Welcome to Paradise
Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2007 6:02 pm
I have a confession which might make me very unpopular. For the past ten weeks, I have exchanged my desk and laptop for tropical beaches, swapped my daily excessive intake of cups of tea, for an even larger consumption of Mango Lassis and Bintang beer and switched my everyday mission from selling games to the pursuit of impressive tan-lines. That’s not to say, I hasten to add, that I did not try to spread the good word about Introversion as I roamed about SE Asia, rather that the PR took slightly more of an informal turn, often involving copious amounts of jungle juice cocktails (never did learn the ingredients), an eclectic mix of traveller types and a lot of animated conversation. I became known solely as ‘Nintendo Girl’ on one island and more than a few hopefuls asked if I happened to have any spare copies of our games stashed away in the backpack. All in all though I feel confident that we might see sales of all our games increase by at least 100% on the lovely island of Gilli Trawangan in Indonesia. Not bad when you consider that there's only one DS that does the rounds amongst its few hundred occupants and most of the PC’s on the island seem to be operating on ‘Malibu time’ i.e. slow, very slow. It's clearly not an island catering to the needs of an average games enthusiast.
Might explain why Gilli’s inhabitants are the happiest and most relaxed people I’ve ever met.
About half-way into my trip I got an email from Mark urging me to return home soon to restore some order as Introversion attempted to alleviate some of the tedium of a long beta phase with the introduction of specific "morale-boosting" exercises. Not entirely sure why he thought I’d be the disciplinarian within the company since I personally think the introduction of BBQ Mondays, Champagne and Caviar Wednesdays and 12 Pint Fridays an inspired idea. All in all it appears however that Mark’s concerns about the effects of a new weekly schedule of debauchery on Introversion’s level of productivity were unfounded as my return to London last week revealed.
In my absence, the dev team have been hard at work making sure that Multiwinia is our most fun game to date and my first full game of Multiwinia was certainly that, if only slightly marred by falling for Mark’s ‘I promise to be nice to you, since you’ve only just got back’ ploy. Can’t believe I fell for that one again.
Game over - Mark obliterates my last few Darwinians.
It was also good to see that finally the great name debate had reached a satisfactory conclusion and marks a continuation of Introversion’s flirtation with the tagline. Multiwinia: Survival of the Flattest – I had to smile, somehow it seemed inevitable we’d end up going right back to the name we’d first thought of!
Morten’s great new logo – look out for more of his fantastic artwork over the next few months.
So as work on Multiwinia rumbles promisingly on and the balmy airs of far-flung tropical paradises fade into distant memory, it appears that all we have to really worry about now is what to do on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Any ideas, answers on a postcard to the usual address.
