I travel down the dusty road, driving cautiously. Another year. I’m doing this again. I’m taking part in The Gauntlet (45.1 MB), where every teenager in the county is standing by the side of this road, a road that had an impressive 360-day stretch of total silence, each teenager armed with a vinyl sign in one hand and Snapchat in the other, all trying to coax us into one of two fiercely competing fireworks stands. I pull into a gravel lot, past some wheezy bouncy houses, step out of the car, walk inside the store, grab a yellow basket, and get to work. I’m not here for fun, Jack. No way. I’m here for work. It’s my job — no, it’s my thrill — to find the weirdest, awkwardest, worst, clip-artiest, mis-translatediest, shoots-flaming-ballsiest fireworks packaging.
Welcome back, my friends. Happy 4th of July.
To relive some of the glorious photos from my past trips, please enjoy 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, and finally, 2013.
Let’s get started.
This year, we had a beautiful smorgasbord, featuring:
Pink Floyd’s Dream Nearly Realized
An Extraordinarily Sad Elvis Presley
Uncomfortable Sexism / Racism / Alcoholism
Eric Wareheim out of Tim and Eric
Every Kid’s Favorite Thing: Palace Intrigue
Super Steroidal Uncle Sams
A Video Game I Want Badly
Copyright Infringement (They Tried To Hide The Hat With Stickers)
I gave a talk at XOXO 2013. I’m not very fond of public speaking. I also try to avoid being too personal or too heavy which leaves mostly jokes and new snack foods. But I knew I had a lot on my mind — I jog right past the YU (where XOXO is held) each day and that got me thinking about all of this stuff and talking and it all kind of swirled together. Andy very graciously gave me a speaking slot, and even though I destroyed a dress shirt I made it through and everyone was so kind.
Seven years, my friends. Seven years of hopping in the car late at night, driving up I-5 to Vancouver, Washington, running The Gauntlet™ (45.1 MB), and visiting Blackjack Fireworks to check out the colorful, poetic, lost-in-translation, Corel-driven beauty of the latest fireworks packaging.
This is a story about one of the best days of my life. I’ll put it up there with the arrival of Joby, my wedding, the Panic trip to Hawaii, and playing Super Mario 64.
We worked with the gang at Pacific Helm on a rare and interesting side project, and as weird payment for their time, we took them (and our collective friends) on a trip to Disneyland, one of my favorite places on the planet.
Thanks to the one-of-a-kind Louie Mantia and a mysterious benefactor, our crew wound up at Club 33.
Club 33, if you don’t know, is the “secret” restaurant at Disneyland, discreetly tucked away in New Orleans Square, requiring paid membership (and long waiting list) to enter, and offering very fancy and delicious food (as well as the only booze in the park). It has a beautiful balcony that overlooks New Orleans square. It was wonderful and relaxing, a total oasis in a whirlwind of a place.
Then we spotted the harpsichord.
You have to understand that I hate playing music in front of people. I’m still traumatized by a moment in Japan, where there was a piano and a room full of business associates chanting my name to play something. I froze in terror. I couldn’t do it. It’s one of those memories that spark an involuntary lemon-sucking face when it springs into my mind.
But 2013 is all about change, if you hadn’t heard. And Disney music is a huge part of my life, especially the theme park music. And the guys came back with some news: “We asked. You can play the harpsichord.”
I’d always wanted to go to Club 33.
I’d always wanted to play a harpsichord.
I’d always wanted to play Disney music in Disneyland.
So yeah I had to make this happen.
My playing isn’t great, and I’m obviously insanely nervous, and I tried to avoid looking up to see if anyone was paying attention, but with the support of nice people, I did it:
It felt like my whole life had led to this wonky ragtime rendition of Grim Grinning Ghosts. I could literally not have been happier.
A harpsichord which was rumored to have been an antique was in fact custom-built for Lillian Disney specifically for use in Club 33. The underside of the lid features a Renaissance-style art piece that was hand-painted by Disney artists. Elton John and Paul McCartney have each played this harpsichord.
That’s it. Close up shop. We’re done here. Life, you can be pretty great.
One of the things we wanted to make truly excellent in our brand-new Status Board iPad app was the setup process. Setup assistants are never fun, always annoying, and kill that “new app” buzz faster than anything. The only thing worse is that giant overlay some apps do that draws arrows all over your screen pointing to all the buttons and things like some demented football coach.
When we landed on the idea of doing a “user manual” — as if you had just purchased a real Status Board and were browsing the instructions — I think Neven said, “And you should hear elevator music!”
And so I wrote elevator music. Here’s the un-tinny-speakerized version. Enjoy?
At the center of my digital storage universe is the house Mac mini, hooked up to a big ol’ external drive that holds all of the e-things: our music, our photos, old work, emulation collections, etc.
(As a side note, this drive is manually backed up monthly onto another drive — a 4TB Seagate Thunderbolt — which I take into the office and place in my drawer for extra-safe fire-keeping. Backup your backup, mang!)
I decided to try the new Thunderbolt-based Drobo 5D as my vault. Did I keep it?
The Good
Drobo’s best feature — that you can swap out drives at any time to semi-infinitely expand your capacity — works, and works well. It’s always mentally nice not having to worry about ever running out of room and having to clone over large volumes all the time.
And it’s fast. Much faster than my previous Drobo.
That older model, a Firewire 800 Drobo, got a sadness-inducing 20.1 MB/s write and 22.2 MB/s read. By comparison, a LaCie Thunderbolt 2big in a software mirror got 111.2 MB/s write and 114.1 MB/s read.
Here’s the Drobo 5D, connected via Thunderbolt:
That’s around 193 MB/s write and 184 MB/s read. So, it’s almost ten times faster than the Firewire 800 Drobo it replaced.
Other notes:
You can dim the many front lights, which is nice for media cabinets.
The metal enclosure is substantial and feels valuable.
It’s surprisingly quiet.
The Bad
The Drobo 5D will not mount until you install the Drobo software. (See here.) The Drobo software includes, among other kernel extensions, DroboTBT.kext, Drobo’s “SCSI Thunderbolt Controller”.
It’s almost a dealbreaker. Every external hard drive I’ve ever used will mount easily without special software. Requiring software not only makes it a pain to hook the drive up to someone else’s computer, but the drive will only keep working in the long-term if the specialized software is well-maintained. (It’s one thing to trust Apple to update their software, which I do, but another thing to expect this maintenance from third parties.)
What will happen when Mac OS X 10.9 comes out and the Drobo .kext inevitably breaks? I’ll have to wait for Drobo to ready an update? How soon will that be ready? You can understand my concern.
But in conclusion, here’s the only review score metric that really matters:
Did I Keep It?
YES
I kept it. Still using it. For now. It’s fast, holds all my stuff, and feels solid. But we’ll see what happens when 10.9 comes out.
We all know it’s not cool to litter. If our hands are burdened with the weighty responsibility of an unwanted and snot-spent tissue, or an empty aluminum can that once held some Dr. Skipper, or even a gentle gum wrapper, the worst thing — the worstpossiblething — would be to throw it on the ground.
Yes, throwing garbage on the ground is literally littering. But beyond that? Well… that’s where things get a little dicey.
Trashcan? The only limit is your trashmagination!
I first noticed the “litterplugs” (if I may) phenomenon in Japan, ten years ago. This is the photo that started it all, a slightly bowing construction wall by Shinjuku station that immediately became a garbage can:
Since then, it was everywhere. Now, I can understand how generalized holes — containers, street light bases, flower pots — become makeshift trashcans. Even if they’re obviously in no way trashcans, and likely will never be emptied or cleaned by any human being on earth, and in most cases there’s a real trashcan mere feet away, they at least share a vague similarity to the raw concept of a trashcan.
But the best litterplugs take it to a new level.
They raise not-literring littering to an art.
Wedge your peach chunks garbage into a brick wall? Sure!
Make PBR stand for “Perfect Bark Receptacle”? Yes, yes!
Pop your can in a drywall hole briefly opened up by construction workers?
Look around desperately until you spot an exterior outlet? Go go go!
Somehow calculate the exact horizontal space required for your juice box? Woo!
Put your wrapper in the hole left by the missing handle… in a garbage can? Award winning!
Remember: you’re not littering if it ain’t touchin’ the ground!
Litterplugs, I salute you and your particularly weird blend of doing the right thing.
If you find any particularly inventive litterplugs, tweet me!
It’s 20 or 30 years ago. You’re working on a videogame. You don’t get any credit for your work, blogs don’t exist, there’s no internet and no fanboys. It’s just you, a crusty old terminal, and got a few spare bytes left in the ROM. What now?
> Type Secret Message
OK. You’ve hidden a secret message in the ROM, to be uncovered many, many years later, and posted on the incredible website, The Cutting Room Floor.
Here are some of my favorites. Click any game’s title to read more.
CONGRATULATION ! IF YOU ANALYSE DIFFICULT THIS PROGRAM,WE WOULD TEACH YOU. ***** TEL.TOKYO-JAPAN 044(244)2151 EXTENTION 304 SYSTEM DESIGN IKEGAMI CO. LIM.
I had no idea Nintendo didn’t program Donkey Kong. Ikegami Co Limited didn’t stop there — they also worked on Popeye, Radar Scope, Sky Skipper, Zaxxon, and more.
For fun, my friend Noby tried to call this number. Sadly, they can no longer teach you:
DIVINE PROTECTION BY =THE MIGHTY GOD= WRITE TO ME: boberg@lysator.liu.se FINALLY YOU HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY TO SPEAK TO A REAL COMPUTER ===== GOD! =====
Stefan Boberg is now the technical director at EA DICE, working on the Frostbite engine, so I think he fully qualifies as a godgineer.
Stefan catches us up: “LOL, 18 year old me… I was trying on bullying, didn’t honestly think it was unbreakable. Although my first version was uncopyable — as in, uncopyable by the duplication plant!” Ah, the dangers of aggressive disk protection tricks. He didn’t remember anyone e-mailing him: “I didn’t expect more than one or two people to read it to be honest, and it’s written accordingly. It’s a message from a parallel universe or something. Things are so different today!” Of course, I know this parallel universe well — one where we would meet up at pizza parlors, bring our big old computers and monitors, set them up, and copy games, like Alien Breed, between stale bites of pepperoni — so Stefan’s message makes perfect sense, and feels like another lifetime entirely, all at once.
I’ll warn you now that this game has a LOT of protection, so it will be a few late nights for you lot. It’s a mugs game anyway, you should be writing games and making loads of money like me (you too could afford a 16V Astra GTE). [...] In the meantime I’ll be thinking of you when I’m in Florida, spending some of my dosh.
Developers often resorted to psychologically shaming crackers, often using the “I have money and you don’t!” angle. I think probably it missed the point of a cracker’s motivation and likely only made the crack more fulfilling.
For the record, a 16V Astra GTE cost £9499 on launch, and looked so awesome:
And Dave Jones did OK: he went on to make Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto.
Next, Tatsuya Ōhashi. Yes, you, you bastard. Don’t give me your flippant sh*t — coming in late on the day we ship the ROM like nothing’s amiss. You can give me all the porn you want; I’m not forgetting that one. All that f***ing weight you put on. No wonder you paid out 18,000 yen and still got nothing but a kiss out of it.
AS FOR GETTING RICH, IT JUST AINT TRUE IN MY CASE. (GOING BROKE MAY BE MORE LIKE IT!) OF THE PRODUCTS I’VE DONE IN THE PAST (M.U.L.E., SEVEN CITIES OF GOLD, HEART OF AFRICA AND ROBOT RASCALS) ONLY SEVEN CITIES MADE ANY MONEY AND HEART OF AFRICA JUST BARELY BROKE EVEN. WHAT THIS SAYS TO MY PUBLISHER IS THE MARKET DOESN’T WANT MULTI-PLAYER STRATEGY GAMES! BUT I DON’T BELIEVE IT.
Danielle Bunten was a prolific developer and M.U.L.E. is largely considered one of the most influential strategy games ever written. I’m very surprised to see it revealed in this message that it didn’t make any money. I want to know more, but quite sadly, Danielle died in 1998 due to lung cancer.
Moto Roader
****************
Thank you very much for purchasing this game.
Did you enjoy it?
But who are you, to be able to read this message?
If you don’t mind, please give me a call.
NCS 03-486-6588 (Ask for Suzuki)
Or, I also use a computer connection, so you can contact me there, too.
NCS NET 03-499-5996 7:00pm to 8:00am
****************
I just like that you could’ve either phoned Suzuki-san, or called his BBS, which has classic “Mom, don’t pick up the phone!” house hours.
You RETARDS say one thing, then something else later all the time. You’re a sound company; quit ignoring pachinko sounds and trying to put these weird sounds in instead! Do you WANT it to be this hard to hear the balls?! I’ve left the PREVIOUS sounds, so edit this if you want to hear it. Set hex address AFFC to 1FAF and AFC4 to E0EE to get decent sounds.
Wow. So management decided to tinker with the sounds in the game, forcing the programmer to play an annoying high-pitched wavering tone almost constantly during gameplay. The programmer didn’t like this and, in protest, provides instructions to ROM hackers on how to revert the sound.
So I busted out my HEX editor. Here’s management’s version:
And here’s the programmers version:
The alarm-like sound is lower and more Pac-Man like, but, well, still pretty annoying.
ANNOUNCING -
Jessica Louise
Ettinger
July 19, 1988
3:25 a.m.
Welcome To The
Fun And Games!
Way To Go, Linda!
Pixar movies, by tradition, have a section of credits for “Production Babies” — babies born during the making of a film. This got me wondering: what’s the earliest “Production Baby” credit in a video game? Is this it?
I asked Jessica about this message. She wrote back:
“I found out about this probably after I started college. Up until then I didn’t know what my exact time of birth was since my mom couldn’t remember and I was too lazy to find my birth certificate I guess. I at least know my birth was noted to the galaxy in some small way!”
And then, some words from Steve himself!
“Yes, I put messages to my kids (and wife) in all of my Intellivision games. This one was obviously from the birth of my daughter – her two older brothers are featured in hidden messages in each of the games that preceded her birth.
I put messages into each of these games: Hover Force (1986), Slam Dunk (1987), Chip Shot (1987), Body Slam (1988), Spiker! (1989), Deep Pockets (1989). My typical ‘cheat code’ was to hold down 23 on the left [Intellivision] controller while simultaneously holding down 26 on the right controller and then pressing reset while holding them down. Admittedly a bit of a contortion act, and not easily replicated on an emulator as it turns out.
I kept the source code for many years for all of these (and more) games, but sadly with a hard drive crash and a neglected back-up I lost them, so I can’t retrieve the code and have to try to remember how to trigger these messages from memory…”
Hey, ROM hackers: sounds like Steve could use your help! Exciting to know there are more hidden personal messages yet to be discovered…
This game sucks. The music is great but the game itself is not how we wanted it unfortunately. I mean, it is a good game, but some things could be polished, as well as sped up. Could use another month to finish this thing off AFTER all the bugs are fixed. oh well, woh is me.
David Pridie died in 2001. According to a memorial site, due to his now-infamous Tetris Rant, “he got himself and H2O in quite a bit of hot water with Nintendo. He figured it was his small piece of immortality and that no one would find it for years, if at all. It took the hardcore gamers about 3 days to find it and post it on the internet.”
See if you can retrieve them from this ROM. If you do, you win the prize. Please.. call (609) 466-2092 (in New Jersey, USA) if you have been able to view the two .GIF pictures, located in the rest of the upper 6 Megs of this ROM. We will have a nice reward..
for you…….Good Luck!….Roger W. Amidon..
Call this number today, and you’ll get… Roger Amidon!
“Good grief! It was over 12 years ago, but yes, that’s me. I have no idea what I was thinking about at the time for a prize!”
The tiny hidden image in the ROM is of Roger and his two sons:
Somewhere in Portland, there’s a very old building, and that very old building has a very, very old basement. An incredible basement, a video-game-level basement, a set-decorator’s dream basement.
And when you walk past the janitors office, with the wonderfully decked halls…
And tromp down a sunken hallway…
You find a old room. Mostly empty, dusty, and dead quiet.
And then you start to look closer at the walls.
And you start to see things.
(You see that Brown didn’t often pay his dime for coffee.)
(You see that a lot of calculation was done right on the wall.)
(You see that World War I was front and center on everyone’s mind.)
(You wonder what was being tallied, and if it was better to win or lose.)
(And you learn the tongue-in-check “rules” of the room.)
And eventually, you crawl behind a corner, and discover a bundle of conduit.
Conduit for every major internet carrier you’ve ever heard of.
Oh, right. You had almost forgotten.
This building, this basement, is the major internet hub for the entire region.
And a wall, where all this data enters the basement just as you did, you see them.
Somehow, still surrounding these cutting-edge, fiber-optic links that burst through the wall, they’re frozen in time, looking at you.
How are they still there? My god, 2012. Could they even imagine?
On the way out, you chat up a worker in the building.
And his story clicks it all into place.
Turns out, he claims, “they used to print The Oregonian down here, way back.”
The pressmen, one imagines, worked day and night down here, working the lumbering machines, spitting out another edition of the day’s business.
And when something caught their eye? Out came the scissors and the paste.
It’s almost too perfect.
The roar of the presses that ruled these rooms has been replaced, just as we all suspected, with the calculated silence of the conduit that carries our data. This data, in fact. These very photos.
100 years from now, when another one of you goes spelunking around this basement, that data, those bits, today’s moments, will likely be long, long gone.
At the center of my digital storage universe is the house Mac mini, hooked up to a big ol’ external drive that holds all of the e-things: our music, our photos, old work, emulation collections, etc.
That’s around 193 MB/s write and 184 MB/s read. So, it’s almost ten times faster than the Firewire 800 Drobo it replaced.
