Today’s Conversations with Creators is Dedicated to Satoru Iwata

Posted on By Wil

Today’s Conversations with Creators features a conversation with Naughty Dog, who you assuredly know brought us legendary games like Uncharted and The Last of Us (which as it turns out is in my top five games of all time).

I’m particularly fond of this episode, because I just loved talking with these guys about a couple of my favorite games, which it turns out were developed by their studio … but I don’t want to talk about that today. Today, I want to talk about Satoru Iwata, who died far too young at 55, this past weekend.

Satoru Iwata’s contributions to the gaming industry have touched every developer, every programmer, every designer, and every publisher. I wanted to take a moment and acknowledge how profoundly he touched my life, without ever knowing that I even existed.

I’ve been playing console video games since the Atari 2600. I’ve been playing handheld video games since Merlin. I grew up in arcades during their golden age, and video games have been part of the fabric of my life for almost as long as I can remember. But it was my NES and my Gameboy that tipped me from a kid who loved games into a kid who lived games.

For those of you who are maybe a little younger than me (probably a lot of you), let me give you a little context. Early consoles had limited graphics capabilities, and while most programmers used that to their advantage, the thing we always wanted was something that would truly let us recreate the arcade experience in our homes. Colecovision did that to some extent, but the NES was flawless. Games like Excitebike, Mario Bros, Donkey Kong, Duck Hunt, and Super Mario Bros. were actually in my house, on my television, exactly like they were in arcades. This was a huge leap for my generation, but then Nintendo and their partners began releasing original NES games that fundamentally changed what console gaming was. Games like Metroid, The Legend of Zelda, Blades of Steel, and R.C. Pro-Am kept me up all night long during many weekends and summer nights, sitting in the CRT glow of my 27” television, fueled by caffeine and the kind of salty snacks that I can’t even think about eating late at night — or at all — now that I’m almost 43.

So … that was a lot more context than I intended, but now that you have it, I hope that you’ll understand why I want to dedicate this episode of Conversations with Creators to Satoru Iwata. It isn’t unreasonable to consider that this episode — and, indeed, the entire series — wouldn’t even exist (at least with me in it) without the contributions Mr. Iwata gave to the industry. I wanted to include a graphic in the episode itself, but we were already locked and that wasn’t possible, so here we are.

I hope you enjoy today’s new episode. Next week, I have a conversation with Trey Arch, where I find out that I like FPS games more than I thought I did, even though I am terrible at them.

Take Care of Yourself

Posted on By Wil

“Take care of yourselves, watch the people around you carefully, and cordon off the ones who are toxic, so that the universe can decontaminate them for you through exposure and death.”

-Warren Ellis

This is always very good advice (I’ve written some version of it myself at various times), but it’s especially poignant for me to read it from Warren, now, because I’ve just had to remove a profoundly toxic, dishonest, manipulative, bad, bad, bad person from my life, who was in my life for years. You’d think it would be easy, but it wasn’t.

So, speaking from experience: it’s not your fault that a toxic person fooled you, even if they fooled you for years. It’s not your fault, and while it is entirely expected that you go through the normal grieving process that is associated with any loss, try not to spend any time blaming yourself for not seeing all the things that you can see now in hindsight much sooner than you did.

Take care of yourself, as Warren says.

in my head

Posted on By Wil

Today, I got to do something that is so amazing and unexpected, I can’t believe it was real … and I have to keep all the details of it a total secret for a very long time.

That seems to be the story of my life these days. I’m not complaining, but everything I work on has this huge list of NDAs and terrifying agreements that make me responsible for millions of dollars in damages if I give up the secrets. Seriously. I had to sign an NDA recently where I affirmed my understanding of the value of the information I would be holding in my head, and that I further understood that if I leaked this information out of my head before a certain period of time, I agreed to be responsible for a minimum of a million dollars per bit of information, up to several millions of dollars. I was so afraid of something happening when the materials were out of my hands, I destroyed them — first in a shredder and then in a fire — to ensure that nobody could somehow dig through my trash for some reason and go through the improbable and difficult series of events necessary to put me on the hook for the millions of dollars that I do not have. It was a little weird, in retrospect. And don’t ask me what it was, because I won’t say.

This is pretty awesome, because it means that I get to work on projects that a lot of people are really excited about, including me! This is also a bummer, because one of my first loves, narrative nonfiction writing, doesn’t have as deep a well to pull from as it has for the last decade that I’ve been writing it almost every day.

Over a decade. Wow. That’s …. a thing.

I’ve been telling Anne that I need to take some time away from my on-camera work, so I can focus on storytelling and creative writing. I have lots of ideas that can be turned into things, and there’s a very good chance I’ll get to pitch at least one of those things to a comic publisher this week. Fingers crossed. I’m also working on narrative fiction pitches for Geek & Sundry, Nerdist, and Legendary Digital, so I can do that sort of thing in addition to the games and the hosting and stuff that’s been most of my professional life for the last couple of years. These are all first world problems, I know, and they are good problems to have, on balance.

I have stories to tell. I just need to find a way, and find the time, to tell them.

HopCon is coming!

Posted on By Wil

It’s become an annual San Diego Comicon tradition: HopCon, at Stone Brewing’s Liberty Station. We release W00tstout, have a big old party, and tap a bunch of rare kegs and interesting casks for fans of great beer to enjoy … and the whole thing is a fundraiser for The Hero Initiative!

This year, something special is happening, and I’m turning it over to Mike Palmer to tell you exactly what that is:

Among the über-cool upgrades we have in store for Hop-Con 3.0, we’re taking the giant plot behind building 12 (aka the garden bar) and turning it into the HOP-CADE! Our dream of creating an outdoor arcade and beer garden from last year has been realized. We’ll have only IPAs on tap, our oversized lawn games (Jenga, Connect Four, etc), two pinball machines (Twilight Zone and Theater of Magic), Donkey Kong, Miss Pac-Man and a Skeeball machine. Not enough? How about an arcade game with a 25 foot screen driven from a used beer barrel converted into a vintage arcade console? This last feat will be created by our friend Hunter Bond, Troll Slayer and resident Pinball Mechanic at J!NX, with custom metal routing by San Diego’s ReproHaus. This is all in addition to the five vintages/variations of Stone Farking-Wheaton w00tstout, exclusive beers we brewed with Aisha Tyler and Kevin Eastman, epic food and all-around geeky good times. See you on July 8th!

Tickets and more deets can be found here…
hopcon.stonebrewing.com

I think this is pretty great. This year, HopCon is not just for people who love great beer, it’s also for people who love great beer and classic arcade games, which is basically a Venn Diagram describing me.

Tickets are going fast, so if you want in, go get yours today!