My DNA is the legendary code that makes Tomb Raider’s Laura Croft nude 
.
Though of course, everyone else will have you believe it’s all a myth just because they haven’t seen it. Hurumph.
In Duke Nukem, I pledged to tear off the head of a giant monster and shit down his neck…and I did.
I once completed Super Mario Bros. 3 in a store demo, just because I knew they would have to crack it open to reset the console after the credits rolled.
I completed Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter on hard, but never on easy. Charger doesn’t play “easy.”
I once played all the way through Contra, TWICE, without using the cheat code.
I made money in Forza Motorsport, when a guy paid me to design a car for him. I made more money than the cost of the game.
In Halo 2, I was being tormented by another player who was chasing me in a Banshee. I jumped up from behind a big rock and stuck a plasma 'nade to his face. His last words were “How in the…”
I have finished unfinishable games. I played Centipede to the point where the game tries to divide a 12-segment 'pede into 13 segments. I once beat Level 24 fast on Dr Mario eight times in a row (the level counter doesn’t advance past 24). I’ve beaten Type B Tetris starting on level 9 with high debris.
I’ve gotten my entire party to level 50 in Final Fantasy multiple times. I always finish the game without any of my party members dying. I’ve beaten Chaos with a party of nothing but White Mages, and with a party that never did any level-grinding, only the quests. That same party beat Garland before ever setting foot in the Inn.
I’ve attained Avatarhood with all eight classes, including the Shepherdess.
I’ve beaten Minesweeper on Easy in 4 seconds, and on Hard in 70. Sometimes, for added challenge, I crank the number of mines up to 150, and I’ve beaten that, too.
I typically beat nine Cyborgs in triple-turret tanks, all teamed up against me, in Scorched Earth. I’ve beaten the field without firing a single shot of anything, not even Tracers or Dirt Bombs. I know how to make the tanks fly and dig tunnels.
I always finish a level of Doom, Doom II, or Hexen with at least as much health, armor, and ammo as I started it with. I’ve blown out the brains of the Icon of Sin both with and without cheat codes. Several times, I’ve beaten Hexen using no weapon but the wand for the entire game (Traductus is a bitch, but Zedek and Korax are pushovers).
I’ve finished every single-player Starcraft mission without losing any units or buildings (including the “unstoppable” Zerg hoard at the end of the penultimate Terran mission). I’ve figured out how to destroy all the Zerg buildings on that mission without losing.
In Myth II, I never lose a unit, and I regularly kill Bowmen, Soulless, Fetch, and other Dwarves using only Dwarves. I routinely finish a mission having taken no damage at all.
In Diablo II, I once beat the Diablo Clone with a level 50 character, using entirely untweaked equipment.
I got everything except Invincibility, but 007 mode grants the “0 damage” option, which makes you invincible to everything except explosives. Beating Facility in 3 minutes was just ridicilously dependent on luck so I said ‘fuck it.’
The Devil May Cry series are one of the best action/platformer games on the PS.
I got everything except Invincibility, but beating 007 mode grants the “0 damage” option, which makes you invincible to everything except explosives. Beating Facility in 3 minutes was just ridicilously dependent on luck so I said ‘fuck it.’
The Devil May Cry series are one of the best action/platformer games on the PS.
I have a Game Genie. I beat you all.
What, the pro artist gets the love but the pro designer doesn’t?!
Seriously, I designed Rainbow Six. And Ghost Recon.
Here’s my page at MobyGames.
I once got past the first screen on Space Invaders. Doubt anyone can top that.
I’m really liking God of War 2 right now. Thanks!
On a side note, I discovered that I have a page on MobyGames and I sure as hell didn’t put it there. What crazed fan goes through the credits of their games and adds all the names to this site?
Blood and ashes. Hey, Pochacco, great work! Opinions on PhysX? I never liked Dominant Species that much, but it was a hell of an interesting concept.
Actually I can’t take any credit for that. The GoW team was in the same building as the Sony 3rd-party group that I’m with. I think I wound up in the GoW 2 credits in the “Special Thanks” section because I played an early build and gave them comments. The real talent behind both GoW and GoW 2 is a guy named Cory Barlog.
Wow, someone who actually played DS! That’s a rare distinction … !
Again, my involvement with DS was somewhat tangential. I was head of engineering at Red Storm while it was being developed so I was involved in supervising the project but not in its day-to-day production.
The main problem with DS was that at the time Red Storm didn’t have dedicated designers on ANY of its titles. (For example, on Rainbow Six I was both Lead Engineer and Designer … which nearly killed me … but that’s another story.) Our attitude at the time was “hey, we’re all creative gamers, design will just happen!” Unfortunately, on DS this really bit us in the ass.
The three main guys behind DS were Jon Owen, the lead programmer, Dorje Bellbrook, the lead artist, and Paul Wirth, the producer. They were all really talented guys … they just weren’t cut out to be professional designers. The production wound up being driven by Dorje’s artwork. He created some really cool aliens, but they didn’t work together as a satisfying RTS unit mix.
The failure of DS was one of the factors behind my push to create an independent design department at Red Storm the following year.
Oh, God, don’t ask me anything technical! I haven’t written a line of code in ten years. These days I do pure design. I work for Sony evaluating pitches from third-party developers and providing design support to teams that need it. I barely know how to boot my own dev kit.
Sorry, Least Original … I didn’t mean to hijack your thread.
Okay, okay, okay! I’m sorry. You get love!
Rainbow Six was a damned good game (some of them) and I heard GRAW2 is pretty badass, but with the impending Halo 3 beta, my time is going to be severely constrained…
Hijack away, by the way. I find it interesting. If you’ve any more tales, please share.
I once actually tackled Bo Jackson in Tecmo Bowl.
I said I’ve sucked at every game. I meant it. Thexder, that darn Jurassic Park ripoff with the hand that blocked your screen… a thousand thousand pixels scream in the night, man. Hi-Octane, Full Throttle, anything that ran under SCUMM or the Z-Machine.
I know what to do with a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle.
I remember Invisi-Clues and the marker.
I played Deadly Discs of Tron in the arcade.
And then Sinistar kicked my tail. Repeatedly.
Hire this guy, please. And point him in the direction of the designers who love to make the players hunt pixels FIRST.
As for me…you should hire me because I don’t have any special skills in Making The Program Work. I could be the tester in charge of making sure that the program is easy to install and use. I actually enjoy playing various parts of a game over and over, to a certain point.
I am a thoroughly mediocre gamer. I play a fair number of games, but do not play them hardcore nor so little as to be considered a casual gamer. And that is why I should be hired.
I possibly represent a fairly large portion of the gaming population, those who enjoy videogames but also have work, family, or other real life commitments that prevent them from playing all of the time.
I know the difference between when part of a game is difficult because it is designed to be hard, and when it is difficult because the design is retarded.
People who design the aforementioned stupid parts will be among the first against the wall when our company ushers in the Video Game Golden Age. Those responsible for games having terrible control schemes or bugs that anyone who picks up the controller/keyboard for ten minutes can find shall join them.
I also play a wide variety of games, ranging from simple puzzle games to FPS to RPG to MMOs, and have participated in both offline and online play.
Games will actually be playtested all the way through, and if MMOs are part of the company, every patch will be released with full reasoning behind each change (What was changed, why we thought it needed to be changed, what the change is and why we chose that particular way to change it rather than other ways.) as well as recognizing that if a mistake should be made, then we will actually fix it in a timely manner.
Also, PvE shall not be allowed to suffer due to changes made to PvP.
I do not use ‘leetspeak’, despite it being widespread among many younger gamers, as it is an abomination of language, nor do I hide behind the anonymity of the internet in order to heap abuse upon other players.
I am fair, friendly, enthusiastic about games without letting them detract from other priorities, willing to work -very- hard, and hate bugs and glitches with a passion.
Here’s one. After Rainbow Six was a hit we milked it by porting to every system we could think of. The team had already moved on to working on the sequel so the porting was done by a variety of different dev teams working under contract to us. Some of these ports were more difficult than others because of the architectural differences between different platforms. The Dreamcast port was a particular challenge, made worse by the fact that the team doing it was new.
The deal was structured so we got all the money up front and they made it all back on the back end. This meant that we really didn’t pay much attention to what they were up to. We’d already gotten paid, and so as long as they didn’t release something so crappy it would damage the brand, we didn’t really care. Still, after six months went by and we didn’t see anything out of them we started to get a bit nervous. This was made worse by the fact that I’d heard through a buddy of mine who did contract programming that they were struggling. So we organized a big conference call to find out what was going on: all the senior studio staff at Red Storm, the producer of the new team, the senior people at his publisher, and, believe it or not, Bernie Stolar, who was head of Sega’s Dreamcast division and had taken an interest in the product.
The producer spent the first half of the call trying to reassure us that everything was okay. They were completely on track and should be ready to go gold in about six weeks. All they had to do was solve a few issues with the game’s memory footprint. His explanation seemed somewhat plausible until the following exchange:
Pochacco: “So we’ve been talking a lot about the memory problems. How’s the gameplay with the Dreamcast controller?”
Producer: “Gameplay?”
Pochacco: “Yeah, using a console controller is really different from mouse and keyboard, how’s it playing?”
Producer: “I told you … we’re having trouble fitting the game in the Dreamcast’s memory footprint.”
Pochacco: “I know. But you’re running in some emulation mode, right? It runs on the dev kit, just not on an actual Dreamcast. Right … ?”
Producer: “No, I told you. It doesn’t fit into memory.”
A sudden cold dread settled over the entire room as it dawned on us just how fucked we were. Six months of work, and they hadn’t even gotten the game to load yet! They hadn’t even started adapting the gameplay to the new platform … .
Producer, sensing that he’d said something really stupid in front of a lot of powerful people: “But don’t worry! We’ll be done in six weeks! Worst case … EIGHT WEEKS!”
Our head of engineering was a quiet guy. He hadn’t said anything during the entire call – he’d just been sitting there taking notes. But at this point he leans forward and says, very softly and very forcefully into the speaker phone:
"I’m sorry … but in this situation, worst case is NEVER."
They eventually shipped it about nine months later, and it was crap. But we’d been paid up front … .
Heh. Nice story. I’ve always wondered if video games got shipped out before they were “ready” (a flexible “ready”, mind you).
Hear hear on the No Leetspeak commandment. Anyone caught using leetspeak will be forced to “supercalifragilisticexpalidocious” on a blackboard 100 times with every variation of leetspeak there is.