Last week, I received a lot of supportive emails about starting my own game studio. Thank you! I don’t know yet if I’m going to stop looking for work to start my second small business. My honest feeling in this moment: If I was offered another full-time game writing job tomorrow, I would rather take that job than start a studio on my own dime. But if I was offered the choice of a year of investment capital to start a studio or a full time game writing job, I would take the investment capital. In other words, I don’t want to bootstrap, but an angel investor would reboot my small business ambitions. Boots, am I right?
While I’m not certain what the future holds for me, I do know this: there are artistic projects I must make before I die. I don’t want to write a “bucket list.” I’m in my mid-40s. I have a good… 5 years before I need to start thinking about death non-stop. So let’s just call these my “Must Make” projects. There is something in my soul that is telling me to make certain projects. I don’t know why! That’s a subject for my next therapy session a future newsletter.
These must make projects can be entirely personal or professionally made with a huge budget. Scale is not the issue. Neither is the actual content, oddly. I just need to have successfully climbed the following project mountains before I die or there’s gonna be a problem!
FMV Game
I need to make an FMV game. In case you didn’t read last week’s newsletter, FMV is a hilariously obscure game “genre.” The acronym stands for “Full Motion Video.” These are games that are built around linear media assets (film clips, animation clips, etc), as opposed to polygonal or sprite-based graphics. Famous examples include Dragon’s Lair, Night Trap, and Her Story.
Okay, yes, technically, I already made an FMV game. But that was a game jam where I used royalty free stock clips. That doesn’t count! This FMV game I need to design must use a decent amount of original footage. It does not have to use the standard interactive movie format where it’s styled like a film, but every few minutes the player makes a choice. Though it could be that! I won’t be on my deathbed saying, “I wish my FMV game broke the mold more.” (And my family is all around me crying and saying they don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.) But I would also be excited to make something more experimental structurally, like Sam Barlow’s mystery games. Or a cheesy dating sim, like Love is All Around. Or a very arcade-like and frustrating game, like Wirehead.
By the way, if YOU currently own the rights to Wirehead and YOU want to give ME the rights to Wirehead for FREE, I will gladly TAKE the rights to Wirehead from YOU. Please reply!
To be clear, this game must be primarily an FMV game. Not a sprite-based game with short FMVs that play when you win a level. The gameplay must be intricately tied to FMV. Whether it’s animation, or way more likely given my resources, low-budget video shot with my wife’s old Mini-DV camcorder, the game has to be packed with FMV. Non-negotiable for my life.
VCR Board Game
This one has looser requirements than the FMV game. I must make a game in the style of a VCR board game. In case you missed my comprehensive presentation on the subject, VCR board games are tabletop games where a VHS tape is a component. You put the tape in and play along with the tape. But I don’t need to make a board game with a literal VHS tape to fulfill this requirement, though I’d be thrilled if I did make a game with a VHS tape in the 2020s! That would rule!
What I need to create is a tabletop board game with a video host, like Atmosfear, the Star Trek one, or the one with the horrible puppet I hope burned in a fire. The video part can be through a tape, an app, a DVD, or a web video. The exact format of the video isn’t that important to me. The important part is that you, the player, have physical components in front of you, and an actor on a screen in costume is ordering you to “steal the trapezoid card” or “address me as Ghostmaster or lose your turn!” For this one, the video must be live action, but the host could be a puppet. Just not a horrible one!
Fumetti Comic
I must make a fumetti comic! This one isn’t that hard. Fumetti is when you use photos instead of illustrations in a comic. You would see them in National Lampoon magazine under the name “Foto Funnies.” Sometimes you’d see them in MAD Magazine, too. There’s a webcomic called A Softer World that used the style artistically. The format gets its name from its association with Italian comics, notably the crime comic Killing (aka Satanik), which features a guy dressed in a sick skeleton costume.
This is another one where I sort of already did it. In several issues of my humor magazine The Devastator, I wrote and produced short fumetti comics with Paul Scheer and Ron Lynch. We posed the comedians in front of green screens with props and I Photoshopped them into hijinx-type scenarios. But these were three page comics as part of an anthology. I want to make an entirely fumetti comic. Something in the range of 20 pages. It could be standard trim size or an ashcan, color or black and white. There could be drawings on top of the fumetti, like this pretty fun Marvel comic where they give the 1980s editors super powers. I would like eye lasers drawn over my photo. Make mine (like) Marvel!
Adventure Gamebook
I must write The Great American Pick Your Path Gamebook. A book where the reader makes choices and solves light puzzles, which takes them to different sections of the book. To be successful, there needs to be a print edition. It can be released in digital, too, but there must be a print edition. There can be dice rolls, character creation, and monster battles, a la Fighting Fantasy, but there doesn’t have to be. It could be a classic Choose Your Own Adventure where you make choices and that’s the whole shebang. The amount of game mechanics? Negotiable.
The book also doesn’t have to be prose. I’d be thrilled to write a comic gamebook! Hell, maybe I should make a fumetti gamebook and kill two birds with one stone. 🤔
Immersive Experience
This is the least defined Must Make on the list. I want to design a show where audience members interact with actors / props / the environment live. It could take many different forms and still count. Escape Room? Absolutely. Immersive Theater? Down to clown. A Meow Wolf-Style Art Room? Hell yeah! Zoom Theater? Mmm… You know what? I respect the hustle, but I don’t think that would work for me. This one has to be an in-person experience. I need to watch real people come into the space and experience it for it to count, but a Zoom Theater thing could be a good testing ground for the real thing. Game mechanics are once again negotiable, though I would prefer if there was some kind of gameplay element. What can I say? I like gamez!
I gave it some thought and realized my must makes have a few things in common.
* They’re all forms I experienced and enjoyed growing up. FMV games on CD-ROM. VCR games at friends’ houses. Fumetti in MAD. Gamebooks from Scholastic Book Fairs. Immersive experience is the only one of these that’s culturally trendy. I think it comes from my love of theme parks and interactive children’s theater, which my mom has been performing much of her adult life.
* Almost all of them are interactive. I wonder if I could make a fumetti visual novel like Cat President and feel like it would count, or if it has to be a comic. I’ll do some soul searching on that.
* Almost all of them are live-action cartoons. They ask the question, “What if, instead of a cartoon character, we used a live actor pretending to be a cartoon character?” Does this mean I secretly want to be a cartoon character? You know, up until a few years ago, I would’ve gladly traded my entire wardrobe for a closet full of the same outfit. Maybe!
🎲 Your Turn: Do you have any Must Makes? Do you have any Must Makes you’ve already made? Are there any you’re currently working on? I’d love to hear from you! Reply to this email or hit the orange button below to leave a comment.
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