The curiously ordinary desire of Tim Schafer
polygon.com
The curiously ordinary desire of Tim Schafer
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Re: The curiously ordinary desire of Tim Schafer
#2The only thing "curious" about this situation is that we've arrived at a place culturally where non-"exponential" success is held as somehow less-than. In tech we derisively call these "lifestyle businesses", as though somehow quietly producing things people want to buy at a level that makes you comfortable is a moral bad, lacking as it is in the "change-the-world" narrative so many startups tell themselves.
Meanwhile, I caught a trailer for Broken Age, decided it would be fun to sit with my toddler and play, and have been enjoying it immensely. Sure, it's not pushing the state of the art in graphics, procedural content, AI, or the medium in general, but it's beautiful, charming, and exudes craftsmanship in ways that many other "game-changers" do not.
Keep on keepin' on, Tim.
Re: The curiously ordinary desire of Tim Schafer
#3seems like an article that was done specifically just to try and save face about all the broken promises with SpaceBase, followed by Broken Age, missing deadlines, mis-managing funds, and then making jokes about your customer base. Sure there's a healthy bit of backstory and a story that tries to basically say 'He just totally deserves a top hit.' I don't think he really deserves one, maybe he should earn it?
But even then, Tim seems like he's been successful. He has a legitimately good design legacy... I'm not sure why he needs a 'super huge great selling game.'
He makes comments like this: "That’s something we’d love to do," he says. "But we don’t want to compromise our approach to games. It would just be wrong if we tried to make a game that was imitating some other successful game."
Except that from the outside it looks like they are very willing to compromise when they could have had success by just following through on their promises...
Re: The curiously ordinary desire of Tim Schafer
#4The only thing "curious" about this situation is that we've arrived at a place culturally where non-"exponential" success is held as somehow less-than. In tech we derisively call these "lifestyle businesses", as though somehow quietly producing things people want to buy at a level that makes you comfortable is a moral bad, lacking as it is in the "change-the-world" narrative so many startups tell themselves. Meanwhil…
Yes, this. I should be so lucky to build a 'lifestyle business', some kind of stable enterprise that is the livelihood of 10-20 people.