...adverb, 17 letters: to do something in a manner of little importance

I had the pleasure of working at Zynga with the Word Streak With Friends team starting in late 2016, including the release of Boggle With Friends in March of 2017, and post-launch support. The whole experience for me was a crash course in mobile game live operations, and allowed me to participate in new feature design, as well as to stretch my creativity with the game's Daily Challenge feature.

I was delighted to contribute to the success of Boggle With Friends, and reveled in the serendipity of the opportunity, owing to my love of word games like Yahoo! Word Racer. By far, my favorite aspect of the project was the Daily Challenge feature, and over the course of about a year, I created more than 350 unique puzzles, padded the feature with a handful of new puzzle types, and monitored the difficulty and completion rates by our Players.

The Daily Challenge feature from Word Streak With Friends had 6 unique puzzle types - Specific Tiles, Same Score Words, Super Juicy, Increasing Time, Riddle and Themed Puzzles - only the last two types required special construction of the puzzle in order to capture the answer to the Riddle, or specific keywords in Themed Puzzles. Here's an example:  What do you have when you snap your fingers twice every second? RHYTHM!

I worked with the development team to create five additional puzzle types - Corner Triples, Double Doubles, Thousand Words, Word Search, and Definition - the last two being similar 'keyword' types to Riddle and Themed Puzzles.

The "Thousand Words" was an attempt to offer puzzles with a vast number of words; typically, a good Daily Challenge puzzle would contain 300 or more words. The grid pictured was a letter sequence I found online that generated over 1,000 words!

The "Definition" type was a straightforward puzzle where the Player would be given the word definition and the number of letters. There were some doubts from the development team 

about some of the puzzles I made, but I think, overall, my work on Boggle With Friends was very CONSEQUENTIAL.

We Totally Did the Donut Jump Before Red Hot Chili Peppers

...I remember saying that the first time I saw the video for Californication sometime in 2000.

Towards the end of my time with Atari Games (then Midway Games West) the San Francisco Rush time was rolling off multiple successes with Arcade and Console franchise games, and continuing the adrenaline-infused white-knuckle 8-way Arcade racing with Hot Rod Rebels, which unfortunately was cancelled coincident with the shuttering of coin-op Arcade development at the Milpitas office.

Hot Rod Rebels leaned into Lowbrow Kustom Kulture and Rat Fink style muscle cars, and every 3-lap race started with a quartermile straightaway and classic drag race 'Christmas Tree' lights which were to be displayed both on the screen, and incorporated into the cabinet with LED lights. We enhanced our driving model to accommodate this drag race, allowing multiple ways of launching without the penalties of false starts or loss of control. I remember popping wheel stands off the line, stomping on the gas, or redlining the tach and popping the clutch for an 'optimal' start. I think we also planned to have burnouts to 'cook the tires' before the race started.

We were definitely getting sub-10 second times, down to the thousandth of seconds.

Besides the Christmas Tree starting lights, the Arcade cabinet also had other Kool features:

• "Lake Pipes" exhaust tubes on either side of the seat with red LEDs inside
• "Barefoot" gas pedal
• "8 Ball" gearshift knob
• "Signature Seven Speaker Surround Sound" - one high up in the marquee, two in the dash, two in the headrest of the seat, one in the back of the seat, and one subwoofer under the seat
• The back of the seat also had two brake lights; not that you'd ever see them lit

At the end of its development, Hot Rod Rebels had six track layouts in various states of completion, each one helicopter-flipping over the boundaries of Arcade racing. Each track featured over-the-top signature stunts and shortcuts made more flexible and spectacular by our new dynamic collision technology, allowing our cars to drive on and interact realistically with large moving objects.

It was a long time ago, but I vaguely recall:

1. Rodsville
A very simple 'oval' track layout; two straights and two left turns. Downtown Rodsville had a car wash, diner, garage, and police station.

The signature finish-line stunt was the "Up-n-down Donuts" drive-thru, an homage to the iconic Randy's Donuts in Los Angeles, CA as well as an obvious play on SoCal's famous "In-n-out Burgers". I came up with the design of the building and the stunt, just thinking, "what would be cooler than simply jumping through a giant donut?" Why JUMPING THROUGH A GIANT DONUT DUNKING UP AND DOWN INTO GIANT CUP OF COFFEE of course!

You can see in other YouTube videos the other ways we used dynamic collision in stunts:

• A car carrier on the roadside allows racers to jump over and onto freight trains going with and against the flow of traffic
• A county fair with a shortcut jumping across the path of a swinging 'riverboat' ride
• Other amusement rides - carousel, and the 'hammer swing' - were also interactive

The other tracks were less developed, but the basic track ribbon had been built, tested, and tuned for multiplayer, as well as filled with stunts and shortcuts.

2. Island - set against the backdrop of a volcanic Polynesian island, the 3 laps saw racers interacting with the signature Volcano in different ways:

• Climbing up a winding mountain road or taking the 'vertical tube' stunt shortcut - a prototype can be seen in the Rush2049 morning track - and speeding past the smoking vent
• Diving down into the tube in the second lap to land on a ledge before the rising lava engulfs the exit tunnel
• Finally jumping over the eruption on the third lap and bombing down the steep backside

3. Canyon:

• Falling boulders
• Double corkscrew inside a massive cavern with hanging stalactites that could be dislodged and fall down to form obstacles in subsequent laps
• High-rising hairpin turn around across a fragile keystone

4. Swamp:

• Winding road through the mangrove swamp - skirting close to the exposed roots would topple 3 giant trees. These trees would collapse and fall down to become a shortcut of narrow bridges in later laps
• A giant tree-cutting machine spanning the entire final straightaway - think about driving under a giant lawnmower, but with mechanized circular saw arms
• A giant teeter-tottering fallen tree. racers leading the pack would tip the log forward, exposing a death wall to slower racers, followed by a secret underground tunnel shortcut

5. City:

• Some kind of recycling facility with a multi-lane conveyor belt and sloped quarter-pipe sides. Recall that Dragon's Lair's marble sequence was the inspiration for this section
• A building scheduled for demolition; cut through doglegs in early laps, just barely clear the debris cloud as slower racers watch it collapse

6. Mountain

• Intrinsically different than the other tracks, the snow-capped Mountain track was a simple point-to-point starting at an elevation of about 2000 feet above the finish line
• The quartermile start had about an 1/8 of a mile padding afterwards before ending abruptly. Keeping your foot on the gas meant that you would freefall downwards about 10 seconds before impacting in the valley. It was actually much faster to brake hard just after the end of the 1/4 mile straight and fall maybe a hundred feet onto the extreme sloped cliff - think of the Track 5 freefall stunt on lap 3
• The signature stunt for this track was about a 15% success rate. A single-propeller plane slowly circled the top of the Mountain, and could be perfectly aligned with a car hurtling off the end of the cliff by simply pausing a few seconds at the start of the race. Soaring through the air about 2 seconds and literally skimming off the slightly-curved wingspan of the plane flying perpendicularly to the direction of the car allowed the lucky racer to fly another 3 seconds to land on the side of another mountain!
• There was an amazingly simple downhill section with a constant slope. The zig-zagging asphalt racing path gave far more traction than the flat snowy and icy ground on either side, and it was fastest to try to catch as much asphalt as possible
• The downhill section continued into a cavern section with giant rock formations. Dodging between and around these obstacles with other aggressive racers often resulted in crashes
• I remember the race taking at least 6 minutes. There were many hairpin turns both on the inside and outside of cliffs

My favorite memory of the development of Hot Rod Rebels was the Playground: a collection of stunts, shortcuts, and geometry that we could teleport around. At the time, legendary Game Designer Mike Hally was in the same building, and so was. He showed me some of the maps from the Arcade skateboarding game, 720. There was a 720 machine in the building, and it was super fun tearing up the skate parks so I recreated one of them in our Playground and drove around on it!

It didn't work so well to freestyle around on the skatepark, so I envisioned it as a shortcut path with a descending ceiling that would crush some of the paths, and close off others.

Thanks to everyone who worked on the Rush Team over the years! Even though Hot Rod Rebels never made it to production, I had a ton of fun working on it.

Little Fluffy Clouds

My career in the video game industry began on Friday August 13, 1993 working in the stop-motion animation studio at Atari Games with "Sneaky" Pete Kleinow for $8.50/hr.

My duties at first were mundane, clicking the correct button at the designated signal from Pete, but as my interest and proficiency increased, and my responsibilities expanded to managing the stop-motion studio as well as the graphics processing pipeline due to the promotion of my co-worker I soon found myself working the copious hours Pete kept just to keep the graphics machine going.

At the time, our working conditions in the 'Black Hole' were a bare-bones concrete floor, a 5-foot stage and lighting rig, a capture computer and processing computer, as well as a boom box cranking The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld, ABBA, Steely Dan, and Deep Forest.

As a result of my work in the stop-motion studio, and my drive to take on more responsibilities such as editing special move tables, assisting in the production of the Arcade Strategy Guide with GamePro magazine, countless hours of testing and debugging, and drafting and editing dozens of pages describing the stop-motion process and our setup which eventually became United States Patent 5,519,826 - Stop motion animation system, I was hired full-time as Atari Games' first Production Coordinator in September of 1994.

I truly enjoyed the hours spent in the stop-motion lab with Pete Kleinow, and I never fully realized the extent of his musical talent and career - Pete was just another hard-working guy like me. He and I worked together on Primal Rage 2, with fellow special effects artist Jon Berg, Pete's son Cosmo, and two graphics processing interns but the sequel never saw the light of day, being overshadowed by flashy 3D fighters in the arcade.

Pete Kleinow passed away in early 2007.

Here's hoping you're sitting upon Little Fluffy Clouds, El Paso.

- Steve

Bookworm - Super Dictionarian

The online version of Bookworm swept through the halls of High Moon Studios in 2004. A few developers had a window open playing a quick game during builds and I just had to try being a word game afficionado.

Since it was standard practice to leave computers on after leaving work, I also left the game window open, resuming it the following day. Over the course of several days, I continued playing the game and purposefully lost after earning 5,245,340 points.

The gameplay suffers from a mild exploit whereby the player can score 'safe' words by ensuring that there are no singleton tiles in any column of letters. That way, no Fire tiles would be created. For example, finding a 3-letter word late in the game usually will spawn a Fire tile at the top of the board. However, if all 3 letters are in the same column of letters, a Fire tile will not spawn. Likewise, a 4-letter word with 2 letters in one column and 2 in another will not spawn a Fire tile.

I'll play again and report back my success!

Here's the latest report: seems like the online version of the game got mauled by ads: every few rounds or so the game is interrupted with ads and in a level 40 game with over 1,000,000 points, after a Nintendo DS ad for a point-and-click I Spy game, Bookworm never came back. Beware wordsmiths!

cwm

I've played Yahoo! Games Word Racer for over ten years!

The game is a real-time 1-8 player online word game. The first round of four is similar to Parker Brothers' Boggle except that each player types words as quickly as possible into the submission box.

The first player to find each word gets the score for it.
Rounds 2-4 offer different letter layouts and multiplier letters and I once scored 1140 points for the word 'fellation' in the 4th round with double and triple word score tiles! I almost fell out of my chair.

My record at the time of this post is:
Rating: 2244
Games Completed: 2810
1st: 1497
Ladder Rung: #792

The Ladder ranking came from tournament play years before Yahoo! launched its All Star subscription feature.

One of my favorite ways to play is a variation called "5s" where players (usually at a private, strict scored table) all agree to enter words 5 letter in length or longer. Another fun variation is "3s" where players only the THREE best words they can find per round.

When playing with players ranked at less than 1800, I usually self-handicap by quietly playing 5s, allowing the other players to scramble for the shorter words.

You'd never know how many 3-letter words there are! My favorite by far is 'cwm'. It's also a place in the United Kingdom, Cwm, Clwyd.

Pirates!

I couldn't count the number of times I expertly maneuvered my pirate sloop or barque and defeated a Spanish treasure Galleon. Defeating forts was much less satisfying and more difficult since they were immobile targets.

I'd head on over to Larry Mar's place in Tropicana Gardens to play when I really should have been doing homework.

Eugene smiles upon you

The arcade game, Robotron: 2084 was published in 1982 by Williams Electronics and is my favorite video game of all time on any platform. It is the perfect combination of elegantly simple game design and lightning-fast frenetic seat-of-your-pants gameplay.

The genius of two joystick control was a design perfected first in the eyes of the chameleon. The menagerie of characters is small enough to have memorized in one's first playthrough although the nuances of each behavior takes only a few more hours of training.

I had a unique opportunity to practice my skills at the game on Robert Birmingham's machine at Atari Games in Milpitas. Over the course of a month of games, playing on 'Tournament' settings, I recorded many attempts on Hi-8 video and on a spreadsheet, the top three being 704,000, 657,675, and 624,000, only the last of which I captured on tape.

I sent the tape in to Twin Galaxies and the performance was good enough for 5th place! Check out the link: Twin Galaxies - Robotron High Scores.

In the summer of 2002 I delivered a speech on my attempt at the high score at Gavilan College in Gilroy vowing that not only would I take the top spot, but that I would surpass 1,000,000 points. I haven't made good on my promise, but I was voted 'most likely to become a speech instructor' by my classmates.

When you barely survive an overwhelming onslaught by the skin of your teeth, Robert and I would chant, "Eugene smiles upon you" in honor of Eugene Jarvis, one of the Designers of the game.

Atari 2600 recording studio

I used to spend a lot of time in the bathroom listening to my recorded Atari 2600 performances. I would record marathon sessions of Missile Command, Asteroids, and Cosmic Ark onto may tape cassette recorder, then play them back. My particular tape player had an unintentional feature whereby you could hold down the play button halfway and cause the tape to play at high speeds. This is how I passed the time on the pot.

My dad introduced me to a wide range of music in 5th grade and I distinctly remember listening to these albums on the turntable (not in the bathroom):

Foreigner - Double Vision

Chuck Mangione - Fun And Games

Herbie Hancock - Head Hunters

Wendy Carlos - Switched-On Bach

Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club

At the time, I attended Buckner Elementary and was part of the chorus - the "Buckner Beats". We each wore blue jeans, long-sleeved red-and-white-checked collar shirts, and a white open vest with a red eighth note stuck on the front.

For the Christmas concert, I had the distinct honor of singing the introduction to "Silver Bells" alone. Afterwards, I'd step back into the bleachers and the rest of the choir joined into the song:

Christmas makes you feel emotional.

It may bring parties or thoughts devotional.

Whatever happens or what may be,

Here is what Christmas time means to me.

I recorded myself singing this intro and the rest of the song on the cassette player. Yes, I did listen to the recording in the bathroom, and yes, at high-speed.

Forgive me Father for I have sinned

Since my grandparents sent me to a Catholic elementary school for 2nd grade, my parents thought it would work again for 4th grade but I remember the experience at St. Thomas Aquinas Elementary School as being the worst of my childhood.

Bullies and undisciplined evil children and lousy, underpaid, super-strict teachers made the environment at the school terrifying. I once got a lecture and was stabbed in the sternum by an angry dwarf of a male teacher for crumpling paper and disrupting the class.

The hour of Mass that started at 7:30 set the tone for the day. Nobody seemed to want to be there.

The attitude of the school combined with their attitude towards God, I think, justified the opening of one of my Christmas presents early that year. After all, there is no commandment that states, "Thou shalt not peek at your presents on Christmas Eve."

I knew exactly the one I wanted to gently unwrap (of course, so I could leave no trace of my peeking). Finding the wrapped Atari 2600 box was akin to picking out a single wrapped CD or DVD these days.

Raiders Of The Lost Ark was the game I was to receive that Christmas 1982 - I had seen the film in theaters the year before and had no fear of my face being melted off upon opening the box.

Mojo Mojo Mojo King Bee!

There was a demo of Koei's Gitaroo Man for the PS2 at the 2001 E3 show at the LA Convention Center. The only level available was the one pictured above, Stage 3 vs. Mojo King Bee and I played it over and over until I finally scored an 'A' ranking.

A few years later, I found the game at an Electronics Boutique and bought it for full price. I played through the 10-or-so stages at the Normal difficulty, then struggled through them again on Master difficulty.

Gitaroo Man hit a soft spot in my heart for rhythm games and quirky Japanese art and character design. The gameplay combined tried-and-true simon-says button-matching (the guard phase) as well as a novel thumbstick beat-matching, pitch-matching and pitch-bending mechanic (the attack phase) that was as charming as the music and art.

Stage 6, The Legendary Theme, featured an acoustic guitar duet that I learned to play on the guitar. I picked out the chords and the melody and wrote out a tablature. I remember posting it to a guitar tab site but I can't find it anymore. Here it is again if you missed it. I know I have.

.E................A......
------------------------
---------4--------------
1^2-2^^4----4-4^6-------
------------------------
------------------------
------------------------

.E..............A........
---------4--------------
------------4-5---------
1^2-2^^4----4-6---------
------------------------
------------------------
------------------------

.Abm7............Db7.....
------------------------
---------4---4^6---6^7^6
1^2-2^^4---4-4^6--------
------------------------
------------------------
------------------------

.......F#m.......Am...Cb7
-------0---------0------
------------------------
4^^1-2---4-2-1-2--------
------------------------
------------------------
------------------------

.E................A......
------------------------
---------4--------------
1^2-2^^4----4-4^6-------
------------------------
------------------------
------------------------

.E..............A........
---------4--------------
------------4-5---------
1^2-2^^4----4-6---------
------------------------
------------------------
------------------------

.Abm7............Db7.....
------------------------
---------4---4^6---6^7^6
1^2-2^^4---4-4^6--------
------------------------
------------------------
------------------------

.......F#m.......Am...Cb7
-------0---------0--2-0-
------------------------
4^^1-2---4-2-1-2--------
------------------------
------------------------
------------------------

.E...........E7..........
-4---0-2-0-4--5--4--2-0-
------------------------
------------------------
------------------------
------------------------
------------------------

.A...........Am..........
-4---0-2-0-4^^5--4--2-0-
------------------------
------------------------
------------------------
------------------------
------------------------

.Abm7...........Db7......
-2--4-2-----------------
---------4----6---7^6---
-----------4--6---------
------------------------
------------------------
------------------------

.......F#m.....Am...Cb7..
--------------2--4-2-0--
4----------2------------
--4---2--4--------------
------------------------
------------------------
------------------------

.E7......................
-4---0-2-0-4^^5--4--2-0-
------------------------
------------------------
------------------------
------------------------
------------------------

.A...........Abm.........
-4---0-2-0-4^^5--4--2-0-
------------------------
------------------------
------------------------
------------------------
------------------------

.Dbm7........F#7.........
-4---0-2-0----------0-2-
-----------4-2---2-4----
------------------------
------------------------
------------------------
------------------------

..F#m7...........Cb9.....
-4------4^5-----2-------
------------------------
------------------------
------------------------
------------------------
------------------------

.E................A......
------------------------
---------4--------------
1^2-2^^4----4-4^6-------
------------------------
------------------------
------------------------

.E................A......
---------4--------------
------------4-5---------
1^2-2^^4----4-6---------
------------------------
------------------------
------------------------

.E................A......
------------------------
---------4--------------
1^2-2^^4----4-4^6-------
------------------------
------------------------
------------------------

.E................A......
---------4--------------
------------4-5---5--5--
1^2-2^^4----4-6---6--6--
------------------------
------------------------
------------------------

..Emaj7..................
-7----------------------
-9----------------------
-8----------------------
-9----------------------
-7----------------------
-7----------------------

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

What do you do when it's 10 below zero outside with a windchill factor of -40 Fahrenheit? Play through Infocom's Zork series, what else!

Sure I ventured outside during Wichita winters, I even made it as far as the lake near our house on Mainsgate Road where my brother and I saw a duck whose feet had been stuck to the frozen water. We returned chilled to the bone with meteorites of snow adhered to the insides of our pant legs.

It all started in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door and in the quiet, cold office of our finished basement. I imagined the trophy case that was intended to contain all the treasures in the game actually sat in the family room just on the other side of the acoustic tiled wall, and the storage room and my room comprised our own Great Underground Empire.

I spent many cold mornings staring at the monochrome green CRT puzzling out the mysteries of Zork, the individual letters devolving into individual pixels, then engulfing my entire field of view until I arrived at my next move. I may have gotten help from Infocom's own hint books, but regardless, I finally solved Zork III and actually printed out a transcript of the play session in the smallest possible font on our dot-matrix printer for extended bathroom review.

Christ! This thing's heavy!

There was one thing that made working on The Godfather: The Game by Electronic Arts worth the obstacles I struggled through: using the garrote wire to strangle victims to death, clamping down on L2 and R2, clicking in L3 and R3 on the Playstation Dual Shock controller and feeling the dwindling strength of the victim's heartbeat rumble through the controller. Like some sort of macabre vampiric Game Design ritual, strangling the menagerie of intentionally staged guards one by one, over and over, day after day, tuning and tweaking the timing of their animations, their paths, their turns and lines of dialog gave me true undead strength that made the long nights bearable.

I pioneered the design work behind stealth mechanics in The Godfather game with the tentative assistance of one AI Designer and a few AI engineers. The mission has the player filling in the back-story of how the horse's head appears in Mr. Woltz's bed in The Godfather movie. The mission is broken into two parts. In the first segment the player follows Rocco, in the second, Rocco follows the player with 'the package'.

You can watch the whole mission from beginning to end in two parts in these YouTube videos: YouTube - Horseplay Part 1. YouTube - Horseplay Part 2.

I was forced to draw on the life force of my digital victims time and time again to help me endure through the lack of support from Design and Engineering for this stealth mission. Let's face it, compared to the entirety of The Godfather: The Game, 99% of the time, the player's Modus Operandi for any task is: grab the biggest guns and fire them until everyone is dead. The Horseplay mission relies entirely on the player (AND the croissant-carrying Rocco. See below) not being seen or heard by any other human being in the Woltz compound.

In the first segment of the mission, the guards and Rocco are expertly choreographed to never intersect paths and Rocco is scripted to never cross their lines of sight. Additionally, the whole scenario is reliant on the player following Rocco from hiding spot to hiding spot to advance the dance step by step. The best course of action is for the player to stick closely behind Rocco although there is a miniscule chance that the player can decipher the guard patterns and leave Rocco to murder EVERY guard in the compound.

After reaching the stables, Rocco enters Khartoum's stall and removes the horse's head from its body with his bare hands. This is implied behind the gigantic opaque stall door with grisly sound effects and the fact that Rocco doesn't carry any sort of tools into the stall with him.

A guard comes rushing into the stables right on cue and the player must defeat him there to advance the plot. Rocco emerges from Khartoum's stall carrying a humongous 'croissant' which supposedly is Khartoum's head wrapped in bandages.

At this point, the player has to 'lead the way' by following the bread crumbs of backwards-turned cigarette smoking guards to the blue pulsing, spinning, and hovering Corleone crest located just outside Mr. Woltz's bedroom. There are a couple of civilians who add flavor to the otherwise lukewarm-tap-water-task of garroting your way to victory. Again, Rocco and the other NPCs waltz through the Woltz mansion with precision timing in order to miss seeing each other and again, there is a slight chance that a player with the patience that only the undead possess could eliminate every other living being in the level besides Rocco undetected.

Rocco, we made it my friend. Finally!

I pitched in my Design skills in other missions, carefully scripting Clemenza, Tom Hagen, Sonny, Dons Cuneo and Stracci, Willie Cicci, and all of the other major players like pawns. I earned the respect from the other developers on The Godfather team at Electronic Arts, Redwood Shores, earning a Capo ring for quietly delivering horse's heads into beds.

Then I was laid off. It's not personal, Sonny. It's strictly business. I was buried in The Godfather game as Baron Von Riesenberger, owner of the Colonial Club. At least once, I had to experience killing myself.

And to prove it truly was nothing personal, I was welcomed back into the EA 'family' in Los Angeles a few months later.

Bloody Bard's Tale

The Bard's Tale series followed me through high school. I lead my party of characters through Skara Brae and the dungeons, carefully mapping my progress on graph paper. Two of my classmates, Brendan and Leeroy, also had the game and were adventuring with teams of their own.

I don't remember finishing the game, but I must have and started a fresh team, or gotten stuck, or simply had an idea of searching for my character's save files on disk by using the hex editor contained in a Fast Load cartridge. I scoured through meaningless sectors of the disk looking for words or patterns when I recognized the names of my characters, then scanned forward for numbers and hexidecimal entries that matched their ability scores and gold. A few well-placed "FF"s did the trick. Soon, my HAXOR3D characters were striding through hordes of evil minions with sideward waves of their hands.

My thoughts were consumed with applications of my new-found power the night I discovered the trick, and I fixed a flat on my ten-speed before going to bed that night.

The next morning I got a slow start but was out the door and at the street in no time. I vaguely remembered changing the tire the night before as I crossed South Bascom Avenue, pulling up the front wheel to clear the curb. I hopped off the next driveway curb as I always did at Woodard and Starview in Campbell, CA, and out of the corner of my eye saw the wheel drop out of the bike's front forks in slow motion. Needless to say, the front wheel came down and the bike and I stopped almost instantly. Then I was flung over the handlebars head first and attempted to prevent the oncoming pavement from hitting my face with my hands. SMACK! With a surge of adrenaline, blood, and sweat I surveyed my injuries: horrid gash up my shin to my knee, and asphalt nuggets embedded in my palms (as usual). What was worse was my bike was mangled and I couldn't ride away from this one and had trouble walking.

I figured I wasn't hurt too badly and decided to limp me and my bike the rest of the way to Brendan's house (why I didn't choose to return home I can't remember) down the street off Calico Ave. His dad answered the door. Brendan had already left on his bike and was probably just arriving at Leeroy's. I believe his dad helped me clean up, then drove me to school in his green VW Beetle.

I must have wrecked on my bike a few more times out of the hundreds of trips I made those first few years going to Leigh; I remember the reaction from my teachers and classmates getting less and less shocked at the gashes, bandages, and scrapes I'd walk into class wearing. I remember once having enough fresh blood to compose a journal entry, and more than enough to take a blood-type test in Biology: AB positive!

Of course, the news of my buffed characters steeled my nerves until I could share my triumph with my two friends. I don't believe I continued hacking hex in Bard's Tale II and III, but the sequels still inspired fierce competition between Brendan, Leeroy, and I.

Light Wizard throws meatballs

Sure, they're meant to be fireballs, but they looked like meatballs to my brother and I! I can't remember how many times we played this game head-to-head in our roasting-hot furnitureless room at our rented townhouse in Sunnyvale, CA. But I do remember how many times my brother chose to play the Light side:

ZERO!

There were two main reasons for this:

1. The Phoenix sucked so hard that it was only useful for taking out Dark's Shapeshifter early in the game, and only after a witheringly tedious battle; even then it was a coin-toss of a matchup!

2. Dark's TWO Basilisks were supposedly comparable to Light's Unicorns but don't believe it! The Basilisk's projectiles were easily five times wider than the Unicorns and just as fast (the fastest in the game?) making the Basilisk a formidable opponent against ANY of Light's pieces.

Some strategies and matchups that came from our hours of playing:

- Light's Knight vs. Dark's Dragon: Any time that the Knight managed to win this match - even if the Dragon was caught on a light square with low health - it was always cause for a celebratory happy dance, followed by running madly away from the loser.

- Summon Elemental: pretty worthless, especially if you got an Earth Elemental; usually only effective at taking out the similarly lame Golem or Troll. Fire was the best but seemed uncommon.

- Teleport / Exchange spell: in the opening moves, this spell is great to drop your Dragon, Unicorn, or Basilisk onto the color-changing squares deep behind enemy lines.

- The Djini was supposed to be the Dragon's foil, but was obviously underpowered in damage and health compared to the creepy-sounding beast.

- The Banshee: cool idea, but relatively weak against all of Light's heavier characters. In Archon II: Adept, the Wraith improved on the Banshee's life-stealing aura attack and regained health as a result! Plus, the Wraith was invisible!

- Usually the game came down to a battle against the Wizard or the Sorceress on their respective Power Point.

LOAD "*",8,1

360 on Xbox

MTX: Mototrax was published by Activision and developed by Left Field Productions for the PS2 and Xbox. At the time I worked with LFP, they had a small office suite next to the Kumon tutoring center in Westlake Village, California. Fellow Designer Brent Clearman and I shared a window office on the second floor and would hear the stampede of elementary school children's feet every day at 3PM.

I was responsible for a few of the Freestyle arenas but my focus was on the Freeride environments - wide open spaces about a square mile in size where the player could explore, ride, and trick off of natural elements like dry creek beds, mountains, and Travis Pastrana's garage. My wacky stunt-designing abilities honed in the development in the Rush games came to bear in motocross form. However, greater attention to detail was needed as compared to Rush, where most of the driving surfaces were procedurally generated by Multigen's Road Tools. In MTX, Designers hand-crafted every jump, slope, and berm with the perfect number of polygons to compliment both the look and feel of the driving surface.

I remember putting a lot of work into the Pastrana Compound environment and was not lucky enough to visit the actual location with other Left Field and Activision employees for reference. Maybe I was luckier that I didn't get to go: the lure of launching a vehicle off a specially made ramp into Travis' custom foam pit (where he remarked in a recent interview he's landed double-backflips thousands of times) was too much to resist for one Associate Producer. My coworkers brought back video of this dude riding a ten-speed bike towards the ramp and foam pit. He half-heartedly pumped the pedals and didn't build up enough speed to catch air and land into the pit. What he did catch was the side of the foam pit, and an aluminum ladder that was leaning up against it.

I'm certain that waivers had been signed, but he was lucky he wasn't hurt. Later on in development, I did make sure to get his approval of the ramp and foam pit, as well as the placement of the ladder.

For the freestyle MX career that ends with the final against Travis Pastrana himself I carefully watched and recreated his gold medal run at X Games 2003 that he capped off with a trick called the 360, shaping and repositioning each dirt and metal ramp to give our AI the best chance and authentically duplicating his entire run and each and every trick!

Here's the YouTube video link of the footage I studied (in German!): Travis Pastrana X-Games 2003

R.I.P. Pitfall Harry

I first played Pitfall! for the Atari 2600 soon after it was released in 1982. I rediscovered it after unpacking my Atari boxes at my stepdad's house and applied my recently developed mapping skills to create a map for the game.

I mapped approximately 90% of the game and never completely won; the pressures of high school, track, and my job at JCPenney's at Eastridge Mall in San Jose, California took precious time away from video game playing!

Forgive me, Harry!

Fast riggedy bombs with invisible invaders and moving shields and fat guy!

Say it three times fast!

This was the game that started the addiction to video games, but it was my mother who started first: the day we bought Space Invaders for the Atari 2600 she stayed up all night playing it - this happened at our home on Randolph Street on Travis Air Force Base in California. I thought there must be something fun about this game that my mom would wear herself out playing it.

My brother and I personalized the relentless murdering of aliens by naming them although some names have been lost over the ages:

- The bottom row invaders with their swinging arms were "Fa-la-las"
- The second row contained the one-eyed "Sheldons"

- The fourth row "Jumping Jacks" were easily the most sensibly named

- Finally, the fifth row "Munchos" evoked afternoon soda and cheese puff fueled game-a-thons

When naming them wasn't enough, I started 'frying' - a technique of turning the game console off and on quickly to produce glitches and erratic behavior in the game. It turns out that if you 'fry' just right while holding down the fire button, you'll get DOUBLE FIREPOWER!

After frying for days, the double firepower gateway gameplay had us looking to score bigger and more elaborate highs. The game boasted 112 game variations - simple permutations of all the available difficulty options - we burned through them all and finally found the ultimate (and the title of this entry) in variation #16

Say it three times fast and do a crazy dance!

Fast riggedy bombs (describes the path and increased speed of the invader's laser fire) with invisible invaders (all enemies are invisible. When you hit one, the entire squadron becomes visible for a split second) and moving sheilds (your three defensive shields ping-pong left and right) and fat guy (flip the switch up from difficulty 'B' to 'A', making the width of your laser cannon twice as wide)

Fastriggedybombswithinvisibleinvadersandmovingshieldsandfatguy!Fastriggedybombswithinvisibleinvadersandmovingshieldsandfatguy!Fastriggedybombswithinvisibleinvadersandmovingshieldsandfatguy!

Another visitor. Stay a while. Stay FOREVER!

This is Impossible mission for the Commodore 64. Scott Pierce, Gary Owens and I used to take turns playing it at Scott's place at the Union Manor Apartments in Campbell, CA. Scott was hearing impaired and even though we made fun of him when he referred to the game as 'Possible Mission' we were always welcome at his place.

Scott and I went to Leigh High School and I got to know a girl in the hearing impaired group since we shared an Art class together. I'd go over to Scott's apartment to use his TDD machine to 'talk' to her (through typing).

Going through adolescence in high school is difficult enough, but dealing with a handicap is most certainly tougher. At our high school we had hearing and speech impaired students, an artist without fingers, wheelchair-bound students, a dwarf long distance runner, and an albino shot-putter. Their high school Missions seemed more Impossible than my own.

CORMORANT!

70's TV

San Francisco Rush 2049 was the first project I worked on from concept to ship back in 1999 at Atari Games Corp. in Milpitas CA. I was the Lead Designer (only Designer!) at the start of the project coming off the successful completion of Rush The Rock and quickly started prototyping jumps, stunts, and shortcuts during those first few months. One of them would be built into the secret gold coin cache at the top of the 900 foot tall Atari Fuji (pictured below), another 900 foot tall structure, the double-sided 'ski jump' became a dramatic shortcut on the Night track.



I had great fun developing the game and near the end our engineers gave me the ability to animate objects that had simple bounding-box collision. A few ideas went into the tracks as shortcuts - opening doorways, monorail trains, and spinning fan blades - and many of these were activated by driving over an 'STV logo'.

I created the logo for the game as a fictitious company brand; the other developers each had their own logos. I resurrected the logo in an animated 3D project for a 3D Studio Max class at Learning Tree University in Chatsworth several years later.

Here's the link to the animation on YouTube: STV logo

Yes, the background music is from the CBS Special Presentation intro bumper from the mid-70's. Even though I had once heard the Dramarama song "70's TV" almost 10 years before, I didn't choose the name for my fictitious company because of it.

You can visit my dream journal entitled "Seventies Television" here.

Pac-man Speedwagon

I was visiting my grandparents at their home in Belleville, Illinois on Adair Drive when I got the chance to play Pac Man for the Atari 5200 at Julie Conrath's house.

This version of the game was a welcome improvement over the one I played a year earlier on the Atari 2600 despite the step back with the new 5200 joystick controller.

Julie played REO Speedwagon's "Take It On The Run" on the record player while we munched digital dots.

Gotta catch 'em all - one flight at a time

From June 2005 to February 2006 I worked at Electronic Arts Redwood Shores and kept a room with my in-laws in Los Gatos. My family lived in San Diego so I flew home every Friday and flew back to San Jose every Monday morning on Southwest Airlines. The Video Game industry had given us some rough spots over the past 4 years and EA was the 4th company in a long list of short hops for me - we weren't about to re-re-relocate for another company no matter how large so we spent the relocation package on airfare.

The time I spent waiting in airport terminals was surprisingly short due to my tight schedule but I managed to fill it with one continuous game of Pokemon Pinball Ruby & Sapphire for the Gameboy Advance.

I played on the Ruby Board and developed some techniques that helped me keep the game going, catching and evolving hundreds of pesky Pokemon including Kecleon, Groudon, and Rayquaza dozens of times over, as well as Jirachi and Latios.

The time spent in the air I filled with crosswords, Sudoku, Game Design books, and complimentary cans of Mr. & Mrs. T's Bloody Mary Mix (or tomato juice if there was none)

I always saved my game before boarding and again before being picked up in San Diego. After the end of my time at Redwood Shores, I returned to San Diego for a time to find my next Game Design job, having amassed several billion points in the game. I put the game away to focus on updating my resume and getting interviews and found it again sometime later after I had reunited with Electronic Arts at their Los Angeles studio.

My 5-year-old had wiped out my multi-billion-point game and started a new one while sitting on the toilet.

Such is life like a multi-billion point Pokemon Pinball game: you put so much time and effort building something up and it's gone in a flush.

Thanks, Joseph, for putting it all into perspective.

- UPDATE! As of October 6, 2008, my Pokemon Pinball passion persists! My new game is going strong with over 65 BILLION POINTS and 360 Pokemon caught!

- UPDATE! October 24, 2008, Electrode became the 500th Pokemon caught. Score is now at 89,321,560,691! Later tonight I lost a ball and recorded my bonus score. See the YouTube video here: Pokemon Pinball Ruby & Sapphire - over 5 Billion point bonus! Final score is 95,022,337,691

- UPDATE! October 27, 2008: 100 Billion points! - EVIL! On November 11, 2008, Snorunt was the 666th Pokemon caught! Score is now 117,862,426,987! - UPDATE! November 28, 2008, lost a ball and working backwards to get the score: current score is 149,766,848,779. 808 Pokemon caught. Score before the bonus was 135,456,398,779. Bonus subtotal was 144,550,000. Multiplier was 99. Bonus total is 14,310,450,000. I have a video of the bonus but I pressed the 'A' button before seeing the breakdown of the bonus so I was only able to see 99 Pokemon caught on the ball. Video is here!

Tech Corporal Riesenberger believes the antenna relay is still functional

The title of this entry comes from a line of VO in the Neptune mission of Medal Of Honor: Airborne for the PC, Xbox360, and PS3.

I worked on the game as a Level Designer for Electronic Arts and lived at the Oakwood Apartments in Marina Del Rey. In one way or another I contributed to every mission (long live Flak Tower!), but I was designated Mission Lead for Operation Neptune. In the mission, the player would jump with the 82nd Airborne division over Normandy France and push through enemy defenses towards the beach, where thousands of Allied troops landed on the morning of D-Day.

The level design was literally an uphill battle. The majority of the playspace was cast upon sloped terrain and this had a trickle-down effect to almost every gameplay system including placing objects, creating AI cover nodes and path nodes, AI locomotion and animation, player navigation, and sightlines. I had two veteran FPS Designers at my command, and even they were as weary and beaten down by the problems with Neptune as I was near the end.

The Airborne team kept its spirits up by hosting finger-rocket capture the flag tournaments, actively contributing to a bloopers screenshots folder, and passing around Photoshopped images of team members. I received recognition from the team (earned my 'wings') in January 2007 for standing up all of our missions in pre-production before we went on Christmas break but my real morale boost would come unexpectedly and from a person outside of the team.

One early morning in the spring of 2007 I walked through the halls towards my hex and overheard, "Is Steven in yet?", and, "No, but he's due any minute." "I'm right here!" I replied, and quickly realized that they were talking about Steven Spielberg. I went about the business of D-Day victory as usual when my Development Director asked me to be ready to demo Neptune for Spielberg in 30 minutes.

I had watched "Saving Private Ryan" even before working on Airborne, and pored over numerous historical books and documents on the subject, but wasn't prepared to have Steven Spielberg scrutinize my struggle with Neptune. I prepared for the meeting like I prepare for most things: by not preparing and simply letting it happen.

I walked into the meeting room and shook Steven's hand, being introduced by my Development Director, noticing that his hand was silky soft to the touch. I proceeded to explain the Neptune mission, the Allied objectives and the Axis defenses, the airdrop, and the historical authenticity to him, knowing that he must be well versed in each detail, perhaps even more so than I. As my in-game avatar dropped out of the C-47, I steered the parachute towards each objective: there was a Tiger tank, a spotting tower, and a radar antenna that the player had to knock out in any order desired.

I landed and ran towards the radar antenna objective, killing Nazi soldiers nonchalantly as I nimbly picked my way over carefully-placed obstacles and terrain as I did hundreds of times in the editor and in my sleep. I entered the encounter space and pulled up behind a shattered stone wall with a couple other Allied paratroopers. I peeked over the cover object in a practiced scripted fashion in order to play up the firefight and to get a good look at the main objective - the radar antenna. That's when Spielberg remarked, "Hey, that's the radar from my 'Ryan' set." Yes indeed, Mr. Spielberg, we drew much inspiration from your film. We also did our homework and ultimately settled on the radar antenna from the movie even though it looks like the skeleton of a drive-in movie theater screen from a distance.

Thanks for noticing Steven!

One thing that someone didn't do their homework on relates to this "Medal Of Honor: Airborne mystery picture" that I sent to the development team:

Deep within a German bunker somewhere, there is an eraser with the word 'eraser' on it. I much prefer the babelfish-translated word, 'Radiergummi'; sounds much more Nazi!

Geronimo!

Jonathan's Miniature Golf

Jonathan was my friend in 3rd grade. We were in the same class and he lived nearby the school. I spent the night at his house a few times and we frequently played his Atari 2600 when we weren't climbing and falling out of the huge tree in his front yard or shooting pellets at the dart board on the back of his front door.

We'd stay up late eating coffee cake and playing Miniature Golf, memorizing the best shots. His living room smelled like catbox and cigarettes but the glow from the television and the late hour drowned out all other sensory input.

I remember the story my mother tells me about how I stole his collection of Mercury dimes, then sincerely apologized when I was caught and had to return them. I do not remember taking them or apologizing but I understand how I could have come to such a decision.

I still keep my collection of Mercury dimes and I've earned a high score on Miniature Golf on Twingalaxies' website. Miniature Golf - 2600.

Thank you Jonathan!

Star Castle at the Quik Trip

I first played Star Castle at the Quik Trip in Wichita Kansas. It was right behind the apartment complex that we lived in and the dumpsters I used to dive into to collect bottlecaps.

I remember one day my brother and I had finished playing the game - the clucking chicken sound of the laser cannon fire still ringing in our ears - when on our way out what should I spy on the door-opening floor mat but a bulging brown wallet!

We rounded the corner to inspect the treasure and discovered that it contained $60! More Star Castle, duh!

On entering the QT I saw a man questioning the clerk behind the counter and glancing wildly around on the ground. I knew the wallet belonged to him and offered it up.

Our reward was moral and not monetary but we staved off our craving for more gaming by watching another kid play.

Cluck-cluck-cluck!

Welcome Red Warrior!

This blog was created as a receptacle for all of my fondest video game memories.

I'll be sure to post lots of experiences with my favorite video games. Gauntlet (pictured) is one of them. I remember playing this 4-player at the Garret in the Pruneyard in Campbell California when I was a teen.

Dire Strait's "Money For Nothing" played on the jukebox. It was an appropriate ghost and grunt-killing song at the time, and wiped away any anxieties I had about burning through my allowance quarter by quarter.

Yipee!