The Next Hit Tycoon Game

The tycoon games are running out of ideas. Zoo Tycoon, Roller Coaster Tycoon, Cruise Line Tycoon, Tycoon City, Tycoon University and Porn Tycoon (Playboy the Mansion). Here's an idea! Spam Tycoon. Yes, you run a junk e-mail company, and you have to spam as many people as possible. You start by spamming with the penis enlargement pill ads. You work your way through OEM software, prescription software and web design until you are sending out fake press releases giving stock tips. (I don't purchase individual stocks, but I'm guessing most people who do can afford spam filters or don't get stock tips from spammers. But, maybe the spammers are banking on fools who will soon be parted of their money)

Have your company hire programmers to create programs to crawl the web for e-mail addresses. Create strategies for text in the spam to avoid those pesky Bayesian filters. If you want to break the law, then you can start phishing scams, send out those pleas to help launder millions of dollars, and hack boxes in order to use them to spam as many people as you can. But be careful! If you don't treat your employees well, they may report you to the cops! Your game will end if you get arrested. Yes, if you like simulations, then Spam Tycoon will be an enjoyable romp while you go from someone hand e-mailing pieces of spam to your friends to a vast spamming empire that is annoying people world wide!

The Big G's Getting Down: Shake Well Before Opening

If Mark Ecko gets to make a game about defacing public property with paint and claim it's art, then I think the Big G needs to take it to the next level. The creation of art with paints was so last millennium. Van Gogh? Picasso? Da Vinci? They we all last millennium. The kids of today want to ruin things with modern art, not the old fashioned paint-based art of their parents. Manzoni? Offili? Friedman? These renegade modern artists appreciate the medium that today's youngsters understand: feces. Mark Ecko combined art and vandalism, but using paint was his mistake. These days, the youth want to make MODERN art with feces AND vandalize! So, without further ado, I present to you: The Big G's Getting Down: Shake Well Before Opening. It has an equally ridiculous name, but a much better artistic medium: human feces. In order to stop the oppressive government and to shock the populace out of their every day lives, you have the power of your bowel movements to communicate all the truths that the corrupt politicians want to hide! Not only does the game allow you to put your poop to good use, it also is educational! Over 30 hours of dialog by these seminal artists in the field of fecal based art was recorded, so you can learn how to make lots of money off of your crap while you play! (Some of Manzoni's poop went for around $40,000)
The game also features a special mode where you can take pictures of your own real life defecations and upload them into the game to use as in game art. If that wasn't enough features to make you crap your pants, the game also has a complex neural network that compares your poop to the fecal based masterpieces of other modern artists. From that, it calculates an estimated worth of your bodily waste in an art auction. Who knows! You may find out that you've been shitting gold for quite some time!

4 months, 16 days, 22 hours and 7 minutes...

... after preordering, I received my replacement Xbox 360, and it works great! It only took me 3 months, 15 days, 10 hours and 20 minutes after launch to receive a working one... I better reserve my Playstation 3 soon, since it's going to come out in 8 months...

Secret to Getting Places in the Games Industry

Want a cushy job where you don't have to do any work, or the quality of your work doesn't matter? Just make a name for yourself! How do you do that? Many people try and get ahead in this industry, but they go about it in the wrong way. Rather than doing productive work, you need to devote your career to self promotion and taking credit for other people's productive work. This is probably true in any industry, but at least in games, the APPEARANCE of doing work is much more important than doing ACTUAL work. Think about it – if you're actually doing work, it can get overlooked. You'll be the unsung hero of the game, yes, but who wants to be unsung? You don't get anywhere by being unsung! Get sung! In fact, devote yourself to singing your praises.
Create a blog (similar to this one) and assert that you are the greatest thing to happen to this industry since the joystick (or gamepad depending on your controller preferences)! Hire a publicist to manage your image and to assist in getting the word out about how great you are... Maybe you should even do interviews, Game Developer talks about how all the smart things you “did” on your last game and a 1up.com blog. (Incidentally, my 1up.com blog just points to this one) Let's face it! The content doesn't matter. As long as you've hyped up your involvement in whatever games you may or may not have worked on, they'll be plenty of people to eat up your every word!
If we want to make more celebrities in this industry (which of course we do! Then we could have our own Oscars!) then we need more names! And the only way you get a name is by bragging! So, this is my message to all you game developers out there! Stop doing work and start taking credit for it! You'll find it's a lot more rewarding that way!

Happy Pi Day!

Today is Pi day celebrating the most useful irrational number in game development. Sorry for the lack of updates. I received a working Xbox 360 last Friday, so that has kept me occupied. I'll post the final counter later.

4 months, 7 days, 7 hours, and 33 minutes after preordering...

and 3 months, 5 days, 19 hours, and 46 minutes after launch, I happily went to EB Games (now Gamestop) to pick up my Xbox 360. What could stop me from entering the HD Era? The Xbox 360 didn't work... *sigh* I contacted Microsoft's tech support department (haven't heard back yet), but it seems that I'm doomed to remain in the Standard Definition Era forever.... The counter has changed to when I get a WORKING 360!