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image © Bryan Stratton

Once again, BradyGames‘ design team outdid themselves with a clean, attractive layout that doesn’t feel shoehorned into a generic template. It’s got plenty of room to breathe, which is essential for such a dense game, but it also doesn’t feel stretched to fill its 320 pages.

Many thanks to Dan, as well as Tim Cox, Leigh Davis, Michael Owen, Keith Lowe and everyone else at Brady for really knocking this one out of the park, and especially to Jeremy Blaustein, who provided some last-minute translation heroics that helped me hit deadline.

image © GameSpot

Oh, and congrats to Square-Enix on another great KH title, which I’m happy to see is already getting some good reviews.

image © BradyGames, THQ, and/or WWE

Apologies to my regular readership (both of you) for the long delay in updating. I was up against a crazier-than-usual deadline for my latest project, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned as a freelance writer, it’s that you never spend time writing stuff for free when you’ve got editors banging down your door for the text that they paid you to write.

But now that I’ve finished that project (and have finally recovered from the 28- and 33-hour all-nighters I had to pull during the last week of it), I can finally get around to writing the piece that’s been floating around in my head for the last couple of weeks.

• • •

I got my start in the games industry in May of 1999, when my girlfriend, my best friend and I packed everything we owned into a 4′ x 6′ U-Haul trailer and made the great pilgrimage from Vermont to the San Francisco Bay Area to seek our fortune. Holly had a Barnes & Noble job waiting for her in Berkeley, Matt had some savings that would get us through a month or two if things got dire, and I had nothing except a vague, “contact us when you get here” email for a job at a startup online games magazine.

At the time, I knew almost nothing about the games business. I hadn’t really played games for fun since my early high school years, and I’d only recently picked up a PlayStation, 3 1/2 years after it had first come out. My recent gaming résumé was limited to the Myst franchise, D&D-based RPGs like Baldur’s Gate and Squaresoft’s epic Final Fantasy VII. But a half-hour phone call to my hardcore gamer brother the night before armed me with enough knowledge and buzzwords about the state of the industry to bluff my way through the interview. It also didn’t hurt that they were looking to launch a “lifestyle” gaming magazine (i.e.: interviewing celebrities about video games), and I had managed to cobble together respectable entertainment journalist credentials by being one of three working journalists in Vermont who interviewed the few rock stars who came to town.

image courtesy Wikimedia Commons

That job turned out to be one of the greatest jobs I ever had, and my co-workers wound up becoming some of my best friends on the West Coast, despite the fact that most of us have since fled the Bay Area. It was one of those rare gigs where the daunting amount of work that had to be done on a daily basis didn’t feel much like work, because every workday also brought ten hours of hanging out with two dozen of the best people I’ve ever worked with. I even managed to repay my brother’s interview prep by getting him a job at the magazine a few months later.

Of course, I had to spend some serious time getting up to speed on the industry I’d doubletalked my way into. Through sheer coincidence, I was entering it just as Sega‘s final game console, the Dreamcast, launched in Japan. And did I mention that our offices were located at 650 Townsend Street, the (now former) Sega building?

image © Bizjournals.com

But all of the synchronicity in the world wouldn’t have helped the Dreamcast win me over if it hadn’t also been the best game console on the market at the time, hands-down. Even once the PlayStation 2 launched, the Dreamcast’s crisp, colorful graphics absolutely blew away any other console hardware on the market, and the lineup of games it featured in its initial 12 months remains the most impressive first-generation game library in history: Soul Calibur, Sonic Adventure, Virtua Tennis, House of the Dead 2, Space Channel 5, Power Stone 2, Star Wars Episode 1: Racer, Resident Evil: Code Veronica, Chu Chu Rocket, Crazy Taxi, Sega Rally 2… the list goes on and on. It was the first console that I ever went online with, and its innovative VMU memory device predated Nintendo and Sony’s efforts to link their handheld gaming devices to their consoles.

If there was any justice in the gaming world, the Dreamcast would have established itself quickly as the dominant console and secured its place in history as one of the all-time greats. Sadly, as it turned out, it only achieved the latter, and only among those of us who were there for the ride. It had the misfortune of launching at a time when its parent company was hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, when the Japanese and American arms of the company could not overcome their cultural differences, and when Sony was preparing a marketing offensive for the PlayStation 2′s launch that would make the Dreamcast’s record-setting launch look like someone selling old VCRs at a flea market.

In a sad bit of tragic irony, Sega Chairman Isao Okawa forgave $40 million owed to him by Sega Corporation and gave it control of his nearly $700 million in Sega stock, shortly before his death in March of 2001. That was the same month that Sega discontinued the Dreamcast.

The magazine I worked for in San Francisco had gone belly-up less than a year prior, one of many casualties of the dot-com bust. And despite the fact that I’ve landed quite well and am fortunate enough to earn a good living from doing a number of things that I love, my memories of 1999-2000 will always exist on an untouchable plateau. I might have been born a generation too early to enjoy the Summer of Love, but I don’t think I’d trade the Year of the Dreamcast for anything.

• • •

For more reminiscences of the Dreamcast on its tenth birthday, see the excellent series of articles on Bitmob.com, where I’d originally hoped that this piece would wind up.

Everyone at Cyan Worlds were just incredible to work with, and anyone who had the patience and the diligence to explore their games to the (admittedly obsessive) level of detail that they demanded found their efforts rewarded, and then some. It was a real honor to be a small part of that for a brief time.

Finding this interview also reminded me that someday I want to put a tape recorder between Myst‘s Rand Miller and Doom/Quake‘s John Carmack. In the early 90′s, their games were the most popular titles available on the PC, and they could not be more opposite in their philosophies of game design. I think the conversation would either be very, very short or very, very long, and either way, it would be fascinating.

FUN FACT 1: The most-discussed storyline in the game is the one I didn’t come up with. I lay the blame for the “Candice Michelle turns male wrestlers into women with her magic wand” story squarely at the feet of my former script supervisor, who was either having a moment of pure insanity or pure genius. In retrospect, some might see it as him leaving a metaphorical turd on the desk of the company he was getting ready to leave, although he’s far too much of a pro to do something like that intentionally. I think.

FUN FACT 2: One of the storylines in the game featured former WWE Superstar Christian in a major role. As soon as I finished my first draft of the script, Christian opted not to renew his WWE contract and instead jumped to TNA (new, upstart rasslin’ company). We replaced him in the script with Eddie Guerrero, who died shortly after the second draft of the script was finished. Johnny Nitro was our third choice for the story, so if something awful happens to him, you know why.

EDIT: As of 8:45 AM PST, we’re #5,845 on the Amazon.com book rankings. Clawing our way toward glory!

The first two interviewers asked us what our sex lives were like. David had the bulletproof answer of “ask my wife.” I need to get me one of them Russian brides.

Here’s the schedule for when we’ll be yappin’, station by station. I’m assuming that you can probably tune in to the stations’ streaming audio via their websites to hear us. I’m the one without the stupid accent. All times are Eastern Standard, so West Coasters need to subtract three hours to get the proper schedule.

• 9:30-9:40am: KRBZ, Kansas City, KA
• 9:40-9:50am: WBBB, Raleigh, NC
• 9:50-10:00am: KRKA, Lafayette, LA
• 10:00-10:10am: KFTE, Lafayette, LA
• 10:10-10:20am: KRAB, Bakersfield, CA
• 10:20-10:30am: WKQX, Chicago, IL
• 10:30-10:40am: KKND, New Orleans, LA
• 10:40-10:50am: KSKI, Sun Valley, ID
• 10:50-11:00am: MTV Syndicated Radio