Before we all packed our bags and boarded our planes, we searched through our archives for our favorite articles over the past few months. We pulled them off the "shelf", dusted them off, and tied them up in the pretty package of this week's issue of The Escapist. So, grab some cocoa and a warm blanket (or a lemonade for you Aussies) and relax into some great articles you may have missed the first time through.
With videogame production budgets surpassing even Hollywood's grossest excesses, the market is rapidly out-pricing small developers, and even the big guys are feeling the pinch. Indie development is one route, but there are only so many games one can produce in one's bedroom. So what's a developer to do? Why, raise the price, of course. But in spite of Adam Smith's notions, it's not as simple as all that.
Assassin's Creed, BioShock, Halo 3, Mass Effect, Call of Duty 4. This was the Year of the Console. Maybe the first of many. I know this year, maybe the first of many, was the year I found myself coveting my neighbor's games.
"I am finding myself having, for the first time ever, negative feelings toward the holidays. Instead of searching out the radio stations that have gone All-Holiday, All the Time, I find myself skipping them. I see holiday decorations popping up, and I grumble. In short, I am something of a Bah Humbug this year. These things happen."
In the past there was E3, and then there was ... well, no one cared, really. E3 was everything to everyone, but, like all good things, it had to end. In its place we now have a rainbow of game conventions spanning the globe and serving all manner of industry needs, some good, some bad.
In this week's issue of The Escapist, Issue 125 "Conventioneering," we bring you the many sides of the convention story.
This week, Nathan Meunier interviews Atari Teenage Riot's Alec Empire about his solo work with a Game Boy, Jim Rossignol takes distributed computing and crowd sourcing to new levels. Our own Russ Pitts talks to the game industry about the dreaded escort mission. Kyle Orland touches base with independent game storeowners. And Joel Gonzales talks about how failure cascades in EVE Online apply to communities everywhere.
Games? Not so much. They are still dealing with the multi-layered system of publisher to distributor to store shelf to user. Seems awfully complicated. ... This week, we illuminate a few of the pitfalls of getting to market and some of the ingenious moves made to bypass those.
Videogames are a modern art, but at their core, tell stories, just like the stone tablets of The Epic of Gilgamesh. The stories they tell range from brutally awful to heart-wrenchingly wonderful, just like all the stories told in all other media, and one wonders, thousands years from now, which of them will survive, and how will stories be told then?
Nowadays, serious games aren't just about mass murder; serious games are about everything, from anthropological research to art exhibits to virtual nation building.
Multiplayer games, to many, are the way of the future. As yet, massively multiplayer online games haven't quite broken into the consciousness of the everyday Joe. But perhaps it is just around the corner? The Escapist takes on massively multiplayer online games in this week's issue, "Raid!"
How did they get there, we wondered, and who is on their way up right now? To attempt an answer, we present Issue 119 of The Escapist.
Chase Murdey interviews Tim Schafer, the LucasArts alum whose Psychonauts became a cult hit; Dana Massey profiles the company behind the Championship Manager games; Pat Miller looks at Mac mavens Ambrosia; and Shannon Drake spends some time with the twisted minds behind Postal.
"October's a big sports month, a sports perfect storm. The baseball playoffs are in full swing. The football season is well underway, as is the hockey season. And pro basketball is over. That portion of my brain dedicated to stat tracking and backseat managing is firing up an electrical storm, and that current invariably makes its way to my gaming lizard brain. And I can't stop playing."
This week's issue of The Escapist is all about jobs in the industry, but not quite what we usually think about as industry. There are many paths you may take, many niches you might fill; after all, games are rapidly outpacing other forms of entertainment. Join us this week as we discover and chat with some lucky and enterprising people who've found these paths and niches. Perhaps you'll be inspired.
We're suckers for a great article, but we have designed, and love, our editorial calendar. It is the foundation upon which the whole of The Escapist is built. However, we have learned in our over two years of publishing The Escapist that sometimes it is best to have a little flexibility built into the mix.
It is this need for flexibility that has brought forth the recurring Editor's Choice issues you'll find scattered throughout the calendar. These issues, full of never-before-seen articles, are literally a mix of some of our favorite Homeless Articles over the last few months.
Luckily, though, for you and for us, The Escapist continues on, regardless of the fitness of those who tend its wild growth. And as my head swims with a disease only a 14-day dose of Amoxicillin can cure, it's my pleasure to introduce to you issue 115, "Crowdsourcing to Victory," wherein we talk about Web 2.0 and its impact on gaming.
