Well, I bet you weren’t expecting to hear that. Next Saturday at the Oklahoma Electronic Gaming Expo in Oklahoma City, the Phosphor Dot Fossils DVD will make its debut. Almost four hours of classic gaming history, footage, commercials, rarities and trivia on DVD for your viewing pleasure – and at a Low Low Price too. (For those who can’t make it to the show, I’ll figure something out afterward…just let me get the show out of the way first!)
I’m sure there are probably some folks wondering where the hell the Classic Gaming Expo DVDs are, and all I can say is: I’m still working on them. A lot of the PDF stuff was pre-produced a little over a year ago, and just needed to be edited into the proper order now. I’ll put it this way: it was much easier for me to finish the entire PDF DVD project within the month of April, in and around and on top of looking after the baby, doing housework, and doing other stuff (not to mention shutting down the whole shebang every time a bad storm rolls through, so the gear doesn’t get fried – which means approximately 2 days a week of downtime, than it has been to try to get the CGE DVDs done. We’re talking about a difference of several hours of material, and material where the sound has to be endlessly tweaked vs. material where the sound mix is already, for the most part, done.
I also wanted to get one project done, and done well, to re-energize myself for the home stretch of working on the CGE project. I’ve run into some epic sound issues (which had everything to do with the Riviera making no provisions for me or anyone else connected to the show to record sound direct from their little microphone mixing board for the keynotes – I know some people are bemoaning the fact that CGE isn’t going back to the Riv, but let me categorically state that I am not one of them). I’ve been working and reworking one segment of the CGE project for nearly a month in and of itself, just trying to get the sound to not suck. We’re talking about chopping up the sound and editing and tweaking it on the order of 30ths of a second. That’s some seriously tedious stuff, but when you’ve got speakers mumbling to begin with, or making no effort to even sit near the microphone, this is the kind of thing you find yourself up against, never mind your everyday sound editing like knocking down the sound level of the guy coughing in the front row right underneath the camera’s microphone. I’ll confess to you here and now that I’ve grown very discouraged with the CGE thing: I thought we’d have access to the sound board, and that would mean that this thing would be in the can by now. Instead, I’m hoping and praying that maybe CGE 2007 on DVD will be ready for you folks around the time that we would’ve been doing CGE 2008 if there was a show this year. 🙄 Seriously, it should be done well before then, simply because having done the work on the PDF project has goosed my enthusiasm a bit.
For those who have seen the earlier incarnation of PDF at the Tulsa OVGE events, this one looks the same in many respects, but it’s vastly, vastly expanded – where the old one took all of about five minutes to blast through the video game achievements of the 1970s, this one takes nearly 40 minutes to get into the 1980s at all. There are twice as many game segments (including stand-alone dedicated consoles), more commercials than the original version, and more trivia bits, including iconic and unusual controllers, notes on vaporware products that were announced and then scrapped, and so on.
Even the PDF DVD has hit some technical snags, including a handful of items that went missing and had to be reconstructed from the original version, a major change in how I handled music for the project, and even new bits that had to be hand-animated from scratch. If you thought the old version was impressive, you better sit down for this one. Mainly because it’s twice as long, and you probably don’t want to be standing for that length of time.
For those feeling betrayed by the fact that this has gotten finished before the CGE DVDs: all I can say is, don’t feel that way. The PDF project has been in progress, at an even slower boil than the CGE project, for years. The announcement of the OKC show just gave me a little kick in the butt to put the other thing on pause for one month and crank this puppy out. Seeing how good the PDF project looks and sounds has renewed my enthusiasm for getting the CGE stuff done. As they say, stay tuned.
In the meantime, if you want to see some bits from the PDF DVD, here they are:
+ There are no comments
Add yours