I transitioned into 16-bit gaming pretty late, by most standards. I didn’t actually buy a SNES until the end of 1994, just before the release of Donkey Kong Country. Before that, it was all PC and Game Gear for me. And I was almost going to continue down the Sega route for my 16-bit purchase, too, until Donkey Kong Country started appearing in magazines. Suddenly, I decided that there was a lot more life in the SNES than there was in the Mega Drive/Genesis.

I’d have to say that I was pretty console neutral though, even at the age of 12. A couple of my really good friends owned Mega Drives, and I was pretty into my Game Gear, to the point where I bought a Sega magazine called MegaZone every month. But I’d gone through primary school playing NES games at friends’ places, and then moved onto SNES games when the lucky ones amongst them did. I rented both consoles a number of times and really didn’t see that one was overtly superior to the other.

Hell, even MegaZone didn’t really have the kind of snipe and sneer that a lot of the other platform exclusive magazines had at the time – and continued to have, right through to the end of the ’90s. In fact, it turned considerably worse, probably because magazines started to skew younger with their content. Some of the Nintendo 64 magazines in the late ’90s especially were just revolting; a real case of fans getting their defenses up when everything seemed to be heading downhill for Nintendo.

“You reckon the 64’s a kiddie console? Well, check out this drawing I did of Mario inserting his foot into Crash Bandicoot’s rectum! Nothing kiddie about that!”

Fanboys slay me, really. Hilarious bunch. I always love writing about them. That kind of thing’s always amused me, just because I’ve always been either completely divorced from the whole system wars thing, or I’ve sat firmly in the middle.

I’m not entirely sure if system wars still go on now in magazines, because I’ve only really read Game Developer and Official Xbox Magazine in the past few years, and even then only when I’ve written for them. I probably don’t even need to say how separate Game Developer is from all that crap. The US OXM’s a great magazine, and while I can’t say I’m similarly impressed with the Australian version (which definitely skews a hell of a lot younger) at least they both seem to stay well away from the pictures of Mario shooting Sonic in the testicles with a machine gun that we used to see on reader art pages in Nintendo Magazine System. There’s no, say, Master Chief being decapitated by Kratos, or something.

I mean, there’s bound to be that sort of thing on DeviantArt, but there’s also a disturbing amount of Sonic and Knuckles slash fan-art too. Although even that isn’t as worrying as the Sonic-turned-human stuff, which is really, really creepy for a reason I find myself unable to put into words. But anyway, I’m going way off topic because I can talk about my fascination with horrible fan art at length.

Arguably, back in regards to my console choice, I made the right call for the years that I owned it – there were far more interesting games that came out in the latter years of the SNES than there was for the Mega Drive. Sonic and Knuckles, Vectorman. I’m struggling to think of many others. Ristar, I guess? The SNES, arguably, had many of its best games from ‘94 onwards: Donkey Kong Country and its sequels, Yoshi’s Island, Kirby Superstar, Kirby’s Dream Course, Super Mario RPG, and so on. And they’re just the Nintendo published ones.

Personally, I can’t say that I think Donkey Kong Country has really aged that well – though Donkey Kong Country 2 is a different story – but it does mark the point that people started to realise the SNES wasn’t the rapidly aging beast they assumed it was. It signalled a real change for the console.

U.S. based readers with an exceptionally long memory for unimportant trivia will know that Secret of Mana was released there in early October 1993, and will probably be questioning the relevance of talking about latter period games. European readers with similarly pedantic streaks will no doubt be shouting the answer at their monitors right now, though: the game (as was in line with standard PAL release protocols of holding off releasing software for at least a year if not more just for fun back in those days) wasn’t released until November 1994. Just a few weeks before I bought my SNES, then.

Mind you, I didn’t pick it up at the time I bought my SNES because – and I’m guessing here, because I can’t find any actual record of it – it didn’t hit Australian stores until early 1995, if not a little later. Also, I didn’t know anything about it. Things were pretty different back then, unless you compulsively read every single magazine on the shelves, and no 12 year old could do that. Well, unless your parents bought them for you but mine sure as hell didn’t and hey look, we’re getting off track again.

From memory, the only game I did grab at that point was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, though the system still came with Super Mario World packed in. That’s relevant too though, because up until A Link to the Past I’d never played anything even close to a role-playing game, despite being a PC gamer. Okay, okay – I know it’s not actually an RPG by definition, because of its action tropes. But think of it as a gateway drug: there’s the story focus, the progression in terms of getting stronger, dungeons, a focal enemy, myth, magic, extensive use of non-player characters, and so on.

That’s pretty much your archetypical RPG right there. Now, I could go on about the Zelda series for quite a while, but for now the important thing to note is that I liked it. A lot. And when an issue of the (at the time) very awesome local magazine Hyper mentioned in its news section that a game by the name of Seiken Densetsu, or Secret of Mana, was getting geared for a local release and fans of Zelda would like it and by the way they gave it 9/10 a few months back when they reviewed the American release, well, I was all ears.

Now, unfortunately, distribution in Australia for third parties was fairly abysmal, because they were mostly all done through the same distributor. Entirely abysmal, actually. Especially for Squaresoft. I’m no expert on the details, but let’s just say that if it was terrible in major capitals like Melbourne and Sydney, in a significantly smaller capital like Adelaide it was pretty much a case of grabbing games when you saw them on store shelves, because chances were you’d never get another shot. Accordingly, I never saw a single copy of Secret of Mana available at retail.

Where I did see it, oddly enough, was at a video rental shop near my sister’s place. I was around there for dinner, and we’d gone to the little strip of shops to actually buy said dinner – planning ahead is not one of the hallmarks of my family, sadly – and popped into the video shop for a bit, I guess. I don’t exactly remember why. Might have been my fault, because I’ve always been fond of video shops.

(Don’t ask; I can’t explain it. They fascinate me, and I imagine being employed at one is absolutely brilliant fun and probably the best job ever. No doubt that’s not entirely accurate, but don’t ruin the illusion for me, please)

I was checking out their rack of second hand games, and there it was, for $25. In Australian dollars – especially at the time, when a new game on SNES could cost up to $130 – that constituted something of a bargain. And so I bought it.

There’s a kind of feeling you get when you snag a bargain like that, I think. I felt the same sort of buzz quite a number of years later when I was in a Salvation Army store and managed to pick up an original copy of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s ‘The Message’ for $2.

“Oh, what’s that?” asked the woman serving me. “I’ve never heard of it. I just put it in the racks this morning.”

“It’s, uh, nothing special,” I replied. Because that’s the kind of thing you do when you get a bargain. I had absolutely no reason to hide the fact that I was getting something very awesome for a very cheap price, because why on earth would a volunteering senior citizen care in the least? It’s not like she was going to rip it out of my hands and go DJ at senior citizen clubs or something. Although, come to think of it, that would have been cool, and totally worth losing the album for.

It’s just the way it happens. You have to act nonchalant, and pretend like you don’t even know what it is you’re getting yourself into. You pretend you’re not getting a bargain, because, hell, if the person serving you works out you’re getting a bargain, they might take your bargain away. Even though they’re the ones setting the price for said bargain and therefore have absolutely no reason to do so.

It’s a messed up little system and I don’t know why it exists. That’s just how you have to play it, you know?

And I did know. So, if I said I grabbed the game excitedly and rushed up to the counter with money in my hand already babbling excitedly, I’d be lying. I hissed something to my sister about the game being supposedly cool – keep in mind, I also knew nothing about it other than the fact that Zelda fans would enjoy it – and casually paid for the game when we also paid for a video we decided to rent.

I seem to recall that the video remained unwatched that evening. I had my SNES with me, and played the game through until my dad came to pick up my younger sister and I. And even though I only made to a point just past the first boss, I loved the hell out of it. I even did some level grinding.

Funny thing is, as impressed by Donkey Kong Country as everyone was at the time, I still considered Secret of Mana to be the better-looking game. Secret of Mana’s a softer game, for one thing, and the choice of colour palette in some areas is just brilliant – the Great Woods’ multiple seasons, for example, or Gaia’s Navel, or the Pure Land. There’s really something about the vibrancy and mood from the colours used in each area and the sense of space that makes the whole game so memorable. It’s never quite as grand in its scope as, say, Final Fantasy VI, but it does just as good a job of creating locations that stick with you.

In fact, as I’m writing this I’m doing so without Wikipedia or any other resource open. Even though it’s been quite a few years since I’ve done a complete play through, there are still locations that I could sketch reasonably accurate maps for right off the top of my head.

As much as that might sound like a result of the game’s story being strong, it really is down to the art design and atmosphere of the game far more. In fact, that story really isn’t a strength of the game at all – it’s passable, but only really in the context of early ‘90s JRPG writing. In terms of more general criticism, it’s barely even what you’d call coherent in a lot of places.

That probably comes down to the development of the game more than anything though. I don’t recall having ever read a really comprehensive article about that side of things, but my basic understanding is that the game was intended as a launch title for the proposed Sony SNES CD-ROM add-on. When the production of the system fell through, the game had to be reworked into a cartridge title mid-development, meaning that huge chunks of story had to be cut, amongst other things.

That’s interesting for a few reasons. Firstly, it suggests that the Sony developed CD-ROM add-on was a lot further along than most people would assume; for Square to be actively developing a game for it, there would have had to be fairly firm specifications, which I don’t recall ever seeing released. I’ve definitely seen specs for the Philips produced add-on (on which development began around the time of the dissolution of the Nintendo-Sony partnership) but that was an altogether different beast. It also suggests that the system would have been technically reasonably close to the SNES, if games could be rewritten with a relative kind of ease. I’m sure it wasn’t simple, per se, but the fact that it was financially viable to rework Secret of Mana for SNES rather than just scrapping the project gives the impression that it would have been a reasonably straightforward undertaking.

Secondly, as speculated by Jeremy Parish in an article a few months back, it would make sense that Secret of Mana was one of the catalysts behind Square’s defection to Sony for Final Fantasy VII. Square had been critical of Nintendo’s decision to stick with cartridges while other companies moved on to optical media – not just because it placed restrictions on what they were able to achieve, but also because Nintendo charged a rather substantial amount for the actual ROM chips. Especially large ones. And Square, well, they’ve never been afraid of making large games.

So it’s pretty simple to see Square’s perspective on this one – Nintendo promised them a platform that would deliver the space they desired (required?) and bring down production costs. They even provided specifications for the platform. But midway through development of their first game for it, Nintendo then pull the system from underneath them (and Sony, but that’s another story) forcing them to downsize the game back to the more restrictive and expensive cartridge format. No wonder they went with Sony’s PlayStation just a few years later.

Anyway, the difference in size between a CD-ROM and a SNES cartridge probably doesn’t need to be spelled out, but you’re essentially talking about a product that could have theoretically filled out a 700MB media being squeezed into roughly 2MB: a 16Mbit cart.

Of course, it’s unlikely the game would have filled out the whole disc. CD-ROM based games from around that time generally used most of the space for audio or full-motion video rather than actual gameplay content, simply because compression techniques were still fairly unrefined. And like I said, I don’t believe there’s ever been anything particularly comprehensive about the subject, so it’s hard to say exactly how much had to be cut when the SNES add-on project was dropped.

One other interesting thing to note is that Secret of Mana is one of the only SNES games – if not the only – to display at a resolution of 512 x 224. Only the menu screens actually use this resolution, but it’s almost certainly a relic of the game’s CD-ROM development.

Unseen64 has quite a number of images of the game in its beta and alpha stages – there’s no way of knowing, unfortunately, whether or not these pictures are actually from the aborted CD-ROM version though. There’s an altered overworld map, a number of pictures of the hero in otherwise inaccessible places, and a number of locations that don’t appear in the final game, though nothing that confirms the shots are from the CD-ROM version.

There’s also a suggestion floating around out there that the game was going to feature animated FMV, though I’ve never actually heard that one before and can’t seem to find a reliable source at all, so maybe take it with a grain of salt. Presumably, if true, this would have been done in the same way as Square’s PlayStation port of Chrono Trigger, which would have been pretty mind-blowing, to say the least.

In terms of unused material left on the cart, there are quite a few sprites and the like, but that’s fairly typical stuff. The most telling clues are things that are still left visible even to players: doors that can’t be opened, staircases that don’t go anywhere, and so forth. It’s very clear that whole areas of the game were slashed at fairly late notice.

Translator and ‘90s Square mainstay Ted Woolsey once noted that “when you play it you can get a sense of areas where it seems that something might be missing”. There’s a good deal of speculation that at least two areas in the game – an island set in the middle of the ocean on the back of a turtle with just one useful item and a seemingly pointless lighthouse – were set for a much bigger role in the game. The lighthouse takes a good minute or so to climb to the top of, for example, and the only thing up there is a spinning monk who babbles something entirely forgettable.

It’s quite likely that quite a number of bosses were cut from the game. The final boss in the Pure Lands, one of the last areas visited, provides you with an upgrade for your gloves that promises to be strong against dragons. That would be particularly useful if it weren’t for the fact that the boss just defeated is the final dragon type to appear in the game – it’s pretty safe to assume that it wasn’t originally planned that way.

Detailed post-mortems, sadly, didn’t factor highly into the list of priorities for Japanese studios in the early ‘90s so the truth behind the development of the game is likely to remain shrouded behind conjecture from fans. The accepted figure in the fan community seems to be that around 40% of the game was cut, but who really knows?

One thing that is certain is that the pacing of the game is strangely uneven. There are plot points that are given only vague resolutions (the underground resistance in the Empire, for example) and characters that remain woefully underdeveloped. It takes hours upon hours to even get beyond the first continent, and then the final stages of the game seem to rush by in a matter of minutes. The Light, Dark and Tree Mana seeds are collected in a very, very short period of time, strongly suggesting that the ending moments were stapled together rather quickly.

Hell, the overall plot of the game wasn’t even particularly clear to me until I read a summary of it years later. Even now I’m not entirely sure that I could retell it in a fashion that would make any significant amount of sense. But hey, let’s see.

The game is the story of a canonically unnamed young man – though promotional manga for the game did refer to him as Randi, and this seems to have been taken on by fans too, despite being an all around terrible name for a hero. It’s a better name for a hero than “HERO”, though – the game freezes after about two minutes if you try naming your character that. True story.

Anyways, one day, Randi’s hanging out around the waterfall near his town with some party hat wearing kid and some fat dude and falls off or something and there’s a magic sword and also he’s an orphan as far as the village is concerned maybe? And so he takes the sword, but that’s probably bad because there’s a balance in the world’s mana and the sword shouldn’t come out of it’s stone or bad things will happen but it can only come out when bad things are about to happen anyway, so…yeah.

It’s pretty dismal, to be honest. Randi, of course, is the hero of legend: the only one capable of wielding the Mana Sword. And naturally, along his journey he meets magic wielding companions: a plucky young tomboy Princess, and an androgynous sprite thing. And together they grow strong and save the world from an evil empire known as The Empire. Except that even The Empire is being controlled and manipulated by an evil sorcerer named Thanatos who plans to destroy the world for some reason that is never made entirely clear and then he turns into a lich. High-level stuff.

Also: the hero’s mother is a tree. A magic one.

Okay, okay. There’s a few twists and turns in there, and some of them are genuinely surprising. There are also one or two moments that manage to hit home on an emotional level, though that’s more to do with the length of time spent with the two supporting allies rather than any sort of intense characterisation.

It is an epic journey, though – you can’t fault that aspect of it. Yeah, the pacing is terrible, but its scope is ambitious enough that it nonetheless manages to get across the most important feeling in an RPG: that spectacular realisation towards the end of exactly how far you’ve gone.

Sure, it’s pretty much a staple of JRPGs, but Secret of Mana pulls off such variety throughout the game that the feeling of progression is really quite impressive. The start could not be more generic: small village, green fields filled with easy enemies on your way to a larger city. No doubt you’re familiar with that sort of thing.

But from there, the game goes through some pretty dramatic scene changes. There’s the desert’s oasis town, and its mysterious field of floating stars on the way to the Moon Palace. There’s the zombie filled subway system hidden under the ancient sunken continent. There’s the flying Mana Fortress – a huge, futuristic doomsday weapon – and there’s the sewers used by the resistance in The Empire as a way of secretly travelling between North and South Town.

You’ll fight shadowy clones of your own team and agents of The Empire. You’ll fight RPG prerequisite ancient magical beings and, in one of the game’s most memorably weird scenes, a monster that is actually Santa Claus trapped by his own misuse of the Ice Mana seed. He did it for the kids, you know. Poor trooper. Just trying to help.

In the end, though, it’s still very standard JRPG fare: the young reluctant hero and his friends save the world from a seemingly overwhelming foe. While Square could be credited with injecting a degree of complexity into the genre in works like Final Fantasy IV, you could pretty safely argue that it wasn’t the story that sold mass market gamers on JRPGs until the PlayStation era made hours upon hours of cut scenes a Unique Selling Point to go on the back of the box.

The translation doesn’t help the clarity one bit, though that’s no real fault of Woolsey. He managed to blitz through the whole thing (including rewrites) on a 30-day deadline in order to have the game ready for the ‘93 holiday period in the US. And as was the case with localisation back then, he not only had to translate the entire game, but do so while making it fit within the space allocated for the game’s text windows. Woolsey estimated that it’s possible to convey almost twice the information in an equivalent amount of Japanese text as with English. Not the easiest of tasks, then.

Just to make things even more interesting, Secret of Mana’s script is completely out of sequence in the code. “As a result, it’s very difficult keeping all the plot lines and story elements in your head while working out what can be lost and what needs to be changed,” Woolsey noted in an interview with SuperPlay.

Plus, there’s the fact that the script wasn’t even 100% finished while Woolsey was working on the translation. The script segments he was working on were finalised, but only seeing bits and pieces would have made it almost impossible to get a clear picture of the plot as a whole.

I’m sure translating a game is not an easy task by any means, even at the best of times and in the best of working environments. Considering the amount of time he managed to do it in and the factors working against him, Woolsey’s translation is a tremendous effort.

But think of it this way: you’re talking about a game that already had significant hasty cuts made to it in order to allow it to fit on a cartridge. Then, during translation, more hasty cuts are made. Then more again, because there are problems with fitting the translation onto a 16MBit cartridge. It’s no wonder at all that the plot is a mess.

It also doesn’t help that the game is a reasonably direct sequel – definitely the most direct of the Mana series, despite being marketed as the first in an exciting new series or some such. The actual first game (known as Seiken Densetsu: Final Fantasy Gaiden in Japan) came out in the US as Final Fantasy Adventure on Game Boy, and was released as Mystic Quest in Europe. I honestly can’t say I know many people who’ve played it – even Secret of Mana fans – despite the obvious ploy with the name. In fact, for one reason or another (chief of which would be that I never owned a Game Boy until a few months ago) I’ve never even managed to get around to playing it or its GBA remake, Sword of Mana.

Pity, actually, because if I had played it, I might actually understand why the hero’s mother is a tree, since the first game follows the adventures of the hero’s father. Presumably it’s a very sad moment, or possibly a very jubilant moment. One or the other.

The other thing that’s certain about the game’s change from CD-ROM to cartridge is that the chunks of code pried out left the game buggy as all hell. Your two allies can and will get stuck in and behind scenery with disturbing regularity. Occasionally, you’ll find that a certain unfortunate combination of status attacks from enemies (especially anything that changes your allies’ form, like the snowman attack) will cause one of your companions to disappear permanently and completely. Even their status bar goes with them.

For another example, weapons in the game are upgraded by taking weapon orbs to the blacksmith – these are either awarded for defeating bosses or, occasionally, can be found in chests. Towards the end of the game, it’s likely you’ll miss at least one of these orbs (the last bow orb, from memory) because of a glitch that turns its containing chest invisible and intangible.

It’s still possible to pick up a number of these orbs from the final area of the game – the Mana Fortress. They’ll randomly drop from enemies, assuming your level isn’t too far above theirs – there’s rather a strange algorithm for determining what will drop from an enemy. I won’t go into it now, but it basically means that you have a very slim chance of picking up anything worth owning once you hit around level 70, simply because normal enemy levels peak around the late 60s. Not a glitch, but still rather strange.

Some interesting glitches crop up while playing against the game’s two or three slime type bosses. Not only can they cause allies to disappear (due to their frequent form and status attacks) but it’s also possible that they’ll cause the game to permanently erase its save files.

Slimes also play havoc with the game’s framerate, but there’s no lack of things that play havoc with the framerate in Secret of Mana. It is, again, most likely a result of the game being pushed back to cartridge, but any time there’s more than a few enemies on screen at one time or if there’s a particularly large boss, the game chugs along very unhappily. There’s worse offenders out there for SNES in terms of slowdown, but Secret of Mana sure can do some impressive slo-mo when prompted.

While I tend to fall on the side that believes most of the game’s problems stem directly from its interrupted development, Jeremy Parish attributes a lot of these flaws to the game’s lead programmer, Nasir Gebelli. “It’s a mess of a game, if we’re being brutally honest,” he notes in the article previously mentioned, “like so many titles programmed by Square’s favorite Iranian savant, Nasir Gebelli.”

Personally, I’m not so sure about that, and I’d be interested to know where that statement stems from because there’s not really any other criticism of Gebelli that I’ve been able to track down. I’m willing to concede that his work on 3D Worldrunner and its (reputedly horrific) sequel JJ left something to be desired in terms of design, but for the most part I’m under the impression that he has a reputation as a fairly solid programmer. His Apple II work, which obviously preceded his time at Square, seems to be particularly well regarded – he was something of a figurehead for the scene for a time in the early ‘80s due to his ability to coax full screen animation from the system. Still, Parish is undoubtedly a lot more familiar with Gebelli’s NES work – most importantly, Final Fantasy and its two NES sequels – than I am, though, so it’s entirely conceivable that I’m missing something here. Wouldn’t be the first time.

Back on track, it’s worth pointing out that the PAL version of Secret of Mana (rather oddly) fixes a number of bugs. There’s still more than enough to keep things very interesting of course, but by all accounts it’s a vast improvement over the NTSC version. The sword has a nasty habit of regularly disappearing from the hero’s hand in the final battle in the NTSC version, for example – as far as I know, this was completely fixed in the PAL version. It’s certainly not something I ever encountered, despite going through that battle numerous times.

I say “oddly”, by the way, because it really is peculiar that the obligatory PAL delay would actually be used for some productive purpose. Normally, PAL versions of games are delayed simply because PAL distributors have black, black hearts that can only be appeased by consistently destroying the hopes and dreams of PAL gamers.

You’re probably getting the impression that Secret of Mana is a game filled with flaws. That’s not inaccurate. It is a flawed game – often frustratingly so, and often in ways that would be completely unacceptable in a retail game these days.

I mean, the outcry over the recently released Xbox Live Arcade game Worms 2’s habit of erasing saved games if users attempted to load a save on more than one console is one thing, but it was pretty quickly patched. It’s not really a huge deal to lose a Worms save, either (though those later single player levels are pretty damned tough, and you do need to save those coins if you’re going to buy multiple colours of cheese hat and seriously why wouldn’t you?).

Imagine if, say, Infinite Undiscovery or Lost Odyssey had similar problems – saved games were erased randomly through an issue with a specific enemy type. I don’t think people would be particularly charitable. Sales would undoubtedly suffer.

And yet somehow, despite its numerous problems, Secret of Mana is still an endearingly popular game; it’s regarded as a highpoint of the genre. I’d suggest there are three conclusions we can draw from that.

The first is that standards have changed. Sure, we might be finding more games are released with bugs that should have been fixed before release, simply because it’s easy enough to patch fixes in these days. However, there does seem to be a blanket disapproval of this method of working (on console anyway – PC gamers have been putting up with it for years). Gamers tend to completely ignore games that have reputations for being too buggy.

I think we’re more fickle about that sort of thing these days. The instant gratification that the Internet has brought into people’s lives means that we want fixes sooner. That’s partially because we move on from games sooner than we would have in the past. It’s not quite as prevalent as it was in the earlier days of this generation, but you still find people tend to move from game to game in groups. We don’t have time to wait for fixes, and we don’t have the patience to work past the bugs and glitches. It’s an odd kind of social migration – would make for a fascinating study.

I played a hell of a lot of Secret of Mana. An insane amount. I don’t tend to do that much these days. I still play RPGs, but it’s rare that I’ll finish one, let alone put hundreds of hours into it. Actually, at the moment I have far too many RPGs that I’ve only put half an hour or so into: Persona 4, Lost Odyssey, Dragon Quest V, Final Fantasy IV. Should work on that.

Secret of Mana didn’t have a timer, so I don’t have any idea how many hours I put into it, but I can’t think of any other game I’ve played with such a focus on absolute completion. All of my characters were at level 99, all of them were at level 8.99 with each of the game’s eight weapons (the highest level possible), and the two magic users were at level 8.99 with each of the seven elements they control.

Actually, now that I think about it, I might not have had all the weapons up to the cap of level 8.99 – there may have been one or two that I was only able to reach level 8 with, because of that glitch with the invisible chest. Certainly not for lack of trying though, as I spent so, so many hours in the Mana Fortress trying to get those extra orbs and slowly grinding to level 99. It was the game I went to when I had half an hour to spare, or a few hours to kill. Mindless grinding is kind of relaxing, especially if it’s down to that or doing homework for high school.

The save file I managed that on is the same one I started playing the first time I started up the game. It lasted from 1995 through til some time around 1999, when – you guessed it – the game decided to randomly erase all save game content. And yet, I don’t curse its name, which brings us rather neatly to the second point: Secret of Mana is a truly brilliant game, despite its numerous bugs and glitches and terrible story. The underlying gameplay is strong enough that it’s not even difficult to look past the flaws.

Like I said a few thousand words ago (sorry readers!) the closest I’d come to playing an RPG before Secret of Mana was A Link to the Past. Even Mana isn’t a typical Square RPG – it’s closer to Zelda in its real time action oriented combat than any other Square game, though it is far more in-depth in regards to stats and levels and magic and so forth.

Nonetheless, there’s a real ease to its gameplay. It’s not easy, per se, but it is simple to play and quick to learn. Attacking is exactly the same as in Zelda, and magic is selected from the ring menu – a circular menu that surrounds the appropriate character and pauses the game, without moving away from the gameplay screen.

It’s simple and quick with good reason, of course, being not only the first multiplayer action RPG, but the first to support three players to boot. Few people who bought the game would have been able to play with two other people, mostly because no one actually seemed to own a multitap. Seriously – I knew so many kids who had a Super Nintendo, and not one of them had a multitap. I don’t think I’ve even seen one in the flesh, so to speak.

Two player mode received a reasonable amount of use from my friends and I, though, and it definitely was the kind of game that anyone could just drop in and out of after just a few seconds of instruction. Even having to deal with coming into the story midway through wasn’t an issue because, well, I didn’t even understand the damn thing myself. I mean, who cares? Let’s kill some things with swords, right?

Mostly though, it was a game I found myself playing in single player, because despite the horrendous plot, I still found myself drawn into it deep. The art is a big part of that, but it’s mostly the gameplay – it’s such a smart mix of action and RPG. The action is fast, but there’s a huge amount of depth to it. Right from the start, Secret of Mana had me watching stats and levels, and loving it.

It’s not required, I’m sure. You can probably get through the game without checking the status screen or caring about what level your magic is at in the least. Turns out I actually really enjoy that sort of thing, however, and Secret of Mana is without doubt the game that dragged me into that, simply because it’s so accessible. And fun.

Did I mention fun? I don’t think I did. Secret of Mana is a genuine blast, and again, it comes down to the way that it mixes depth with accessibility, as well as that feeling of progression that I mentioned earlier.

And, of course, let’s not forget the music. The soundtrack to Secret of Mana remains one of my favourite video game OSTs ever. The project was actually composer Hiroki Kikuta’s first full game soundtrack – he’d done soundtracks for television prior to joining Square in 1991, however. His first game work was as sound effect designer for Romancing Saga before he was given the Secret of Mana project to head as composer and sound director.

It does seem like rather a short rise to the top to be doing sound effects one year, then heading up sound for the company’s SNES CD-ROM launch title. Square was clearly a little different back then – Kikuta decribes it as being “small and homey” in 1991 when he started. “I remember that Nobuo Uematsu and Kenji Ito interviewed me in their office,” he recalled in an interview a few years back. “We talked about progressive rock music and famous guitar player Allan Holdsworth with each other.” Sounds like it would have been a hell of a meeting. The image of Kikuta, Uematsu and Ito talking prog is pretty fantastic, huh?

Also interesting is his discussion of his other influences in another interview a couple of years ago. “Early on in my career, I was really influenced by the progressive rock styles of Yes and ELO, and also by techno-pop like Devo, but it was really listening to Prince’s music that formed my musical aesthetic and made me aware of the need for originality.”

Probably not what you were expecting, but it makes a good deal of sense, really. Kikuta’s work is unmistakably heavily influenced by progressive rock. Secret of Mana’s polyrhythmic compositions aren’t too far removed from the melodically focused percussion of, say, Mahavishnu Orchestra or Gong (appropriate, seeing as “famous guitar player Allan Holdsworth” played with the latter for some time).

It’s particularly obvious when you hear the pieces re-imagined as part of the ‘Secret of Mana +’ album, a one track, 50-odd minute CD compiling songs from Secret of Mana and its sequel into one single movement. It’s about as prog as it gets – the whole thing starts with sampled telephone tones.

The influence of Prince, maybe, isn’t so clear in Kikuta’s output. Kikuta’s comments suggest it’s more to do with Prince’s constant hunger for invention and innovation in the late ‘70s and ‘80s than anything else, though there is a definite sign of a pop influence in there. It’s more apparent in the lighter, less grandiose pieces, as you might imagine – towns, shops, that terrible dwarf village theme, moments of comic relief, and so on.

It tends to be the more ambitious songs that impress the most, however. The title screen’s a particularly good example – the music stirs and rises as the camera does, scrolling slowly around the heroes pictured in front of the Mana Tree. It’s a pretty amazing statement of intent. Definitely grabbed my attention when I first saw it, since I’d never seen a title screen that promised so much scope. Kikuta counts the piece – Fear of the Heavens – as one of his best as a composer. “It is so simple but so lyrical, isn’t it?” he enthused in his interview with RocketBaby.

It’s the third conclusion that we can draw that interests me most, though. I’m not suggesting that every person who cites Secret of Mana as a favourite feels this way, but I think there’s definitely a subgroup of fans who are still obsessed with it because of its mysteries, both in terms of the material cut from the game and the way the game can be manipulated through its flaws.

I talked about this on GameSetWatch briefly and obliquely a while back, from memory: the idea that something we love has elements yet to be discovered is endlessly fascinating. Especially if it’s something that we’ve invested tens or even hundreds of hours into.

It’s the reason that director’s cuts of movies sell, and the reason that people re-buy albums they own when demos or outtakes or bonus tracks emerge. I bought a second copy of Whiskeytown’s ‘Stranger’s Almanac’ last year simply because it was re-released with a second disc. As one of my all-time favourite albums, the thought of new songs from that period that I hadn’t heard and demo versions of songs I had was a little too much to resist. There’s a Fleetwood Mac cover. Hard to put that back in the rack.

A Secret of Mana director’s cut is out of the question, of course. Even if it was possible, it would make absolutely zero business sense, and Square is definitely one company with a tendency to (justifiably, for the most part) prioritise business sense well above anything else. We’re never going to see the content that was cut, and in a way, it’s better that we don’t – mysteries like this tend to be more powerful before they’re revealed.

Actually, as a little side note, there was a version of Secret of Mana planned for Bandai’s WonderSwan handheld back in 1999 which was never actually released. There was also a port of Romancing Saga that did make it out which featured content cut from the original release. There’s not any word as to whether the Mana re-release would have been treated to the same, unfortunately – it was only ever mentioned by Square once, maybe twice, and then never again.

In terms of mysteries retaining their power, take for example Brian Wilson’s 2004 release ‘SMiLE’. It’s spoken of in rightfully reverential tones (it’s brilliant, seriously) but it’s never going to have the same mystique that the unreleased 1967 Beach Boys version has. Similarly, the obsession that Secret of Mana fans have with the cut material would fade if that material were ever reconstructed. Not so much because it’s likely to disappoint in a relative critical sense, but because once it exists in the public sphere, its mythical status is no longer applicable.

Truth be told, aside from the hints of cut content, there’s not a great deal of hidden secrets in the game. There’s nothing like the Final Fantasy series’ ultimate weapons, and nothing like the hidden bosses that populate that series. It’s the manipulation of the games glitches and bugs that most obsessive fans have really jumped on.

The best known would definitely be the glitch that allows you to obtain a ninth sword orb. Normally, you’ll never actually receive one, and the only way to power the sword up past the eighth level is to use the appropriate magic in the final battle (by actual design, just for the record). However, by flying your characters to a very specific area you shouldn’t even be able to land in and saving with the merchant there, then resetting and starting a new game, then resetting again, you can trick the game into letting you fight the first boss again. This means you can get another sword orb, and keep the sword in its most levelled up form constantly.

Technically, you can get as many sword orbs as you want this way, but the game doesn’t much like it when you use that method to level it up more than once and has a habit of corrupting every save on the cart. Actually, it’s possible that even doing it once can screw things up royally, but that’s to be expected when you’re purposefully breaking the game like that.

This seems like a rather opportune time to move onto discussing the sequels briefly. After all, there’s definitely a connection between the last point there and sequels – they play directly into the idea of being able to extract more from something we dearly love. That’s why there are always such high expectations of them, and why they so often disappoint. People expect and think they want more of the exact same – a direct extension – but can’t help but be let down when it’s too similar. On the other hand, if it’s too drastically different, that can be even worse.

The first sequel to Secret of Mana – known as Seiken Densetsu 3 in Japan – would have fit almost perfectly into expectations. The game changes enough to feel fresh, with three possible storylines and six characters to choose from, but retains enough of the basic gameplay mechanics to feel familiar. For various reasons, however, the game was never released in the west.

Contrary to popular belief, one of those reasons was not the impending release of Squaresoft USA’s one and only title: Secret of Evermore. Despite the obvious links in terms of title – not to mention the fact that it uses the same basic gameplay mechanics as Secret of Mana, ring menu and all – Secret of Evermore was never intended to be part of an either/or situation with Seiken Densetsu 3. “Secret of Mana 2 will be an action/adventure title, as will our first US-developed game; both of which are currently in development,” Woolsey hinted in his interview with SuperPlay back in 1994.

Unfortunately, the issue of cartridge space once again reared its head – Seiken Densetsu 3 would have proved too much to fit in a reasonably priced cartridge once translated. The Japanese cart was 32Mbit, but translating would have likely pushed that to 48Mbit (the next step up). Only Star Ocean and Tales of Phantasia were released with SNES cartridges of that size, and neither game made it out of Japan, likely due to projected costs of translation and manufacture versus sales predictions.

There were also concerns about the buggy nature of Seiken Densetsu 3. Secret of Evermore’s lead programmer Brian Fehdrau noted in an interview last year that it “had some bugs” which would have run up against Nintendo of America’s “zero bug policy” at the time. “I think they might have had a difficult time getting it through certification,” he hypothesised.

Whatever the basis behind the decision, it certainly wasn’t a result of Squaresoft USA utilising resources that should have been committed to translating Seiken Densetsu 3. According to Fehdrau, not only was Squaresoft USA effectively a separate entity from its parent and staffed by new hires, but Chrono Trigger, Breath of Fire and Final Fantasy VI were all translated during the time Secret of Evermore was being developed. Squaresoft was clearly not lacking in resources for translation.

Without an easy resource to straighten the story out, though, speculation ran wild and Secret of Evermore’s reception was frosty to say the least. “We’d taken a lot of flack for not being Seiken Densetsu 3,” Fedrau recalls. Secret of Evermore was put into an unenviable position – not only was it being judged with the expectations normally reserved for a sequel, but it was being blamed for not being that sequel even before people had played it.

Word was beginning to spread about Seiken Densetsu 3, meanwhile, which only made the situation worse. Reviews from Japan were glowing. And with some genuinely incredible looking previews still fresh in the audience’s mind (upon seeing them in a magazine in 1995, I could barely believe that I was looking at a SNES game, cliched as that might sound) Secret of Evermore never really stood a chance. The very connection that Square tried to get consumers to make with the choice of name proved the game’s biggest stumbling block in terms of sales and perception.

Fortunately, while Square’s mind may have been made up regarding Seiken Densetsu 3’s fate in the west, the burgeoning emulation and fan-translation scenes weren’t going to give up so easily. Neill Corlett and his team began work on translating the game in April 1998, following the success of other groups on games like Final Fantasy II and V. Translating Seiken Densetsu 3 proved a little more challenging, since the game “obscures its text behind numerous layers of compression, putting it well out of reach of the casual hex editor,” according to Corlett. Nonetheless, just over a year later in July of ’99, an English patch was released for the game.

I’ve played a little of Seiken Densetsu 3, but hardly as much of it as I would have thought. For some reason, it didn’t grab me in the same way Secret of Mana did. Possibly, it’s because I didn’t start a playthrough until 2004 or so. I liked it well enough, and there’s no doubt that the game walks a great line between series progression and stability – it would have been the game Secret of Mana fans hoped for, without doubt. Maybe it’s just that I find the whole thing a bit daunting. It’s a huge game, after all, and like I said: time isn’t exactly on my side for huge games these days.

I missed most of the PlayStation era, so Legend of Mana, released in Japan in 1999 and the US in 2000, passed me completely by. Doesn’t help that it didn’t even get a PAL release, of course. I played a borrowed copy very briefly in about 2005 or so and it’s an interesting game, but it doesn’t really feel like it comes together in the right way to me.

In a way, I think there are similarities to the connection between Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross – Square tried a few sequels in the 32-bit era that attempted something really different with the game world, though the level of success of them depends on which fans you’re talking to. Chrono Cross, of course, was a big departure from Chrono Trigger because it switched focus from time travel to dimensional travel, and completely replaced the cast. The Mana series tends to be a little less set in continuity, however, so plot is less of concern – series director Koichi Ishii commented at one point that the connections between the games are more karmic than set in a distinct timeline. That is, each game has a Mana Tree, and each game has the Mana Sword, but they’re not necessarily the same ones (with the exception of the first two games).

The gameplay differences between Legend of Mana and Seiken Densetsu 3 are well pronounced, however. Most notably, it removes the open world that its predecessors used and replaces it with a map screen on which area tiles are placed, almost in a Carcassonne-like manner, though naturally without anyone competing against you. From there, you visit the area, complete certain tasks in each, and move on.

It’s not linear, exactly, but it’s certain a lot more streamlined feeling. In a way, the separate vignettes of each area remind me of Atelier Iris – it’s got that same sense of things being focused on smaller events than in more epic games. There’s nothing wrong with that – I quite like Atelier Iris, in fact – but it’s a very different form of narrative than in previous Mana games.

Maybe it gets better later in the game. I only put 10 or 15 hours into it, all up, so maybe later in the game it all comes together and explodes into a brilliant climax. Probably not though.

From there, well, I’m not entirely sure about the Mana series. I’ve avoided picking up any of the rush of games that came around the middle of this decade simply because I’ve heard they’re a bit crap. Children of Mana and Heroes of Mana for DS, Friends of Mana for mobile phone and Dawn of Mana for PS2 all came out within about a year of each other in 2006/2007, but few people have anything particularly positive to say about them.

I’ve been tempted to pick up an import copy of Dawn of Mana – again, no PAL release – but it’s hard to get excited about something I’ve heard is fairly horrible, even if the first screens I saw did give me a flutter of hope. Word is that Heroes of Mana is an okay DS real-time strategy, and is an improvement over Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings, but that all sounds like damning with faint praise from where I’m sitting. Improving Revenant Wings wouldn’t be too much of a challenge.

And now? The Mana series is probably dead. Koichi Ishii left Square just after the release of Heroes of Mana, and seeing as he’s headed up the series from day one (despite not really doing a great job of it post-Legend of Mana) it’s likely that means that there’s not going to be another revival of the series. Honestly, that’s probably not a terrible thing. Ishii was more focused on taking the series in as many different directions as possible than he was on actually appealing to fans.

Obviously, there’s a danger of pandering too directly to series fans – you lose the ability to expand your audience after a while. See, for example, the Dynasty Warriors series. But there’s also something bizarre about Ishii’s refusal to create something that too directly resembled Secret of Mana.

Still, we got some good games out of it, and at least one great one, depending on personal tastes. Secret of Mana may be buggy, it may be a pain sometimes, and it may show more than its fair share of signs of a tumultuous development period, but it’s not a surprise at all that it has the fan base it does. It’s a game with a whole lot of heart – the very definition of a flawed gem.

Once again, I’ve rambled away thousands of words. Thanks for sticking with it this long. The next column’s going to be a shorter one, mostly because I know a whole lot less about the 1989 3D strategy game that’s the subject in question. Also, I don’t plan on catching swine flu again so it should be out a good deal quicker too.

…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.”

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.

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.

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.

What are the long term goals of GarageGames?

It really is as simple as our tag line ‘change the way games are made and played’. GarageGames has been at the forefront of the independent game development movement, breaking down the barriers to entry from technology to markets and putting the fun and innovation of next generation of talent directly into the players hands.

How would you rate the achievements of GarageGames to date?

What was once a dream is now becoming history, the transition to downloadable gaming entertainment, the new opportunities like Xbox Live Arcade for downloadable content wanting a premium casual 3D game experience and now Torque being recognized as the world class community driven game development technology that is affordable for everyone.

Why do you feel that what GarageGames is doing is important for the industry?

Well when we started the technology barrier was so high that independent game development was basically an oxymoron in that only fully funded or publisher owned studios could afford to build games and the buyers at Walmart and the analysts on Wallstreet decided what was a viable game to bring to market. Basically closing down all the ‘pick up’ publishing relationships that had existed for independents to bring games to publishers. From our perspective we take the power away from the suits and give it to the players to decide if we have a fun game.

What is the relationship between GarageGames and Microsoft like?

For us MS is giving the players that vote in Xbox 360 Live Arcade, being the highest grossing title [with Marble Blast Ultra] on XBLA has been proof positive that with fun high production value multiplayer games GarageGames can produce ’snack food’ size games that fill a craving from players around the world. As far as our relationship with Microsoft, they get games and they get GarageGames’ mission.

Now that Satoru Iwata from Nintendo has essentially confirmed that the Revolution will feature original content on their download service, do you see yourself establishing the same kind of relationship with them?

We’ve always said we’ll be everywhere there is an opportunity to bring fun games to players with our tools and our games. I can neither confirm or deny any relationship with Nintendo or why GarageGames booth was right next to the Nintendo Gamers Lounge at GDC.

Where do you see the industry heading in the next few years?

When I write my future trends book for the game industry, I’ll get back to you. For now its a great time to be GarageGames.

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.

What prompted you to pick up pen and paper in the first place? You’ve mentioned in the past that you’re not neccessarily completely aware of what’s come before you in the industry, but there must have been things that infuenced you.

Oh yeah, but my knowledge was very narrow. I grew up reading English children’s comics in the eighties, like Buster and Whizzer and Chips, and Dandy. They’re what made me start drawing, there are a few artists in particular who I used to trace and copy a lot.

Now I find myself working for The Dandy alongside them, which is a very weird experience. But it was only when I got to Art College that I picked up a couple of issue of Deadline, then the Tank Girl magazine that came out. In there was a Milk and Cheese strip, so I hunted the comic down. In finding those 3 things, what I did changed a lot and gradually became what I do now.

Do you have formal training, then?

I went to Art College for 4 years, but it wasn’t really a place to ‘learn’ art. It did afford me a lot of time to do my own stuff though, which was invaluable, because I had supportive tutors (which is weird, most tutors look down on ‘cartoons’), so in that sense it was useful.

What was your first commercial work?

I did bits and pieces for people during Art College but when the course ended, a friend’s dad got in touch and asked me to do a small 6 panel strip for his cookery magazine. That was the first time I picked something up in W.H. Smith and saw my work in it.

What are the origins of Bear?

I’d been drawing greetings cards solidly for about a year, and while it was great fun, I needed to do something a bit less ’safe’ otherwise I’d go criminally insane. I can’t say where Bear came from, it just kinda fell into place at once. I’ve chosen not to question it.

What was the greeting card work?

I was lucky enough to be put onto a large range of cards after doing the odd design here and there, in total I think there were over 300 in the range, so that was great work. I did them all hand painted though and quite intricate, and because I’m just stupid enough to paint standing up, it’s really quite knackered my back…heh…

How did you get involved with Slave Labor Graphics?

Sent them my work, they said yes. People ask for advice on how to get in the industry, but really I’m not the best one to ask.

My suggestions are ‘put work into envelope, address to Slave Labor, send’. I’m sure there are better ways of doing it though.

Do you feel that your time working on Bear has improved your work methods? The writing and inking are both noticeably improved by issue 10.

Oh yeah, completely. The art in issue 1 to 3 looks very different (to me at least) to the later art. It’s natural it’s going to change and evolve, it’s tightened a lot. But there’s about 300 pages of Bear in total that I’ve drawn, it was bound to.

Do you feel like you’ve learnt things from Bear that you can use for future projects?

Oh I’m sure, I know what works and what doesn’t, what my limits are and what limits I’d like to push. I’m toying with moving away from a very strong inked line, to much gentler pencilled work, but it’s trying to find a way to combine the two which is taking me a
while. I need to keep myself amused, otherwise there’s no point doing it…

What would you say your influences in terms of writing and humour are? Because Bear seems to really thrive on its Britishness, in many ways.

I think I saw the Young Ones when I was about 9, and I was totally hooked that something could be so fucked up. I think I absorbed a lot of that. Also as a kid I liked all the usual fare, Monty Python, Blackadder, Bottom, stuff like that. I think TV has been a bigger influence on what I write than any comics I’ve read.

People do tend to compare your humour to things outside of comics a lot – things like, as you say, The Young Ones, or Sam and Max.

Yeah, ha! Well as I just proved, they’re right. Sam and Max I remember seeing but only a couple of times, I think it was shown too early on TV. But it seemed cool from what I saw. Also there were the other cartoons like that, Earthworm Jim, The Tick, they were all really great.

Have you always written and drawn your own work?

Yeah I always have done, to me it feels more natural if you’re going to be drawing something that you should be dictating what that drawing is going to be doing. I’d find it hard drawing someone else’s writings. It would get boring to me I think, no matter how good the writing.

So why did you decide to wrap up Bear after 10 issues?

Bear was only supposed to run for as long as me or Slave Labor wanted it to. But about issue 8 I realised that I should probably be winding it up, for a coupla reasons.

One is I didn’t want it getting tired, invariably if you keep doing a comic series it’s going to get uninspired the longer it keeps going. I thought ten issues would be a suitable enough portion of it to keep it fresh.

And two, yeah, there were other things I wanted to be working on, which was distracting from my full enjoyment of working on Bear. Doing Bear the rest of my life would become very boring, but opening it up to do other comics is more exciting.

It seemed a very conclusive ending, though. Not so much in the fact that it had a sense of finality to it, but more that it wrapped things up more so than any other story in the series.

Uh, there are a few ways of looking at it. One is it was a way of closing up the chapter in Bear’s life, I’ve toyed with the idea of bringing Bear back after this ending, because how it ends doesn’t completely rule this out. But I’m not sure I will. Also for me, it was maybe symbolic as me letting go of Bear as I’d been doing it for about 3 years and it felt right to be moving on. So it’s however you want to look at it.

So now you’ve moved on to doing My Own Genie for The Dandy.

Yes, that’s a real buzz. I was a little nervous to show them Bear, considering the faeces and the swearing and the violence and, well, everything, but they still offered to take My Own Genie. It’s a lot less extreme, but it doesn’t feel any different for me to do.

All the swearing in violence in Bear is just detail, underneath it needs to be funny and crazy and silly. And that’s what Genie is too.

And you’re also working on Hairy Steve with Steve Bright, one of the creators of Bananaman. That must be pretty amazing.

Yeah, I was amazed Steve said yes to working on Hairy Steve (no connection). When I started working for The Dandy, Steve was doing Bananaman for them too. Steve’s art is stunning, I really felt it could fit into more alternative comic books as much as mainstream British comics. So I wrote a story specifically in view of working with him, and approached him with it. He said yes, and we’ve been working on it since.

Is that just a one-shot?

At the moment it’s only a one-shot yeah, but we’ll see. It certainly has scope to be more, and at the moment it’s hella fun to do.

You were doing Space Raoul for the Sunday Times too – is that still happening?

He’s not made enough appearances, no, there’s a lot more to do with Raoul, I think. But now the Funday Times, the comic supplement he appeared in, has ended and moved online, his pages there obviously have ended too. But I think there might be more from him soon, I’m certainly keen to.

Were you surprised by the success of Bear?

You don’t expect success. You can believe what you’re doing is good and funny, but you can never presume that other people will latch onto it. Yeah, I was totally blown away by the success of it, it’s been much bigger than I ever expected. And it’s incredibly gratifying, not only for having an audience you can readily contact, but also for the idea that you might have done something that has become a (albeit small) detail in someone’s life. That to me is the biggest honour.

About the audience – you’ve got your LiveJournal that’s been going for quite some time now, and there’s this whole group of people associated with it who are very, very complementary about what you do. Is that weird at all?

It helps my enormous ego grow larger and larger, and soon I’ll start believing what I’m told and buy a throne made of skulls. Of course it’s great that people are nice about what I do, and most of the Bear audience are really cool people, so it’s a great compliment that they’re interested in what I do.

I don’t think you can start believing your own hype, otherwise it gets dangerous and you become a real dick, so it’s best to take it as it’s meant. Just ‘hey, like your stuff’. That’s always good to hear.

I remember a while back, sitting around with a group of friends – people who would normally never pick up a comic – with all of them reading Bear. There’s something in it that appeals to a lot of people, it seems.

Yeah that’s one of the best things, hearing from people who don’t like comics but read Bear. It seems to manage to escape the typical demographic it often gets labelled as; being goth/alternative, since I think the smarter readers realise it’s neither of those things. It’s just a happy bit of randomness to waste half an hour of your life on, and I think the audience are people who get that idea.

Did you have an audience in mind when you began Bear?

No god, that would be the worst thing creating something solely for a particular audience. That’d be incredibly contrived. You have to do whatever makes you laugh, and if other people get it great, but I’m not trying to please anyone.

There was that story in Bear #4 where you parodied the emo scene – did you worry that you might be offending a part of your audience with that?

It wasn’t intended to, though I was aware when I was doing it that it might, I figured the scenesters known as ‘emo’ would get the joke. I like the emo scene myself, although it seems to be a byword for ‘pretentious nobber’ a lot of the time, for the most part ‘emo’ people are very, very sweet people, and a lot of the bands have some nice stuff going on.

So it’s not like I’m saying hip-hop’s all about shooting people having only heard Snoop Dogg. I’d like to think I know something about emo, to the point that I get incredibly angry when people get it so terribly wrong. Emo doesn’t mean nerd. I don’t get why they get mixed up so much. Emo’s a nice attitude, let’s go with it.

You’ve written a bit in your blog lately about reviews – do you find the best way to handle them is to be bemused by them?

If the reviewers slag me off, I’ll trail them for a few weeks and then when I’ve worked out their routine and movement patterns, I’ll chase them atop a griffin.

Yeah, I suppose you have to take it on the chin. I’ve never been great with criticsm, or indeed with spelling it, but sometimes it’s gratifying that your work is pissing someone off.

Well, the one that you used as an example was:

“Bear’s humor is NOT clever, it is all cussing and violence, some of which is perverted”

Isn’t that the point of Bear, really ?

Yeah, it’s all it was ever sold as. Dumb, silly, crash bang wallop fun. It’s not trying to be a great epic. That’s when I get angry, when people slag it off for not being something they were expecting it to be. That to me is incredibly dumb. Slag it off because you think I draw like a tool, fine. But not because I’m not the same as the other comics you like.

But then again, you did do the takes on things like Pride and Prejudice. What was that all about?

To try and forcibly insert some highbrow humour in to keep the reviewers happy. Pfft. didn’t work. No it was just keeping in the same vein as the rest of the comic, silly fun, but laying it on top of grander situations.

Bear’sback-story fascinated me, the idea he could have been around at important points in history (being a toy), and I wanted to see what it was like putting him into that. Also, it was a small homage to the kind of books or films I was enjoying at the time.

What kind of work schedule are you on?

I used to work 7 days a week but I’ve started taking Sundays off now, which is working nice for me. Usually I try and get up at 6 and work through till the evening, but obviously it varies depending on what else I’m doing during the day. I get incredible guilt if I don’t get enough work done in a day, so that makes me keep plugging away at it.

Oh yeah, and there’s the slaying of virgins and the riding black horses into hellish openings in the dusty ground beneath us, but I figure you’re not as interested about that.

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.

From your CV, I gather that you did your undergraduate degree in sculpture and then went on to do your Masters in fine arts?

Sort of. Ontario College of Art wasn’t degree granting then, so the only degree I have is a Masters. I have an Associate of the Ontario College of Art diploma from OCA – which is now Ontario College of Art and Design. I like to joke around that an AOCA is more letters than a BFA (Bachelor of Fine Arts) so it must hold more legitimacy.

As well as your own work, you also work as a technician at the Ontario College of Art and Design – what does that involve?

My job involves backend server installs, backups, maintenance, configuration, upgrades blah blah blah. We use proprietary as well as open source software. Also I am involved in front end configuration stuff, as well as some teaching demos for students and faculty. I maintain 4 servers – software licensing server, authentication server, webserver, fileserver, and a lab of 25 computers running mostly high end CAD, sound and graphics software.

I’m pretty much self taught in terms of computer technologies. My first computer was a garden flower. (s)He loves me. (s)He loves me not.

Would you say there’s a general theme running through your work?

If I had to commit to a general theme, I’d have to say, that I’m interested in emotional and social connections and the shortcomings of our species. Further to that, I am interested in technology and its impact on relationships.

How do we engage with these technologies on a day to day basis, the effects of these technologies on our culture and our philosophies. What do these technological objects, devices mean to us, and how can we understand them, how can we challenge them.

Do you think there’s been a thematic change in your work?

When I was younger I was really caught up in ideas around normalcy. I had never felt like I had fit in – and that created a deep groove in me that took awhile to smooth out. What helped was becoming involved in the Toronto art community and finding people that I could connect with.

I care less now about fitting in – but I am still very disillusioned with societal constructions, models for living, frameworks that we’re expected to live within.

Your site states that your work often begins with simple ideas that become more complex with the addition of technology; can you explain this?

My ideas are usually related to everyday experiences. If I wrote the phrase – butterfly fluttering communicates – or drew a picture of a fluttering butterfly – it would be pretty mundane. But because I’m interested in the intersection of technology and its impact on our culture – making a moth powered by motors communicating through Morse code somehow becomes much more layered in meaning, albeit disheartening.

I am interested in social phenomena in relation to technological inventions, in particular consumer grade/every day objects. This could include modular connectable devices, single moments of poetic electrical & metaphorical reciprocity, or the drain gurgling in the basement floor.

I am not only interested in the triumph in configuring a technical feat, but in the meanings that comes out of the technical, and from social interaction/interpretation.

I am interested in hacking – be it machines, objects, social conventions – in my work, I engage in reconfiguring roles, purposes, meanings and expectations, in ways that favour human intimacy, and interpersonal connections, honest moments and saccharine sublime.

You’ve worked with a number of different materials – is there one medium in particular you feel more comfortable with?

I am pretty uncomfortable with technology – although I am not afraid of working with it. I have some skill with it that gives me some understanding and power over it. I am uncomfortable with its pervasiveness, its ability to dis-empower, to be transparent but yet impacting.

I am formally trained in both painting and sculpture but also find them uncomfortable. I am also at odds with objects. So I guess the answer is not really.

Is the inclusion of videogame imagery in your work there for the same reasons as the stuffed rabbits – that is, as a connection to childhood?

I’m a gamer so the video games do come out of direct experiences with the games. As do the rabbits – having grown up the being the daughter of a scientist.

What is your background as a gamer?

My background in gaming – well you know, 80’s teenager, bored daughter of a government scientist. I was 12 and programming hearts moving back and forth on our VIC-20 in the basement and then playing back the data tape on our stereo. Later, I spent an entire summer laying on my back playing Super Mario Bros. after having handed out over 200 resumes in a futile effort to get a summer job….unfortunately I’m way more employable now.

Do you feel that gaming is in need of artistic reinterpretation?

Not necessarily. There are some fantastic games out there, built on amazing ideas and logic. There’s a lot of really innovative stuff going on in gaming. But you know, just like with movies – there are some stinkers, and I think when it’s part of our culture, we have the need to critique it and engage with it.

What have you found interesting in games recently?

In terms of game-play – what I think is fun and what I think is interesting aren’t necessarily the same thing.

I think that online collaborative RPGs are interesting – in that as a gameplayer, you don’t have to sit in the peanut gallery anymore – but at the same time – the living room video game party isn’t quite the same, even if you have a LAN party.

As for fun – okay, I really like all the Zeldas from Link to Minish Cap. I like thinking that I’ve figured something out – and for the most part I feel like I am doing that when I’m playing any of those. We’ve played a bit of Pikmin - it’s kind of fun.

I thought I would really like all the Final Fantasys but I find it irritating. BloodRayne is ridiculous in terms of female representation – but gives me fuel for rants…

Do you think that we just lack the vocabulary to discuss games in a critical fashion at the moment?

I think that gaming has been and continues to be seen as low-culture. It also has a kind of geek mystique that personal computers had in the 70’s and 80’s. I think that it’s changing though, as the generations start to get older – and bring their interests in gaming into their various places of power – in particular academia. If you look at Baudrillard, he’s been talking about video games for awhile – not literally but definitely experientially and what these simulated experiences mean to culture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacrum.

Do you feel conventional games can function as art?

Yes – although I feel this question can be a bit of a trap – but I am asked it a lot. There was an assumption in a newspaper review of a recent exhibition that my games were in alongside other artists who are hacking games, and their glitches, that as artists, we are outside of the gaming world – we are not hardcore gamers, and therefore are observers critiquing from the outside.

According to the article there was some animosity around “artists hacking games” as though we didn’t respect the gamers when really, it’s engaging in a critique of the industry more than the gamers or collaborators of the works. It became a kind of strangely class-ist division not unlike when people reference the “general public” as though artists aren’t part of the general public, moving around in the same cultural venues and mediated experiences as everyone else. It is also the mode of thinking that divides design and art at an institutional level.

Do you feel, then, that your work is, in some senses, a tribute in that you’re pointing out a deeper meaning in games?

Not a tribute so much but yes, deeper meaning. There’s deeper meaning available in all of our activities.

Do you think that by dexcontexualising the imagery of games, as you have in the gameover series, it legitimises the visual aspect?

Oddly, yes – it does provide a different legitimacy – but that’s true of anything that you put into a gallery context.

Your trilogy of hacked Mario ROMs raise some interesting questions (as you put it “Is supermario walking through the same places as I am?”). I think, though, that the work raises different questions for each person who plays it. Was the intention for it to be left up to the individual to take their own meaning?

Absolutely – although I usually anticipate some of the reactions, meanings, interactions. So it is not a “whatever happens” scenario. There’s still constructed experiences – but I am often surprised at what ends up happening.

The unpredictability is reflected in the keywords used at runme.org too:

”trivial-friendly-deconstructive-violence-minimalistic-folk-cute-archetype”

It could, in many ways, be considered to be a list of contradictions, but it seems to fit the work perfectly – even “violence”, despite the fact that, on a superficial level, at least, nothing happens. Would you consider it violent? And do you consider the keywords appropriate?

I guess it’s violent in terms of erasure – but that is not really the intention of the piece. I thought the keywords were odd initially – they seemed to lack the presence, or legitimacy that other keywords for works on there received – but as time goes on – I am realizing that it’s really accessible work, and sometimes people think that reaching a wider audience translates to friendly, cute, and folkish. I’m okay with that if it means that more people will play it.

The idea of creating something that is, essentially, illegal from the start is interesting too. Do you think this is an integral part of the work?

Well, I have never been much for following rules and laws although it’s not usually my intention to break them. More that I have an inherent disregard for authority, and like to question systems of behavioural control when I encounter them. I think however, making the illegal aspect of the work a primary concern is not really my battle – as a singular being – I can only comment and hope that in some way my comments are meaningful and viral.

Recently, one of my works was censored – in a public square on a large media pixel screen. There was a request for a release from Nintendo. Since I don’t believe that Nintendo owns my work – or my experiences of their work – I refused to get one. Not that I thought they would give me one – but also I did not want to wake the sleeping giant. I am pretty sure they aren’t aware of my games – or maybe the fact that I work at an academic institution has allowed me to dodge them somewhat gracefully.

I have some opinions on trademarks, copyright, intellectual property and cultural experiences that bleed into things I’m working on but isn’t usually the driving force behind me.

The request for the release from Nintendo came from ClearChannel, though, didn’t it?

Yes! Michael Alstad is the curator of Transmedia 29:59 and he is awesome. ClearChannel donates the time. apparently the city agreed to let ClearChannel have the ad space in the new public square on the condition that they provide some community space on the boards – so ads for socially conscious charities, and other things, including year01.com ’s Transmedia 29:59.

And the piece gameover: zombienation v1.2 was a kind of response, directed at ClearChannel?

Yes, they killed my piece. It is a one minute death – also I thought the premise of the game played out nicely in relation to the big media taking things over in a zombie like manner.

As much as you’re careful not to “wake the sleeping giant”, are you curious as to what someone like Shigeru Miyamoto would think of your work?

I would hope there would be an understanding that once you create things – and it becomes part of culture and cultural icons it then belongs to everyone. I would hope that it would be seen as a huge compliment – and maybe even a little funny. But I also think that Nintendo should feel that way about the whole game modification scene and uh, it doesn’t. So…

What’s the aim of the piece controller?

In controller – I am a bad mother – fighting my kid for the video game controller. In the end, I give myself over to him – by giving him the control. It kind of came out of a conversation I had with a friend who is also a mother. She told me she thought I was a bit of a control freak with my kid.

I know that relationships with children change over time and when they’re 2, and they tend to run out into the street traffic, you need to be able to have control over them, and it’s slowly something that you let up on, as they grow. You start to say “maybe” instead of “no”.

Negotiating authority with my kid is something I don’t like doing – hovering on the edge of control and friendship – it’s a strange place to be. I make mistakes a lot – it’s very humbling. but I think a lot can be garnered from this idea – as we become more and more controlled by systems around us – we are losing our abilities to move into adulthood and people are taking less responsibility (becoming less able to?) for their actions in both local and global terms.

What is the idea behind the series that controller is part of, the loser series?

There this kind of machismo that goes along with gaming as well as sys-admin geekery. It’s aggressive and conquering. But if you suck at playing games, you’re a bit of a loser, you don’t become empowered by the experience, at least not until you redefine it.

Is this an ongoing series?

Maybe. It depends on how much of a loser I am, and if I’m noticing it or not.

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.

What’s your background in art? Have you studied painting?

I did study a little bit of art in college, but actually when I was in college at Pennsylvania State University, I was actually studying Kinesiology (the study of movement) as my major. I actually left school because I didn’t like my major. I got into art more through my friends who are artists like Gus Fink.

Do you know of anyone else working in the same way you do?

Actually yes, there is another guy doing what I do. His stuff is kind of sloppy looking and the colors seem kind of blotchy. I think my stuff is much better, but I believe he is in the same boat as I am when it comes to just doing it as a hobby, so more power to him. Maybe one day we can have an 8-bit painting showdown.

What about your gaming background?

My gaming background consists of starting with the beloved NES. Then moved up to SNES. I made the mistake of buying a Sega Saturn so I didn’t play it all that much since stores stopped carrying games for it a year after I bought it. I do own a PS2, but it is basically a DVD player for me. I haven’t played that in a long time, but I do still play my top loader NES, SNES and my Sega Genesis since I missed out on that as a kid. I never had an Atari but I did play it down at a friends house a few times.

What do you think the attraction to “retro” systems is?

I think its just childhood fondness. You will always remember the sweet toys you had. For me, the NES was the top king, but I also have a place in my heart for old 80’s toys like Battle Beasts, Madballs, M.U.S.C.L.E Men, G.I. JOE and He-Man. I was actually throwing around the idea of doing a pixilated He-Man piece, but that’s all hearsay for now.

How do you go about painting one of your pieces?

Well, I’ve only been painting for about a year now. I wanted a Mega Man piece painted like the sprite from the video game and I asked my good friend, who is a painter, to paint me it for my birthday since she asked what I wanted. She got really busy with other stuff and never got around to it, but I wanted the painting so bad, I thought to myself, “It’s just squares, I do can that myself”. So I tried it and it came out ok, nothing like the pieces I do now, but I got better and better with practice just like with anything.

Have you attempted any kind of pixel-art on the computer?

Well, I have MS Paint on my computer, that’s about it. I’m pretty dumb when it comes to the likes of Photoshop and Illustrator. I just like the idea of me sitting down with a blank canvas in front of me and getting to paint something that I think is cool looking and that I know other people will like.

Why have you chosen to focus on painting 8-bit scenes?

8-bit is just so near and dear to my heart. I started this as a hobby. Never in my wildest dreams would I of thought people would buy pieces from me or ask me to paint them specific scenes. I love the 8-bit style. Just by using little colored squares, you can make something look so damn cool, I just love it. A lot of people around my age who owned a NES have fond memories of sitting in front of there TV like 2 feet away playing Super Mario Bros and there is that one long jump where you think “How the hell am I going to make this?!” but then as you jump,. you move your controller along with your character to magically make him jump longer so you don’t die. I love when people will look at a painting I did and it just takes them back to those times.

Or moving the controller to the side in racing games. It’s funny that the Revolution controller is going to actually work like that. You know, I still crane my neck to look around corners in 3D games.

Yes! I think that’s a product of playing the old school games when you were younger. I know when I moved my controller along with the jump, damnit, it made me jump farther! I am interested to see how the Revolution controller is going to work. I’m not all that familiar with it, but if that’s the case, I think it seems cool in theory but if I’ve got to swing that controller every time I want Link to swing his sword, it might get old, at least to me.

There’s no chance you’ll move on to 16-bit games in a year or so?

Haha, that question is my most asked question with people. They all want me to do 16-bit pieces. Maybe one day I will, this is still relatively new to me. Only problem is I have so many 8-bit games I want to pay tribute to, that I might not ever get to the 16-bit games.

How do you go about creating one of your pieces?

I try and find a scene that is action packed and fun to look at or is just a plain cool idea. If I don’t just create a scene using sprites, I will play with my NES emulator and try to capture a scene, after that, I will open it and start to draw out the scene on graph paper. Then I’ll get the canvas ready and start to it.

I know you’re not too impressed with masking, but do you tend to grid up the canvas after mapping the piece out?

When I first started, I gridded the canvas. I’m really trying to get away from that. I don’t do it with as much stuff as I once did. The only problem I have with masking is that it takes way to long to do and I think masking takes a little bit away from the piece. To mask off each individual color, it would take me weeks upon weeks to finish a complex piece. Gridding isn’t terrible, I know painters that draw their stuff out then paint the picture over the drawing, but in all actuality, as long as you have a steady hand and patience to actually paint a piece square by square, you can probably do what I do. There are much more talented and incredible artists out there that have done video game related pieces – you can check that out at http://www.iam8bit.net . Some notable names that have done video game related stuff are Mike Matei, Greg Simkins, Josh Holland, bLiNkY and Gabe Swarr.

Do you think your work is a kind of pop art?

It could be claimed as pop art, some people might say it’s just fan art. Painters have been doing similar stuff for a long time – maybe not video games specifically, but you know.

How many pieces have you done so far?

I have probably done around 30 or so pieces as of now. Some games that have been done are Super Mario Bros. 1, Super Mario Bros. 2, Super Mario Bros. 3, Kid Icarus, Super Dodgeball, Contra, Final Fantasy, Kid Niki, The Legend of Zelda, Dragon Warrior, Mega Man 1, Mega Man 2, Ninja Gaiden, River City Ransom, Metroid, Mike Tyson’s Punch Out, Dr. Mario, Duck Hunt, Castlevania 2, Kirby and Bionic Commando.

Games I would like to paint are Battletoads, Ghosts ‘N’ Ghouls, Double Dragon, Bubble Bobble, Wizards & Warriors, Snow Brothers, Gargoyles Quest II and RC Pro AM.

Bubble Bobble is one of my all time favourites. I’m looking forward to seeing that.

Bubble Bobble is one of my favorite games. I remember my dad and I playing that game all the way through. I was toying around the idea of doing the end boss battle with lightning bolts shooting everywhere.

Have you sold many of them?

As of right now, I’ve sold about 25 or so. I am in my first art show called Video Armageddon in State College, Pennsylvania on April 1st with some awesome bands (a couple cover old video games) so I plan on selling a lot more at this show.

Do you get many requests for specific pieces?

I get about 2 a week, unfortunately, most people are flaky and never follow through. Keep in mind, this is strictly from myspace, I haven’t put any up on eBay or anything. I am currently working on a website to display all my paintings besides using MySpace and DeviantArt. As I stated before, I only started this as a hobby to try and keep me sane in a very boring town. I started to post my art on myspace and people really took to it. Even if I never sell another piece again (which wasn’t the intention when I first started) I will still be posting new paintings all the time. My entire house is like a Nintendo art gallery. Very dorky yes, but it is something I love doing and have fun doing it, which is all that matters in life. Whether it be the real world or the Mushroom Kingdom.

Do you think games can be art, without being decontexualised in the way you do?

Most definitely. The character design and quirky yet fun backgrounds in say the Mario games are just great art designs. The game designers are just using a different medium than your traditional artist.

Do you think taking the visual experience away from the game makes it more valid artistically?

I’ve had people tell me that what I’m doing is copyright infringement and that they are going to email Nintendo and tell them about me. Haha, I’m sure a possibly multi billion dollar corporation doesn’t give a shit about little ole me painting some Nintendo dudes. Some people might think since I am just “copying”, and that my stuff isn’t original. I don’t think this is really true because if you had the choice between having say, my big Contra piece done as a painting or maybe just a blown up print of the actual screen shot, I think people would like the painting more. I like the word “recreating”. Knowing that someone hand painted the scene and seeing the brush strokes and colors they used. It’s more appealing to the eye I believe.

I think you’re pretty safe – it’s the same as videogame cover bands.

Pretty much. I read in your Xoc interview (who actually purchased some of my art) that The Minibosses and The Advantage said that Nintendo kind of looks the other way. Although if I’m not mistaken, I think The Advantage was featured in Nintendo Power, and another person, Shawn Phase – who does similar stuff – was also featured. So it seems that they actually embrace it in some sorts. If I was Nintendo’s president or CEO or whatever, I would actually be flattered. Free promotion, you know.

It is very different though – you’re using their designs, but you’re using a different medium.

Exactly, just as long as you take it for what it is; a big fan paying tribute to the games of yesteryear, you should enjoy them. I don’t go around saying I’ve made these characters or saying that are my creations. Obviously, everyone knows who created Link and Mario, the great and very creative Shigeru Miyamoto. I’ve actually had someone send me an angry email stating that I’m saying these are my own original character designs, which is just ludicrous.