Erik Twice Reviews: Overwatch!

[Erik_Twice]

Look at the games on your shelf. How many give any kind of artistic credit?

Kind of pathethic isn't it? I analyzed 1000 games and only 3,5% gave credit. Only one designer is credited on consoles (Kojima) and that's only taking into account the most well-known games, the actual number is even lower.

Discredited

[ZeroAX]

This might just be my favorite of all the articles you have ever written. Great point.

I was actually very surprised about Beyond Two Souls too, because David Cage made a point of turning his name into a brand so that publishers would never be able to just get rid of him, since his name would be the brand and not Omicron/Fahrenheit/Heavy Rain/ect.

But now I did a quick google search and his name is in NON of the game's boxarts.....WHY?

Anyway it's a well known problem in the industry, and I don't know how we can change things as gamers. It seems like something the directors/designers of the games should fight for themselves. In other words "union time".

[GryeDor]

it's a fair point, unless the designer is a big name like Miyamoto, they tend to go relatively uncredited and unknown. especially anymore with big name titles getting as much or more development time as some films, not to mention humongous marketing budgets it just seems unacceptable. unfortunately it all falls back on branding - people know the name Kojima, people know the name Capcom... they don't necessarily know the name Inafune or Kodama (designer, Skies of Arcadia). that's not to say this is how it ought to be, but that's certainly how it is.

as a side note, the first game i thought of was David Crane's A Boy and His Blob, he at least enjoyed visible credit on that and the Game Boy game, David Crane's The Rescue of Princess Blobette.

[BoneSnapDeez]

Things have gotten a bit better.

Remember when end credits looked like this?
http://youtu.be/XxIRJPMAwy0?t=5m10s

[Erik_Twice]

I was actually very surprised about Beyond Two Souls too, because David Cage made a point of turning his name into a brand so that publishers would never be able to just get rid of him, since his name would be the brand and not Omicron/Fahrenheit/Heavy Rain/ect.

Me too, I actually double-checked but his name is nowhere to be found. I don't like his games, but I hope he gets credit soon.

Anyway it's a well known problem in the industry, and I don't know how we can change things as gamers. It seems like something the directors/designers of the games should fight for themselves. In other words "union time".

I agree that most of the chance must come from within though I doubt we will see unionisation any time soon, much less in Japan.

I think all gamers can do but is more than enough is to ask developers to credit themselves. Indies can do it without repercusion and once a good chunk start doing it, everyone else will follow suit.

Things have gotten a bit better.

Remember when end credits looked like this?
http://youtu.be/XxIRJPMAwy0?t=5m10s

Talk about a pointless credit sequence if there was ever one

[Ack]

Actually there is an old industry reasoning behind this, and it dates back to the inception of the arcade game and their popularity in the 1970s. At this point, most games were designed entirely by a single individual, so if a game proved to be popular, it would mean that a lone person's idea had proven fruitful and valuable, and their other ideas might take off as well.

As the early arcade heyday was fiercely competitive, a lot of companies from a variety of industries tried to break in and beign producing their own machines. To bolster their game development departments, or in cases of small companies looking to one-up the competition, they would often try to hire talented individuals out from under other companies. To prevent this, companies like Atari specifically forbade their employees from putting their names on the games they created, so they could keep their employees when other companies were trying to hire them out from under them. Culture also played into this, as many game company heads believed designing popular games were easy work, so game developers shouldn't be excited over credit or receives bonuses when they were successful. This became an industry-wide practice, with a couple of interesting historical firsts spawning from this: the first Easter Egg was a hidden credit title giving the name of the developer, and the first independent game developer(Activision) was formed by Atari employees who wanted credit for their work.

When Activision was formed in 1979 by David Crane, Alan Miller, and Bob Whitehead(with Larry Kaplan joining them a short time later), along with former music industry executive Jim Levy, they specifically founded it to give focus to each designer, and to oppose Atari CEO Ray Kassar's statement that "anyone can do a cartridge." Atari sued, and Activision beat them in court, opening the floodgates for any company interested in trying to make money on the new and potentially lucrative video game market, such as the Connecticut Leather Company, Quaker Oats, and so on. And the culture changed at Activision, first with Larry Kaplan leaving in 1982, then the market crash in 1983, then Miller and Whitehead leaving in 1984, then Levy and Crane leaving in 1986.

To prevent these kinds of uprisals, but still in an attempt to keep their best designers, many Japanese companies began letting their employees put special nicknames in credit sequences for games. Sometimes these nicknames would remain consistent across the industry, such as Hyper Shinchan(also known as Shinchan or Shinchan-SSS), who first used the nickname at SNK but then later at Hudson and Capcom. The names in Bone's Phantasy Star example are great renditions, though employees still weren't happy and found other ways of slipping these names in, such as Akira Nishitani slipping his nickname "NIN NIN" into Street Fighter 2 high scores and this particular background.



In general, game devs aren't treated well(companies like Electronic Arts are rated some of the worst in the United States), and games have moved away from the single individual and into massive teams. And sure, games can be hugely profitable(can be, but most aren't. Only an estimated 1 in 4 turn a profit, and these are often small games that are being used to fund much bigger projects with massive teams costing millions or even tens of millions to design, produce, and distribute, which is how a game like Tomb Raider can rake in millions and still not make up the money that was spent on it), but the industry is highly competitive, and many devs worry that putting out their employees names will make rival companies target them.

Also, tech work is cyclical, and many of the designers on games will come and go on a contractual basis, depending on the needs of the company. When they do work, they will usually work full time or beyond, depending on whether "crunch time" is in effect. And there are a lot of people who want to make games, so finding replacements is actually pretty easy at this point, as generally no one individual is making all decisions in the process(unless it is a big name person with clout who serves as a brand or a really small dev team, like Charlie "Flayra" Cleveland and the Natural Selection series).

[ZeroAX]

I understand why that started in America, but I'm surprised about Japan, where it's usual for employees to stay with their firm for life (don't you think anyone outside Nintendo would want to hire Shigeru Miyamoto?)

[Erik_Twice]

I really enjoyed Thief 2: The Metal Age, I think it's a real classic and will stay on my (for now digital) shelf for a while. But I've already beaten it and I was in the mood for now so I checked a pretty neat fan expansion called Thief 2X: Shadows of the Metal Age.

It's not perfect, it's simply too easy to be as interesting as the original, but it's very well made. If you like Thief, you may have a lot of fun with it:

Thief 2X: Shadows of the Metal Age - A

(BTW, Ack that was a very good post, thanks for writing it )

[Erik_Twice]

Writing about Thief II fan missions is a good way to polish my writing skills so I've decided to review a bunch of them. This time it's The Art of Thievery, a quite fun missions in which aeasthethic considerations have been ignored in favour of pure gameplay with all the good and bad things that means.

Thief II Fan Mission: The Art of Thievery - A

If you like my "normal" articles better, don't worry, they won't get replaced, I'm going to update again this Sunday.


By the way, last month I got 20% more views than I've ever gotten. I don't even know what to think of it other than "I really must get someone to make my blog prettier than this"

[Erik_Twice]

A long time ago I wrote an analysis of the main themes of Team Fortress, namely futility and incompetence and how they are a mirror for video game plots and themes as a whole. It was a fun, if poorly written article, so I decided to bring its ideas back writing a new article from scratch. Enjoy!

Team Fortress 2, a tale of incompetence