I like this Josef Fares guy. He's whacked out and he says weird shit. A filmmaker who made a kind of wild, natural slide toward game development - I've known a couple people like this - he's carved out some kinda fuckin' lane. I understand that it's considered bad form to accrue all the valor for game development into a single person, but I also feel confident that you know that I know other people worked on it. Which is true! It would have taken way longer otherwise.
I just have a hard time imagining that these games happen without someone odd and intractable calling the shots - the themes are nuts, the co-op requirement is nuts, all of it. He reviles the industry status quo and attacks it with art. I feel like you probably should not make these games according to the received wisdom. And yet!
Their game before Split Fiction, a platformer about a married couple who are also dolls deviates somewhat from blockbuster gaming expectations, but it sorta makes sense. I've talked with prolific game designer Eric Lang a few times, and the last time we talked seriously about this kind of thing we were talking about how as big as boardgames are - and we were having this discussion at PAX Unplugged, so we had a nice Exhibit A - the kinds of games we were playing there weren't really mainstream. They're our mainstream, but they aren't the mainstream's mainstream. We're talking about something like Uno, let's say. Games which have passed into a state something like a ritual. To show me what he meant, about the kind of thing he was talking about, he found a pen and tore tore up a piece of paper to set up set up a game that is called a bunch of stuff but you might know it as The Fishbowl Game. It is easy to learn, scales like crazy, and virtually anyone can access the vibe. It isn't based on a bunch of cloistered ludic verbs. Indeed, the word "ludic" is nowhere to be found. Sometimes I wonder is Fares and Lang are eating two ends of the same spaghetti, like in Lady and the Tramp.
Hazelight likes to reach out into films to find stuff, and then let you experience it with two cameras. A buddy crime movie, an animated feature, and now with Split Fiction the most gamey-game they've ever done but it's almost a parody send-up of the medium. A Way Out sold eleven million copies, It Takes Two sold 23 million, and now the new shit moves like a million copies in 48 hours. Every one of them finds an audience, somehow. As success to failure ratios go, winning a hundred percent of the time seems pretty okay.
(CW)TB out.
