patrickklepek

Welcome back, everyone!

I’ve been dumping Worth Reading material into a digital notebook for the last few weeks, and we’re filled to the brim with stuff today. I still have a dozen or so links that I didn’t even get to, and maybe some of those games and pieces will sneak back in next Friday.

I mentioned this on the podcast, but I just wanted to take another moment and thank the Giant Bomb community for their support over the past month and change. Few people go through an experience like mine and feel as though they have the backing of thousands. Your comments made me stronger, and this thread was bookmarked on my phone for a solid week, a source of comfort.

It’s been a bittersweet ride, and one I’m hoping to encapsulate in words soon. As a writer, catharsis tends to come from expressing yourself in the medium you spend the most time in. I’ll get there.

Thanks.

Hey, You Should Play This

• Zenith (PC, Mac / Free) by Jacob Knipfing, Tom Astle, Sylvia Forrest, Tom Lanciani, Evan Gonzalez, Dan Spaulding -- www.arcanekids.com

With the high-definition tweaking of Jet Set Radio on the horizon, I’ve got buzzin’ around on skates on the brain, and the student-made Zenith is an interesting distraction. I’m not sure how I feel about the dude with the big, wacky arms, but after playing Vanquish and Gravity Daze rather close to one another, I’m reminded how much fun a game based solely around movement can be. You can play Zenith with a keyboard and mouse but it’s not recommended--plug in an Xbox 360 controller. Coming to grips with wall jumping is a little tricky, but whereas Jet Set Radio keeps players relatively grounded, Zenith releases the constraints of gravity, and you’ll be flying high. Freedom feels good.

• Asylum (PC, Mac / Demo) by Senscape -- www.facethehorror.com

It’s satisfying to know my horror kick doesn’t have to end soon, since October is only a few weeks away. Senscape’s Scratches has been recommended in the past, and I’m more inclined to try it, given how impressive the interactive teaser for its next project is. Rather than just give players another trailer for the long-delayed Asylum, Senscape actually released a playable demo that doesn’t feature gameplay from the finished product, but gives a strong sense of atmosphere. It’s a little jarring to be playing a first-person adventure that, at times, feels like a first-person shooter, but once you become adjusted to swapping screens, you’re quickly drawn into the world. An insane asylum is the perfect setting for a point-and-click adventure, a place of dread and madness that clicking will only make worse.

And You Should Read These

• "Unintimidated By Apple, Nintendo’s Boss Says The World Still Needs Dedicated Gaming Handhelds" by Stephen Totilo for Kotaku

With Nintendo likely revealing the final launch details regarding Wii U in New York next month and everyone’s focus squarely on whether Wii U has a chance in hell at replicating the success of Wii, it’s easy to forget how much trouble the 3DS was in not so long ago. Kotaku’s Stephen Totilo recently sat down with Nintendo president Satoru Iwata to extensively discuss the hurdles facing the 3DS going forward, and I’m surprisingly inclined to agree with Iwata’s optimistic assessment about the future of dedicated handhelds, especially ones produced by Nintendo. The big caveat? Nintendo has not produced the same level of innovative software that made DS catch mainstream eyeballs for 3DS, and that, more than anything, is what’s to blame for 3DS being able to catch fire, decent sales or not.

Iwata didn't let the presence of an Apple laptop and the iPhone do all of his talking. He never said the words "Apple" or "iPhone" or "Android," but when I pointed to my iPhone that was recording our interview and began asking him about why some people think that device is the future of portable gaming, he knew exactly what I was talking about. He knows people wonder about the long-term viability of dedicated gaming handhelds. He cited the arguments himself and proposed that there are people who argue that the period of gaming handhelds "has passed us by" due to the popularity of gaming on "a device that you're always going to be carrying with you at all times"—a phone. He knows that logic is what produces the doubts. "I don't think that opinion is completely nonsensical," he said.

• "Japanese Games Aren't Gibberish - Just Different" by Erlend Grefsrud for Edge

One of the reasons I’ve gone out of my way to play a game like Dragon’s Dogma (which I wound up enjoying) or spent an afternoon with a three-hour 8-4 Play podcast about Monster Hunter (which I still don’t care for) is a desire to better understand the games outside of my usual comfort zone. You may not care for the Japanese aesthetic or approach to design (see: Team Ninja's recent confusing and questionable comments about portraying women in Dead or Alive 5), but there are plenty of people who do enjoy them, so there must be something there. Uncomfortable experiences are a healthy deviation from the norm, whether it’s surviving a nightmare like Amnesia: The Dark Descent, or violating a personal one-hour rule for having fun to give an unorthodox game a longer, closer look.

This cultural chauvinism has reached the point where western game designers feel the need to pontificate about the apparently objective failure of Japanese game developers to design games and tell stories. Nonsense: Japanese game design is valid in entirely the same way as Japanese storytelling and visual art tradition is valid, founded on a very separate range of aesthetic ideals that share few parallels with the Western cultural traditions.

If You Click This, It Will Play

I Don’t Know About This Kickstarter Thing, But These Projects Seem Pretty Cool

• It doesn't seem that David Crane's pitch for a new adventure game is going much of anywhere.
• I haven't seriously played an RTS since the era of Total Annihilation, so I can get behind Planetary Annihilation.
• Because we need more games from the developers of Wizorb, I fully support Mercenary Kings.
• Walking around a haunted house with a camera is an interesting concept in Paranormal.

Oh, And This Other Stuff

• I'm hoping for more details on Wii U's eShop next month, which some developers are cautiously optimistic about.
• Outside of a paragraph where reporter Dean Takahashi quotes someone who isn't a patent expert to provide an analysis of patents, this breakdown of OnLive's demise is well done. Curious to see if OnLine can recover.
• Slate's collected some pretty amazing reader mail from old issues of Nintendo Power.
• The New York Times weighs in on sexual harrassment in gaming communities, and mentions Cross Assault.
• A look at what it's like to run a sprawling, frantic blog like Kotaku on a daily basis.
• Changes to Japanese law have impacted the bottom line of several companies, including Gree.
• Veeeeeerry interesting that Republique's feedback apparently included comments about it being "too polished."
• With Zynga up against the ropes, is there a way to reform the company in time to save it?
• Unsurprising for an Obsidian game, but a whole bunch of stuff was cut from Fallout: New Vegas.
• If you've ever been curious about making pixel art, Pixel Edit (free!) seems like a good place to start.

@LikeaMetaphor said:

I hate to be "that guy", but you've got a typo.

"...brief, pointed commetns after weeks of prodding."

Otherwise, nice write up! I knew of Slenderman, but not really of its origins, and it's great to see what some of the developers behind these games have to say about Slender.

Thanks!

Even though Slender Man has no face, do not look at him. Even though Slender Man often appears far away, he’s always near. Even though Slender Man will not physically touch you, he’s dangerous. Even though Slender Man is more terrifying, ambitious and skilled at night, he’s still lurking during the day. Nowhere, it seems, is really safe.

You may not see him, but he’s there. And he’s scary as hell.

There are few examples of believable monster mythologies created in the modern age. The Internet has made it both incredibly easy and deceptively hard for the traditional myth to propagate, but Slender Man is a rare example of a tall tale slowly transformed into a legitimate myth, one that’s expanded well beyond its humble origins on the Something Awful forums. Slender Man is now a creepy creature with a life of its own, and it's only growing.

Cue the “Create Paranormal Images” thread from the Something Awful message boards in the Comedy Goldmine category from April 30, 2009. User “Gerogerigegege” created the thread.

“Creating paranormal images has been a hobby of mine for quite some time,” said Gerogerigegege in a thread that's now, amazingly, three years old. “Occasionally, I stumble upon odd web sites showcasing strange photos, and I always wondered if it were possible to get one of my own chops in a book, documentary, or web site just by casually leaking it out into the web -- whether they'd be supplements to bogus stories or not.”

The first few pages include your typical hair-raising submissions, including poorly Photoshopped ghosts and distorted faces with too much blur filtering. On the third page, however, user Victor Surge posts two altered photographs with accompanying stories. The faux accounts tell of “The Slender Man,” a person, creature or thing that apparently stalks children. It’s the fictional context, combined with the creepy photos, that cements “The Slender Man.”

“One of two recovered photographs from the Stirling City Library blaze,” reads the description attached to the second photograph. “Notable for being taken the day which fourteen children vanished and for what is referred to as ‘The Slender Man’. Deformities cited as film defects by officials. Fire at library occurred one week later. Actual photograph confiscated as evidence.”

Like The Blair Witch Project, a little sense of realism goes a long way. Your mind fills in the gaps, and your mind can be an evil thing.

“An urban legend requires an audience ignorant of the origin of the legend,” said Victor Surge in an interview with Know Your Meme. “It needs unverifiable third and forth hand (or more) accounts to perpetuate the myth. On the Internet, anyone is privy to its origins as evidenced by the very public Somethingawful thread. But what is funny is that despite this, it still spread. Internet memes are finicky things and by making something at the right place and time it can swell into an ‘Internet Urban Legend.’”

Responding to enthusiasm from other users, Victor Surge began expanding upon the legend, establishing Slender Man’s distinctive features, tropes that would later be exploited in other mediums, including video games.

“Both subjects were hunting in the Steinmen woods four hours before sundown,” reads a story about two hunters in the woods who encountered Slender Man. “Surviving subject states that while hunting both men grew uneasy as fog levels rapidly increased. A constant murmuring sound accompanied by a low hum eventually became apparent to the two men an hour after the fog increased.”

Slender Man captured the imagination of the thread, resulting in pages and pages of other users creating material related to Slender Man, diversifying its abilities and establishing a deep history of “sightings.” The thread keeps going, eventually sputtering out around page 46, but Slender Man didn’t die there.

Like Slender Man’s tentacles, the myth spread. Slender Man was just getting started.

The largest tangent, and one more likely responsible for introducing outsiders to the idea of Slender Man, was a YouTube series called Marble Hornets. The first episode of Marble Hornets was published in June 20, 2009, just weeks after Slender Man was conceived on the ground floor of Something Awful. The series follows Jay, a friend of Alex Kralie, a college film student who was preparing to shoot a movie called Marble Hornets, only to give up partway through, following a series of incidents wherein friends described him as distracted, irritated, and paranoid.

The first episode has 1,893,614 views, as of this writing. The series is still going, too, with episode 61 having been published just a week ago. Hundreds of thousands of users are still following the saga, myself included.

In Something Awful’s footsteps, Marble Hornets helps reinforce signs of Slender Man’s presence:

Giant Bomb readers will probably have the most familiarity with episode 10, though.

Like many others, I hadn’t heard about Slender Man until the video game from Parsec Productions, simply titled Slender, started making the rounds. Not thinking much of it, I booted up Slender in the middle of the day. A few minutes in, I shut it off. Slender was too much, even with the sun blaring. Why am I playing this?

In Slender, players are dropped into the middle of the woods, and given a deceptively simple task: collect eight scraps of paper. The pieces of paper are about Slender Man, though, and Slender Man is following you. True to lore, he does not speak and he does not attack, but he stalks. Oh, he stalks. And if you look at him, your vision goes screwy, and it sounds as though someone is blaring a broken, staticy radio through an amplifier meant to fill up a stadium. The sensation is unsettling, and looking at the screen is an exercise in terror.

(The sheer act of writing these sentences is giving me goosebumps, by the way.)

Parsec Productions, the studio behind Slender, is just one man, it turns out. Slender is the twisted creation of 35-year-old designer Mark Hadley of New Mexico. He’s a hard man to get a hold of, one who seems very private, and only responded to my requests regarding Slender with brief, pointed comments after weeks of prodding.

Hadley was unaware of Slender Man’s origins on Something Awful, and learned of it through Marble Hornet. Slender was merely an experiment for Hadley, who’d never used the popular development tool Unity before. Unity makes a simple game like this doable. Like Slender Man himself, the results were unintentional.

Hadley was reluctant to discuss previous creations, but we can gain some insight from archived pages. Until recently, the Parsec Productions website primarily pointed towards a board game he'd designed called Pancakes. Yes, Pancakes. It's no longer referenced on the site, but a little digging shows the Pancakes page is actually still active, even if the game is temporarily dead.

"That was a (somewhat failed) project of mine from a couple of years back," he said. "I'm also an aspiring card and board game designer, and I had made a simple card game that I was trying to sell, but haven't been successful at it. I took it down for now so that it doesn't cause confusion for people looking for info about Slender."

He would, however, speak to his inspirations.

“I like horror games, and one that especially sticks out is Amnesia: The Dark Descent,” he said. “I liked a lot about the game and I think it did a masterful job of creating a true horror experience through helplessness, atmosphere, and unsettling images (as well as building up suspense instead of relying solely on jump scares). If I had one complaint with it, it's that it doesn't have as much replay value since it's mostly scripted (I like it when games include at least some degree of randomization).”

Randomization is a huge element of Slender’s appeal. It’s resulted in a community of users scribbling out maps to help players who can’t or aren’t willing to put in the time to find all of Slender’s notes.

Slender works because it’s effective at establishing a chaotic atmosphere, and its design plays to Haldey’s own strengths and weaknesses as a creator. The character model for Slender Man is hysterically bad, but since the gameplay forces players to look away from Slender Man to survive, it’s irrelevant. It’s only when the player dies that Slender Man’s blocky polygons becomes front-and-center. By then, you’re so freaked out, it hardly matters.

Haldey said the basic character model for Slender Man was a “limitation of time,” though one he’s hoping to address with a graphical update in the future.

Work began on Slender in the beginning of May, and he released that first version soon after.

“The initial release was actually very limited,” he said. “I posted it to the Unity forums of course, since I had worked on it there. I also posted it to a Slender Man mythos forum, and to one other forum that I frequent. Other than that and the youtube video trailer (which I made to include with the aforementioned forum posts), I didn't really spread it around at all. Someone from one of the forums showed it to a popular YouTuber, who posted a video of himself playing it, and it went viral shortly after that.”

Here’s that original trailer, for reference:

That “popular YouTuber,” by the way, was Tom “JurassicJunkie” Wheldon, whose help in giving Slender an early, centralized place to live probably lead to much of its viral popularity. Upon learning there was no official website for Slender, Wheldon established www.slendergame.com a basic site (it’s more fleshed out now) with details about the Slender Man legend, and links to brand-new mirrors for the PC and Mac versions of the game.

More servers were essential, as all of them kept crashing. Wheldon's site is how I first found the game.

The website actually ticked Hadley off, since players kept assuming it was the official website.

“While initiative is good, I don't think it was right to do it without gaining my permission first,” he said.

Wheldon did ask for permission, but buried under a slew of emails, Hadley didn’t respond quickly. Given how long it took for me to get in touch with Hadley, I can understand why Wheldon went ahead, and solicited forgiveness later. When asked, Hadley still sounds slightly peeved about Wheldon’s site, but seems to have buried the hatchet now that it sports the tagline “this is not the official Slender game site.” The official site, complete with t-shirts, is now up.

Slender is currently at version 0.9.6, which includes some tiny changes to the game, including the addition of fog. As if Slender was a game that needed more ways to creep you out, right? Slender was not intended to be perpetually in development, but Hadley has plans to continue iterating on it, due to its enormous and continued popularity.

He’s not the only one hoping to capitalize on Slender Man in video game form, either. There’s a multiplayer variant in development called Slender: Source, and an awfully similar game set in different environments called Slenderman’s Shadow. More maps for the latter are on the way, and it gives credit where credit is due, as Slenderman’s Shadow opens with the text “based on Slender.”

The effectiveness of Slender Man as a tool of horror means he (or it) probably isn’t going away anytime soon. There’s even speculation Slender Man was an inspiration for a series of creatures on Doctor Who called The Silence. Who knows?

“We think the appeal about the Slenderman is that he isn't exactly what you'd picture a ‘monster’ to look like,” said Slender: Source designer Justin Hall. “He's sort of 'human' and that's probably what makes him so scary. [...] Why does he kidnap children, why doesn't he have a face, and why does he have tentacles? I think the fact that we perceive him as a human, but he's more than a human makes him scary. The fact that he cannot be explained.”

Hadley, the man responsible for scaring the crap out of so many of us, probably puts it best.

“We know nothing about his motives, his abilities, what he's capable of, or what his ultimate purpose is,” he said. “We only know he exists, and sometimes we're not even sure of that.”

Black Isle Studios has been effectively dead since 2003, but that may no longer be the case.

The worshipped RPG developer was responsible for Fallout, Fallout 2, Baldur’s Gate, Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn, Planescape: Torment, and Icewind Dale. That’s one hell of an RPG lineup.

Interplay is teasing the studio’s return on its website, though without any details on the how or why.

“Our goal has always been to make the world’s best RPGs,” reads the teaser. “Black Isle Studios is back.”

There’s an option to sign up for a newsletter, in addition to links pointing to Facebook and Twitter accounts. Neither of them actually feature any useful information.

Fallout: New Vegas senior designer Chris Avellone, who previously worked as a designer on Fallout 2 and other Black Isle Studios projects, claimed to have no details on the apparent studio resurrection.

“I know nothing about the Black Isle Studio news announcement,” he said on Twitter. “Doesn't involve me or Obsidian... or well, anyone that I know. ;)”

Interplay was last in the news for having the rights to develop a Fallout MMO stripped away from them, after attempting to get the project off the ground for years.

If our recent Quick Look of the sequel to Double Fine Happy Action Theater got you wondering “hey, maybe I should pick up a Kinect,” Microsoft has conveniently dropped the price for you.

The company announced today the official price has moved from $149.99 to $109.99, an appreciable $40 shift.

This change only applies to North America, Latin Ameria, and Asia Pacific regions, though. In Europe and Japan, Kinect remains at its current price.

In just a little while, the next game from Chair Entertainment will be available on the iOS App Store, in which you’ll finally get to live out your fantasy of, um, a boxing match between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

It’s called VOTE!!!! The Game.

Yes, it really has does have four exclamation points.

It’s a goofy partnership with the well-intentioned Rock the Vote folks, who work each election cycle to encourage voter turnout, so it’s hard to say too much about it, one way or the other. Chair has also partnered with the Video Game Voters Network and Project Vote Smart to connect players with relevant information for this year’s election.

And even though Infinity Blade is more popular than Shadow Complex multiple times over, I refuse to characterize today’s news as “from the developers of Infinity Blade,” if only to encourage Chair Entertainment to finally make Shadow Complex 2.

VOTE!!!! The Game is already live in some territories (click this link to check yours), and should be available for everyone within the next day or so.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thanks, guys. :)

@Evercaptor said:

More News Stories today that the whole of last week. Glad to see you back, @patrickklepek Looking forward to seeing audio versions of these (saw another comment you made) but if it ends up being a less "free" talk because PR has to get involved and embargoes, feel free to never ever do that.

The concept is that my "interviews" for features are usually pretty technically raw and don't sound that great--made over Skype or a phone call (it's not meant to be a podcast)--but that people might be interested in listening to them, anyway.

@Cirdain said:

Fuckin' christ can I get an audio version... I'm kidding, I'll read it later.

We have plans to get the audio version of my interviews into stories eventually.

@MrGtD said:

It just says 'Darksiders' spoilers, does that include 2?

Nope. Just the first one.