched it and felt similarly a little weird about the response to the video. but in my opinion the speculation in the markets around retro games has been really ridiculous to watch. while obviously i don’t believe in policing who is allowed to consume or buy games, i reserve the right to very much look down on anyone who is making big money off a speculative bubble (and that includes WATA, Heritage Auctions, NFT people, art market people, etc). it may be legal but watching private companies get into this stuff and kind of create their own self-contained market on art and culture does suck. it may be the norm but it still sucks. it’s worth thinking about how all these youtubers contributed to the higher and higher valuing of retro games though.
one other thing to mention (which i’m assuming is what is hinted at when Frank says “white nationalism”) is Karl Jobst is like a long time Goldeneye speedrunner and has been open with a handful of other Goldeneye speedrunners (especially RWhiteGoose) of being more or less “alt right” in the past, and very much publicly performing that. though i guess he’s been not putting that out in the open much anymore as his youtuber career as grown. i don’t really get the “white nationalism” thing from the video itself, but the point that it part of this like aggressive policing of a hobby is a good one. Karl is obviously an unreliable narrator here.
though somehow someway i feel a lot less bad for WATA/Heritage Auctions than i do for gamergate’s targets… so i kinda take issue with the comparison there being made by Frank, given the wildly varying level of vulnerability of the targets.
but anyway even the video itself brings up the point that that’s happened in other markets… it’s just that seems to be tripping the hardcore gamer/collector base online which is very mobilized in certain spaces. i think these people are going to be disappointed when they realize that all their emotional appeals against this stuff is not going to prevent the fact that there are next to no regulating mechanisms to prevent this. i do think the retro game market is an interesting small slice of this larger issue, though this is far from any kind of objective take on it but more of a kind of weird Judge Judy emotional appeal. but it’s a bit like a sort of legal cosplay in the way it acts like this is some kind of horrible exception to the system and not just the system functioning as intended.
tl;dr i honestly can understand why people would be upset of the idea that some moneyed interests have taken over their hobby and turned it into a gold rush. i think you can pretty safely say that there are reasonable reasons why people don’t like this without making QAnon comparisons or whatever. i’m not saying they shouldn’t know better, but i understand why some people have the emotional attachments they do. but this is what capitalism does. which is why capitalism suxxx. but a lot of those people would never admit to that - they would never grow as people or learn to exist outside these bubbles and have a greater broader awareness of history and culture. so they have to find ways to make this thing seem like this great big horrible exception to the rule that must receive divine punishment in order for them to feel better about everything.
also i just wanna repeat again that we should please not pretend some people with resources being harassed because they tripped into a really mobilized/often reactionary space is the same thing as gamergate though. it’s not!
Hearing the discussion around the Postmortems book prompted me to buy a very reasonably priced copy. Other than the appeal of something (sort of) new to read on videogames it would be interesting to read about the featured games from a more contemporary perspective that I was perhaps potentially a fraction too young to fully appreciate at the time.
was hellishly busy with work last week and forgot to comment (still hellishly busy with work and have left some threads hanging sorry) but i just want say i had actually forgotten frank‘s pandora’s box of forbidden knowledge about why the hell panning shots jitter even when i'm watching one in super duper blu-ray specdracular so thanks frank u jerk
@whatsarobot I assure you, whatever knowledge I possess is far from encyclopaedic and more the result of working a terrible unsupervised job in the middle of nowhere that affords me the time to read up on stuff I care about, at the expense of having little else to do, on or off the clock.
I have no desire to go on podcasts and there’s even less demand for me to be on them BUT my job’s hanging by a thread right now and I’m already in income-backup-plan mode, so in the event that you do hear or see more of me anywhere, it’s because I’m being forced to commoditise my life… so yeah, look forward to that, I suppose.
I saw that just the other day, yeah. I understood why they settled but I really do wish they’d managed to cut Wardell out of the picture for good.
