See, I love music games. I mean, I really love them. This is in part because I love music in an embarrassingly wide variety of genres, and in part because I’m a musician myself (I sing and play bass, guitar, and drums, in case you didn’t know). So these games sort of hit me right in the sweet spot.

Anyway, I’ve been spending the last few months putting this site together. This is a solo project; I’m doing all the writing, design, coding, PR, administration… Suddenly I’m very tired. Where was I? Oh yes: This site is all me. But I’m also hoping it’ll be useful to other fans of music games, who can keep up with the latest news and releases, and find lots of new music in The Vault.

So there it is, my Big Secret Project: Plastic Axe — Music games for music fans. Go have yourself a look around, and let me know what you think in the comments (over there rather than here, please).

Steve Taylor writes to ask: “What PS2 or PS3 game would you recommend for those of us who LOVE Ratchet & Clank? I don’t know of anything like it.”

Well, let’s assume you own all the Insomniac-developed Ratchet games. (No? Here are Amazon links to Ratchet 1, 2, 3, Deadlocked, and Ratchet Future 1 and 2.) My next recommendation would be the Jak and Daxter series. The first is my favorite by far, followed by the third, then the second. There’s also a pretty solid racing game.

Also within the same basic genre (and most certainly within the same level of quality) is the Sly Cooper Series.

Beyond these, the Big Three of PlayStation platformers, you may enjoy Psychonauts and Klonoa 2: Lunatea’s Veil. Aaaand that’s where my recommendation engine stalls out, because I honestly can’t think of any other really good games that are remotely similar.

Anyone else have any suggestions?

This is just to say that Green Pixels recently put up a couple more reviews of mine, for Guitar Hero Smash Hits and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 (the Wii version, with the fancy-schmancy new Wii MotionPlus pack-in). They’re both good! Go find out why.

[Update: Fixed link to reflect where the stories are actually posting. Come leave a comment!]

So please forgive me if this place goes dark for a bit. I expect to be back in the regular swing of things by mid-June.

Well, as regular as it gets around here.

One: The “random facts” interview theme is something I’d been wanting to pitch to some outlet for awhile but hadn’t gotten around to yet, and now it’d look like I’m ganking their idea. Jerks.

And two: Jaffe relates this little vignette that would make such an awesome premise for a story that it makes me angry I didn’t think of it:

I once called my childhood phone number — about five years ago — just to see what would happen. The phone picked up — no one said hello — and on the other end I heard two little kids playing and calling each other Philip (my brother’s name) and David (me, duh). Did I call the past? I still wonder. And no, you can’t take the idea and use it for a movie or book. It’s mine! Mine I tell you!

Isn’t that great? Check out the whole article, it’s a fun read.

People often ask me for recommendations for things like games and books and music and other things we humans need to survive. So a couple weeks back, I spent an afternoon putting together a huge collection of lists of my favorite games, music, movies, books, and even food…and then promptly forgot to mention it here on the main page.

So, hey, lookie there in the left-hand sidebar! It’s a Favorites page! It has all sorts of recommendations of stuff I happen to enjoy a whole lot. I hope you’ll find them useful. If not, feel free to leave a comment on that page. As long as you’re okay with me telling you how wrong you are.

If you’ve been playing along with the OPM home game (that is, our staggeringly awesome podcast — tune in at radiopm.1up.com today! [Edit: :( ]), you know that a few of us here have been bitten by the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion bug. So I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about why this game is so compelling. I mean, sure, it’s enormous, and sure, it’s real purty, but we’ve seen other big, beautiful games that haven’t captivated our interest (and that of millions of other players) like Oblivion has. But I think I figured out what that special something is that keeps people talking about the game: freedom.

Now, “freedom” is a buzzword that’s been thrown around since GTA3 made “sandbox” games the Hip New Thing. But consider what that means in the context of GTA: You can be a bad guy…or you can be a really bad guy. I mean, you can follow along the main story and steal cars and carry out hits and whatnot, or you can do all that plus run down pedestrians and beat grandmothers over the heads with baseball bats. What you can’t do is be a hero. (Well, you can be a goody-goody, law-abiding citizen, but that pretty much entails walking down the sidewalk and looking at architecture. Not exactly the most entertaining experience.)

Of course, that is freedom compared to what you normally find in games, where you’re either a hero or an anti-hero, following a narrow path with few significant choices. But Oblivion offers real freedom: Completing the main story does involve being basically a “good guy,” but if that doesn’t float your boat you can play as a thief or an assassin—and get a game’s worth of play time out of either of those choices. You can be a paragon of virtue of the incarnation of pure evil; the game supports both choices, and everything in between.

Of course, choosing to go down either path has legitimate, logical consequences within the game world. If you decide to play as a villain you will be treated like a villain, forced to tread lightly where honest, law-abiding citizens are concerned.

Morality within a game world is something that’s been tried before; the old Ultima RPGs incorporated the idea heavily, for example. But it’s not something you see too much of these days, and that is, to my mind, a damn shame. As we approach the point of diminishing returns with regard to graphics and size and realism, it’s time for game designers to start turning all that technological prowess toward designing games that have real depth to them, depth that can only be achieved by giving the player legitimate choices within the game world.

When it’s done right, the result is a game that offers a different experience to just about anyone playing. It generates lots of discussion, fierce dedication, and a fervent desire for more games that treat players like adults capable of making significant decisions. This is the final frontier of gaming, the real next generation. Designers, are you up to the challenge?

If I were to estimate the amount of time I spent in that building…well, let’s do it now. I went to work there every day for almost four years. Call it 7500 normal working hours. Now add an extra 40 to 60 hours a month to account for deadlines, for around 44 months. Yeah, that’s about what I expected: ten thousand hours is a pretty fair estimate. To do that all at once you’d have to work for about 14 months straight. Without stopping to sleep.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not complaining. Some of my fondest memories happened in and around that building. I made some dear friends. I learned some important lessons. I met my wife during this time. I laughed a lot. I ate some really spectacular take-out.

But you stay in any place long enough, you’re gonna get a little crazy.

WELCOME TO THE FUTURE
Last time I implied that the Lombard shenanigans didn’t stop with the move over to Oakbrook, and to a certain extent that’s true. But it’s also true that lots of things changed for the better. For example, I got a new computer. When I started at Ziff I was working on a Macintosh IIsi (OK, technically I was sharing a IIsi with Nelson Taruc), a machine that had already been discontinued for three years when I started using it. It had a blazing twenty-megahertz processor and a staggering one megabyte of RAM.

What it did not have was a CD drive. Or an Ethernet connection. Hey, I’m lucky it did color. So the new machine I got, which if memory serves was a PowerMac 6200, was a pretty big step up.

It was also right around that time — this is late 1998, remember — that we were allowed to use the Internet. This was a big plus because for the last year or so we had only inter-office e-mail — no Internet access whatsoever. And for my first year and a half or so we didn’t even have that. If you had something you needed to disseminate through the group you would print out a memo, walk around the office, and hand-deliver it to everybody.

Remember that this is the company that published PC Magazine, Computer Shopper, and about a bajillion other technology-focused magazines. Have we all meditated on the irony? Good.

Other things improved, too. The new office, having been custom-fitted for our use, boasted a few pretty sweet features. One was a full-time demo room, complete with 50-something-inch TV, surround sound, and tiered seating. Before this, game companies would demo games at whoever’s desk was available.

We got a tricked-out lunch room, with actual tables and chairs, and a refrigerated vending machine that I bought way too many Lunchables and microwave chicken sandwiches from. It had a solarium which led to a brick patio with picnic benches, where Gary Steinman and I would play chess and the smokers would congregate on warm summer deadline evenings.

We got a suite of arcade machines, from a new hybrid Blitz/Showtime machine to a pair of linked Hydro Thunder sit-down cabinets. (I believe I still had the high score on Ship Graveyard when we left that place.) We got a network, so we no longer had to tote SyQuest disks around the office on deadline. And we got swanky new cubes that, probably not coincidentally, could not be moved or otherwise resized.

And then we got an electric skateboard.

ZERO TO DISFIGURED IN HALF A SECOND
This was not the first wheeled transport we’d employed within the building. Earlier, as part of some questionable game tie-in, some company had sent over a bunch of Razor scooters. Since the office sprawled across a single level, these were actually legitimately useful as quick transportation; you could scoot over to the print area to grab proofs and then scoot back to your desk in record time. And if we occasionally built ramps to jump over people lying prone on the ground, or gathered up half a dozen scooter pilots to race laps around the building, well, who could blame us? What else did you expect us to do on deadline? Make magazines or something?

Anyway, at some point before the launch of the original Xbox, the guys at EGM went up to Microsoft to look at the system. The way I heard it told, someone in the Xbox division, someone fairly high up, if memory serves, used an electric skateboard to get around the Microsoft campus. And I guess the EGM guys were so obviously taken with this concept that as a gesture of appreciation Microsoft sent one over.

Now, understand that this was not a toy. This was a fairly massive device, probably about four feet long and heavy as all get-out — maybe 30 pounds or so. It was controlled by a handheld trigger device similar to those used to pilot high-end remote-controlled cars; stand on the board, squeeze the trigger, and the thing moves. Wait, let me change the emphasis there: Squeeze the trigger and the thing moves. It only did maybe 10 to 15 MPH or so — you could ride your bike faster — but it wasn’t about the speed, it was about the acceleration. See, this surprisingly heavy machine could hit top speed in about a fifth of a second.

Picture, if you will, standing perfectly still atop a fairly small device as it moves from a dead stop to 15 MPH forward in less than a second. It’s like having a rug yanked out from under you. By a motorcycle. Watching people try this thing out for the first time was like riding a candy cart down into a bottomless mine of amusement. Even if you were prepared for the controller’s sensitivity, it was very, very easy to squeeze the trigger hard enough to take your (or someone else’s) life into your hands. So for the first week or so that this thing was in the office, half the staff had bruised tailbones.

To everyone’s credit, up until this point we really had been doing a fine job of keeping the new office in good shape. I joked last time about whether a more professional environment makes people behave more professionally, but I do think it can. Working in that office, I think we all felt more like grownups and less like anarchic college students, and we were doing a pretty good job of keeping this place looking pretty nice.

But very quickly, marks and dents started showing up in walls. Tire marks started showing up in carpets. Cube walls near the open space in the EGM area — the space that was most often used to try out the skateboard — started to get a little wobbly from people running into them. We could have resisted, I suppose, but come on. It’s an electric skateboard. How do you not play with it?

Of course, I suppose we technically didn’t have to put Crispin in a football helmet and shoulderpads and ram him into the rows of metal chairs set up for a meeting. Maybe we didn’t really need to experiment with mounting chairs on the skateboard and tooling around the office in a recumbent position. I suppose it wasn’t strictly necessary to tow people around on wheeled office chairs. But, you know, you get a brilliant idea, you gotta try it out. If you don’t risk permanent disfigurement on an electric skateboard, you’ll never learn just how far your neck can bend without breaking, is what I always say.

Even so, one deadline evening things did get a little out of hand.

BLACKOUT IN THE RED ROOM
Toward the center of the office was a space we all called the Red Room. Picture the room in your office that has the copy machine and fax machine and office supplies, only lop off the walls at about six feet so the room opens to the industrial ceiling far above. Now stick it in the middle of a sea of beige cubicles and paint it blood red. I think someone thought it was stylish, but to me it always just seemed like an odd place to have to go to make copies.

Anyway, this room was one of the few places in our part of the office where The Suits could be relied upon to visit regularly. Normally they’d stick to Administrative Row and leave us to our videogames and scooter races, but everyone needs to make copies now and then. My point here is that there were places in the office where we could reasonably expect damage to go unnoticed by anyone who would care. This was not one of those places.

Which is why it caused such a stir when someone — someone who specifically requested I not name him here, so let’s call him Art — mounted the electric skateboard, yanked on the trigger, and fell on his ass while the metal beast smashed at pretty much full speed right into one of the corners of the Red Room.

In case I’ve not sufficiently related the power of this thing, I’ll describe the damage: horrific. The skateboard struck at just the right angle to tear the entire corner of the wall off like an overgenerous hunk of string cheese. The bottom three feet or so of the corner was demolished, down to the studs. You could peer into the interior of the wall. The skateboard had actually bent the metal in the stud.

Arty turned so pale I thought he might pass out. Here we were in this new-ish office, in a very central location, and he’d done some damage that contrasted very well with the bold colors of the walls. But then something interesting happened. Rather than abandoning poor Arty McArtguy to his likely fate of impending unemployment, the entire office (well, those of us who were there at that late hour) rallied around him. Plans were laid. Color samples were painstakingly assembled from the debris. A contingent was directed to head to Home Depot for a tub of spackle, some chicken wire, and paint.

Not long thereafter, we had assembled a work space around the blast zone. We molded chicken wire over the gaping hole. We slathered on spackle. We went and played Hydro Thunder for a couple hours while it dried. Then we painted.

It looked good. Not great, but good. The sharp edge of the corner had been restored, and it matched its mate on the other side of the wall. There was just one problem: We’d been in the office long enough that the walls had picked up a fairly significant and indelible coating of dust from the open ceilings. And here was this brand-new, blazing-red paint right on the corner everyone would walk by. It would be as obvious as a zit on prom night. So here’s what we did. I think this might have actually been my idea, and if so I’m pretty proud of myself: We took the remaining paint chips from the incident. We ground them up into a fairly fine powder. And then we blew the powder onto the wet paint. It instantly blended in with the older paint. Genius!

And how did we do? If you read the comments from my previous entry, you already know. Our receptionist Laura wrote, “I know about it…but never did find out where the repair was actually done.” Success!

LOOK NORTH, TURN LEFT
But all things must end. In June of 2002, I was getting ready to drive to Ohio for a week’s vacation with my girlfriend when I got an IM from my boss, John Davison. “I need you to be in the office on Tuesday,” he wrote. “For a meeting. It’s very important.” But he wouldn’t tell me why.

This was irregular. But John was not the type to make bizarre requests lightly. So I drove back from Ohio on a Tuesday morning and walked into an all-hands-on-deck meeting, where it was revealed that pretty much the whole damn office was being relocated to San Francisco.

San Francisco, the place I’ve wanted to live since I first visited at the age of 13. Sometimes things just have a way of coming together, you know?

But we’d be losing a lot. Many of our friends and colleagues couldn’t or wouldn’t make the move due to positions being eliminated, family obligations, and/or a simple desire not to leave the Midwest. We’d also be leaving behind the sprawling megaplex of office, which meant no more scooter races or electric skateboards or cavernous lunch room with en suite arcade.

Never again would I hear Stratty McStrategyguy try to impress the temp receptionist by talking about his run-ins with UFOs and his wrestling of alligators. Never again would Clueless Editorial Director Guy try to convince us that losing half the staff of EGM was like losing an arm, but that’s OK because “we’ll just grow another arm” (or, for that matter, call me into his office and give me such an odd talking to that I was convinced I was being fired, when in actuality I was getting a 15-percent raise). Never again would signs be posted warning of caustic urine disintigrating the walls in the bathroom; no more Hydro Thunder challenges would be issued; no more cowboy hats would be burnt out on the patio.

This was the trademark headwear of my first boss. He was…not a great boss.

But a new office awaited, in a new city. So one August day, my girlfriend and I squeezed ourself into her VW hatchback with our three cats and a bunch of suitcases, hit I-80, and drove west and west and west. A lot of really wonderful stuff was in front of us. In the next few years, we’d get married, I’d get promoted, we’d take many spectacular drives around the Bay Area. A lot of new faces would come through Ziff’s doors. And a lot of faces would leave — including mine. There was a lot to look forward to.

But damn do I wish I’d taken pictures of that skateboard crash.

Next time: Gambling and gluttony on the high seas, the Greatest Commute Ever, and the rise and fall of RadiOPM.

Thing the First: My weekly column about music games is up over at Green Pixels. We did something a little different this time, reorganizing the column as a collection of links to let you dig into the catalogs of the different artists. I think you’ll find it more useful than previous columns.

And Thing the Second: Don’t worry, fans of office-related destruction, I’m still working on the Ziff-trospective, Part III — I had some things that needed tending to over this past week, but I’m planning to have it up over the weekend or early next week. Thanks for your patience.

But trying to hang these all together in some sort of coherent narrative would a.) take way too long, and b.) probably not make any sense anyway. There was a lot going on, as you’ll see, and if I were to try to hem everything up all pretty it would probably come off as some sort of fevered drug-dream. So instead, let’s peek in on some memorable moments, some iconic people, things, and events that represented that whole heady, smelly time.

Let’s start with the Cone of Violence. It’s as good a place to start as any. Now, enough has been said about this device that I’m not going to waste much time describing it except in the simplest terms: It was a full-size traffic cone, heavy as these things are, positioned appropriately next to the Blitz machine… Oh, I haven’t told you about the Blitz machine? Yeah, we had an NFL Blitz arcade machine in the office, positioned directly in front of the main door so that you couldn’t possibly miss it. “Oh, I was just heading down to the break room for a soda, but I guess I could squeeze in one game.” It’s a wonder we ever got any work done. Anyway, games of Blitz could get pretty heated, thanks largely to what has been variously called “CPU assist,” “rubberband AI,” and “bullshit.” See, what happened was, as soon as one player opened up a big lead, the game would start causing him to fumble the ball, throw interceptions, miss easy passes — pretty much do everything but trip over his own shoelaces. This made some people angry.

But it made Crispin Boyer positively livid. Now, Crispin is truly one of the nicest, mild-mannered fellows you could ever hope to meet. Honestly. The only exception I ever saw was when he was losing at games. And boy howdy, did he have a temper in those days. The Cone of Violence was really primarily for him. He’d lose a game of Blitz, and rather than rabbit-punching someone in the throat or throwing a chair through a window, he’d pick up this heavy rubber cone and slam it, repeatedly, upon the ground. This generally served to dissipate his wrath.

Except the one time. I remember watching Crispin lose an epic seesaw battle of Blitz by a hair’s breadth. He had built up a legendary lead, only to see it slowly whittled away thanks to CPU assist. In the end, he lost by maybe a single point. I mean, he got seriously, seriously screwed. And I remember him looking at the Cone of Violence and sneering, kicking it almost nonchalantly out of his path, walking over to the closet nearby — you know, the kind with the accordion doors? — and tearing the closet door clean off. Like tearing tissue paper.

It was awesome.

No, we had absolutely no respect for our environment in those days. The office had been occupied by EGM for long enough that it had built up a healthy amount of normal wear and tear — and it wasn’t exactly nice to begin with. Plus it was populated primarily withtwentysomething guys. This combination does not breed reverence for one’s surroundings.

You could see it in the way we staked our territorial claims. Walk into EGM in the mid-’90s and you’d see an environment I lovingly referred to as “the Shantytown.” See, a regular office has cubicles of a fairly standard size. But EGM’s cubes were separated by movable walls…which meant that every so often someone would try to annex new territory. After seven or so years of this, the layout had become almost entirely organic. One cube might be just big enough for a desk and a chair, while the one next door would be a palatial manor with fountains and servants’ quarters.

I remember someone — I think it was Shawn Smith — had a cube so small you literally had to turn sideways to get in. There was room for him to sit at his desk and maybe enough room for one other person to stand awkwardly close. But the funny thing was, to get from the main walkway into his cube — a distance of about three feet — you had to make two 90-degree turns.

Meanwhile, the guy next door had a full-sized Killer Instinct arcade cabinet in his cube. I shit you not.

In all the years in Lombard, though, I don’t know that anyone was ever more audacious about cube expansion than Shoe. When I started in 1996, just a couple months after he did, he had a small desk wedged into a corner between a real wall and movable cube-wall. (I remember this clearly because his desk was the place where I first saw Mario 64.) By the time we left Lombard in December of 1998, he had added three more wall sections, a full-sized bookshelf, and a couch. Not a love seat, a couch. I swear to God this is not an exaggeration.

(Something else comes to mind while we’re in this section of the building. The real wall that made up the west end of Shoe’s estate had the game closet on the other side. This was a room about the size of your average half-bath, filled with racks and racks of old games. It was always kept locked, and only a few people had the key. Which was why one enterprising strategy-guide editor, who happened to also sit adjacent to that wall, punched through it one night to grab handfuls of whatever he could reach. If memory serves, this was the same guy who prompted the institution of a no-shorts policy by showing up to work in cutoff sweatpants with nothing on underneath. That’s class!)

Anyway, this quest for territory manifested itself in different ways. In some cases, people would move the boundaries of their cubes in increments small enough to not be noticed. In other cases, guys would just spy an empty area and move in. That’s the route I took when the last mail guy left. See, the office got so many packages on a daily basis — most of them games — that it was originally deemed necessary to have a full-time employee sorting them out and distributing them to the editors. But when the third guy in a row was found to have been skimming free games from the FedEx haul, the position was permanently eliminated. Which meant a space had opened up — and not just any space, but a legitimate room. With a door. So one evening, I grabbed all my crap and moved in.

OK, sure, it was technically a kitchen. Yes, it had cabinets, countertops, and a sink. But by God it had a door. And really, you don’t realize until you have it how useful running water can be in an office.

Cabinets and counters, blessed darkness and quiet. (Not pictured: sink.)

By that time I was just happy to have a place to retreat from the insanity. Because sometime between 1996 and 1998, the stars aligned just right and we ended up with a group of very active, very rowdy guys. Many stories have already been told about the extracurricular activities that went on in that building, from Decapitato to creative re-signing. But did you know that at one point we started regular Lazer Tag games in the office? The rules were: Anywhere you could get to was fair game. Bathrooms, the offices upstairs — even the basement was technically in play. I still remember my sweetest kill. I’d noticed that one player had gotten into the habit of trying to surprise people by taking the elevator upstairs and camping out by the open stairway. So I hit the elevator button, got in, and let the doors close without selecting a floor. Shortly thereafter: Ding! Zap! Game over.

Have I mentioned we were a bunch of friggin geeks?

Anyway, this is all preamble, really, to the pinnacle of irresponsibility: The Last Night. See, in 1998, with the industry growing steadily in respectability, it was decided that the magazines would all be moved out of that stained craphole in Lombard and into a swank, newly redecorated office building a couple towns over. I think someone up the ladder hoped that in a more professional environment we’d all act more professional.

Oh, those poor, misguided people.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before we entered the new office we had to leave the old one. And that meant that there would be a day when we would all walk out of that shanty town and never come back.

Did you think we were irresponsible before? You have no idea. I can honestly say I understand now how rioting starts. Understand me: I’m not saying what we did was anything close to rioting. It’s just that by the end of the night a group dynamic had taken hold that, had it turned in a different direction, could easily have gotten ugly. And I imagine that’s how things get started when the real shit goes down.

Fortunately, we were just a bunch of geeky kids, so the activities that went on that night were only mischievous, not malicious. Unfortunately, we had all recently been sent baseball bats as a game promotion.

Many things were destroyed that night. Mostly these were confined to bits of non-functional furniture and other things destined for the garbage dump. We played home-run derby with old game CDs. We tore apart sagging plastic desks. We flattened busted metal filing cabinets.

Oh hey, look at that slide in the lower-left — that’s how we used to get game screenshots from publishers. On photographic slides. Really!

You’d be amazed how satisfying this is. Also, note Shoe’s expanded cube in the background. Did you think I was joking? You can even see a corner of his orange couch peeking out.

But the destruction was really just the beginning. The night became a series of escalating dares. Oh, you’re going to flatten a filing cabinet? I bet you won’t slip this week-old pizza under the door of the office upstairs. Oh yeah? Well, I bet you won’t rearrange all the letters on the building directory. Oh yeah? Well, I bet you won’t set a remote-controlled car on fire and drive it around outside until it melts into a plastic puddle! Oh yeah? Well, I bet you won’t move this abandoned car from the parking lot into the lobby! (Turns out we actually couldn’t do that last one; it had sat there so long that the tires had fused to the pavement. We did try, though.) And I’m not one hundred percent certain, but I believe someone may have attempted to ride a wheeled office chair down the stairs.

No way did we get our security deposit back.

And in between these events, we sat around, drank beer, and traded stories about all the weird shit that had gone down in that building. And I’m not talking about our childish pranks, I’m talking about legitimate weirdness and/or profoundly unethical behavior that I was fortunate enough to never witness firsthand. But oh my, the stories: an editor and a copy editor discovered in flagrante delicto in an office…another editor rumored to be trading coverage for “happy endings”…many many bits of pricey schwag gone mysteriously missing…lawsuits and allegations, intraoffice adultery, suspicious hirings and firings, blackmail and hush money. Crazy times that I’m glad I missed most of.

I remember sitting in a circle around a mostly-empty twelve-pack. The mischief was winding down and most of the staff had gone home. We were surrounded by a wasteland of debris: smashed furniture, shattered discs, a carpet of old press releases. And in walks someone from administration, who’d been staying late packing up the important things we were actually taking with us to the new place. She looks at us, looks around, shakes her head, and walks away without a word.

That pretty much summed it up.

Next time: Do nicer offices instill a greater sense of responsibility? Do the words “midnight Home Depot run” give you any hints?

Oh well. We had a pretty good run, didn’t we?

Look, I never claimed to be a trend-setter.

The thing is, I’ve noticed some gaps in others’ accounts. Some gaps that need filling. And by God, I’m just the man to do it.

Plus, I have pictures. Incriminating pictures.

And so, I present to you the first in a four-part series: A Ziff-trospective, Part I: The Lombardening.

–

Pretty much any story anyone tells about Lombard includes mention of it being the most suburbiest of suburbs. And oh dear lord, it is. (Or at least, it was the last time I was there.) But do you think that mattered to a 22-year-old kid, fresh out of college, new to Chicago, and starting his first day of work at a videogame magazine? No. No, it did not.

It was June 24, 1996. A bit more than a month previous, in anticipation of moving from my hometown of Cleveland to Chicago, I had answered an ad in the Chicago Tribune for “Writer / Game Player” with a resume (thin) and writing samples (laughable). Both, I learned later, had been promptly lost, but my cover letter had stuck around on someone’s desk long enough to make some sort of impression. So I got asked in for an interview, impressed the hell out of everyone by showing up in a tie, and found myself reporting for work at the offices of Sendai Media the following Monday.

Let me tell you what I saw the first time I walked into this place. You drive up on the outside to a very plain, very institutional-looking, brown-brick building. Three floors, darkish windows — pretty much the epitome of the anonymous late-20th-Century office building. (Come to think of it, here: see for yourself.) You open the doors into a modest, tiled lobby, facing a bit of ugly abstract art that’s inexplicably blocked off with velvet ropes. You go up an open stairway to the second floor. Straight ahead is Reception, but if we’re going to EGM (and we are), we’ll turn left. Swipe your card and open the door.

You walk into a long, low room, harshly lit in zombie fluorescent. You hear electronic noise, some laughter, more yelling. You smell something funny. Crammed into this room are somewhere around 30 videogame geeks, most in their early ’20s, some in their late teens. Many have not seen the inside of a shower in days. (Some have not seen the outside of this building in as long.) They’re scattered in an apparently random distribution, separated from one another by raggedly arranged temporary walls, carpeted in hideous light-blue fabric, chin-high and wobbling. The carpet is stained. The furniture is plastic.

A representative section of the EGM offices. (Though this is technically the OPM area.)

The entire office wasn’t quite this messy, but it wasn’t far off.

Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, this ain’t.

But then you notice that every desk has a TV. And every TV is surrounded by a scattering of game systems. And the break room has a Mortal Kombat machine. And as ridiculous as it may seem, you are about to begin a new career writing about videogames. You will be paid for this. (Given the hours, it comes out to less than minimum wage, but let’s not talk about that now.) You will be working alongside a group of passionate young adults every bit as geeky as you are. You will show up to work in jeans and a t-shirt. And when you’re there, you will play games.

Maybe Heaven smells better, but it ain’t as much fun.

So there I was on my first day, trying not to make an ass of myself in front of my new colleagues, whose names I still hadn’t quite gotten. Luckily, by the time lunch rolled around I was saved: Dan “Shoe” Hsu and Crispin Boyer, two other newish hires, took pity on me and dragged me along to lunch at their favorite deli, right down the street.

I was still in a daze, which may explain why I never told them about the enormous roach I saw burrowing through the salami.

Sorry guys. Now you know why, anytime you asked me to come along to the deli after that, I always had plans.

I don’t remember anything else about my first day. But tomorrow I’ll tell you about Day Two.

No no, I kid. I have no interest in walking you through each step of my career. I just wanted to set the stage a bit, give you a frame of reference for the stories that are to come. I hope I’ve been successful.

Next time: the truth behind the Cone of Violence, the claiming of territory, and photographic evidence of the Last Days of Lombard.

Attention game journalists:

Can we stop overselling Flower please? Yes, it’s a lovely little game. Yes, it does a lot of interesting things with control. Yes, it has wonderful atmosphere and a nice message. But how about we let players discover these things for themselves? Do we really need to engage in a Most Embarrassing Hyperbole contest every time we talk about the game?

Here, I’ll help. Here’s a handy list for anyone planning to review, blog about, or otherwise cover the game:

Things Flower Does Not Do

• Redefines gaming forever
• Cures cancer
• Justifies, on its own, the purchase of a PlayStation 3
• Reverses global warming
• Personally fellates the player
• Magically turns your significant other into a gamer
• Rescues us from the post-holiday lull
• Saves the whales
• Feeds the hungry
• Allows you to stop considering other games for Game of the Year
• Sticks it to The Man
• Helps you clean your apartment, you filthy troll
• Brings about peace in the Middle East
• Takes the place of real flowers for your loved one
• Makes you any smarter, hipper, or more attractive
• Loves you

Things Flower Does

• Kills a couple hours in a soothing, and yet thought-provoking, fashion
• Surprises the player…if you people will let it

Thank you for your attention.

1969 – The first ARPANET link is created, building the first strand in what would eventually become the Internet.

1978 - The first multi-user dungeon (MUD) is created. Little more than a customizable chatroom, the MUD is nevertheless the predecessor to today’s MMORPGs.

1985 - Quantum Computer Services launches Quantum Link, an online hub for the Commodore 64, featuring simple multiplayer board games. The service is later renamed America Online.

1991 - Neverwinter Nights, the first MMORPG with graphics, is launched on AOL. It costs $6 an hour to play. Its server capacity: 50 players.

1996 - Quake is released, shortly followed by QuakeWorld, a client for playing the game over the Internet. The era of the online FPS is born.

1997 - Ultima Online is launched. 100,000 subscribers sign up within the first six months, only to be brutally PKed and have their boats stolen.

1998 - The Dreamcast is released in Japan, becoming the first game console to launch with a built-in modem. Also, the last.

1999 - EverQuest and Asheron’s Call are launched, completing (with UO) the unholy triumvirate that has strongly influenced MMORPGs to this day.

2002 - Xbox Live is launched on the original Xbox, setting new standards for communication both in-game (with standardized voice chat) and cross-game (with a unified login and friend list). PS2 and Gamecube also debut online functionality, but neither approaches XBL in popularity.

2003 - EverQuest is ported to PS2 in the form of EverQuest Online Adventures. The gaming world notices, yawns, and goes back to hunting for new Final Fantasy XI screens.

2004 - Halo 2 is released, featuring one of the most popular online components in any console game. Within the next two years over half a billion games of Halo 2 will be played online. Also this year: World of Warcraft launches. You may have heard of it.

2006 - PS3 and Wii are launched. Xbox Live takes note of the systems’ respective online offerings, heaves a sigh of relief, and returns to lounging on its jewel-encrusted throne.

2007 - Halo 3 launches. A crippled Internet limps along under the strain of a few million players all getting online at the same time.

2008 - “Internet2″ is completed, offering researchers and universities 100 Gbps transfer speeds.

2009 - Debut of 100-Gbps streaming porn.

2010 - Most metropolitan areas now offer free Wi-Fi within city limits. All that shared bandwidth makes users nostalgic for the dial-up days.

2029 - The Internet, now self-aware, sends a T-800 back in time to kill Sarah Connor.

2050 - Humans move to an internet-only existence, uploading their brains to permanently live in the electronic world.

2112 - Attention, all planets of the Solar Federation: We have assumed control.

So I agree with the article up to a point. But then the author starts dishing out gems like this one:

What happens to the music itself when the way to build a career shifts from recording songs that ordinary listeners want to buy to making music that marketers can use? That creates pressure, subtle but genuine, for music to recede: to embrace the element of vacancy that makes a good soundtrack so unobtrusive, to edit a lyric to be less specific or private, to leave blanks for the image or message the music now serves.

I’m sorry, Mr. Pareles, but that is just so very much bullshit. Anyone who would seriously allow a thought of marketing to affect their songwriting would already have been writing commercial-friendly music. It’s not going to “corrupt” artists because corruptible artists are already corrupted.

If launching a “music career” is your goal, you’ll begin by making choices that are in line with that — see “…songs that ordinary listeners want to buy…” — which means you’re going to look for some method of getting your music out in front of as many ears as possible. The idea of the incorruptible artist who suddenly “sells out” and begins writing radio-friendly crap in order to make a buck — it’s a myth. Either the success was an accident, and a truly independent artist got “discovered” by a hip ad exec, or the artist was in some sense working toward that goal (or one like it) all along.

Understand me: I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that. Writing music for money is no less noble than, say, writing game reviews for money. The whole idea of commercial music being ipso facto bad is something I find faintly amusing. I’m just saying, if you sell out, you were probably sold out to begin with.

Agreed? Great. Now, on to what I really wanted to talk about. Check this shit out:

It took Guns N’ Roses 15 years between albums to complete “Chinese Democracy,” certainly long enough to receive worldwide notice when the album was released this year. But instead of letting the album arrive as an event in itself, the band licensed one of the album’s best songs, “Shackler’s Revenge,” to a video game that came out first. Metallica fans have complained that the band’s new album, “Death Magnetic,” sounds better in the version made for the “Guitar Hero” video game than on the consumer CD, which is compressed to the point of distortion so it will sound louder on the radio. But they take for granted that the music will end up in the game in the first place.

OK, dude: If you think licensing music for Rock Band or Guitar Hero is in any way similar to licensing music for a Subway commercial, you officially have no friggin’ clue what you’re talking about. These music in these games is focal, not incidental. It’s the reason for the game. The songs sell the game, sure, but they sell the game in exactly the same way that they sell the albums they come from. The music-rhythm game is a new method of music appreciation, not some sort of nefarious new avenue of commercialism. To imply any different is to display a very special sort of ignorance, not to mention the almost admirable amount of gall necessary to parade that ignorance in the Times.

More and more, music games are growing into a new music delivery system, no more “commercialized” than radio or MTV or iTunes. In fact, I could argue that experiencing music through a music game offers a substantially greater appreciation for the song, because you’re experiencing it from both the perspective of the listener and the perspective of the performer.

An example: I was never a huge fan of the Who. I don’t mean that I disliked them, I just didn’t have much of an opinion about them. But then I happened to download the Rock Band version of “Who Are You” for a story on Green Pixels. And suddenly I understood why they’re considered one of the greatest rock bands of all time. Once I experienced the song from the artist’s perspective — felt the weird, organic structure and timing of Pete Townshend’s guitar work, the barely controlled chaos of Keith Moon’s drumming — I got it. It gave me an appreciation for the band that an infinitude of C.S.I. spinoffs could not.

Listen well: Music games are a vital new frontier, a way for the music industry to redefine and revitalize itself in the age of the MP3. They’re a way for listeners to experience new music in a powerful new way, to connect with artists in an entirely novel fashion and perhaps even discover a talent (or at least drive) to produce art of their own.

To try to make that seem like a bad thing isn’t just ignorant, it’s irresponsible. New York Times, you should know better.

Hero of Sparta

Warfare Incorporated

Frenzic

Toy Bot Diaries 2 and 3

If you like what you read, please drop a comment on the review, rather than here. Comments closed by way of encouragement.

The reason why I haven’t spoken about it is that, honestly, I just have no fucking clue what to say about it. I mean, here you have this amazing group of people putting out these two amazing products. (I’m talking about 1UP.com and EGM, but of course 1UP also comprised a ton of podcasts and video shows and blogs and on and on.) And rumors had been percolating for awhile that EGM was not long for this world. With the internet being what it is, I found those rumors disappointing but not surprising. EGM is a great magazine, but when your target audience is exactly the sort of person who a.) hates to pay for stuff, and b.) knows how and where to get it for free, you’re on thin ice. Add in a recession and a sale and, well: disappointing, but not surprising.

But I felt optimistic for all my friends and colleagues because 1UP had recently gone through this major reorganization, where all (or nearly all) the staff of EGM got hybridized into 1UP. As annoying as this may have been to the people involved, I thought it was a very smart move; I believe I may have even expressed to some of my colleagues that it should protect them in the case of EGM closing.

Yeah, sorry about that, guys. What I didn’t take into account is that 1UP would be bought by a company that wasn’t interested in the things that I always considered to be the site’s biggest strengths. 1UP was, to me, a site about personalities and personality. The previews and reviews were fine, they worked, they did their jobs. But the site really showed its stuff when it came to the podcasts and the 1UP Show and Broken Pixels and all that other wacky, irreverent shit those people put together every week. To me, that was 1UP. You could ditch all the reviews, previews, and feature stories, but if you still had the 1UP Show and 1UP Yours, you still had 1UP.

So what does new owner UGO do? They get rid of most of the people involved in both of those properties. I just don’t get that. I am genuinely confused.

And maybe that’s the problem. Maybe that’s why, even after rambling on for six paragraphs, I still don’t know what to say. Because I just don’t understand it. I can’t wrap my head around it. It’s like a force of nature; you can’t explain it or control it, all you can do is try to accept it and work with it and move on.

But I do know this: I wish nothing but the best for my colleagues and former co-workers. I’m sure you all know this, but I’ll say it anyway: You didn’t deserve this. Here’s hoping everyone lands quickly and adroitly on their feet. Lord knows they’re owed at least that much.

Burning Monkey Puzzle Lab

WinRemote

Netter’s Anatomy Flashcards

Live Poker 40K

Please feel free to pop over, check them out, and comment. Comments closed here to, y’know, facilitate that.

For example, did you know that I was the first person ever to write about the original Guitar Hero? It’s true — I was down at RedOctane doing a completely unrelated story and they asked if I wanted to see the game.

I did. And I got to write about it before anyone else in the world. I still think that’s pretty neat.

Anyway, that’s not what I came here to talk about. I came to talk about my review of Guitar Hero World Tour, which has just gone up at Green Pixels. Head on over and check it out, won’t you?