Annotated 32-18
Sorry I’ve been having a little trouble posting before midnight like I should of late: going to address that by getting further ahead this Wednesday. Usually I maintain a solid lead of pages primed to auto-update, but there’s a lot going on with me lately. Applying to adopt a kid ain’t easy (and neither is bracing to maybe get one!). Wish me luck.
Pitch #5 of 10: Young Man’s Game. Bil Levi, a developer once hailed as a wunderkind, comes back after a decade’s absence to a vastly changed field. He has one more big idea, which he tells himself is for his daughter and those like her, but there’s definitely also a desire to prove those early reports of his genius were right and the later reassessment was wrong. The game itself, Decathlon, reflects the conflicts of its inspiration, as a little girl character is in various competitions with familiar-looking rivals (hungry circle, bouncy plumber, speedy porcupine, and so on). He recruits many of the people who worked with him on his last big release, but he’s changed in the intervening decade and so have they. It’s The Lion in Winter if Henry II were a game dev.
To the Guilded Age audience, I suppose it also sounds like “What if HR, but no magic and nicer?” I did get as far as discussing this one with an artist about a year before Guilded Age launched, and there are probably a few echoes of it in HR’s development (at one point, he was supposed to be “doing it all for his daughter” too, but no indication that he had a family made it to the canonical text). I’m still intrigued by it and maybe now old enough to actually speak to it, though I feel like my white-cishet-guy-focused vision for it would need some updating. (Not that Bil couldn’t represent certain minorities, but I think he’d at least have to appear part of the privileged class to have the history he’s had in the field.) And to make it work, I’d have to do what I ended up doing with GA: seek out a writing partner who lives and breathes the gaming world more than I do. That’s my big conflict sometimes: wanting to reach out and speak to something beyond my fixations, but always feeling like I haven’t done enough research to talk about anything else.
Good luck with the adoption!
I can’t remember for the life of me if you have told the story of how GA’s conception? Whose idea was it originally and so on?
If Mr. Campbell has already has told how Guilded Age came to be, I missed it completely. I started reading the original run near the end, so he might already adressed that question in the original comments, perhaps? Even so, I too would like to know how GA started
The way Flo likes to tell it, I called her up (having already worked together with her on Sketchies and a few odds and ends) and said, “Look, I’ve had enough with throwing my original ideas against the wall, I’m ready to sell out. Let’s just do some World of Warcraft shit. I know you play it a lot: teach me how it works, I’ll make a couple jokes, the advertising dollars’ll roll in.” Flo comes back with “I have a better idea! Why don’t we develop our own IP and sell it off to a game developer so we make NO money?”
In actual fact, of course, I wasn’t quite that burnt out and cynical, and Flo actually hoped to develop a universe that could serve as its own game from which we could both profit handsomely. Didn’t quite work out that way, but she was right that both of us were better at immersive story-universes than one-off jokes rooted in cultures we were too freethinking to really feel completely part of.
Man, I’m glad I asked, that’s pretty interesting.
So, pretty much the exact opposite of selling out actually happened?
Pretty much! I mean, we had some decent moneymaking initiatives, it wasn’t like we went totally arthouse. But as for the initial aim to pander to gaming fans and save the artistic ambition for the next project, yeah, that didn’t work out. We learned things about ourselves as people as a result.
Well, the result was epic, quite literally.
I wish it could have made youse rich as well.