It’s an examplar of the standout solo developers of the early '80s scene that never really transitioned to team development. What’s the best way to make deep technical and design breakthroughs? Clearly monk-like seclusion!
Chris managed to confuse programming and design, a type of technical work that relies upon an industry thieving from itself, with the deep personal enlightenment of theological work.
That he did this by flouncing out of a conference to share game development knowledge he himself helped found is impossibly ironic. It almost makes up for how many times I got angry reading his book.
In 1992 Crawford withdrew from commercial game development and began experimenting with ideas for a next generation interactive storytelling system. In 2018, Crawford announced that he had halted his work on interactive storytelling, concluding that it will take centuries for civilization to embrace the required concepts.
I suddenly feel like I know everything about this person.
I appreciate that games as a creative form has so many different flavors of reclusive crank. Crawford is certainly one of the most fascinating ones we have because so much of his misery is purely of his own design. Whenever I see a reclusive games crank who appears to be this way because they have no community around them, or because their life has been impacted by irl suffering that keeps them from seeking community, their crankitude is sad. But Crawford chose that life, which makes it more exciting than sad? I don’t know, I’m probably just mean.
i played some of the Mario 64 hack “B3313” that’s been compared to Yume Nikki a couple months back and i still think about this particular area where this particular song plays:
a Mario 64 hack evoking these weirdly complex, ambiguous, melancholy, unsettling feelings that i rarely see in media in general is really cool. i don’t think the other areas quite lived up to this particular part for me but it’s still a very unique hack regardless. but i’ll prob play more of it again in the future, esp as it seems like it’s still being worked on.
honestly I’d be super into a handheld like that. breakable moving parts notwithstanding… I’m super into the idea of dedicated specialized displays for ui elements and game mechanics.
So like my PC desk is literally laptop screen, monitor, phone, and iPad all propped up for me to access at any given second… having all those screens do parts of a game would either be cool or hell and nothing inbetween
