The Quixotic Engineer

Happy new year everyone! You’ll have to excuse another decade retrospective in list form; we won’t get to do this again for ten years, after all. Here’s my perspective on the 00’s in video games, using the only honest metric I know: games that I personally enjoyed.

2000

The autumn years of the Nintendo 64 and Playstation brought us some real gems. Perfect Dark, Rare’s successor to GoldenEye, forced us all to buy 4 MB of extra RAM in order to enjoy four player deathmatch with an abominable framerate. The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask was destined to be the black sheep of the series, but it has found significant critical appreciation with age. We clicked and looted our way through the hellscape of Diablo 2 (including the long-teased “cow level”). Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 found broad appeal outside of skater culture for its deeply challenging trick chaining system, establishing a fan base that would justify dozens of sequels.

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Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was a something of a sleeper hit for me. I had enjoyed the previous entries in the series, but only as World War 2 simulators with little lasting appeal. If it hadn’t been bundled economically with Assassin’s Creed¹ at the time, I doubt I would have even bothered to check it out. It was therefore a complete surprise when Modern Warfare delivered a one-two punch: an exciting campaign with some truly memorable set-pieces and an addictive MMORPG-inspired multiplayer. I was absolutely floored, and have been an Infinity Ward adherent ever since.

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This week I attended the Montreal International Game Summit, a professional conference for game developers. Since that is not my profession (yet), I managed to get a free pass as a student volunteer. This was a compelling arrangement, even if it meant I didn’t always have my choice of presentations (I particularly regret missing Brenda Brathwaite.) Fortunately, the talks I did attend were also terrific, so I thought I might share some of what I learned.

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The project that became Norwegian Wood began in late April of this year. With school winding down and the weather heating up, I felt the itch to tackle something new. By chance I had met a number of like-minded people over the winter; students with big ideas and aspirations of working in the game industry. Inspired by this collective potential, I decided to reach out to my local friends and colleagues about coming together to make a game over the summer.

The response was overwhelming; of the nine people I had e-mailed, seven of them were interested in participating. The project was suddenly much larger than I had anticipated, but I didn’t have the heart to turn anyone away. The eight of us (Kira Boom, Thomas Hibbert, Phil Jones, Renaud Bédard, Alex Charlton, William Mitchell, Kyle Sama and I¹) formed the facetiously titled collective No Fun Games.

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The game project that I’ve been quietly working on this summer is finally ready for release! It’s a rhythm-based shmup inspired by the Beatles song Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown). You can download it for PC, Mac and Linux on the game’s website:

Norwegian Wood – No Fun Games

I have more to say about the game’s development process, but I’ll save that for a postmortem post later this month. For now, enjoy the game, and please leave your feedback and suggestions in the comments below.