Thank you, Garage Games

In the summer of 2004 I met with a couple of people who desired to make a game company. It was a laughable experience, nobody new squat about what that means or implies, in every sense of the word. Everybody was talking about everything else and nobody seemed to understand (or have any knowledge of the term) that in order to start a game company you pretty much need a game engine. What? Somewhat the initiators of this ..thing managed to bring to the meeting a screenplay writer. And a bass player. Hm?

In the time between the phone call I got with the meeting details and the actual meeting taking place, I managed to find 3 or 4 very affordable at the time game engines. Let's call them 'software solutions'.

The top of the list was Torque.

The game studio thing sort of faded away even before the meeting was over. However Torque remained in my mind for some reason. So I went ahead and purchased a license. You don't want to know how difficult was to buy stuff online at that time here. This episode alone is a whole chapter on the book about how goofy people can be.

Since then till about a while ago, I think I ran torqueDemo.exe a million times. I learned a lot, I wasted a lot of time too, and I had a lot more fun also. It was, indeed, a heck of a ride.

The reason I moved from games and reverted to basically just 2d stuff has something more serious to it than just a 'move on' thing we sometimes do in life. A while back I had a rough exchange of blog posts about violence in games and, while attacking the position of those games that simply have no respect and come into our faces with really violent stuff, I was myself into something like this. Not at the same scale (or profit for that matter) but still. FPS or First Person Shooter is, everyone agrees, a game genre. It is so all around us and so common that we rarely jump from the seat when we see someone 'shooting stuff'. And that's sad. It's how things are and it can't be changed now. Why don't we make games that won't require a weapon inventory? Why don't we have games like Katamari Damacy as the main stream genre and FPS as an obscure, strictly controlled and widely introspected genre? The fact that we, as a people, solve most of the problems in our lives with conflicts (instead of resolutions) is reflected into what we do, invading even the concept of spending free time / having fun. It's a very delicate matter and I am not debating it here. I just needed to step away and be true to my word. It's the least everyone of us can do. That doesn't mean we should quit our job or anything, but being a little less bad every day could someday lead to a world in which entertainment by means of violent expression is an absurd notion.

......

However, things we learn, we can learn in many ways. But people we meet is something else. The people experience is what changes us and what remains after is all done. And I must say, the community here was way over and above any expectations. So, in regard to that, considering the replies I kinda let flow on in the previous blog, I respectfully bow and say

Thank You