The Tech Team Party Proposal List

We have these awesome new walls at our building covered in "whiteboard paint", which creates a giant wall-sized writing surface. I'm sure that someday these will be used for algorithms or whatnot, but as we break them in we are primarily using ours to make funny lists on the board.

As such, we (well, mostly me) have decided to enter in a "party war" with the lost-souls wandering aimlessly at a Chicago game-tech outsourcing company. As such, I present the following (cleaned for public consumption) party suggestions:

* The start-up in question has a "Fire and Ice party." We proudly invite you to our "Earth, Wind and Fire Party." That is right, dear readers, we have an entire extra element!
* Strip linear algebra.
* "Drunken Knights Party." 20 adult programmers, enough mead to drown a horse, and an evening at Medieval times!
* "Drunken Redneck Party." Paintball and Coors Light!
* Anything where we roast a pig. Or an intern.
* Revenge of the Nerds Party and Talent Show. Jon will provide the Kaossilator Pro!
* Boston Tea Party. Sam Adams and Freedom!
* Come as your favorite racial stereotype Halloween party.
* MK vs SF3 sales and bonuses comparison party!
* Cinema bug fixing party sponsored by Jack Daniels.
* Pre-Party the intervention we are having for one of our employees who is getting married.
* Jon comes to the Jabroni Report's house and calibrates his HDTV party. No refreshments will be provided.
* Let's Mocap our junk party!
* Deliverence re-enactment and pot luck.

We are currently working out how to merge all of these parties, as well as many more suggestions, into a single, week-long festival of fun.

Let's target our hate correctly, shall we...

"UNICO National, the group representing Italian-Americans upset over the portrayal of Italian gangsters in the recently released Mafia II, have scored a win in their battle against 2K Games' mobster adventure."

- Kotaku

As a proud Italian American, I feel it is my job to help set my friends at UNICO straight. Mob movies, and now games, help present the following stereotype of our peoples:

1. We are attractive. We all look like a young Pacino in the Godfather or a young DeNiro in the Godfather II. This is true.

2. We eat delicious food, and lots of it. Even under the most trying of times. I learned from Goodfellas that when I eventually end up in prison for "telling it like it is", I will be joined by my fellow Italians in a delightful private cell with a fully-stocked pantry filled with the freshest ingredients. How is this bad?

3. We are powerful people not to be trifled with. God forbid we keep this stereotype going and instead focus on, I don't know, our stellar military accomplishments since the Roman Empire?

4. We dress well. We wear excellent suits...and we wear them from the "office" to the "clubs." That's right, even when burying the body of some snitch, an act most cultures would do in jeans and a t-shirt, we still wear suits. That is how important looking good is to us.


5. We are so confident in our sexuality that we wear pinky rings. That is right, we make the single most effeminate piece of jewelery possible look downright masculine.


So, in these trying times, is it the WORST thing for our peoples to be stereotyped as Mobsters? Maybe it is time that we band together and focus on the true enemy of the Italian people. The group so likely to ruin our reputation forever that, despite the fact that they don't share our heritage, they have become the poster-children for our country.

That's right, UNICO, despite the fact that I have never paid my dues, nor have you asked, I feel we should spend our money wisely...by distancing our collective heritage as far from the cast of Jersey Shore as possible.

Thank you.

The Unsung Heroes...

Today I saw our developer support team install a giant television in our hallway. In a company where you literally have to go to the bathroom to escape a television monitor, this is hardly noteworthy. What is noteworthy is that this TV is connected to some magical folder somewhere in the building where people can drop video clips that will automatically be added to the "loop" that this television displays. The entire tech team is now focused on hacking into this folder to replace the current game clips with more appropriate "wang" clips...but I digress.

Ask yourself, when did IT at your company throw something like this together in their spare time for the pleasure of the company? My experience with IT at other companies has traditionally been a group of people who may or may not fix your outlook inbox after you "accidentally" get it filled with spam for various pills and mail-order partners. I mean this with all sincerity, our game would NOT ship at the quality we have without our awesome IT staff. In fact, we found calling them that to be so inadequate for their duties that we refer to them, justly so, as "developer support."

On top of the lightning fast response time (we are talking minutes) to any issue we may have, I'd like to present a list of the things these guys and girls do that makes a producer's life infinitely easier.

* Today we had a 10 minute meeting to discuss our options for storing priceless game data that we have never dealt with before. 10 minutes...and it is solved. I didn't have to call people, get quotes, follow up...nothing. It is solved. I've had multi-day meetings with people on my own team where we literally can't decide where to go to lunch, let alone build a server infrastructure for huge volumes of data.
* Prior to this game, bug tracking was done in excel and on a twiki. Think of that for a second. Is your mind as blown as mine? Within a week of asking, we literally had a fully working and configured issue system that was personalized for our workflow. Every time we want a new feature or upgrade, it just magically happens. Thanks to this team, we now have an automated way to ignore feature requests from artists...we no longer have to manually delete them from a document.
* We have dozens upon dozens of custom buildbots that check everything from build stability to performance and memory. We have custom scripts for perforce check-ins and reviews. We have websites with charts and graphs for all this stuff. The tech team adds fancy new tools every damn week...and somehow it magically appears the very same day on a server that never dies. God knows we try to make these things explode...can't do it.
* Configuring devkits and updating SDKs is hardly a task for standard IT. Our guys can do it blindfolded. Note: Tomorrow I'm going to make them try this.
* Want a 100% secure remote Perforce depot to China the same day you ask? Our guys have done it. How about running an automated installation and upgrade system for a local "art tool" via the web to some friends in Canada? Done. Are you SO concerned about security that you need a system that uses a one time use key to encrypt data? We've been.

Frankly, this is the "easy stuff." You can't imagine the strange and obscure needs a team full of tech-savvy game developers has. When it is "crunch time" and someone needs a local proxy to some other team's depot, every second can count. Frankly, even though they are on call 24 hours a day, we've never once had to abuse this, since the team always seems to be here when we are...and we work some pretty crazy hours.

Despite all of this, they still find time for our "fun" requests to keep morale high like the "Wang TV." The tech team wants to make a podcast. Not content with poor quality audio, and wanting to make us look good, Developer Support is using spare parts, dusty licenses, and duct tape to put together a pro-tools enabled Mac just for us.

In summation: Lupe, Ryan, Steve, Calvin, C-Bass, Jen...Thank you!

Also, Happy Birthday Mom!

The Post in Which I Defend MK DLC...

I'm going to break my traditional "Blog form" and actually talk about Mortal Kombat. Specifically, I'd like to talk about the sometimes downright angry response from a minority of forum dwellers ever since people saw that pesky "DLC" character slot at E3.

The inspiration for this article comes from the response to Ed’s Kotaku interview posted at Kotaku.

Let's start with a couple complaints from the forums, shall we?

"We aren't being offered "extra" characters, we are being offered content that was built into the original cost of development, that is covered by the box purchase, but is yanked from the game and then put into a little side bin, and then sold as "extra" content. "

"You are being charged money to access content on a game that you already bought.

Not content made later as an addition. "

I'm going to try clarifying the DLC issue as it applies to our game. Mortal Kombat has no evil strategy wherein we're going to cut content from the game to ship it as DLC later. None. It has never been discussed. Period. We're going to be polishing all of the content that will be included on the game disk right up until the game is ready to go to store shelves to make sure that the final product is perfect.

What we are trying some strategies on, and this is what Ed alluded to in his article, is a method that once we start working on DLC, we can get it in the hands of all players, whether they purchased the DLC or not. We are still working out if this is possible, but in an ideal world, you'd be able to fight against a DLC character even if you have not purchased it...and that somehow requires us to get the content onto your machine. We're going through a lot of negotiations to see if we can make this happen...it may not be possible, but we are certainly trying to do something we think would be a very cool way to make DLC "seamless" in terms of both those who chose to purchase any new content and those who would prefer not to.

"...I refuse to pay full price for a game not to be able to access all the characters. And then to be teased by characters that I can't access after I payed FULL PRICE for the game?"

"You know how to solve the problem of DLC fracturing the community?

Bung all the characters on the disc - remember, the way things were before - and stop nickel-and-diming us to death"

This opinion, and there are quite a few people out there, just plain confuses me as a video game player and developer. There is no reason for us to make a game if we work on it indefinitely and it never ships. Every single developer would love to literally spend decades working on a game...constantly adding new features, maps, characters, etc. If we did that, though, there would be a great deal of Duke Nukem Forevers still being toiled away on that you would never get to play. At some point, development has to stop and the game has to ship. At that point, the game is 100% complete, and you need to make the decision as to whether what is on the disk is worth your hard earned cash. With the shear volume of content we plan on including in MK, we definitely think it will be an easy choice.

This is why DLC, when done in a non-malicious nature, is so awesome. It lets those of us who really enjoyed a game get even MORE of the game without having to wait years for a sequel. In the case of MK, if we add new characters, for instance, it will literally let players extend their enjoyment of the game by mastering all-new strategies long after the game has been on store shelves. How is this bad, again?

If you don't want the DLC experience, then by all means don't purchase it. You can keep playing the same game you purchased in the store for years. All it means is that the other people who _do_ want some new experiences have the option to do so.

One last point on the idea of DLC characters in MK specifically. If we choose to do these, they are certainly not trivial in terms of the time and manpower required to complete them. Since just a small portion of the press has seen the game, it is tough to judge just how awesome our characters are from screen shots.

Characters in the new Mortal Kombat not only have the exterior model you see, but don't forget we are also modeling the character's skeletons, muscle systems and internal organs. We have to make it so their skin and cloth can be ripped, damaged and bloodied. All of this is character-specific to ensure each character looks and feels unique. For this game they all have unique animations, fighting styles, special moves, particle effects, sound effects and in some cases, unique bits of technology specific to each character. They have X-rays and fatalities. And even after all that is in there is the ridiculously comprehensive period of balancing and tweaking. It is no joke that, even with some of the most talented and efficient artists in the industry, each of the characters in Mortal Kombat takes a VERY, VERY long time to complete.

Why do I mention this? It sort of hearkens back to my original point at the beginning of this overly long post. Specifically, that NetherRealm isn't some evil studio planning to rip people off with DLC, as some of the forum reactions seem to imply. We LOVE the game we are working on, and we think that after you get an opportunity to play it, you will too. All we are saying with the infamous "DLC button" is that we (and hopefully you) will love the game so much that you'll want to continue seeing new, optional content for a long time to come.

The true story behind the Midway Logo in the Trash

The following, as with all posts here, represent the barely legible ramblings of a single person, and in no way reflect any sort of official position by or for any larger organization.

I was reading through the Kotaku comments (http://kotaku.com/5612465/so-long-midway-and-thanks-for-smash-tv) surrounding the “Midway Logo in the trash” picture Hans took, and I was struck at how evocative that single image is in regards to the story of the new NetherRealm studios under WB. I was also surprised how much internal context exists around this image that we take for granted. As such, I thought I’d pull out a few of the comments from the article and give some background for the record. Someday, somehow, someone will write a tell-all book about Midway’s history that will make the more provocative scenes from “Zap! The Rise and Fall of Atari” seem like Saturday morning cartoons in comparison. At this point though, I, along with most of the staff at NetherRealm, have only heard these stories 2^nd and 3^rd hand. The comments here are simply some observations about the last days in the old Midway building before starting in our fancy new WB office building.

“i think after the pic it was taken back out of the trash and home somewhere.”

Just so the record is complete, and some poor sap doesn’t go trying to find out where it ended up in 20 years or so, this sign did not in fact find a good home. This poor-quality item was definitely taken out of the trash, but only to be torn and beaten into a pulp.

“Gasp”, you say, “but this is a collector’s item! You folks at NetherRealm have no sense of your own history.” Sadly, we do have a sense of our own history, which is the reason that this sign was one of the items that became the target of years of pent-up frustration. But more on that in a moment, as first I want to calm the fear of collectors and those with a sense of Midway nostalgia.

“ Seriously? You're going to throw away the logo? I've got a friend of mine that kept the sign to a place he used to work at when it closed down…”

“Aw, why trash it? It's a perfectly good memorabilia item!”

Trust me, anything of any real collector’s value from Midway’s history is either long-gone in the homes of the “old time” former employees, auctioned off in bulk as part of the bankruptcy proceedings, packed up and coming with us to our new building, or locked safely away in some Warner vault in Burbank.

While very few employees at NetherRealm were around for Midway’s “glory days” in the arcade, we all share the same sense of Nostalgia that most video game fans have for arcade gaming. On a daily basis over the past several weeks emails would go out about random posters, props, t-shirts, and other miscellaneous “collectors stuff” that people could take before it was thrown in the trash as part of the clean-up process. Frankly, if your office wasn’t in close proximity to the cafeteria where they laid this stuff out, there was virtually no chance of grabbing anything remotely “collectable” before someone snatched it for safe-keeping. Nothing, and I mean nothing, was more disheartening than watching one of your colleagues walk off with some awesome piece of arcade art as you arrive to pick through the tattered “Hour of Victory” posters that had been hanging on the walls throughout the building.

So, before we get back to that logo in the trash, I want to assure the video game community that all the cool Midway stuff that may have been left in the building, and there honestly was very little at this point, is safe.

Now back to the now-deceased logo.

“What a sad day for all of us. RIP Midway.”

There is one key point of context to keep in mind about Midway. The “Midway” name as you know it has been officially dead for over a year, and the Midway of the arcade era had been dead far longer than that.

The NetherRealm team working on the new Mortal Kombat game, while largely consisting of former Midway employees, has been very happily part of WB Games for most of our current project, and we haven’t looked back for a second since the buyout.

The sign in the trash is just us shedding our last tie to Midway…the horrific building we’ve been stuck in for decades. From the annual “sewage flood” that required evacuation of the sports building, to the buckets permanently affixed to the ceiling to catch the leaks, to the non-functioning heating and air conditioning that would leave us sweltering in the summer and freezing in the winter, to the ad-hoc nature of building construction that led to a maze that made it literally impossible to find someone if they weren’t in their office, there is no love for the environment the team has somehow managed to overcome to create games.

There had been meetings and talks of getting a new building for years under Midway. It was a topic of conversation at nearly every “all hands” conference call. It had been promised and taken away so many times that it became a popular running joke. Within a year of our purchase by Warner Brothers, we are finally moving into a brand new, cutting-edge facility custom created based upon our present and future needs.

That sign that had been hanging on some interior wall represented a building that had nearly killed one of our engineers when a 10 gallon bucket filled with water came crashing through the ceiling right behind his desk.

That sign represented a building where every morning we had to walk by walls that had strange brown stains on them that were so deeply baked-in that they couldn’t be cleaned.

That sign was hung in a building where people literally had to evacuate their work areas because sewage water was shooting out of toilets and drinking fountains.

For this, and so many more reasons, that sign had to die so that we could start anew.

“They really shouldn't have gotten rid of the Midway name. Just because Warner Bros. owns them now, they could still exist as Midway.”

A lot of us at NetherRealm debated this point even before Midway went bankrupt, but frankly, outside of Mortal Kombat and a few other titles, Midway had really never managed to successfully transition to home consoles. The company did go bankrupt, after all, and luckily Warner Brothers identified a very talented group of people who somehow managed to create quality products under less-than ideal conditions. Like I mentioned earlier, I can’t think of a single person in the building who wanted to still exist as Midway, even if it was an option. Most of us desperately wanted a fresh start. But even more pragmatic than that, the Midway name had been driven so far into the ground in the past decade or so that we’d be insane to want to keep it. There were a lot of horrible console titles released by Midway, and the NetherRealm staff that was picked-up by Warner Brothers has very little connection to those projects or Midway corporate policy as a whole. Why start out on our new life with all the baggage of other projects we didn’t really work on created in a company that made poor decisions we weren’t part of?

I don’t want to beleaguer the point here, but let’s just say that much of working at Midway during the modern era would hardly be considered pleasant. Before the ink was dry on the acquisition by Warner Brothers, we all started referring to ourselves as “WB Chicago” until we picked the NetherRealm name. Despite some distinctly great memories, a lot of people “suffered” greatly under Midway, from horrific hours to underfunded games to questionable mandates we were powerless to stop. We were excited to get the opportunity to make the great games we had been trying to make with a publisher who would empower us to do so. I’m confident you’ll see the passion of the team finally freed from the shackles of the “Modern-era Midway” translated to the games the new NetherRealm studio will release. Unfortunately for the Midway sign, there had to be some casualties to get us there.