Promo image for the 1983 film "Never Say Never Again," courtesy The Nostalgia Factory 

When we saw the news this morning that Criterion Games' much-debated-then-much-praised Burnout Paradise would be coming to PC, we were more than a little surprised. That's because in the past, the studio's creative director Alex Ward has made some playfully disparaging comments about gaming on PCs. So as we were Googling for one of his previous statements on the matter to throw into this morning's High Score post, we came across a statement that he had made previously to...us. Here's the exchange we had on the subject back in the fall of 2006:

What about PC gamers? You've been critical of the PC in the past. What would you say to someone who's finished F.E.A.R., they've finished Half-Life 2, they've finished Quake IV. They've seen their little brother rocking out with Black on the console, and they want to know, "When is Alex Ward going to show me some love?"

Never. I'm just being totally honest. I could lie, right, and say "Maybe you'll see a PC game from us in the future." No.

To see the rest of what Ward told us back in Fall 2006, along with some screenshots and the full text of the press release, click on the link below.

1. EGO...trip: The gospel of Level Up leads to faith-questioning and public stoning...
2. HMM...while the PCGA unexpectedly turns a former blasphemer into a convert 
3. THE...80-20 rule, as re-envisioned by the mad geniuses at Rockstar Games
4. KIC...k in the door, wavin' the four-four/All you heard was "Poppa don't hit me no more"
5. MEA...nwhile, over in Europe, Sony's claim of "Victory!" goes unrefuted
6. RND...The must-see movie of holiday 2008. But will there be Happy Meals?

1. EGO...trip: We fake it so real, we are beyond fake
2. EGO...trip: Our recent post on the MSM and game reviews, considered
3. TEN...The Bo Derek age of videogames is officially upon us
4. WHE...n, oh when will the PCGA smite the blasphemers?
5. GTA...IV failed to respect Shaolin. Will Shaolin have its revenge?  
6. RND...Safe for work porn? Only the best for you, Dear Reader

1. EGO...trip: Level Up's dirty little secret, under the microscope
2. EGO...trip: EA's Kotick rebuttal gets pickup; others struggle with attribution
3. NOT...hing like a good, old-fashioned blogfight
4. RND...In which we belatedly welcome a fellow critic to the 'sphere
   

 

Anyone who's been a faithful reader of Level Up knows we have some pet themes to which we keep returning. Among them: games are not a fundamentally narrative medium; we all "see" games with our hands; we videogame journalists need to develop a critical vocabulary that will enable us to better explain the unique qualities of this art form. This week, we managed to smuggle some of that thinking into the pages of NEWSWEEK by means of a page-long essay on Grand Theft Auto IV, in which we wrote:

When I write a post about videogames on my NEWSWEEK.com blog, Level Up, my target audience is the sizable one that's already knowledgeable about the medium. The real challenge, however, comes when I return to the pages of the magazine. It's not easy to explain a game like Grand Theft Auto IV to an audience that's not native to this art form. Yes, I said art: to draw an analogy or three, Grand Theft Auto is to videogames what "The Sopranos" was to television--a sprawling, operatic crime series that has elevated the genre and made its creator very rich in the process (Rockstar Games took in more than $1 billion in the United States for the last three GTA games alone). But on the TV show, you only watch Tony and his minions kill their enemies. In Grand Theft Auto IV, you also direct and star in a story that unfolds over as many as 100 hours, depending on your skill as a gamer.

The experience is hard enough to sum up that I'm tempted to put novices at ease by writing something like this: a first-person, here's-what-I-did-in-the-game introduction, followed by a colorful précis of the Grand Theft Auto IV story and characters, then a recitation of the numerous landmarks and radio stations that give this skewed facsimile of New York City--called Liberty City in the game--its authentic flavor. The problem with this approach is that it doesn't begin to give you a feel for what it's actually like to play the game. Just as the majority of movie reviewers still struggle to find a meaningful critical and technical language with which to discuss actors' performances, we who write about videogames have yet to find a vocabulary that enables us to thoroughly engage the medium. One that will allow us to examine the mechanics, visuals, sounds and narrative elements of videogames not in isolation, but in concert.

When we wrote those two paragraphs, we did so specifically in response to several reviews of GTA IV that we'd read in the mainstream press, where the need to distill a game's essence for non-initiates is the most acute. Take, for instance, the ecstatic review that ran in the New York Times. Only two almost-throwaway sentences--"The point of the main plot is to guide Niko through the city’s criminal underworld. Gang leaders and thugs set missions for him to complete, and his success moves the story along toward a conclusion that seems as dark as its beginning"--describe the main thrust of the game. The rest of the review, though artfully written, starts with that "here's-some-of-what-I-did" intro we mentioned in our excerpt, and then follows it up with a laundry list of adjectives, characters, locations and narrative elements.

To read the rest of our post, click on the link below.

 

When the CEO of the world's largest videogame publisher takes repeated shots at the runner-up, even a journalist must eventually take note and seek comment. That's exactly what we did after noticing three separate statements in which Activision CEO Bobby Kotick had taken a dig at Electronic Arts, including an accusation that EA has been "taking the soul" out of a lot of the studios it purchased. To address this string of criticism, we sent some questions over to Jeff Brown, EA's vice president of corporate communications, for the company's official response. Here's what he wrote back:

In a recent Q&A with Portfolio, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick had the following exchange with the interviewer:

Is there a key to Activision's growth?

It's about really being considerate of the culture in the game studios that Activision buys. That's the biggest difference between us and any of our competitors. We built a model that celebrates entrepreneurial, opportunistic, independent values. It's almost the opposite of Electronic Arts, which has commoditized development. It did a very good job of taking the soul out of a lot of the studios it acquired.

What was the reaction of the executives at Electronic Arts when they read that quote?

The truth is, everyone laughed. In the past year EA has made radical changes to decentralize the company and put creative control back in the hands of development teams. It's too early to declare victory but if you talk to people like Patrick Soderlund at dice in Stockholm, Mark Jacobs at Mythic in Virginia or Josh Resnick at Pandemic--they'll probably tell you that it's working. They get a lot of resources and creative freedom. That freedom has already contributed new start-ups like Dead Space, Mirror's Edge and Boom Blox and there's a lot of others to be announced soon.

EA CEO John Riccitiello has made numerous recent remarks about EA's shift away from a command-and-control model towards a city-state model, in which individual studios and teams have more control over their own destiny. Do remarks like this suggest that he has more to do to change the perception of EA among his peers, or is something else at work? Which studios would you point to at EA that still have their souls intact?

 

A journalist writes for the moment--the first draft of history, our profession has been called--and if the journalist is fortunate, his or her work will hold up in the years to come. Back in the fall of 2005, with the Xbox 360 on the verge of release and the Playstation 3, Wii and the event that would change the blogosphere forever Level Up still a year away, Rockstar Games released both The Warriors (for PlayStation 2 and Xbox) and Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories (for PlayStation Portable). We used the one-two punch to convince our editors to part with some precious space in the pages of NEWSWEEK, but with space at a premium, we had to find a way to make each word count. We decided to try to distill what makes Rockstar different from many of its peers; here's how we kicked off our story:

Videogame creators firmly believe that their work will someday become the dominant form of entertainment in the 21st century. So why isn't their message as original as their medium? The vast majority of story-oriented games shamelessly rip off the same set of sources as though they were the Gospels: "Aliens," "Saving Private Ryan," "Band of Brothers," "Black Hawk Down," "The Lord of the Rings" and Dungeons & Dragons. It's as if every Western game designer were cloned from the same DNA; indeed, a recent survey of game creators in English-speaking countries found that the overwhelming majority are straight white males (average age: 31).

The one company that consistently avoids this trap is Rockstar Games. Best known for its controversial hit franchise Grand Theft Auto, the New York City-based publisher is headed by a trio of British expatriates who draw inspiration not from the heroic side of Americana, but from its outlaw side--mob movies, pulp novels, gangsta rap, '80s cop shows and spaghetti Westerns. For its latest trick, Rockstar recently released The Warriors, based on the 1979 urban gang movie, and Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories, which brings its sprawling epic to Sony's PlayStation Portable. "I remember when Rockstar was nothing," says Andrew McNamara, editor in chief of Game Informer magazine. "They came to us and said, 'We're going to build a company around pop culture and youth culture.' We were like, 'Yeah, right.' And they went out and executed on every front."

The story is somewhat reductive, as such pieces must necessarily be. But our critique was pretty accurate then. How much have things changed since?

To read the rest of this post, click on the link below. 

1. EGO...tape: music to read Level Up by, for the week of May 4, 2008
   
2. EGO...trip: our book recommendation to Bill Harris keeps spreading
3. EGO...trip: "Never stop fighting until the fight is done," said a wise man
   
4. THE...re's the wrong way to respond to an outrage, and the right way. Kudos. 
5. ROC...kstar's cunning sense of teh funny knows no bounds, linguistically
   
6. MMO...Better grinding through WoW, and Sony's MMO advantage
7. WHE...n the shoe is on the other foot, graciousness is the best policy
8. KON...gregate gets sticky-icky-icky with its metagame, Kongai
   
9. RND...Like Cinque and the Lox, should today's children be freed?
   
10. RND...Why so serious? Because we seriously can't wait to see this flick

1. ARE...we what we pretend to be? Our roles in games, considered
2. AMA...zon founder Jeff Bezos invests in Kongregate
3. YET...another heretic who refuses to preach the gospel of the PCGA
4. HUH...Job hunt be damned: a real gamer would play in poverty
5. PUT...some videos on MTV, and maybe you'll get your iPod, sir
6. RND...Man Bites Orange, or, how Kanye Justice just out-disturbed Rockstar

1. CON...sistency is also the hobgoblin of big CEOs, it would seem
2. GTA...IV is certainly audacious, but is it really hopeful?
3. HMM...More hot air Steam and other Valve topics, discussed
4. RND...Who will tap out first, Sumner Redstone or Les Moonves?

 

To get some more information on tomorrow's announcement of the Rubik's World title for Wii and DS, which will be published in the fall by The Game Factory, we conducted two separate interviews. We spoke first with the game's Dutch developers: Two Tribes managing director Martijn Reuvers, and the company's creative director Collin van Ginkel, who also serves as lead designer on Rubik's World. We also spoke with with David Hedley-Jones, senior vice president for the Rubik brand at Seven Towns, which owns the Rubik's Cube IP. Here's what they had to say:

Whose idea was it to make a Rubik's Cube game?

David Hedley-Jones, senior vice president for the Rubik brand at Seven Towns, credits The Game Factory with the original vision for this licensed videogame. "Game Factory approached us," he says. "They were obviously aware that there's a whole new craze going on about Rubik, which has been building over the last four or five years, reaching a critical mass last year in 2007 and carrying on this year as well. It's a great time to get involved with a brand and an iconic image that's appealing to a whole new young generation."

I want to know more about the game, but this Rubik's Cube revival is interesting. Did Seven Towns drive that, or did it happen more organically?

"It was fairly organic, to be honest," says Hedley-Jones, citing the slew of programs at the turn of the century that looked back at significant pop culture events, many of which devoted time to the Rubik's Cube. He also points to the independent World Cube Association, which bills itself as an organization which "governs competitions for all puzzles labeled as Rubik puzzles, and all other puzzles that are played by twisting the sides, so-called 'twisty puzzles'." He adds: "It's also been featured a lot in movies and advertising in particular over the last five or six years, which obviously creates a great brand awareness."

Advertising? You mean like that Playstation 3 launch commercial?

Absolutely. "They came to us and asked us if they could use the Cube in their advert," says Hedley-Jones. And in a wonderfully recursive example of life imitating art imitating life, Game Factory publicist Damien Sarrazin told us that when his company and developer Two Tribes went to pitch the Rubik's World concept to Seven Towns, one of the pieces of video they showed was that very same PS3 ad. "The commercial with the PS3, where you see actually the Cube being deconstructed, is the ancillary idea of our game concept," Sarrazin says.

I'd like to hear from the developers now, thank you very much. Are they Rubik's Cube experts?

To read today's installment of Just the FAQs in its entirety, click on the link below.

At Nintendo's media event in San Francisco a few weeks ago, we made the acquaintance of The Game Factory publicist Damien Sarrazin. He was there to show off the first of an intriguing series of relaxation games for Nintendo's DS handheld. But as we chatted, Sarrazin casually mentioned another title that had yet to be revealed, this one involving the Rubik's Cube license. The combination of a mainstream brand and an unannounced title was too intoxicating for the Level Up staff to resist, so like Activision and Aerosmith, we locked up this announcement exclusively. We've also scored an interview with the game's developer (Two Tribes) and the owners of the Rubik's Cube intellectual property (Seven Towns), which you can peruse by clicking here.

To read the Game Factory press release that will be crossing the wires tomorrow, click on the link below.

1. FOR...merly dapper Thompson looks haggard after copping GTA IV
2. ALL...things reconsidered: NPR takes a a trip to Liberty City
3. UBI...One day, every major city in the world will have a Ubisoft studio
4. YET...another developer appears to have missed the PCGA memo
5. RND...Don't believe the hype? For $10 million, we say: believe

 Poster for the 2001 film "Antitrust," courtesy impawards.com

Oft-quoted Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter isn't just ubiquitous, he's also multifarious. Did you know that in addition to being a financial wizard (Level 60, no doubt) with 15 years of mergers and acquisitions experience under his belt, he also has a law degree from Pepperdine and a master of laws in taxation? We bring this up because in today's installment of Verbatim, we've got a full-scale legal battle among three parties over the best way to interpret the antirust implications--or lack thereof--in Electronic Arts' proposed acquisition of Take-Two. The combatants are as follows:

• Michael Pachter (see above for his extensive credentials)
• Justin Blankenship, Level Up legal affairs columnist; former Federal Trade Commission lawyer (in the Mergers 2 division, which reviewed mergers in the chemical, technology, and entertainment fields)
• Mark Methenitis, editor-in-chief of the Law of the Game blog; and lawblogger for Joystiq; and a licensed attorney in Texas

We've even got a journalist caught in the crossfire: GamePolitics' Dennis McCauley.

The idea behind Verbatim is that we scour the Internet for what various people have said about a particular topic; isolate the most salient excerpts; and compile them in a single, convenient location for your reading pleasure. To see how these lawyers (and journalist) debated this particular issue, click on the link below.

It's a warm Tuesday night at the Olde Fort Pub in Ft. Thomas, Ky., just across the river from Cincinnati, and the regulars are rolling in with the early spring breeze. The Reds game is on the big screen, but no one is watching. Kid Rock wails from the jukebox, but no one is listening. The pool table is lit, but no one is playing. Instead, the crowd is cheering on Casey Niehues, 23, as she rips off a blazing guitar solo on Guns N' Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle." But Niehues isn't really playing guitar; she's playing Guitar Hero, the wildly popular videogame.

As a virtual GNR plays on the flat screen behind the bar, the petite blonde supplants Slash by pounding colored buttons on the fretboard and strumming the plastic "string" on her ax, a game controller more akin to Fisher-Price than Les Paul. But don't try telling these revved-up rockers they're playing a game. "It's just totally different," insists Clem Fennell. Barmaid Rachel Wallingford hollers over the din: "It makes you feel like a rock star."

But as the band Boston (a Guitar Hero act) might say, it's more than a feeling. It's a cultural high-tech phenomenon that is changing the way we interact with music. Listening and watching aren't enough anymore. Now we want to play along. Millions of us are doing it, including gray-haired gaming newbies who still think Grand Theft Auto is a felony. Since Guitar Hero debuted in late 2005, nearly 15 million copies have rolled out retailers' doors, according to market researcher NPD Group. An additional 1.83 million copies of Rock Band, a new game involving guitar, bass, drums and vocals, have sold since it launched last Thanksgiving. In each game, you play along by pressing color-coded buttons on your instrument in time to colored dots coming at you on the screen. The more dots you hit, the better the song sounds and the more points you earn to get deeper into the 58-song set list. Together, the two multiplatinum hits represent a $2 billion market, analysts say.

Behind this rock-and-roll fantasy is Harmonix, a Cambridge, Mass., game developer staffed by rock-star wanna-bes and game geeks. The creator of Guitar Hero, and now Rock Band, was founded in 1995 by two quirky artists, who turned their musings as MIT Media Lab partners into a booming business. Today, these old college chums, Alex Rigopulos, 38, and Eran Egozy, 36, oversee a staff of more than 200 in the former offices of Harvard's Russian Studies department, where spike-haired and tattooed employees zip around on Razors among the detritus of musical instruments, both real and simulated. "It looks like we're having band practice," says online community manager Sean Baptiste as he strolls past a giant gong used to call staff meetings to order.

Harmonix's history is the classic "Behind the Music" story of the 10-year "overnight" sensation, complete with career setbacks and band breakups. In fact, Harmonix lost the Guitar Hero franchise when game giant Activision bought it, along with the game's plastic guitar maker, two years ago. So Guitar Hero III, the latest version, is now playing for a different company. But Rigopulos and Egozy hooked up with MTV, which acquired Harmonix in November 2006 for $175 million and bankrolled Rock Band. MTV, part of media giant Viacom, gave Rock Band the star treatment, with promotions at the Video Music Awards and even its own "Behind the Music" episode.

Having created a monster market in musical pantomime, the challenge for the gaming glimmer twins is topping themselves. But Rigopulos and Egozy don't seem daunted. Lounging on couches inside the "Star Chamber," a soundproof room where Rock Band plays on a continuous loop on a massive TV, CEO Rigopulos (a rock drummer) looks goth in his black hoodie, while chief technical officer Egozy (a classical clarinetist) looks preppy in his chinos and button-down shirt.

Read the Full Story Here