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A bundle to celebrate the anniversary of the Dreamcast’s 9.9.99 launch in the US. Sit back and listen to the sublime Sega-inspired sounds of Christa Lee, read about the console’s most cutting-edge games, play minigames that evoke its aesthetic, and escape into a musical VR trance! All proceeds divided equally between creators, helping cool people to keep making awesome stuff in a post-Dreamcast era. [su_button url=“https://itch.io/b/129/9999-dream-bundle” target=“blank” background="#478c54" center=“yes” icon=“icon: download” desc="$9. -
Dreamcast Worlds is in Games Storybundle #2
Set your price for the whole set
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Dreamcast Worlds is out!
It’s finally ready! Dreamcast Worlds is out now, just in time for the 14th anniversary of the Dreamcast’s US launch. You can learn all kinds of things about the book on rupazero.com, which includes a really amazing collection of press coverage the book has already received. I’m so pleased with the reception that the book has received so far. It’s been a long journey to get here, but I think it’s been worth it. -
About beta-launching Dreamcast Worlds
Visit dreamcastworlds.com
A couple of weeks ago I launched Dreamcast Worlds in beta. That means that from now on if anybody buys a copy they get instant access to the latest pdf version of the book, but I'm going to keep editing as comments come in until about mid-August. The book will hard-launch on September 9th, and people should be getting their print copies around about then. After the cut I'm going to talk about my reasoning behind this, and what I'm hoping to achieve by beta-launching, and a couple of the many reasons why I'm not looking for a publisher. -
Shenmue: Historical accuracy as nostalgic fantasy
Featured in February’s Critical Distance Blogs of the Round Table.
This is a work-in-progress extract from my crowd-funded book Dreamcast Worlds. I’ve selected a section that explores photorealism, deliberately moving away from technologically determinist arguments about how better console technology “allows” games to become “more expressive” (yes Sony I’m glaring daggers at you after that pseudo-history you just had to shoehorn into the PS4 presentation) and instead looking at accuracy as a design question: what does it mean for a game to be like a photograph?
Accuracy
The high level of historical details in Shenmue’s recreation of 1986 Yokosuka is as much about setting an emotional tone as is it about establishing accuracy. For one thing, they are not consistently accurate. The Sega Saturn in Ryo’s home is anachronistic - set in 1986, but Saturn released in 1990s. Nevertheless, a slavish devotion to accuracy informed work on all areas of the game, possibly in spite of calls for restraint from higher-ups at Sega.
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Backer-editing Dreamcast Worlds
I feel obliged to point out that, by popular request, I’ve set up a way for you to pre-order a copy of Dreamcast Worlds if you missed the Indiegogo funding deadline. Just go to this page.
Last week I sent Dreamcast Worlds supporters the first extract from the work-in-progress, and asked what they thought about it. It was the first step in an experiment in ‘crowd-editing’, though in reality, the ‘crowd’ part isn’t really appropriate - it’s more that a small number of backers are generous enough with their time to discuss the book with me and share their opinions. But the principle is that as a self-publishing, crowd-funded writer, I have a direct connection with my audience - and as such, I don’t have to make guesses about what they want from a book. I can just ask them.
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How did it gogo?
I published this on Gamesbrief this week and thought it would be nice to keep it here too as a postmortem of the Indiegogo campaign.
Not long ago, I was talking about crowd-funding with someone over coffee. ‘I remember in the wake of the Doublefine campaign,’ they said, ‘Tim Schafer started publishing all these articles about how to run a successful Kickstarter. I thought, are you kidding me? You were successful because you were famous. Strategy had nothing to do with it. Crowd-funding isn’t going to work if you’re not a tried and tested name.’It’s true that an unknown budding creative with a dream and a concept drawing is unlikely to raise millions of dollars on Kickstarter. However, I just recently raised $5000 on Indiegogo for a book on the history of the Dreamcast, and when I started the campaign I had just 150 Twitter followers (@rupazero, in case you were wondering). It was an amazing experience - I learned a lot about community, marketing and metrics, and came out the other side with the means and motivation to get my book finished.
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Dream come true
This feels strange. I’ve got a bunch of client work out of the way for the day, and now it’s time for me to settle down and start actually working for myself. Well, actually I’m working for the 110 people who have funded Dreamcast Worlds and are expecting some good results from me. That’s even stranger.
[caption id=“attachment_905” align=“aligncenter” width=“740”]
CC Paul de los Reyes[/caption]I’m nervous, overwhelmed, excited, and did I mention nervous?
So, what comes next? I’m partly writing this to answer a question other people are asking me, and partly writing it to make sense of it myself.
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"The best time at Sega Europe was at the launch of the Dreamcast"
As part of further research for my possible book Dreamcast Worlds (fund it here or it can’t happen), I recently interviewed Tom Szirtes about his time at Sega Europe. He was working in product R&D during the Dreamcast era, and paints an image of a tech playground where innovation was king and anything was possible. Here are some extracts:
“My job was initially to support developers who were writing games for Sega platforms, Sega Saturn and then later Dreamcast, but I was also developing all sorts of really odd bits. I worked on developing the network - you know, Dreamcast was connected to the network so you could find other games to play and compare high scores, and I wrote that bit. I did the Dream On demo disc, so I put all the game demos in one thing and packaged it onto Dreamcast Magazine. I worked on some games, mostly for the Saturn - I did some work on Sonic 3D - and then the last thing I did was I worked on a title called Planet Ring, which used voice over IP.
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Still thinking - learning from Dreamcast game design history
This is one of two talk proposals I’m sending for GDC. It kind of relies on Dreamcast Worlds actually getting funded, a big problem that you can help me to solve here.
The late 1990s is still an under-studied part of video game history - for many, it still seems like it wasn’t so long ago. But as we reach the end of another console generation, now is a good time to look back to the short and fondly remembered lifetime of the Dreamcast.
It was a time when software and console developers were finally, excitedly pushing frontiers into open-world, online, fully three-dimensional game worlds. Sandboxes, life simulators, and MMOs were turning the Gibsonian dream of cyberspace into a reality.
At the same time, many game developers were using their craft to look back at an already rich cultural history. They preserved in nostalgic virtual worlds such as the 1980s Yokosuka of Shenmue lived memories of places that had been transformed by economic and technological change.
This talk is based on my crowd-funded book on the history of the Dreamcast and research at the Victoria and Albert Museum. I look at three game worlds from the inside-out, to reveal their authentic histories. Taking a design historical approach, I occupy game spaces, analyse artefacts, and draw connections to the people and technologies that created, distributed and consumed them.
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Dreamcast worlds: a design history
I’ve launched an indiegogo campaign to fund a book expanding on the 30,000-word thesis I wrote for my Master’s at the Royal College of Art.
I intend to write a historical book about Dreamcast games, with a unique approach - instead of following the life stories of heroic game designers, or recounting how and why the Dreamcast failed commercially as a games console, in this book I tell the story from right inside the games themselves. And I plan to do it with your help.
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Change is the ultimate weapon
cation changes the theme of the game, to the tension between fragmentation and wholeness, between diversity and imperial unication. Resistance against the unification and thereby destruction of the world is an interesting story to tell in a game on the theme of pirates, because it lauds individualism and regionalism in defiance of a structuring global order. This is a curious narrative for a Dreamcast game, because of the possible parallel between the totalising technology weaponised in Arcadia and the unifying technology of digital networking that was the console’s unique selling point. -
Concluding thoughts to my thesis
cance that could not be satisfactorily covered here. What has been achieved through this thesis is an exciting and valuable methodology for video game design study. In a similar way to how I analysed specific objects from the game worlds of Final Fantasy games in a term paper in my first year, I have here looked at particular spaces and places in Skies of Arcadia. While this makes it sometimes difficult to consistently maintain a critical distance from the game itself as the constructed and traded object in question - I have been criticised for slipping into treating game worlds as if they were real' - I believe that this approach actually unlocks a more critical engagement with the game's design, by questioning specic strategies, rather than looking at the entire game as a whole. -
Wood, metal, plastic: ship design in Skies of Arcadia
first twenty hours or so of gameplay, the Little Jack is a second home to the main characters. Its wood textures are set off by tarnished brass, mirroring the character design of its owner, Drachma, who has a brass prosthetic arm. This design feature is a charming contribution to the storyline, as it creates an intimacy of place even though the character himself is stand-offish and private. Wood on the Little Jack is less about playfulness, as it was on Horteka, and more about homeliness. -
Technologically flat game design
nity as they learn how to game the battle system in order to achieve progress. Another game that very clearly presents technology as a product of temporal advancement is Sid Meiers Civilisation series. In these games, the player controls the development of a civilisation by managing the resources of a city-state, military strategising, and directing technological research. Technology in these games is presented as a tree leading from primitive technologies such as the wheel' and meditation' all the way to refridgeration, space travel and future tech'. -
Narrative architecture and verticality
fight in order to pass through. The use of underground architecture for subversive action is established on Pirate Isle, where all buildings and objects that relate to piratical activity are located in a secret underground base. This equation of height with power lends itself to a reading of Arcadia’s architecture as panoptic. In some ways this is true. Valua features many electric searchlights that glare down on the characters from above, at one stage in the game actually posing a real threat as being caught in the searchlight generates a battle with a set of deceptively powerful robots. -
Productivism in play
gured as a setting for entertaiment.' These worlds are not representations of the real-world, but playgrounds for leisure pursuits. Like Disneyland or the Disney-themed RPG Kingdom Hearts, the game world is a `metaverse' that contains a variety of barely connected styles and moments. The fun lies in the variety, and the design of the game world has to answer to this apparent fragmentation with structure and narrative. Media theorist Scott Bukatman describes space design in theme parks assimulated tactics'; specically, simulations of the derive of the situationists, an aimless passage through urban space. -
Taxonomising play
finitely win eventually. In reality, the risk is minimal, and the probabilistic nature of attack success simply functions to provide disappointment when an attack does less damage than expected, and thrill when it exceeds expectations. The issue of mimicry is even more problematic - the moniker role-playing game' has more to do with the fact that the core game mechanics are inspired by Dungeons and Dragons and less to do with any actual role-playing engaged in by the players.
