PAX 2009
Posted: Fri Sep 18, 2009 4:18 pm
Myself and Mark were at PAX this year, and it was incredible. We’ve been to shows before of course – between myself, Mark, Tom and Johnny we’ve been to just about all of them, but never before have we seen such an amazing gamer fest as PAX. Every single person visiting PAX is at the absolute pinnacle of their geekery, and that unashamed love for Games in all their forms shines through everywhere you look. I actually felt a great deal more connection to this crowd than at any other show we’ve ever been to – because at the core, I’m a geeky Gamer too. I love games and I’ve played games all my life, ever since my parents gave me a Spectrum 128k for Christmas when I was a kid. And I love the fact that PAX exists, and that it hasn’t devolved into the cynical big corporate nonsense of E3, or the sombre and professional atmosphere of GDC. We were exhibitors this year, and it was quite an experience.
We spent much of our time attached to the Microsoft booth, running Darwinia+ on a show dev kit for anyone who came near us. And we had no shortage of gamers – our immediate neighbours on the floor were Bungie, Valve, and Blizzard, and we were right by the main show entrance, so the area was pretty rammed all day long. Gamers queued all around us to play the new Halo game or Left4Dead2, and we also had a long queue of gamers waiting to play Forza on a massive triple-screened set up right next to us. So whenever our stand got a little quiet we’d ambush whichever gamer was nearest in one of those queues, who basically had nowhere to go because he’s queuing to play something, and we’d sell Darwinia+ to them.
For the most part, we had people playing the game all day. A few people knew of Darwinia but most didn’t – some had a dim memory of playing the demo on PC years ago. Darwinia is an old game now, and PAX has a slight console bias in its gamers, and this is excellent news for us, because it means most of the pax crowd haven’t already played/bought the game, so it will be new and fresh and just as exciting for them as it was for you when you first played the game.
So we’d talk about the game with people for a bit, then send them into the introduction levels to get them started. Darwinia+ has had substantial usability work done on its opening 15 minutes, with an entirely new introduction level that’s never been seen before and a heavily revamped intro to the Mine level, designed specifically to ease xbox gamers slowly into the confusing world of Darwinia. And it worked brilliantly. It’s very satisfying to see the initial confusion of Darwinia slowly fade from a gamer, and for him to start enjoying himself, then to start loving it, then to be asking for more when it’s over. We had quite a few gamers who must have played for half an hour or more before moving on, and some of them even came back for more later.
We’ve been working on Darwinia+ for so long now that we’ve almost forgotten what a great game sits under all the snazzy new menus and presentation. When we look back on the intial Darwinia PC demos we released, we just can’t believe how stupid we were. No help, no tutorial, just dump the players into the 3rd level in the game and expect them to figure out they have to hold the alt key and draw a triangle? WHAT THE FUCK? We’re our own worst enemies sometimes. The new Introduction is just what Darwinia needs, showing off some of the love in the game and gently drawing the player into the world, and the controls and HUD work we’ve done is the best it’s ever been. We found that Gamers often explored the multiplayer content after they’d had their fill of Darwinia’s campaign, and were amazed to find effectively another entire game bundled in the package – Darwinia and Multiwinia together for the first time, two sides of the Darwinia+ coin. They complement each other very well. The second demo we released on PC – the Launchpad – now sits as an extra bonus level between Darwinia and Multiwinia, bridging the two games together.
When bundled together, Multiwinia finally becomes how we always imagined it : an extension to the Darwinia story – taking place many years after the end of the Virus outbreak, when the now sentient Darwinians have fractured into different tribes, and Civil war has torn the world apart as they fight each other over the limited resources of the planet. Each of the game modes explores a point in this Darwinian civil war – from the early skirmishes and territory conquest of Domination and King Of The Hill, to the spiritual battles over religious iconography and technology in Capture the Statue, through the mechanised and high tech warfare of Blitzkrieg, and ending in the Exodus of the tribes from the broken world of Darwinia in Rocket Race. Darwinia+ on the Xbox is the best version of Darwinia we’ve ever made – the Directors Cut, the game as it would have been the first time around if only we’d had another two years to spend on it and were able to realise every single ambition we had for the project. It all fits together for the first time – a hundred thousand generations of the Darwinians, from their birth in the cave, through their nomadic simple beginnings, through spiritual awakening and sentience in their extinction level battle against the virus, through strife and civil war, and on through the Exodus to their future outside of Darwinia.
In fact, I drew a picture of what I now call The Darwinian Genome, for those who are interested.
PAX is massive, with so many things going on at once that you can’t possibly take it all in during a day. There were little sprinklings of magic everywhere though. From the “World Maps” printed in retro lettering to guide you around, through the standing rules of the show including such gems as “Rule 3 : Don’t punch or kick people” (no mention of grapple, push, stab, shoot, tazer etc), through panels with names like “How can we make online gaming communities suck less?”, through Will Wheaton hosting unashamed geek-outs onboard something called the USS AWESOME. And the costumes! I’ve never seen so many ridiculous costumes. When you’re trying to have a serious meeting with guys from Microsoft, and in the background you can see a fully equipped Team Fortress Engineer and Scout running down an isle, with a Medic behind them using his Healing gun to keep them going, it makes it hard to concentrate. After a while you realise the Microsoft guys are actually just loving it as much as everyone else. Most of all it makes me feel good about Games.
There was a ton of Indie content on display at PAX, with one entire section called the Pax Ten devoted to Indie games and their creators. It was outside the main exhibition hall and enjoyed a much more chilled out vibe. The organisers had filled the area with bean bags for people to laze around on, and each Indie game was on display on massive plasma screens high up above peoples heads. Crowds of people would gather around watching these fascinating games being played, some gamers would just crash on the floor and chill, sometimes a film crew would march through and interview a young indie developer in front of their game. We spoke to quite a few of the developers in this area and it’s clear to me there’s a ton of upcoming Indie talent out there. Indie is its own established genre now, with its own styles and quirks, and it’s become accepted as a viable and often wildly creative corner of gaming that everyone is interested in – publishers, press, gamers and (crucially) game developers. In this new indie world Retail is a distant memory, creativity and charm win out over technology and brand every time, and it’s Steam, XBLA, PSN and WiiWare that are the places to be now.
For some time at Introversion we’ve debated our continued use of “The Last of the Bedroom Programmers” as our company slogan. We’ve all been generally in agreement that it doesn’t represent us anymore, but nobody has come up with anything to replace it (Apart from “Videogames from our souls”, but that’s just too funny) and so it’s stayed through inaction more than any desire to hold on to it. That slogan was the PERFECT message to represent us in 2002, when the Indie genre just didn’t exist in any meaningful way, when big Retail was still the dominant way to make money from games, when digital downloads from websites weren’t well established and long before Steam, XBLA or PSN even existed. It was a totally different market, dominated by big corporations and franchises, and we felt very much like it was Us Versus Them. Our launching of Uplink into Retail in 2002 was a guerrilla battle against insurmountable odds. Fast forward to 2009, and all of that has changed, we no longer program in our bedrooms, and more importantly there are now lots of super talented Indie companies doing what we do. Those guys at the Pax Ten are the new bedroom programmers – we’re working on our fifth and sixth games now, and that time is behind us. If I was an Indie starting up now, I’d be offended by that slogan. I’d think Introversion were a bunch of arrogant assholes to keep using it. And most likely many Indies do in fact think just that. It’s a relic from a time in the Games Industry that no longer exists.
So with that in mind, we’ve decided it’s time to rid ourselves of that slogan. It’s coming off the website, it’s coming off everything we do from now onwards. We will never use it again. That time has passed, for us and for the wider Games Industry, and it’s time for us to accept we’re working in a different world now. Still, that slogan has been with us for a while, and there was a time when it was a rallying cry for us. We will miss it, but this has to be done.
And with that, it’s gone.
We spent much of our time attached to the Microsoft booth, running Darwinia+ on a show dev kit for anyone who came near us. And we had no shortage of gamers – our immediate neighbours on the floor were Bungie, Valve, and Blizzard, and we were right by the main show entrance, so the area was pretty rammed all day long. Gamers queued all around us to play the new Halo game or Left4Dead2, and we also had a long queue of gamers waiting to play Forza on a massive triple-screened set up right next to us. So whenever our stand got a little quiet we’d ambush whichever gamer was nearest in one of those queues, who basically had nowhere to go because he’s queuing to play something, and we’d sell Darwinia+ to them.
For the most part, we had people playing the game all day. A few people knew of Darwinia but most didn’t – some had a dim memory of playing the demo on PC years ago. Darwinia is an old game now, and PAX has a slight console bias in its gamers, and this is excellent news for us, because it means most of the pax crowd haven’t already played/bought the game, so it will be new and fresh and just as exciting for them as it was for you when you first played the game.
So we’d talk about the game with people for a bit, then send them into the introduction levels to get them started. Darwinia+ has had substantial usability work done on its opening 15 minutes, with an entirely new introduction level that’s never been seen before and a heavily revamped intro to the Mine level, designed specifically to ease xbox gamers slowly into the confusing world of Darwinia. And it worked brilliantly. It’s very satisfying to see the initial confusion of Darwinia slowly fade from a gamer, and for him to start enjoying himself, then to start loving it, then to be asking for more when it’s over. We had quite a few gamers who must have played for half an hour or more before moving on, and some of them even came back for more later.
We’ve been working on Darwinia+ for so long now that we’ve almost forgotten what a great game sits under all the snazzy new menus and presentation. When we look back on the intial Darwinia PC demos we released, we just can’t believe how stupid we were. No help, no tutorial, just dump the players into the 3rd level in the game and expect them to figure out they have to hold the alt key and draw a triangle? WHAT THE FUCK? We’re our own worst enemies sometimes. The new Introduction is just what Darwinia needs, showing off some of the love in the game and gently drawing the player into the world, and the controls and HUD work we’ve done is the best it’s ever been. We found that Gamers often explored the multiplayer content after they’d had their fill of Darwinia’s campaign, and were amazed to find effectively another entire game bundled in the package – Darwinia and Multiwinia together for the first time, two sides of the Darwinia+ coin. They complement each other very well. The second demo we released on PC – the Launchpad – now sits as an extra bonus level between Darwinia and Multiwinia, bridging the two games together.
When bundled together, Multiwinia finally becomes how we always imagined it : an extension to the Darwinia story – taking place many years after the end of the Virus outbreak, when the now sentient Darwinians have fractured into different tribes, and Civil war has torn the world apart as they fight each other over the limited resources of the planet. Each of the game modes explores a point in this Darwinian civil war – from the early skirmishes and territory conquest of Domination and King Of The Hill, to the spiritual battles over religious iconography and technology in Capture the Statue, through the mechanised and high tech warfare of Blitzkrieg, and ending in the Exodus of the tribes from the broken world of Darwinia in Rocket Race. Darwinia+ on the Xbox is the best version of Darwinia we’ve ever made – the Directors Cut, the game as it would have been the first time around if only we’d had another two years to spend on it and were able to realise every single ambition we had for the project. It all fits together for the first time – a hundred thousand generations of the Darwinians, from their birth in the cave, through their nomadic simple beginnings, through spiritual awakening and sentience in their extinction level battle against the virus, through strife and civil war, and on through the Exodus to their future outside of Darwinia.
In fact, I drew a picture of what I now call The Darwinian Genome, for those who are interested.
PAX is massive, with so many things going on at once that you can’t possibly take it all in during a day. There were little sprinklings of magic everywhere though. From the “World Maps” printed in retro lettering to guide you around, through the standing rules of the show including such gems as “Rule 3 : Don’t punch or kick people” (no mention of grapple, push, stab, shoot, tazer etc), through panels with names like “How can we make online gaming communities suck less?”, through Will Wheaton hosting unashamed geek-outs onboard something called the USS AWESOME. And the costumes! I’ve never seen so many ridiculous costumes. When you’re trying to have a serious meeting with guys from Microsoft, and in the background you can see a fully equipped Team Fortress Engineer and Scout running down an isle, with a Medic behind them using his Healing gun to keep them going, it makes it hard to concentrate. After a while you realise the Microsoft guys are actually just loving it as much as everyone else. Most of all it makes me feel good about Games.
There was a ton of Indie content on display at PAX, with one entire section called the Pax Ten devoted to Indie games and their creators. It was outside the main exhibition hall and enjoyed a much more chilled out vibe. The organisers had filled the area with bean bags for people to laze around on, and each Indie game was on display on massive plasma screens high up above peoples heads. Crowds of people would gather around watching these fascinating games being played, some gamers would just crash on the floor and chill, sometimes a film crew would march through and interview a young indie developer in front of their game. We spoke to quite a few of the developers in this area and it’s clear to me there’s a ton of upcoming Indie talent out there. Indie is its own established genre now, with its own styles and quirks, and it’s become accepted as a viable and often wildly creative corner of gaming that everyone is interested in – publishers, press, gamers and (crucially) game developers. In this new indie world Retail is a distant memory, creativity and charm win out over technology and brand every time, and it’s Steam, XBLA, PSN and WiiWare that are the places to be now.
For some time at Introversion we’ve debated our continued use of “The Last of the Bedroom Programmers” as our company slogan. We’ve all been generally in agreement that it doesn’t represent us anymore, but nobody has come up with anything to replace it (Apart from “Videogames from our souls”, but that’s just too funny) and so it’s stayed through inaction more than any desire to hold on to it. That slogan was the PERFECT message to represent us in 2002, when the Indie genre just didn’t exist in any meaningful way, when big Retail was still the dominant way to make money from games, when digital downloads from websites weren’t well established and long before Steam, XBLA or PSN even existed. It was a totally different market, dominated by big corporations and franchises, and we felt very much like it was Us Versus Them. Our launching of Uplink into Retail in 2002 was a guerrilla battle against insurmountable odds. Fast forward to 2009, and all of that has changed, we no longer program in our bedrooms, and more importantly there are now lots of super talented Indie companies doing what we do. Those guys at the Pax Ten are the new bedroom programmers – we’re working on our fifth and sixth games now, and that time is behind us. If I was an Indie starting up now, I’d be offended by that slogan. I’d think Introversion were a bunch of arrogant assholes to keep using it. And most likely many Indies do in fact think just that. It’s a relic from a time in the Games Industry that no longer exists.
So with that in mind, we’ve decided it’s time to rid ourselves of that slogan. It’s coming off the website, it’s coming off everything we do from now onwards. We will never use it again. That time has passed, for us and for the wider Games Industry, and it’s time for us to accept we’re working in a different world now. Still, that slogan has been with us for a while, and there was a time when it was a rallying cry for us. We will miss it, but this has to be done.
And with that, it’s gone.