A Tree Falling in the Forest

The New York Times is the official newspaper of record of the United States. If I knew how to make an underline in blogger you would see this by the underline under the name The New York Times. In the second grade I learned it is the only newspaper title I am supposed to underline in a sentence. This past Sunday the Magazine's cover story was about The Beatles: Rock Band , and it was the greatest game coverage I have ever seen. For the first time, not a single one of the thousand words disparaged gamers, the game's creator was given credit and people like Paul McCartney explained to about 2 million mainstream readers, and a bunch more on line, why they would really like the game. The article also explained how the game is actually contributing to the music business and consumers were willing to pay twice as much for the twice as many copies of Motley Crue's latest release - "twice" is of course relative and not absolute. All in all, a game with mainstream...

In America we have a great tradition of putting things on a high enough pedestal to cause serious damage when we knock them off. We build everyone from politicians to athletes into heroes and then celebrate the inevitable indiscretion with excessive coverage in our 24 hour news cycle. Celebrities are followed and pestered until they slip and the media highlights box office failure more readily than the hits. As an industry, we enjoyed the ride to the top, so I guess we must hold on for the ride back down. For the past year the media trumpeted the video game business as the only thriving business during the world wide recession. We were the lucky ones, people still wanted to play games and we were the beneficiaries. No one seemed to mention the publishers were all still suffering losses associated with the console shift and games were late, the focused on aggregate numbers. Lucky us. But then, last week, we learned misery loves company. The coverage shifted to the fall of...

I saw an article about Funny People, the Adam Sandler, Seth Rogan film opening this weekend and this line caught my eye (I added the emphasis) The film, which has a respectable 62 score on Metacritic.com, arrives a week after another R-rated comedy, Sony’s poorly reviewed “The Ugly Truth,” opened to a surprising $27 million. Do you think we would hear "respectable," "metacritic" and "62" the same sentence from a publisher or journalist? Then again why would we? The quote comes from Hollywood, Hollywood guys only care about money.

Every year I start to get calls around this time asking whether I am going to attend comic con. As you may have read in last year's post about the rise and fall of the con, I've been going for over twenty five years and have seen some change. This year I am noticing the change in the people who are calling and I am starting to wonder whether it is a good thing. I used to get calls from artists or comic fans who could not afford to pay the fee. Then I got calls from writers and directors who did not know where to look to get a badge. Now I get calls from game folks, agents, executives, all thinking I can get them a badge to the sold out show. Sure, hold on a second, I'll just lift Shakespeare's head, push the button, and pull one out of my ass, just give me a second to clean it up for you. Let's just stop right here for a second. Sold Out. For years, Pre-Hollywood Takeover, tickets were always unspokenly voluntary. By that I mean you never really had ...

This morning my trusted iPod and its little Nike + friend let me know I passed the 5,000 mile mark. If I ran in a straight line, I would be in South America, The Arctic or very wet.

As we move into the Independence Day weekend here in America, I felt it was worthwhile to point back to last year's post about a small corner of what our fore fathers fought for.

It's been a while since my last game related post. Every time I sat down to write something it felt like groundhog day. Another developer shut down, take a look at these. Governor Schwarzennegger is trying to get the Supreme Court to review his video game bill even though his movies are worse than the game he is trying to block, look here. It just felt like I had written all the way through the news cycle and I would just be re writing myself in a new flavor. Then I saw this article in the LA Times http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ct-games-moguls1-2009jun01,0,4429125,full.story around E3 and it led me to like it was 1993 all over again: THE HOT TICKET two weeks ago was to Francis Ford Coppola's hacienda in Napa. Fred Fuchs, head of Coppola's American Zoetrope, pulled 50 people to the 1,600 -acre estate for a weekend summit on multimedia, complete with five meals and a tour of the vineyard. After Saturday morning intros, the afternoon was taken up with demos from...