Grok Talk

Fracture on Penny Arcade

2008-09-21T15:07:00.000-07:00

We announced the release of LucasArt's demo for Fracture this week. Shortly thereafter, Fracture made its debut on Penny Arcade. A funny yet not altogether unkind look at a "shortcoming" in the Fracture story...or maybe a poke at military intelligence...regardless, it's pretty funny, as usual.

Take a look:

D3 Publisher & Matt Hazard

2008-09-10T10:36:00.001-07:00

We've just started working on a project with our friends over at D3 Publisher, the folks behind the BRILLIANT Puzzle Quest title on XBLA. The news is, the studio is re-invigorating a classic gaming hero who you've surely heard of -- Matt Hazard. You probably remember Mr. Hazard from some of his earlier works in the 80s and 90s, including:

The Adventures of Matt in Hazard Land (1983)
A Fistful of Hazard (1987)
Matt Hazard 3D (1992)
You Only Live 1,317 Times (YOL1317T) (1995)
Haz-Matt Carts (2000)
Choking Hazard: Candygram (2002)

Some great gaming memories there...the guns, the women, the baddies, the go-carts and even the pinatas!

You can read more about Matt Hazard at this site: www.WeaponsofMattDestruction.com.

IGN is also running a new blog about Matt Hazard here.

PAX 2008

2008-09-05T09:27:00.000-07:00

We headed out to Seattle last week for the 2008 Penny Arcade Expo (PAX 2008) to help support the first public showing of Twin Skies which is being developed by our partners at Meteor Games. It was a quick and enjoyable trip to one of the largest consumer gaming conventions in the US. More importantly, while we were only showing an early technology demo of Twin Skies, which included web interface integration and character creation (it's only been in development for 3 months), everyone who saw it walked away extremely impressed. For example:

Much of the Meteor team actually worked on Neopets back in the day, and Twin Skies reflects this - it's a bizarre fusion between casual MMOG and a series of browser-based Flash games that almost needs to be seen to really be understood. I'm not really sure what I was expecting, but what they showed mne definitely wasn't it. More detail to come, because Twin Skies is one of the most interesting games I've seen at the show so far."

John Funk, Warcry

As an exclusive for attendees of PAX and those interested in Twin Skies, we were handing out highly coveted and extremely cute plush critters pulled straight from the game itself. The plush creature is called a "Salabounder" -- in typical Meteor Games critter-naming style -- Eleplants, Gnarls, Gnunicorns, etc. They were a bit hit from kids to adults alike and I saw them all over the show floor.

And, here are a few images from the show:

Donna Williams and Tom Mannino as characters from Twin Skies (Priest and Corsair)

PAX attendees checking out the Twin Skies demo

Twin Skies Announced

2008-08-06T12:03:00.000-07:00

Matt posted about our work with the fantastic team over at Meteor Games last month, which included some of the feature coverage from the July announcement -- Wired's GameLife, AOL's GameDaily, Venture Beat and Gamasutra.

To repeat, Meteor was founded by Adam Powell and Donna Williams who were the creative geniuses behind the massively popular Neopets site for kids. Los Angeles-based Meteor is their new gig and we just announced their first new project -- Twin Skies.

Twin Skies is a new take on MMOs, and frankly I'm pretty excited about it. I'm an old sk00l MMO player dating as far back as Gemstone III but also including lengthy stints in Ultima Online, EverQuest, and, of course, World of Warcraft. I kicked the WoW habit about a year and a half ago simply due to the sheer amunt of time it involved.

What excites me about Twin Skies, among many things, is that it's going to allow me to get back in MMO gaming, but on a more mellow level. And, it's certainly going to be something my two young kids can enjoy too -- these are the creators of Neopets after all. And, I really dig that.

Here are a few screenshots from the announcement:

-- Grok

So, Why "Grok"?

2008-08-01T08:25:00.000-07:00

It's a question I've heard literally hundreds of times. I'm happily fragging n00bs, obnoxiously sniping, stealing kills, planting traps or hijacking herbs and generally having some good old fashioned fun when I run into someone who has a question about my rather simple gamer nickname -- Grok.

"What does Grok mean?" "why'd you pick that name?" "I hate you Gork and your Gorky nickname...haha!"

It's actually a rather convoluted and entirely boring story, which makes it perfect fodder for the blog!

What I find particularly interesting, is that people actually care enough about my nick to 1) actually wonder about it as it appears in front of them, 2) to then formulate a question about it, and 3) to send that question to me. Clearly, it's partly a simple form of new age gamer communication -- we only know each other by those nicknames and it's a simple way to break the ice and say "hello."

However, I think there's also a bit of confusion being expressed by the victims of my depraved gaming behavior. Grok simply doesn't fit the mold. It's short, guttural and features a distinct lack of l337 speak. (l337 meaning "Elite" as in special or super or wicked awesome). Read more about l337 from our guidebook to the future, The Urban Dictionary.

"OMGZ0rz WTF n00b u d0n7 5|*34k l33t!!1 u r n0t 4 h4><0rz> l1|<3>

These days when you jump onto a server, you'll rarely see a name you can pronounce at first pass. Sure, they exist but they are the exceptions to the l337 Speak Rules for nick creation, which clearly state:

The more complex your nick, the more exponentially powerful you become and by proxy the more l337 you actually are
Numbers are significantly more awesome than letters...duh
Foreign keyboard characters and symbols are way, way more awesomer than numbers!
Don't forget your clan name! Its complexity is also an indication of your l337ness

So, anyway, how did Grok actually come about. The seeds were planted long before multiplayer gaming and personal computers (though I did have a Commodore 64 at the time). I had just recently gotten into some heavy science-fiction reading when I was introduced to a classic of the genre in Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.

Heinlein coined the term grok in that 1961 novel, which meant "to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes part of the observed." It's a cool concept -- you know something so well, you become it -- "I Grok You!" -- and it stuck with me.

Years later, while I was at what was then Bender, Goldman & Helper (a video game PR firm in Los Angeles), Blizzard released Warcraft II. A colleague, John Foster, and I were huge fans of the original and immediately jumped into the sequel spending countless hours in LAN battles. We needed nicks to play...and Grok was born.

I've since used a number of variations -- Grokzilla, Groksmith, etc. but come back to the original whenever possible. So, if you run into one of them...it just might be me, n00b.

One Year Later...

2008-07-28T07:18:00.000-07:00

Wow, it's been 12 months and I've made exactly zero contributions to my "legacy" on the interweb. I am shamed.

However, with the launch of our very understated, yet wickedly awesome, Maverick Web Site I've made a mid-year resolution, which is to make an attempt to try to occasionally, if possible, and when time permits to be more proactive and forthright in my ongoing goal to achieve enlightenment and happiness through the use of a web log.

Credit for the new Maverick site goes entirely to Matt, he is our resident HTML monkey, and while his coding skills would leave most site designers weeping, he makes me look like I just stepped out of the intro to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

-- Grok

The Grok Speaks...

2007-07-25T10:24:00.000-07:00

Under intense pressure from my long-time colleague, partner and occasional friend over at PR_Flak's Flak Attack I have elected to toss my hat into the blogosphere to better ensure my future relevance as a human being.

I have many opinions -- most of which should never see the light of day -- nevertheless, they will reside here until the end of time or I get bored posting things nobody reads, whichever comes first.

-- Grok