…an introduction, in which our hero starts to reflect upon the woman he hopes to make his secret lover, before they leave on a journey of epic proportions.
“Shall we go now?” she queried. She stood with a suitcase on either side of her in the open doorway of her neat Californian bungalow. Her clipped tones (the very obvious result of her having lived in Russia until the age of 21) were difficult for some people to understand, but oh brother, they were music to my ears. She was a vision of total god-damned loveliness.
We had – well, she had, really – organised this only weeks ago; a trip to the Indianapolis head office of the publishing company that I worked for. They’d asked me to drive her, and I was more than happy to oblige. Anything for that woman, you know? Especially if it meant a couple weeks alone time with her.
I was never really the type to move in another guy’s territory. Hell, I lost my first and second wives to guys who didn’t have any such qualms. But for her? Yeah, I was willing to break a few of my personal rules. Plus, she was feeling it too. I had a knack for knowing things like that, and I definitely knew she was pretty damned into me.
Her husband, Frank, well, he was off filming what I believe was Shoot to Kill. It was meant to be his big break, just like every other damned film he was in back in those years. He was playing Deputy Clem Sparks, and he was going to be credited with the role. Really credited.
Made a change from most of the crap he performed in, that’s for sure. He’d always play “bailiff” or “desk clerk”, “cop”, or “man who sets off emergency signal”. Always without a single mention of him anywhere on that ratty piece of film stock. He was so damned happy about the fact his name was going to be up there at the start of the film. Should have seen the little weasel brag about it, too.
But then they spelt his name wrong in the credits anyway: Frank O’Conner. Conner with an “e”! What a laugh! I’d have felt sorry for him, but by God I hated that bastard. Whiny little self-important nobody, he was. Hanging off the fame of others, and probably damned well living off it too. I hated people like that. Hated him more, though, just because of whose fame he was hanging off.
I dragged gently on my cigarette, leaning out the window of my car with my elbow up on the sill in feigned nonchalance. I had to feign it, see, because she made me nervous. Damned nervous. I hoped that my hat – an expensive plaid thing, with a down-turned brim that I hoped to turn into a staple of my image – was drawing attention away from the signs of my anxiety.
And how could I not be anxious? She was Queen of the literate social set, toast of the capitalist philosophers the world around. In two short years, she’d be the name on the lips of half of Hollywood too, thanks the to adaptation of her first novel into a movie. In twelve years, she’d set the world alight once more, with a book that would change the way many Americans thought about life.
They say now that it’s the second most influential book in the country; after the Bible, of course. I don’t know if I believe that, but I do know that there were plenty of people willing to tell her how much it meant to them. Even more people hanging around her just in the hope that some of her genius would rub off on them.
But that was still to come – years off. As fearsome as I sometimes found her at the time of our trip, she was still growing in many ways. It was only later she would later become a figure of such social standing that criticising her was the same as drawing a big old target upon your own back.
“Yes, let’s,” I smiled, exhaling smoke slowly. I tried a little chuckle and hoped she couldn’t see how nervous I was. Hell, if it weren’t for the fact that I was sitting down, my damn legs probably would have been shaking so much I’d have to have sat down.
Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum. What a woman. She would have slapped me for calling her by her full name, of course. No one did, because that’s not who she was any more. Hell, most people didn’t even know it was her name. To them she was Ayn – and to me as well, naturally, ’cause I sure as hell didn’t want a slap.
She hefted her suitcases, and smiled at me in a way barely perceptible to those who didn’t know her as extraordinarily well as I did: a kind of vague upturning of the very edges of her mouth, and a slight lift of one of her eyebrows. Maybe a little twinkle in her eyes? Who knows.
Maybe I imagined that, because that’s how I wanted to see her. I wanted there to be that secret little side to her that no one knew about – the side that felt something for me. I was pretty sure I’d noticed little things from time to time, like that smile, and the time she brushed my arm entering my office. Other people wouldn’t have noticed, but I did. I knew she felt something for me.
But what did other people know, anyway? Other people thought she was cold. She was, in some ways, but not all the time; she could be friendly, and gentle. Humorous even, occasionally! She really was a damned wonderful woman. That bastard O’Connor didn’t even know what he had. I sighed gently, and rubbed my moustache between my thumb and forefinger.
She stared at me blankly, having moved her bags over the to the car, waiting for me to lift them up into the back seat. I must have zoned out on my thoughts about her. Heck, I was going to have to watch myself, I thought, jumping out of the car to help – maybe a little too hastily; a little too enthusiastically.
I was going to have to watch that too. Damnit.
I hefted the bags over the front seat, and walked around to Ayn’s door. She gesticulated sharply, waving me away, back to the driver’s side, then opened her own door. I was driving a 1942 Chevrolet Fleetline Aerodsedan at the time. Nothing flashy, that’s for sure, and more than a few years behind the fashion. People were more interesting in Fords and Pontiacs by that time, but damned if I could afford one on my salary.
Ayn had a number of cars – beautiful models, like that DeLuxe – but she didn’t want me driving them, especially if we were going all the way from California to Indiana. Not that she didn’t trust me, I was sure. Must have been more to do with the other drivers.
We’d met four years before – just after the release of The Fountainhead, before it became real successful. I worked with her publishing house, the Bobbs-Merrill Company. I hadn’t exactly been instrumental in the acquisition of the novel, mind you. That was all down to young Archibald Ogden.
He staked his career with the company on that book getting published! “If this is not the book for you,” he wrote, in a letter to head office, “then I am not the editor for you.” Hell of a guy. Balls the size of coconuts.
Me? I couldn’t claim cohones anywhere near as big. My claim to fame was that I’d picked the company up the rights to Irma S. Rombauer’s The Joy of Cooking back in ‘36. I’d watched on as company lawyers flew in and picked up the copyright to the ‘31 edition too, though I did always feel a bit bad about that. Rombauer was a nice old bird. I don’t think Ayn would have approved, but I never did tell her about it.
The company was sure happy about it though. “Nice work, Eggleston!” my boss had said, clapping me hard on the shoulder. “Damned nice work!”
I was just finishing up work on the ‘43 edition when I met Ayn – another 200 or so pages, mostly from Rombauer’s Streamlined Cooking. It was good stuff, and I was proud of it, but the company was buzzing about Ayn’s book. They knew it was going to be big. The ‘43 edition of Joy of Cooking was big too, but the company took that for granted. All anyone wanted to talk about was Ayn’s book.
I’d read it, naturally, and it seemed like a good enough book. A little lengthy, maybe. Kinda preachy. Never would have admitted that to Ayn, course.
I didn’t entirely get the point of it, though. Hell, maybe even Archie Ogden didn’t. I never really asked him about it. It all just seemed a little too obvious. That was Ayn’s thing though; the black and white, good and bad, heroes and villains. She wasn’t one for ambiguity or complexity. Not her style at all. In her eyes, you were living life the right way, or the wrong way.
Me, I wasn’t so sure. I guess I had my ambitions, but I wasn’t going to put my job on the line for them like Archie. Ayn loved that, naturally. She had a lot of respect for that gutsy little move.
I guess that it could be taken as a pretty selfless move – doing the right thing for the company and all – but it wasn’t really. Ayn wouldn’t have liked that. She knew why Archie did it: because he was sure as hell confident in the book, and if it hadn’t worked, he would have probably worked out a way to publish the damned thing himself, making himself a ton of money in the process.
As it was, he did make a nice little bonus that year, and won himself a bunch of respect from the big wigs at the head office too. Eventually he moved up pretty high in the company, just like he knew he would. Had his sights set on the skies, young Archie, and that’s what Ayn liked about him. He knew where he wanted to go, and he wasn’t going to let anything get in the way of it.
He was testing Bobbs-Merrill, you see. He wanted to know if they were right for him, not the other way round. He wanted to be someone who could really push the book industry to places he wanted it to go.
Ayn came in one day to talk with Archie, just after the book was shipped out. I think he’d asked her in, from what I could figure – he was concerned with the reviews it was getting. Ayn didn’t care a bit. She just shrugged; turned up her lip a little.
She held very little regard for reviewers, of course. “Tuneyadec”, she called them: “Parasites”. They weren’t creating their own art, so what was the point of them?
“A man who exists for no reason but to criticise the work of others is living parasitically off another man’s livelihood,” she told me once. I imagine she said much the same thing to Archie that day.
Ayn and I first spoke later that day, while out for dinner with a selection of high-up editors at Bobbs-Merrill. For the life of me, I don’t know what actually happened that night. It just seemed to occur without my acting. Suddenly, Archie had been dropped from working with Ayn – or had stepped aside – and I was her new editor. Celebratory drinks; cigars. Ayn smoked in celebration too, of course. She was a hell of a smoker. Used to put down more cigarettes and cigars than I did back then, and I put down a damned lot of them.
Maybe Ayn selected me for the job. I’m a redhead – “hair the colour of a ripe orange rind” – just like The Fountainhead’s Howard Roark. That might have stood out to her. Or maybe the fact that my mother was Russian had something to do with it, though she moved over to America a good twenty-five years before Ayn did, and Ayn was rather outspoken against the country by that point.
Or maybe it just was Archie stepping aside. He’d done his work with Ayn, and the book had helped his career in ways most of us couldn’t have imagined. And my bosses knew plenty about my successes with The Joy of Cooking.
I wondered on that a lot, as Ayn and I built up a friendship over the four years that followed. Well, it was work based, as much as anything, but I knew there was more to it than that. I like to think I have a feel for those sorts of things. After all, I’d had dinner with her and Frank on many occasions, even if most of those times had been discussing her upcoming projects. I was still there, you know? Still in her house.
She was always writing; always reading too. We discussed her progress on the screenplay for The Fountainhead a lot, in those days, even though Bobbs-Merrill didn’t have anything to do with it, really. But the Indianapolis office was a bit less patient than the Californian branch I worked for, and wanted to talk with Ayn about her follow-up book – we didn’t have her signed to a contract, per se, but we’d optioned it, and all indications pointed to Ayn choosing Bobbs-Merrill again.
And given the sheer number of copies of The Fountainhead we’d sold, head office was happy for me to continue working with her on that assumption. They wanted to know that she was progressing on her follow-up, though, and asked the two of us to come up and talk to them about it. It was a tough situation for me: Ayn and I had barely talked about it, with the excitement over the screenplay. She assured me that she had plans for it, but wouldn’t say much more than that.
Ayn took her seat and wound down her window, lighting a cigarette right away. She turned, blowing smoke in my direction and looking at me with silent expectation. I smiled happily back at her. “Any, lemme just say how happy I am that we’re doing this,” I said. “You and me. Hell of a team, ain’t we?”
She just continued to stare at me. “Just start the car, Eggleston,” she sighed.
Other people, they would have taken it wrong, but I knew that Ayn was only being terse to hide the way she really felt about me. In my heart – strange are the ways of Ayn! – in my heart was the first peace I’d known in…jeez, almost 45 minutes, I’d say.
Tim Rogers is best known in Australia as the front-man for indie rock mainstays You Am I, a band currently celebrating its 20th year together in one form or another. They were the first Australian band to have three consecutive albums debut at number one on the local charts, have released eight studio albums, two ‘Best Of’ compilations and a live album. They are name-checked by numerous younger groups as an influence, particularly their albums Hourly Daily and Hi-Fi Way, which are arguably amongst the top ten finest Australian pop albums ever.
Rogers is also an accomplished solo artist. His first solo album was performed with The Twin Set as his backing band – the classic What Rhymes With Cars And Girls, which was recently performed in its entirety in concerts in Melbourne and Sydney. Two further albums followed, with the backing band changing its name to The Temperance Union, and 2007 saw his fourth which, while featuring The Temperance Union, was released solely under his own name.
Earlier this year, Rogers made his stage acting debut as The Entertainer in Melbourne Malthouse Theatre Company’s production of Woyzeck. He continues to write for theatre and film.
He once punched Australian Idol judge Mark Holden while drunk at Adelaide Airport. He should be applauded for this, if nothing else.
Rogers is about to start touring as part of The White Album Concert – a start to finish recreation of The Beatles’ White Album featuring vocals by The Living End’s Chris Cheney, Grinspoon’s Phil Jamieson, and solo artist Josh Pyke. I’ll refrain from judgment, but mention it as context – this interview was conducted for dB Magazine in regards to said concert. I’ll post a link to the finished article when it goes to print.
Hey Tim, how’s it going?
“Very well.”
What are you up to at the moment?
“I’ve just come off the tour, so I’m back into writing.”
Mostly for You Am I?
“Mostly theatre stuff at the moment. I’ve set aside next week for that, and the next week it’ll be something else.”
Theatre stuff for who?
“A company that I became involved with, earlier in the year. Myself and my partner are writing a play at the moment – everything’s in pre-production and it should be ready to roll next year.”
Excellent. You were involved with, uh, I forget the name of the play off the top of my head, but…
“Woyzeck.”
That’s the one. That whet your appetite for more theatre work, did it?
“Well, it’s always been there, I’ve just never approached it. The company had the play they wanted to get together, and asked me to get involved with the music writing and lyrics writing for it. It’s amazing little hard working theatre company, and they’re the kind of people I want to be involved with for the rest of my life. So I’m involved with that and about six or seven other things I’ve got on the go at the moment. It keeps me rather alive.”
I can imagine. It’d be a completely different experience to trying to write for a solo project or for You Am I.
“I guess it is in a lot of respects, but I tend to approach it pretty similarly. Working with source material – that’s the big difference of course. But I tend not to intellectualise how it’s different too much. I just take the source material and try and work with it and you find in the middle of it before you realise what you’re doing. I try not to prepare for things too much. I just get involved.”
Do you ever worry that you’re taking on too much?
“Oh yeah. That’s sort of negated by the financial necessity to take on too much. It’s…you need to. You have to pay rent. I’m definitely stretching myself beyond my means intellectually, but I’m trying to prevent my pockets shrinking, and…I don’t spend a lot of time watching lifestyle TV, let’s say that.”
This is something you really want to continue with in the future?
“Working with other people’s material and correlating that, and working in an environment that’s different to being in a different town every night – which I’ve been doing for the past 20 years – it’s just different ways of working. I take things on and then consider afterwards whether it’s something I want to continue doing.”
“It’s like, I’ve been doing some film stuff, preparing it for next year. I’m not sure if it’s something I want to keep doing, but I take it on because it’s something I’ve been offered and I don’t have a manager to sift through things, so I take it on. I say no to a lot of things as well. [But] I don’t think, ‘This isn’t suited to an indie rock has-been so I’m not going to take it on.’ I would rather be involved, then afterwards when I’ve wiped the blood off my face decide, well, do I want to be doing this for a while? Keep the ball rolling or just leave it be?”
When did you become an indie rock has-been, Tim?
“Every time someone screams it at me when I’m walking down the street.”
Does that happen often?
“No, I don’t go outside much.”
Oh, to prevent that from happening?
“Definitely not. I really could not give a fuck. I figure at least I’m contributing something to their health by letting them vent their spleen, you know?”
Yeah. Surely though, the reaction that you’ve had to the performances you’ve done of What Rhymes With Cars and Girls would be a pretty good sign that you’ve still got a healthy following.
“I’m not complaining by any stretch. It’s…I’m joking.”
I know.
“The …Cars and Girls stuff was amazing. We could have taken that further, but it’s quite hard to take that band on the road. Everyone wants to do it, but it’s just a stretch. It’s money really. Like I said, I look after myself, so I’ve got to be a bit responsible financially. I’ve accumulated a lot of debt over time.”
“But those people are incredible. Just incredible. There’s a wonderful, warm feeling in that band that is there with other bands,but we’re just different people and we’ve had different experiences. Sometimes with You Am I, I think we’ve been through so much that we take things for granted. We don’t – we just need little reminders. But because Temperance Union and Twin Set, we get together rarely, there’s a bit more of an immediate, ‘Wow, aren’t we great?’ With You Am I, it takes a bus crash or something. Or someone to open a bottle of anything, and then we’re all over each other.”
Temperance Union’s been a pretty stable band over the past five years at least, hasn’t it?
“It is. They’re incredible people. I just adore them. I don’t know what to do – everyone’s so busy, but it means that when the chance comes, everyone just races at it.”
It’s the kind of thing I would have absolutely loved to see come to Adelaide, but I can understand why it didn’t as well.
“I think we’re actually going to bring it over. We might do a couple of nights at the Grace Emily, and we’re speaking to them about that to make it happen. I think rather than doing one show, we should do a couple of nights, and I really think that band can do a lot, you know? So, I really hope that happens.”
So do I. It’s one of those shows I briefly considered flying up to Sydney or Melbourne just to catch it.
“You’re mad.”
A little bit mad. I like the album, what can I say?
“I’m pretty fond of it myself.”
Have you considered doing that sort of thing with You Am I? The whole one album over a night thing?
“I don’t know which record we’d do. I mean, there’s obvious ones – [screeches] Aourrrrly Daeeeeely – but I don’t know. We’ve been approached about doing it, and I can see why, but I just don’t find it that interesting to do it.”
It seems to be the done thing at the moment.
“That’s probably why we don’t want to do it. With the Union, we did it absolutely without that in mind. It was just something we were talking about one night. It had nothing to do with anything else that was going on, though it might have been in the back of my mind somewhere.”
How did you get involved with the White Album Concert?
“Someone wrote a letter to me, to tell you the absolute truth. I just got sent a letter, and initially I said no, and then spoke to Phil [Jamieson, Grinspoon singer] about it, and then thought, ‘Why not?’ That’s about it, to be honest. For everything I do these days, I just get approached personally, and I make a decision based on, well, I might even do it sober. Things have to be really attractive to me. I don’t just do shows for money, though sometimes I do have to, but because it’s The White Album and not another Beatles record.”
“It wouldn’t have been the first record I would have chosen to do from go to whoa, but because it was this one and not the obvious ones like Sgt. Pepper’s…, I said yes. ‘The White Album’ just means more to me. I’ve got more memories associated with it, and more massive anxiety attacks associated with it.”
You’re worried about performing it?
“No, not at all. I can’t wait. I love the record, and I love the songs I’m doing.”
So you already know what you’re singing for it?
“Well, we asked somebody to choose songs for us and just throw them at us. Rolling the dice: there you go, there you go, there you go. We all kind of thought, ‘Let’s give the responsibility to someone else’, because we were all in conversation trying to choose the same songs. So we said, ‘Look, throw what you think at us and then we’ll see what we make of it. It may not be our first choice, but good! Treat us like minions, you fucking egalitarian cunts!’”
[Pause]
“Sorry, not egalitarian. I misused the term. I haven’t gone to dictionary.com today.”
That’s okay. You’ve got a 17-piece band with you, right?
“Apparently. I don’t know the people involved with the music, but I’m looking forward to meeting them.”
So, what is your experience with The White Album?
“Just being a kid and listening to it, really. It blew my mind then, in a creepy kind of way, and it still does now.”
Was it the first Beatles album you really got attached to?
“No, A Hard Day’s Night was the first for me – particularly the second side of that record. I haven’t listened to that in quite a while actually. But that was the one for me. The White Album was, well, I had a babysitter who tormented me with it. And then when I started playing in rock bands at about 14, myself and my friends used to like to experiment with drugs and try and play songs from The White Album and we’d never get through them because we’d all, you know, freak out. It’s got an element of fear to it that I really enjoy now.”
That kind of seedy side to it, I guess.
“It’s the comedown from the trip, and it’s uncomfortable at times. Even the happy-happy-happy songs, there’s something creepy about them.”
Is that something you’re trying to see brought across when you perform it live?
“I think I’ll just know when I’m up there, really. It’s a strange way to approach things, and it’s definitely not what I’m used to, so I’m trying to get involved even in the things I’m not singing. I’m sure we’ll know on the first night. Something’s going on, and I don’t know what it is…”
It’s a pretty packed tour, yeah? A show a night for two weeks?
“Yeah, well, that’s the job, man.”
Is it the kind of thing where it becomes really obvious it’s a job?
“Oh yeah.”
It’s probably pretty hard to miss the column below which sprung up a few days back. Well, I say that, but I really have no idea if anyone’s read it or not. Still, soldier on and all that – it’s a sign that littlemathletics is going to be updated a little more regularly in the coming weeks and months. Although, now that I think about it, anything is more regular than never. Never mind.
Anyway, the column below is RetroPerspective. Think of it as a kind of take on the all encompassing obsession shown by awesome sites like Hardcore Gaming 101, but from a personal perspective. I’m not going to pretend I know everything – not that I’m suggesting Hardcore Gaming 101’s writers do that. RetroPerspective embraces gaps in knowledge, but also celebrates games that I’m truly obsessed with. A gaming autobiography, but with enough exposition to (hopefully) allow other people to understand why the games I’m talking about are important.
Obviously, some are going to be more important to me than the general gaming public. Others may be considered classics by a large number of people. There’s a few lined up already, but if you’ve got any suggestions, please leave them in the comments and I’ll take them into consideration. It might cross into music and possibly comics now and then too, because hey, why not?
Coming up in the next day or two is another new column, Scrap Waste Management. Scrap Waste is a column I should have been doing for a long time. It’s because this site has been in a weird mire of uncertainty for a long time that it hasn’t happened, but now that I’ve figured it out – sort of – and realised it works best as a dumping ground for whatever’s laying around, Scrap Waste Management is definitely something that you’ll be seeing a lot of.
It’s definitely a more music focused column than anything else you’ll see on the site. Basically, it’s the transcripts of interviews I do for the magazine I work for, dB Magazine. It might be in a little bit of a grey area legally ahem cough, but given that most interviews run to 2,000-odd words and get down to 750 once they’re written up – so, maybe 500 words of quotations – there’s always a lot of unused stuff left over. Scrap Waste, if you will.
It’s a pretty sparse column other than that – I’ll try and briefly explain who the person is and a little of their goings on, but there won’t be much more than that. It’s not a write up, it’s not a feature: it’s just Scrap Waste Management. You may as well see it, readers, because no one else is.
“Will there be other columns?” I hear you ask. Yes, hyperactive little monkeys, there most likely will be. There’s a couple of more feature-y interviews on the way, and maybe a couple of articles looking back at the history of the Australian games industry.
So, yes. That’s all pretty exciting. Stay tuned – I can’t remember if there’s an RSS feed around here or not, because RSS has always been a complete mystery to me. But follow me on Twitter: my username is ‘littlemaths’.
And then you can also keep up with awesome things like explaining to my housemate that I went over our off-peak cap because I’ve been downloading a tonne of stuff from Steam’s weekend sales. You’ll love it.
When I was younger (so much younger, as they say, than today), The Secret of Monkey Island was far and away my favourite game. I was always one of those kids who’d talk at length to my parents – and occasionally even to their friends – about what I was playing, and Monkey Island was definitely one game that I spent a lot of time nattering on about. I’m pretty sure both of my parents could still tell you the basic plot of the first game, as well as the names of all the major characters. And probably also quote the sign from the rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle shoppe.
Probably just as well for them I didn’t get into Final Fantasy until a lot later. “So then Tidus and Yuna and Lulu and Rikku and…”
Still, not like I would have even had a chance to get into those games. I was a PC gamer exclusively around the time Monkey Island was released, and the only experience I had with consoles was an Atari 2600 we had that worked one time out of ten, and the odd NES and Master System session at friends’ houses. Our plucky little Amstrad 1512 – that’s a punishingly fast 8Mhz 286, for those of you not up with mid to late ’80s PCs – only had EGA graphics, which limited the amount of games available to me pretty severely even at that time since it was more or less out of date even by the time my parents bought it, but it sure as hell ran Monkey Island okay.
(Interestingly, a little research shows that the 1512 came with CGA graphics. Not sure how we ended up with an EGA one, because I can’t seem to find any reference to such a model existing. There was the 1640, which came with EGA graphics, but I’m positive that we had a 1512 – I can’t really imagine just pulling that model number from nowhere. Weird.)
For those not familiar with the game, it’s still regarded as one of the high points of LucasFilm Games’ (now LucasArts) point and click adventure games from the ’80s and ’90s. It was – and I’m just going on release dates here, so I might be off a little – the fifth title to use the SCUMM engine, the Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion created by Ron Gilbert and Aric Wilmunder which evolved pretty constantly over an almost ten year period. I could probably go on about SCUMM for a while, but I’ll save that for a post later on.
Ron was the project lead, lead designer, lead writer and probably a bunch more, but some really important contributions were made by co-writers and designers Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman. If those three names aren’t ringing any bells – and for most people, I can’t imagine they would – it’s worth examining for a second what they’ve gone on to do after Monkey Island, and its sequel, which they all worked on.
Ron Gilbert left LucasArts in 1992, supposedly under circumstances that could be described as being not entirely friendly. He went on to found Humongous Entertainment along with fellow ex-LucasArts employee Shelley Day, where he produced a vast number of SCUMM-utilising children’s games. Humongous’ non-kids game offshoot Cavedog came next, around which time Ron took on the role of producer for Gas Powered Games’ Total Annihilation.
Cavedog, sadly, shut its doors in ‘99. Recently, Ron announced that he’s working as a creative director for Hothead Games, did a bit of work on the Penny Arcade games, and is now working on DeathSpank, which he describes as being like Monkey Island crossed with Diablo. Which is a pretty exciting concept, no?
Tim Schafer stuck with the company a fair bit longer, co-creating, -directing, -writing and -producing Day of the Tentacle, then heading up development on Full Throttle and Grim Fandango. After that, he founded Double Fine Productions, and developed the exquisite Psychonauts. The company’s still going, and is set to release Jack Black-starring apocalyptic metal game Brütal Legend in October. Probably goes without saying that I’m going to be picking that one up the second it’s released, if not earlier.
Dave Grossman is possibly the least recognised out of the three, though it’s not as if he hasn’t been involved with some pretty amazing games in his time. After Day of the Tentacle, he left LucasArts to join Ron at Humongous, where he worked on a number of different titles. After a brief stint with Disney’s game arm, he joined Telltale Games, where’s he’s been a guiding force on the Bone, Sam and Max and Strong Bad titles.
Also definitely worth noting: Michael Land’s awesome music, and the fact that Steve Purcell, creator of Sam and Max, worked on art for the game along with Mark Ferrari. I believe Monkey Island features the first appearance of Sam and Max in a video game, when they appear as one of many tribal idols on the titular island later in the game. Purcell also did the box art for the first and second games – both are still amongst the best covers for any game I’ve ever seen. The second one especially. Masterpiece. Check out massive versions of them here, then download them and produce huge and arguably illegal posters of them. Not that I’d do anything like that.
The game was, seemingly, developed pretty quickly. Originally, it was going to be the first thing Ron Gilbert worked on after Maniac Mansion in 1988, but he began work on the first of the Indiana Jones adventure games instead. That seems to only leave a period of about 18 months during which the game could have been developed – it might have even been less, since it a prototype version was put together in roughly three months.
For a story driven game, it’s actually a relatively simple task to sum it up quickly: Somewhere in the Caribbean, Guybrush Threepwood wants to be a pirate. He works his way through a series of trials, falls in love with Governor Elaine Marley, only to have her kidnapped by the ghost pirate LeChuck, and then rescues her. It’s not so much the plot that really drives the game forward – it’s the scenarios, the characters, the little details, and most of all, the humour. Oh, the humour.
It’s hard to think of any game that’s had a more profound influence on me than Monkey Island. I really can’t imagine anything would come close. As I said, the first game came out in 1990, which I think is the year I was given it for my birthday, meaning I was eight when I first played it – it might have been the year after, though. Either way, media experienced around that age can tend to have a pretty huge effect on kids in terms of their ongoing development, I think.
Well, probably. I mean, I did study sociology for a little while – and could probably go far too deep into this and make myself look like a complete fool – but I’m no expert, by any means, and I’m certainly not going to go around making declarative statements about things I only have a very, very basic knowledge of. But, I do have the ability to pass on a little anecdotal evidence. Sure, most actual academics will tell you that anecdotal evidence is worth less than nothing, but oh man we really are getting off track now aren’t we?
Here’s the point I’m trying to make: I think I can honestly say that Monkey Island has been a bigger influence on my sense of humour than anything before or after it. I found that game hilarious at the time, and I remember trying to explain the jokes to people on a very regular basis – you know, mostly people who hadn’t played the game and had no interest in ever playing the game, like my parents their friends and relatives and friends parents. “So there’s this rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle shop and, get this, the sign says…”
Yeah, it didn’t come across quite as well as I’d hoped, but it didn’t really deter me. The jokes were amazing. And they still are. They still make me laugh, and I’m positive that’s because Monkey Island is where most of my sense of humour is derived from. I’m sure some part of it came from my dad – which is unfortunate, because that means I’m really going to tell some awful jokes to my kids, should I have any – and some part of it probably comes from the fact that I saw “Weird” Al’s UHF roughly two million times.
But there’s something very subversive and clever about a lot of Monkey Island’s jokes, and that sets it apart from most of what I found funny before I played it. For example, the guy at the start who launches into a rather lengthy spiel about LOOM™, another LucasArts point and click from around that time which I’ve never actually got around to playing. I don’t know if I totally understood the whole joke as an eight or nine year old, but enough of the intent definitely filtered through in the character’s overuse of the trademark symbol. I knew from that – and the use of the symbol in other places in the game – that it was a kind of thumbing of the nose at authority.
I mean, nowadays I can recognise it as not only being subversive in regards to that, but also in the way that it’s a – check this business out – meta-textual, anachronistic, fourth wall breaking reference just five minutes into a game. That’s pretty bold, and still brilliantly funny. And sadly, it’s not the kind of thing you see in games very much any more.
Another great example of this is the famous tree stump joke, where Guybrush announces that he can see “a series of catacombs” under a stump in the forest, after which users were asked to insert disc #23, disc #47 and disc #114. I seem to remember hearing that Tim Schafer came up with that one. It surprises me that people didn’t get the gag – I believe it was left out of more recent versions, from memory, because people would actually ring the LucasArts help line and complain that they were unable to access that part of the game. Personally, I remember understanding the point behind it even at eight or nine. Quite honestly, I feel lucky to have been able to experience things like that at a formative age because, while it’s not exactly the most edgy humour you might be able to name, it’s a good deal more intelligent and amusing than a lot of things kids under ten are force-fed.
Hell, I could go on for hours just talking about my favourite jokes from the game. The rubber tree joke is an unbelievable classic, as is the aforementioned rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle and its associated shoppe. And it goes without saying that the insult swordfighting still makes me and everyone else laugh, and judging from the minigame on the Special Edition website, it’s imprinted into my brain so thoroughly that I still recall all of the responses off the top of my head. Which is mildly scary.
Incidentally, the insults were written by sci-fi author Orson Scott Card. Can’t say I think much of his politics, nor his views on homosexuality and gay marriage, but anyone who came up with “How appropriate, you fight like a cow” can’t be all bad.
Oh, and the fight with the Sherrif in the Governor’s mansion is hilarious too, and so is pretty much anything the cannibals say, and absolutely anything to do with the head of the navigator. Oh man. That guy. Absolutely kills me every time I play. Any time I even read his dialogue, even.
Also: “Look at tremendous yak”. Probably the best use of a parser ever. There’s a reason adventure game control changed and went parser-less a few years later – there’s no way anyone could ever come up with something funnier than that.
I think there’s something, if not exactly relatable, then definitely recognisable in the character of Guybrush. He’s really a bit of a jerk, he’s terrible at talking to women, he’s not even close to what you’d call competent, he’s naive, and he knows absolutely nothing. That last one’s especially key, because as a player, you learn with him – about the locations, the other characters, how to become a pirate. Things like that.
Obviously, he’s rather overblown and exaggerated, because otherwise it wouldn’t actually be funny. There is a certain humanity there, though – a real sense of character that’s rare in games even now.
It’s hard to explain exactly how much the game means to me. I don’t think I’d call it my favourite game of all time or anything hyperbolic like that. It’s up there, but I’d be hard pressed to name just one (actually, talking about the games that would be amongst my favourites is part of the point of the RetroPerspective series of posts that you’ll see coming up on the site). Anyway: it’s not my favoutite game. It is easily the most important game I’ve ever played, though.
I was looking at the screenshots posted by Ron Gilbert in his very awesome recent post on the game (I can only hope we see more of that sort of thing from him, because I’ve read it about twenty times already). It just makes me feel so nostalgic – not just for the game, but it reminds me of smells and pets and sounds and the room I played the game in. Which is a really cool feeling.
Ron sent me an email once, incidentally. He complimented a column I was writing at the time for Gamasutra called Desert Island Games and asked if he could take part. I almost fainted and died and genuflected all at the same time, then sent him questions, then sent about ten or so reminders. I’ve never heard back from him, hah. Can’t say it’s negatively coloured my opinions of him in the slightest. Reputedly, even Tim Schafer has trouble getting a reply out of Ron half the time, so I’m in pretty awesome company. Or something.
However, eagle eyed readers would note that since my computer had only EGA graphics, it put me in a position where I was unable to play the second, VGA only game for a long time after its 1991 release. I’d actually found out about its upcoming release and was more than prepared to be there day one for the chance to get a copy – the first time I can ever recall doing that for a game. It wasn’t until a holiday at, of all places, my grandparents’ house about five years later that I had the chance to borrow a copy from a friend and work through it. I’d moved on from the 286, but only onto something very slightly more powerful – a 16Mhz Macintosh LCII. Yes, in 1996. My grandparents, for some reason, had access to more up to date technology, and were packing a 486 (though I’m fairly sure I got more use out of it in those couple of weeks I spent there than they ever did).
Anyway, I’m far from familiar with The Secret of Monkey Island 2. I’ve probably only played through it maybe two and a half times at most. In fact, it’s been quite a few years since I’ve played through more than the first island, so I can’t say I’m all that familiar with the jokes even. I’ll probably give it another shot over the next few weeks, because what I do remember of the rest of the game is all good. The locations were fleshed out beautifully, the writing was probably even sharper than the first game, and while some of the puzzles were a little more obtuse than in its predecessor, they never felt unfair. Certainly not, say, Gabriel Knight cat hair and treacle mustache kind of unfair.
It’s a gorgeous looking game, though. Not just for something that’s almost 18 years old – it is genuinely stunning. I’m glad they never released it in EGA form, and really, it’s quite possible that they weren’t able to technically – the level of detail probably relies on things like, you know, more than 16 colours.
Probably the most notable thing about the game is its ending, which is one of the most bizarre pieces of writing ever to make it into a video game. Okay, actually, let me qualify that: it’s one of the most competently written, surrealistic moments ever in a game. There’s a lot of really bizarre writing in games, but you kind of get the feeling that most of it isn’t intentional. That’s a whole other article, though, and probably one more suited to a top ten list, so I can’t really see myself writing it any time soon. Feel free to steal the idea.
Monkey Island 2’s ending, basically, sees Guybrush falling into a series of what appear to be maintenance tunnels under Dinky Island – amongst other things, there’s a service elevator that leads to the first island Guybrush visits in the first game. There’s a voodoo battle between Guybrush and LeChuck, following which it’s revealed that LeChuck is actually Guybrush’s brother Chuckie, and then the two are shown walking out of an amusement park with their parents. But then, Chuckie’s eyes seem to sparkle, and Elaine is shown above the hole Guybrush fell into, commenting that she hopes LeChuck hasn’t put “some sort of SPELL” over Guybrush.
I recall one magazine at the time – the name of which escapes me, because it was a dull name like Computer and Video Gaming but probably not that – listed it as the most surprising ending of the year, or something along those lines. Having not played the game at the time, I wasn’t quite sure what they meant (to their credit, they didn’t spoil it), but it’s hard not to be a little thrown by it even now. It’s incredibly weird and very sudden.
It was also intended to be resolved in the third game. Ron Gilbert had always envisioned the series as a trilogy, and had the “secret” of Monkey Island planned and ready to reveal. And then he left the company.
The third game that eventually reached store shelves, 1997’s Curse of Monkey Island, is not a bad game. In fact, it’s rather a good game. A great one, even. It looks stunning, for one thing – the 2D animation might be a little lacking in the resolution department, but it’s a timeless kind of look, and utterly charming. Plus, the writing is really sharp, the puzzles are good, and the voice acting has come to define Guybrush as much as anything from the first game. Dominic Armato’s voice fits Guybrush so well that it’s not possible to replay the first two games without hearing it in your head. Also: unforgettable singing.
But, as most fans of the first two games will tell you, it’s not really the third game. Not as it was meant to be, anyway. Larry Ahern and Jonathan Ackley, the project leads who had just come from working on Full Throttle, did a pretty exceptional job of making it feel like a proper Monkey Island game – probably the most brilliant gag is the one where Guybrush can stick his head through a crack in a wall in an underground area, only to peek out of the infamous stump from the first game.
As much as they nailed the humour, and the characterisation – with the possible exception of Elaine, who’s more of a damsel in distress – following on from the ending of the second game without Ron Gilbert’s involvement was always going to prove problematic. Essentially, the solution was to emphasise the spell side of things and push the more troublesome elements under that banner. Guybrush only thought LeChuck was his brother, and so forth. There wasn’t really an elevator to a previously explored island. It works, in the context of the game, and it could definitely have been handled a lot worse.
Still, it’s not Ron Gilbert’s secret. The secret. For some fans, that’s just something that’s a little too much to look past – though of course, there are plenty of fans who started with Curse for whom it’s not an issue in the least. Some of us are just picky, I suppose. It feels like a dumb thing to hold on to, 12 years after the game was released. Maybe it is a dumb thing to hold on to.
Or maybe it’s just an understandable need to grasp the original intention of the plot-line. I’m trying to think of a similar example in movies, but nothing comes to mind – I guess I’m a little more familiar with games minutia than I am with movies. I do know it’s definitely something you see a lot of in comics, though. The example that stands out for me most immediately would be when Chris Claremont left Fantastic Four in late 2000. There’s always going to be a few dangling plot points when a writer leaves a series – especially if that writer is Chris Claremont, he of the million dangling subplots at once. Claremont left an important one unresolved when he went back to X-Men after Fantastic Four volume 3 issue #32, though – about a year previous, a mysterious girl had shown up, claiming to be the daughter of Dr. Doom and Sue Storm (and bear with me here, because this is actually going somewhere other than an inane comics digression – eventually, anyway).
The next writers, Carlos Pacheco and Jeph Loeb, explained the girl as being the miscarried daughter Sue lost back in volume 1 issue #267-ish, who had been transported to some pocket dimension or something something and eurgh really, what a mess but let’s not get too sidetracked talking about the debatable writing skills of Mr. Loeb and Mr. Pacheco’s non-existent ones. Claremont even commented that he wasn’t particularly happy with the way they’d taken the story – it ignored a number of things, like the memories she’d talked about, and the people she knew, and the fact that she could bypass Doom’s security systems, and so on. If I could let Claremont jump back in and finish the story the way he’d intended it, would I? You bet. Absolutely. As a fan of the comic and the characters, the curiosity to know the original intentions of the writer is really strong.
In fact, he’s about to do more or less exactly that with Marvel’s upcoming X-Men Forever, picking up on his X-Men series of the early ’90s and taking the plot the places he had intended it to go before he left the title. Pretty neat idea, and also arguably pretty well suited to Claremont, who’s still very much an ’80s and ’90s style writer and hey digression again oops.
Actually, maybe that’s not the very best example I could have used. Loeb and Pacheco’s run was abysmal – barely even comprehensible by the last few issues – whereas Curse is a truly great game.
Maybe the fate of the late Steve Gerber’s 1976 limited series Omega the Unknown is more appropriate. The book was groundbreaking: a superhero comic that didn’t really focus so much on the titular hero as a seemingly unconnected boy, then drew everything together, piece by piece. Unfortunately, it was cancelled after issue #10, before Gerber could finish his story-arc – planned, I believe, for 12 issues. The fate of the characters was eventually wrapped up a few years later in Defenders by killing pretty much the whole lot of them. For all intents and purposes, though, while Marvel has always considered that resolution canonical, fans of the original series choose to ignore it. For them, it’s Gerber’s great unfinished masterpiece.
In 2007, a revived 10 issue limited series was written by author Jonathan Lethem. He completed the story, and while he tied it up well, obviously it wasn’t done in the way that Gerber had originally intended. It helps, in a way, that the series was written out of Marvel’s regular continuity, because it’s a hard thing for fans to accept. One the one hand, both were great interpretations of the story. But Lethem’s version is brilliant. It’s easily one of my favourite comic books of the past decade, and I can’t recommend it enough. But it isn’t what Gerber intended.
Curse, like I’ve said, is great. But it’s not what Ron Gilbert intended.
Unfortunately, there’s not really a lot of room in game development for something like X-Men Forever. The hypothetical Monkey Island Forever would appeal to a particularly small niche. I mean, X-Men Forever probably only appeals to people who read Claremont’s X-Men back in the early ’90s, but given that the first issue was a record setting multi-million seller, it’s guaranteed a pretty reasonable number of sales at least. ‘Til the nostalgia wears off, anyway.
I suppose I’ll have to just take comfort in the fact that there is a new series of episodic Tales from Monkey Island games coming from Telltale Games in less than a month. Dave Grossman’s involved, Ron Gilbert is a consultant and Dominic Armato is doing the voice of Guybrush. It’s not quite my Monkey Island Forever dream come true, but it’s pretty damned close. About as close as you can get while still remaining commercially smart, anyway.
In fact, there’s really no way I can complain about it at all (well, maybe a little – Telltale’s lighting is just terrible, and it’s the same in all their games. Not good). Dave Grossman has admitted that this won’t be the game where Ron’s intended secret is finally revealed, but an acknowledgment is pretty welcome after 18 years of waiting. Well, 13 years of waiting, in my case, but that’s still a long time. But, you know what? Maybe it never even needs to be revealed. Maybe it’s one of those things that’s better and more interesting in the heads of Monkey Island fans. Really, it’s better just to be happy with the fact that there’s even a new game coming out, developed by a bunch of people who know what they’re doing.
Not to forget the soon to be released Special Edition of the first game. I know far too many people who have no experience with the franchise, and every single one of them is going to be sat down in front of the TV and made to watch all the funny bits, i.e. the whole game. To some degree, I still find it a bit hard to believe that the episodes and the Special Edition are even coming out. After all, up until a week ago, it was pretty much assumed that Escape From Monkey Island had killed the franchise.
Let’s not say too much about the game, other than to mention that it’s very much of its time, has dated badly and retains far too little of the original charisma and mood of the series to be worth playing these days. Unless, of course, the new series follows on from Escape. Not sure about that.
It’s a great time to be a Monkey Island fan right now, though. I think anyone who has experience with the series can agree on that. I’m not entirely sure why the sudden resurrection has come about, but it’s a damned good thing that it has. Hopefully the response from consumers will be strong enough to show LucasArts that they should have done it a long time ago.
Time to wrap this bad boy up, I think. Any suggestions for other games to take on in RetroPerspective? Comment below! Otherwise, come back in a week or so for a chat about another secretive type game: a certain SNES action RPG that consumed a good deal of my life in 1995.
After a good couple of months of abject confusion, I’ve finally found a new host, so hopefully things can run a little smoother. The new one seems rather excellent – and pretty good at helping me through my Wordpress retardation – which means I’ll be sticking to them for quite some time, I’d say.
Next step is to get the archives back up. Unfortunately, given that I failed to save my database the correct way, that could be a hilariously hard task. It’s probably going to involve a lot of copying and pasting from archive.org’s Wayback Machine into Notepad, then into the editor, then saving all the pictures, and then uploading them. Still, it’s worth it – right?
And it seems that a new start deserves a new look, so we’re going with pink this time. I think it’s rather fetching.
Beginning in 2001, GarageGames have aimed to bring games development back to the independents – or even the individuals. Founded by Jeff Tunnell, Rick Overman, Tim Gift and Mark Frohnmayer – all formerly of Dynamix, which was closed by Sierra during the restructuring of the company by Vivendi Universal.
GarageGames is there to take the focus of the industry away from the big publishers like EA, and inject creativity and freshness into a market that has become bogged down in sequels and licences.
The company’s website is not just a place for the companies products to be sold, but is a support network and research centre for developers, who can use the considerable expertise of those who work there.
The main product is the Torque Engine – a modified version of the engine used by Dynamix for Tribes 2. And immensley powerful piece of software, it is available to indie developers for US$100, and has recently been expanded to include the Torque Shader Engine, which allows support of higher level shading technology.
The Shader Engine was used to delevop Marble Blast Ultra, which was released onto Xbox 360’s Live arcade to enourmous success, effectively raising the bar of what was thought possible by an indie developer.
littlemathletics spoke with Jay Moore, self described Evangelist, buzz builder, biz dev. guy, and game promoter from GarageGames.
The first issue of Bear hit the stands in June of 2003, and the tenth and final issue arrived in December, 2005. In between, Jamie Smart estimates that he worked on 300 pages – half of which were collected in 2004’s Bear: Immortal trade paperback, the other half of which will be collected in the upcoming Bear: Demons in June.
The comic is published by Slave Labor Graphics, an American “alternative” company, though Jamie himself is British.
Past articles on littlemathletics would suggest that this is the point that I should start talking about how the work is an example of postmodern genius, but Wikipedia beat me to the punch:
“The stories are marked by a combination of violent shocks, random silliness , and other hallmarks of Dada.”
I could spend a while here arguing that it does not, in fact, show the hallmarks of Dada, but that would be missing the point of Bear. It’s short, sharp and hilariously funny, and for that reason, it appeals to a wider audience than a majority of comics. Storywise, Bear is simply the story of a stuffed bear, named Bear, his owner, Karl, and Looshkin, Karl’s cat, whose life’s work is to torment and maim Bear. There’s no story arcs, or alternate universes, just swearing and destruction. And faeces. It’s got something for everyone.
littlemathletics spoke to Jamie Smart about Bear, his new projects, and much, more more.
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Given the current pre-occupation here at littlemathletics with gaming as art (see our fur interview, and our 8-Bit Artist interview), it makes sense that Myfanwy Ashmore’s work would make its way onto the site sooner or later.
Her work from 2000, mario battle no. 1, is a hacked Super Mario Bros. ROM with all the level detail removed – “?” blocks, enemies, power ups, goals, etc. The result is, as Myfanwy puts it, is a game where:
“…there is nothing left to do but go for a walk, run, or jump around, solitary in the landscape and then you run out of time and die.”
The “game” that’s left is unexpectedly versatile – different players will react in different ways. The choice is there to wait, or to run, or try and find a goal, but the end result is always the same; it’s a brilliant example of the user defining notions of postmodernism – that is, no two users, or readers, or viewers, will react to the “text” in the same way.
Two more were later released – mario doing time and mario is drowning, both variations on the theme. Videos of the games were intended to be shown in Dundas Square in conjunction with the Controller exhibition at Interaccess Media Arts Centre in Toronto, until the advertising board’s owner, ClearChannel, threatening to pull the videos unless a release for the copyright material was granted by Nintendo. The work was replaced by Myfanwy’s gameover: zombienation v1.2 – a one minute video of the”Game Over” screen from the game Zombie Nation slowly fading to black.
During the course of her career as an artist, Myfanwy has been exhibited alongside artists like Yoko Ono, Sol LeWitt, Mark Hosler of negativland and has also short listed for the prestigious K.M. Hunter award in 2003.
littlemathletics spoke to Myfanwy about her work, her views on games as art, and her history as a gamer.
Pop art, or Neo-Dada art, is a style that employs the use of populist, rather than high culture, elements. Depending on your view of these matters, it’s either an expansion of abstract expressionism, or a reaction to it.
Since early 2005, the 8-Bit Artist has been painting authentic renditions of Nintendo games from the 8-bit era – taking what is considered to be the lowest of all forms of artistic expression, and bringing the iconography of the medium to the canvas. In many ways, this goes beyond pop art even, and well into the realm of postmodernist art, at least in the definition of the form by Jean Baudrillard who wrote that art is not the search for originality or authenticity, but rather the desire for novelty – although, far from being a bad thing, Baudrillard explains that this is an integrated and organic phenomenon.
In this sense, and in the sense that postmodernist art is often a pastiche of what has come before, 8-Bit Artist’s work attempts to make sense of the confusion that exists in a generation who have grown up with this imagery, but have been told that this is not “true” art.
Film critic Roger Ebert recently commented that ” video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic”. The work of the 8-Bit Artist challenges this, though he may not see it that way himself:
“I just do this as a hobby and side gig,” he says. littlemathletics spoke to 8-Bit Artist recently about games as art, and his work.
Jason Cox’s career as one-man-band Xoc hit the big time in August last year when his debut – SMW, a cover of the entire Super Mario World soundtrack done using accordion, acoustic guitars, antique pickaxe, asscheeks, banjo, bike horn, cabasa, Canon Powershot, ceramic toilet mug, children’s drum set, claves, coconut thumb piano, cowbells, cuatro, doublespeed acoustic guitar, doublespeed banjo, doublespeed guitars, drum set, drum sticks, electric bass guitar (Yamaha RBX200), electric guitars, finger cymbals, gooseneck mic stand, handclaps, handmade maracas, jam block, jew’s harp, Korg MS2000B synth, lap steel guitar, maracas, matchbook, melodion, ocarina, pennywhistle, pump organ, PSS-270 keyboard, refrigerator door, ribbon crasher, Roland Groovebox, rototom brace, school bell, shakers, slide whistle, sportshorn, tacklebox, tambourines, triangle, turkey locator, Tyco Hot Lixx, ukelele, upright bass, violin, vocals, woodblock, wood flute, Wurlitzer electric piano, and xylophone – appeared in Edge magazine with the comment that “every track is both a pop gem and a testament to the lasting appeal of [Koji] Kondo’s compositions and XOC’s one-man-band prowess”.
Eight months later, the album -available for free on the Internet Archive – has clocked up in excess of 82,000 downloads, more than 60,000 more than any other open source audio.
Jason’s next project as Xoc was Videogame: The Movie: The Game: The Cover Album, an double album of covers and originals from a supposed pirate NES game, which, in turn was based upon a supposed movie from 1984 starring Jonathan Brandis, Jill Bennett and Ed Flanders. The concept features an 1,800 word summary, including the history of the movie, it’s producers, and reveals that “all three of the film’s stars would eventually go on to commit suicide”. It’s a mix of fact and fiction that goes into such depth it beggars the senses.
Again, Xoc was featured by Edge, this time on their website, where they called this work a ” twisted conceptual madness”, and Xoc’s “magnum opus”.
Over the period of just over a month, littlemathletics spoke to Jason about SMW, Videogame: The Movie: The Game: The Cover Album and a myriad of other topics, all through the magic of email.