It’s done. Thank God it’s done. It’s Miller time! Well, that’d mean something if I were a drinking man. As it is, I’m a man who still needs to drop chapter stops and author the DVD, and once that’s done, and I’ve verified with my own eyes that the whole thing doesn’t look, sound or read like crap, then it’s time to duplicate like there’s no tomorrow, because there’s only a tomorrow until April 10th.
Since I’ve crossed the Rubicon, so to speak, by completing the content, I’m confident enough to open the door for pre-orders; the discs will ship at around the same time as the DVD’s premiere at OEGE (April 11th).
A few fun facts about the for-all-intents-and-purposes-finished-product…
- The Battlestar Galactica finale influenced how I arranged the last few games covered. No joke. Without getting too spoilery for those who haven’t seen it, the last episode of (new) Battlestar Galactica rolls out a series of vignettes to send off all the key characters. One thing that I was a stickler about covering, in the 1985, ’86 and ’87 segments, was updates of classic games that had been around for a while. I realized that I had some of these laid out scattershot in 1987, and then decided to regroup them for a little themed segment – in essence leaving town on the road we came in on, recapping the key classic games whose franchises were still going in some fashion in ’87, and saying goodbye to the old favorites as it were. I won’t give away more than that, except to see that it creeps up on you by way of a sequel and then brings it home. I wish there’d been a decent tennis game in the mix somewhere so I could’ve started and ended on Pong, more or less.
- Uah! There’s a cameo appearance by Burchuss. Again, no joke. Not going to tell you where or in what context. You’ll just have to watch. You might even spot me in a fleeting Hitchcockian sort of way too. Heh. I said “Hitchcockian.”
- Last, first, worst. The last game I played (for footage gathering purposes) for this project was Sega Master System Zaxxon 3-D, albeit in 2-D mode so as not to give everyone watching a brain aneurysm. My favorite “new discovery” that I hadn’t played before this project was Megaman (expect me to go back to the well and cover that one on the PDF site before the year is out, it’s fun). And no, really, I had never played Megaman before. Contra comes in a close second (I’d never played that before either). Least favorite game: Double Dragon. I’m not a huge fan of fighting games, but I even found things about Shinobi and Street Fighter to like when I played them to record footage; Double Dragon just didn’t trip my trigger. Which totally surprised me. I never thought I’d meet a game which made me think “I’d rather be playing Street Fighter.” First game played for the project: oddly enough, 2600 Return Of The Jedi: Ewok Adventure, which I played sometime last year and kept on the Avid knowing that I’d want to feature it in the next PDF project.
One thing I’m very happy with on PDF Level 2 is the writing. It’s a bit of an odd thing to be proud of writing that has to share screen real estate with a little window of video game footage, and therefore by definition can’t be very long or details, but that’s just it – it’s very concise, and very non-judgemental. One thing on PDF 1 that I would not do again was the thing where I made fun of the Channel F Tic-Tac-Toe game – that might be borderline OK on the site, but the DVDs, if they’re being presented as a history timeline, should not be judgemental. Some of my own opinion and interpretation does naturally work its way into Level 2, but presented with a bit more professionalism. Other than that, however, games that you might not associate with each other end up clustered together if that proximity serves to help tell a larger story. In some cases I’d bookend stuff, or find the occasional ironic pairing (not hard to do with the 2600 games in 1987…), to make a point, to illuminate some bit of history, or – occasionally – just for laughs, just for the sheer ridiculous irony of it… or occasionally the sheer bury-your-face-in-your-hands “I can’t believe they did that”-ness of it.
Some of the games covered in the later years are stuff I wouldn’t normally play, or had never played before. But part of any project like this is stretching your own comfort zone, and I had a little epiphany that not everything from the NES era was bad. Now, I still think that it’s an era where the kind of off-the-wall experimental stuff that hit us in the 2600/Intellivision/Colecovision era vanished due to marketing departments strong-arming designers into delivering only what the public seemed to expect and want (i.e. 30,000 Super Mario and/or Metroid knockoffs). I think that’s a problem that we still have today to some extent; there are oddball games all the time, but they frequently don’t get the attention that yet another sequel to yet another franchise would get. It’s rare for, say, a Katamari Damacy to actually break through and get some mainstream love. That I can learn to stop worrying, hang up my NES-era hang-ups and learn to love Hang-On, shows that there may yet be hope. I clearly need to develop my late ’80s/early ’90s gaming vocabulary. Who knows? Maybe there’ll yet be a Level 3 out of this deal.
But not this year. For the love of all that is holy, not this year. I’ve cranked out two video game documentary pieces in excess of three hours, not just in the same 12-month period, but with release dates barely 40 days apart. That’s just crazy.
In excess of three hours, you ask? Oh yes. Level 2 is longer than PDF 1. Here’s how it breaks down:
1972-75 – 5:57
1976 – 4:37
1977 – 8:46
1978 – 9:17
1979 – 7:38
1980 – 8:37
1981 – 13:19
1982 – 41:12
1983 – 34:21
1984 – 14:33
1985 – 8:08
1986 – 8:13
1987 – 14:57
End Credits & Previews – 3:35
This effectively puts us at 3 hours and 3 minutes. I used to work in increments of 15 and 30 and occasionally 60 seconds. Have I done a single short-form piece since going solo? I have not. I’ve done a 30 minute talk show pilot and three DVD projects in excess of three hours (one of those DVD projects being a box set running closer to 12 hours). Still, despite all this longform love, I don’t think I’m gonna go try to produce any newscasts anytime soon.
The previews are kinda-sorta incorporated into the end credits, and they cover PDF 1, the CGE DVD set, and…something else. The next thing that I’ll be turning my glutton-for-punishment compulsive-writer brain to next.
Its task done (for now), the Avid is powered down just in time for some nasty storms to roll through the area; once I’ve double-checked the 1983-87 segments and assured myself that there are no game-killing boo-boos in there, the PDF stuff will be deleted from the machine at last and I’ll start a crash edit on another thing that has to be ready in time for April 11th: a looping DVD previewing All My Fine Products to an unsuspecting (but hopefully not unwilling to buy) public.
It’s an awfully strange way to make a living, this. If indeed it can be considered anything that can be mistaken for a living. But I can think of a lot worse. Which brings me to this little slice of my life that constantly sits in one corner of the Avid’s dual-monitor desktop:
I refer to these as notches on the digital bedpost – basically, the major projects that have been produced on this machine in the past 12 months. I’ll probably be adding at least one more before the year is out – and these are just the video projects.
At any rate, I think…I’ve earned a nap. Remember, you can go ahead and pre-order either PDF Level 2 by itself, or bundled with volume 1 as “The Brown Box”, from this page.
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