Ben Paddon

Category: Games & Technology

  • An Apology

    Late last night, far later than I had any business doing on account of the insanely early start I had this morning, I was thinking about Justin and Griffin McElroy, and their final week at Polygon. Their final day. I was thinking on what they’ve accomplished, not just at Polygon but outside of it – with Travis, with their father, everything. I reflected on all of the joy they have brought into the world, and everything they’ve yet to do. I’m excited for it.

    Then I remembered, not for the first time, an act of kindness that Justin performed for me about seven years ago. And, being utterly incapable of having a thought without immediately sharing it on social media, I tweeted about it. I won’t repost the tweets here, they’re easy to find, but the tl;dr is that at a time when I was a much younger, angrier man than I am now, at a time in my life when I was regularly shitting on Justin and Griffin for doing their jobs, Justin helped me – unexpectedly and unprompted – during a time when I needed help.

    Those tweets gained some traction overnight – hundreds of likes, dozens of retweets, and a quote tweet from Justin that has been itself liked and retweeted hundreds upon hundreds of times. 

    A big part of that story, however, of that exchange, is who I was in 2011 at the time it takes place. And so what follows is a very long post about growth, anger, and shame. (more…)

  • PortsCenter’s First Year: What I’ve Learned, How I’ve Grown, And What I’ll Be Changing

    In 2011, with the help of a handful of friends, I produced, shot and edited the pilot episode for PortsCenter. The process from early idea to finished edit was surprisingly short, sparked from a conversation I had with Kyle LaCroix about the PSone port of id Software’s Doom. I wrote the first episode over a couple of days, purchased two grey PlayStation consoles and two copies of the game (with kind help from Teri Fisher and David Lewis, who chipped in funds for the pilot at a time when money was thin on the ground for me), and roped in a bunch of friends to help me shoot the episode and capture the game footage.

    Two years later, I’m in the final stretch of the first season. 2013 has seen PortsCenter join Retroware TV as a featured show and signed with Screenwave Media, a YouTube network that has been incredibly kind and supportive of the show. But most importantly, we’ve nearly completed our first full year of production on the series, with twenty completed episodes and a further four left to produce before the new year.

    Over the last year I’ve learned a lot, a lot, about producing content for the internet. I’ve learned a lot about what I need to do to make PortsCenter work. I’ve no idea how much of what I’ve learned is going to be applicable to others, but what the Hell, I’m going to write it down anyway.

     

    #1: Keep your mouth shut.

    It’s a fool who tells the world what he’s going to do before he’s actually done any of the doing of it. Don’t tell the world you’re going to climb Everest before you’ve bought your gear. Or before you know how to climb a mountain, for that matter. Do your research. Study. Figure out what you need to do in order to do the thing you want to do. Then, once you’ve done that, keep your fucking mouth shut until you have something to show the world. Don’t make promises you can’t keep.

    I’ve made this mistake often over the last fifteen years as I’ve hopped aimlessly from one pipe-dream creative endeavor to another. I still made that mistake with PortsCenter, by posting the complete list of games I intended to look at for the first season. You’ll notice games on that list that I sadly didn’t get to this season – Perfect Dark, Street Fighter II, Gears of War: The Board Game. The Gears episode is my biggest disappointment, because I’d announced plans to look at it before I’d figured out the logistics of filming four people playing a board game.

    For season 2, I’ll be keeping my planned titles close to the chest. No list, no episode list complete with intended release date that I have to keep editing to shift stuff around. Just the show, and the episodes I release.

     

    #2: Tell the world.

    You may think this contradicts my previous point, but it doesn’t. You’ve got to plug. You’ve got to be on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram, Vine, everywhere talking about the video you’re filming, the song you’re recording, the comic you’re drawing. Then you’ve got to do it again when it’s released. Then you’ve got to do it again so you catch the people who didn’t catch it the first time ’round. Then you’ve got to do it a third time. Then you have to do it all over again when you’re getting ready to release your next video, or song, or comic, or whatever. If you don’t tell people what you’ve released, how is anybody going to find it?

    The trick is not to be obnoxious with it. I try very hard not to drown people with “WATCH PORTSCENTER!” messages on Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook every five bloody minutes. I use a rule of three – the day the video drops, the night the video drops, and then later in the week as I’m working on the following episode. This may seem excessive, but remember for every person who saw your first post, there’s probably someone who missed it who’ll catch it in one of the later posts. This is the internet. It’s global, and not everybody is going to be online or even awake at the time you make your initial post.

    Occasionally I’ll post something from an episode currently in-production – a photo of my monitor showing part of a script, or a voiceover outtake. Something fun, so it’s not all promotional. I mean yes, ultimately this sort of stuff is promotional, but it’s fun too. There’s a world of difference between a tweet that says “Episode 21 drops tomorrow!” and another that says “Wow, Ben can’t even get his lines out of his mouth without accidentally beatboxing.” Again, the key difference here is that I’m not stating an intent to do a thing. I’m showing you the doing of it.

     

    #3: Give a shit.

    If you’re talking about a topic, be it for a podcast or a video series, or just for your Tumblr blog, make sure it’s something you genuinely care about. I’ve seen people, occasionally friends, make videos solely to attract an audience, often about a topic they have no genuine heartfelt interest in. It shows in the work, and people will see through it, whether you’re making a simple YouTube video, or a blockbuster movie.

    On the flipside of this: If you have a genuine, heartfelt love of the project you’re working on, don’t phone it in. A “That’ll do” attitude isn’t going to result in a fun game, or a decent video, or a song worth listening to. It’ll be crap, nobody will give it the time of day, and you’ll wonder why you bothered.

    The point is, a labor of love has got to be exactly that. It’s got to be hard work, and it’s got to be something you care about. Forget just one of these ingredients, and it’ll just be a thing you did.

    This may sound silly, but I care deeply about video game ports. I’m fascinated by them. Almost obsessed. The version of myself I portray on the show is a little more aggressive about his fascination with ports than I am in real life, but the passion is still there. Ultimately, without that passion, PortsCenter wouldn’t be what it is. If I were just making this show because there aren’t other shows about game conversions on YouTube, it’d feel hollow. I think that’s an important distinction to make.

     

    #4: Push your limits, but know your limitations.

    Plan to make stuff outside of your comfort zone, outside of your knowledge level, because in doing so you’ll learn new tricks and techniques which will make your work better. You may fail, but you’ll still learn something and you can use that knowledge in the future. Or, as Thomas Edison allegedly put it, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

    That being said, keep in mind your resources, talent pool and technical ability. It’s one thing to write:

    A giant robotic spider lurches over the city, firing lasers from its eyes and swatting down aircraft like flies.

    It’s another thing entirely to actually film it. If you know you can, do it. If you think you can, go for it anyway. If you know you can’t, or think you won’t be able to, scale it down to something more manageable and realistic. Remember to push yourself, but don’t overdo it and don’t try to run before you can walk.

    That, ultimately, is what bit me in the arse with the Gears of War: The Board Game episode. I have no bloody clue how to film it. I still don’t. I want to include the episode in the second season, and I’m working on how to make it happen, but it’s nowhere near as simple as pointing a camera at my couch and making jokes about it. Mind you, two of my webseries projects for next year are going to be… well, not exactly simple. Yikes.

    And finally…

     

    #5: Make the sort of content you want to see.

    This is an extension of sorts of Point #3. If you want to see a webcomic about a sentient cheeseburger trying to make it in a world populated by anthropomorphic geometrical shapes, start drawing it. If you want to watch a webseries about a guy with rabbit ears applying for a business loan, get writing. Write, draw, film and record the sort of stuff you wish existed, because either you’ll spend the rest of your life waiting, or someone else will beat you to the punch and you’ll regret not acting sooner.

    PortsCenter exists because nobody else was making a show about video game ports, nobody else was making a video game show with this kind of sense of humor, and the one person I secretly hoped would make one, Charlie Brooker, seemingly had no plans plans on following up his single Gameswipe special, although in a few days his next gaming project, “How Video Games Changed the World”, airs on Channel Four in the UK.

    So that’s it. That’s what I’ve learned. Except that I’m lying, of course – I already knew all of this. The trick is remembering it, and acting upon it. Here’s hoping that next year, be it PortsCenter, Dalek Gary or the other projects I have in the works, I’m able to keep a firm grip on these words.

  • Frog DNA in John Hammond’s Bakery

    Last week I tweeted about a song that had been stuck in my head that I discovered was, in fact, this piece of music from Ocean Software’s Jurassic Park game for the Nintendo Entertainment System and Game Boy:

    This was a little surprising because I’ve never actually played Jurassic Park on either of these systems. I had the Amiga version as a kid, but it’s an almost entirely different game with its own distinct soundtrack that sounds nothing like its Nintendo counterparts.

    LaserFrog tweeted back at me that actually the piece of music was lifted from a Konami game called Comic Bakery for the Commodore 64. BEHOLD:

    See? Jurassic Park adds an intro, but it’s basically the same piece of music. But I haven’t played Comic Bakery either, so where the Hell did I hear this tune? How did it get stuck in my head for three months?

    The answer, as it turns out, is on the Amiga. See, we didn’t buy most of the games we had when I was a kid. We copied friend’s games, and we had an extensive library of pirated titles. Most of these titles’d had their copy protection circumvented (or cracked, for some reason) by cracking groups like Fairlight, Paradox and Skid Row, and they’d often slap a fancy intro onto the disk which would appear before the game itself loaded. I got very used to seeing these intros as a kid, and some of them featured some very snazzy animation and catchy music.

    It turns out that much of the music was catchy for a reason – it had been lifted wholesale from other games. Check out this crack intro for Crystal’s release of the Team17 platformer Superfrog:

    That tune sounds a little familiar, don’t you think?

    I don’t remember ever watching that intro all the way through, but I must have done because that tune was lodged in my head for a long time, resurfacing earlier this year. Then there’s the weird chain that led to my discovering where this piece came from – hearing it in Jurassic Park, learning it originated in Comic Bakery, then realizing I’d heard it in Superfrog, where you’d not hear it at all if you owned a legit copy of the game (as I now do, of course).

    That absolutely fascinates me. This goes beyond my love of video game ports – I wonder if there is other brilliant video game music I’ve heard in cracking intros like this?

  • Reboot Ralph

    Wreck-It Ralph opened last month, and I may well have become obsessed with it. I’ve seen it three times now – twice in 2D, once it 3D. I’d love to see it a fourth time at the El Capitan before it vanishes. It came at a pivotal time in my life – in September I had what I can only describe as a small breakdown, in October I lost my job, and in November my girlfriend and I parted ways. My life is in a state of upheaval right now.

    At a time in my life when I’m questioning every action I’ve taken, every decision I’ve made, that has led me to this point, and when I find myself wanting more out of life, Wreck-It Ralph speaks to me.

    About two weeks ago I was with some friends discussing what a possible sequel to Wreck-It Ralph might be about. Director Rich Moore has all but confirmed that they’re doing one, and he’s suggested he’d want the follow-up to explore console gaming and online gaming. That got me thinking: How exactly would they do that?

    As I was talking, the story I’d write for a Wreck-It Ralph follow-up basically fell out of my mouth. It was, I thought, basically perfect, though not strictly speaking accessible. Literally no one at Disney would want to make my idea. Nevertheless, I’m going to share it with you now. Mild spoilers for Wreck-It Ralph follow. (more…)

  • PortsCenter Funded!

    As you can probably tell from the snazzy Kickstarter widget on the right, our attempt to fund PortsCenter was slightly more than successful (and I use the word “slightly” in a literal sense – no typical British understatement here).

    I’ve already ordered almost all the equipment needed to produce all 13 episodes, and this weekend I’ll be moseying into my local “Holy Shit, They Sell Everything” store to buy pretty much all of the games and hardware.

    The last year has been building up to this moment. I am preposterously nervous, but very excited to finally be working on the show. I’ll probably post occasional updates here, but for more news and announcements regarding PortsCenter keep an eye on PortsCenter.tv. PortsCenter is also on Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

    I’ve already tweeted a fuckton of Thank Yous, but… thank you to everybody who pledged for the show. You have no idea how incredible grateful I am for the opportunity to make this happen. I hope you won’t be disappointed with the end result.

    Incidentally if you weren’t able to pledge to the Kickstarter, consider pledging to this one instead. Joe Walker is trying to raise $700 to produce a webseries about underrated and inexpensive gaming gems called “The Backlog”. It’s a marvelous idea, and he isn’t asking for much money, so do pledge if you’re able.

  • An open letter to Activision

    Dear Activision,

    I will not be buying your ridiculously over-priced map pack for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Quite frankly you’ve had enough of my money, and considering your poor treatment of Infinity Ward over the last few weeks (as well as the shitty way you’ve treated other companies such as RedOctane and Double Fine Productions) you can consider yourself lucky if you receive any more. I’ve never really been much for boycotts, but you’ve made the decision decidedly easy for me.

    Kind regards,
    Ben Paddon

  • Incompetent Love

    I started the year by re-reading Rob Grant’s “Incompetence” which, as a side-project, I’m adapting into a screenplay. I’ve already started typing up the dialogue for individual scenes but I’ve yet to sew anything together. I’m also trying to work out how to reorder the story – the prologue, for instance, happens between chapters four and five – and how to work the first-person perspective. Do I go for the typical Film Noiresque voiceover approach, or have Harry Salt talk directly to the camera, to the audience High Fidelity style?

    That’s not all, though – with my friend Rene Engström having recently wrapped up her webcomic, Anders Loves Maria, I mentioned on Twitter that I’d been fighting the desire over the last few days to adapt the story into a screenplay. And Rene, Glod bless the poor misguided fool, has given me her blessing. Yikes! I’ve already started making notes! Iv’e got two adaptations on the go at once, not to mention two Jump Leads scripts on the go and a website redesign in the works!

    Considering current events in my personal life, I welcome the distraction. I need it. It’s either work on stuff like this, or waste my day playing Star Trek Online, and that’s something I can easily do at night, when most of civilized society (well, most of American society at least) are asleep. If you play STO, come find me online – Paddon@Squirminator2k.

    Anyway, sigh and lament. I’m off to bed. Far too late, as usual.

  • Things I Would Do If I had $60 Right Now

    1. Preorder Star Trek Online: Digital Deluxe Edition from Steam.
    2. That’s pretty much it.