Late last year, artist Erling Løken Andersen thought it would be a nice idea to set up a website for his Fallout fan art. It was lovely art, coming in the form of posters based on those found on the walls in Fallout games, and in a nice touch, Andersen even uploaded incredibly high-resolution (and vector!) versions so people could print out their own copies.
Enter DLA Piper, a law firm representing publishers Bethesda, who own the rights to (most of) the Fallout universe. They sent a two-page letter threatening Andersen for having distributed the art, despite the fact he was not charging for it, and that Bethesda does not itself offer such images for sale.
So Andersen sent a very polite, very considered letter back, outlining his case and why DLA Piper's points of contention don't apply to a guy giving away art on the internet. You can read both letters at the link below. The lawyers are yet to respond.
I'm sure DLA Piper are just working off a brief, and this has nothing to do with Bethesda specifically targeting the guy, but still, when you hire a firm to conduct business in your name, it's your name that gets dragged into this kind of petty bullshit.
UPDATE - Those who had grabbed a poster or two before they were taken down say they weren't just close to being replicas of posters found in actual Fallout, they were essentially recreations.
It's not often I come across a game I've never even heard of putting this feature together, but that happened yesterday with Road Prosecutor. Which means, yes, I'd never heard of its arcade original Road Blaster either. Man, I wish I had. All these years I've wasted without having seen this clip.
So, first things first: Road Blaster was a 1985 arcade game using laserdisc technology. Meaning, like Dragon's Lair, you weren't really playing the game at all, you were just making decisions at certain points of an animation spinning on the disc.
It was later released on a ton of consoles in Japan, from the MSX to the Saturn to the PlayStation, but it only made the trip to the West on two machines: the Sega CD (where it was known as Road Avenger) and LaserActive (where it was called Road Prosectors).
The video above mixes audio from the American Sega CD edition with the PlayStation version's intro. It is wonderful.
If you hear the words "professional video game player", you probably picture somebody who is, well, the exact opposite of awesome. As fair or unfair as that is (sorry professional video game players!), that's usually what happens.
Unless you did the smart thing and pictured Mr. Awesome, the most awesome professional video game player the world has ever seen.
Mr. Awesome, aka Roy Shildt, may be familiar to some of you from his cameo in 2007 documentary King of Kong, in which he plays a minor, background role. Which was stupid. If you're sitting down to make a video game documentary, and you're making it about a Regular Joe and a villain whose most distinguishing feature is the fact he wears a tie, you're making a terrible mistake.
We should instead have had a documentary called Shildt Happens. It would have been, well, awesome.
Why? Because Roy Shildt is crazy. In a mostly good way. In 1983 the body-builder and fitness guru recorded the planet's highest recognised score on Missile Command. His new-found "fame", on a game he called "macho" and which has "phallic associations", sent him on a journey of proto-reality-TV madness that, viewed from the safety of 2012, seems almost prophetic.
Given the nickname "Mr. Awesome" following his feats, Shildt got it in his head that he could, and should, be a celebrity. To achieve his goal, he set out on a journey of ceaseless self-promotion, releasing books, doing interviews and trying to get his name in as many papers and his face on as many TV sets as was humanly possible.
Which in the beginning wasn't hard, because Shildt had suddenly ceased to be Roy Shildt and had become Mr. Awesome. Designing a military-inspired uniform and driving around Los Angeles in a badass, customised Camaro Trans Am (complete with MRAWESM plates), he preached to all who would listen an intoxicating mix of regurgitated film quotes, pleas for celebrity, and even some life coaching.
His escapades, which became increasingly irrelevant once the mid-80s slipped into the history books, would ultimately culminate in the release of a book almost nobody read and an appearance on Howard Stern that was, as you'd expect, slightly bizarre. Oh, and he's been in Playgirl. Twice.
In 1988 he won a contest to appear in the magazine. Which he did, in a mildly NSFW image which you can see here.
A year later he was in the magazine again, not as a model, but because he took out a massive advertisement (in which he was shirtless and standing next to a...ladder), using his real phone number, saying he was available for "bachelorette parties, character roles in motion pictures, Swedish massage, tour guiding and personal fitness training".
Perhaps the weirdest thing he did, at least that's on record, is that he sent that issue of Playgirl, along with a letter, to Madonna. In Adam Parfrey's book Apocalypse Culture II, Shildt reckons that after receiving it Madonna actually called him on the phone. He also speculated that the millionaire pop star had a "desperate need" for his sperm.
As you can see, the guy's a little unhinged. Not enough to be dangerous, but enough to consistently run that fine line between making you laugh and making you feel a little uneasy.
While it would be easy to assume he then rapidly fades into insignificance, or perhaps even some kind of institution, Shildt's Missile Command record stood for over twenty years, and was beaten only in 2006. He's still one of the world's top three players of the game, and still shooting his mouth off, like when he was kicked out of the gathering of the "International Video Game Hall of Fame" in 2010 for shouting crap at Billy Mitchell.
He is also, last I checked, still awesome.
Total Recall is a look back at the history of video games through their characters, franchises, developers and trends. You'll find Total Recall stories every Mon-Fri between 11pm and Midnight ET.
The trial of Anders Behring Breivik's is currently underway, and already there has been talk of video games and their influence on Brehvik's behaviour, which is troubling to say the least. Almost as troubling as this picture of his World of Warcraft character - how he managed to play with that user interface I'll never know…
World of Warcraft has already been discussed in the court, where the above image was shown. According to The Daily Telegraph, Breivik broke into a "broad smile" when a screenshot of his World of Warcraft character was projected into the court.
The game was brought up by the Prosecution, in an attempt to characterize Brehvik as an anti-social, troubled man struggling with a series of failures in his life.
It's difficult to know precisely how to feel when a video game makes news in this way. On the one hand it's clear that Brehvik is completely insane, and his consumption of video games is barely relevant in this case. But in the context of the prosecution's attempt to characterise Brehvik as an anti-social loner living in isolation, is it fair to discuss the fact that Anders Brehvik practically played World of Warcraft full time for a year? Possibly…
So far no-one has directly attempted to blame the Oslo Massacre on video games, which is a good thing. But the trial is still in progress, and I'm sure the topic will come up again at some point.
This post originally appeared on Kotaku Australia.
I've never experimented acid or done any kind of psychedelics. People say it's great, except for all the flashbacks and stuff. From my never-tripped point-of-view, Dyad looks like it simulates an chemically altered mindstate pretty damn well. It's got a lot more going for it than just that, though.
Shawn McGrath is making Dyad and, in the video above, he talks about the unique mix of ideas and mechanics that he's combining in the racing/shooting/puzzle hybrid. I'm terrible at the level he had me play but watching him play a far harder level later is like watching someone do a magic trick. You'll get to handle the dizzying experience when Dyad comes out later this summer.
Len Peralta just has a way of bringing out the pony fan in today's most respected video game developers. After outing Valve's Gabe Newell as a certified brony, Minecraft's Markus "Notch" Persson admits his My Little Pony Admiration on the latest Geek a Week podcast.
Now Notch wouldn't call himself a brony per se, but he does admire the workmanship that goes into creating an episode of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. He tells Mr. Peralta that it's the sort of cartoon that he'd let his children watch, if he had children. You know, standard boilerplate for a brony too timid to join the herd.
It's okay, Notch. They're a gentle bunch. After all, vänskap är magi (thanks, Google translate!)
A report on website Cult of Mac claims that, in addition to Apple's widely-expected foray into the world of TV sets later this year, the company will also be trying its hand (again) at the video game console market.
The site's sources say that "Apple is working on a television set with an iTunes-integrated touch screen remote and Siri-like voice command technology. The TV set will be coming before the end of 2012. Rumors and patents have said as much for the past year, so that's nothing new. But that's not all we've heard."
"Our sources also say that Apple's television set will come with an Apple-branded, Kinect-like video game console. The interface will rely heavily on motion and touch controls."
They then go on to mention Valve repeatedly, though with no clear link or statement tying the Half-Life developers to the program, it reads more like speculation (based on more rumours) than a report.
Sure, Valve could be helping out, at the very least with a version of Steam for the platform, but it's not like Apple couldn't handle things on its own. It seems to have no problems selling games on most of its other devices.
The last time Apple came out with a dedicated games machine was nearly twenty years ago. Things didn't end well.
How does Starhawk for the PlayStation 3 seamlessly transition between twitchy spaceship shooter to strategic ground-based build-and-battle gameplay? Lightbox Interactive's Dylan Jobe talks us through an entire single-player mission.
I might need to hire a friend to help me play Starhawk. When it comes to space sims, I am at the top of my game, ready to take on all comers. Once I hit the ground, however, I might need to pass the controller over to someone a little more qualified to shoot-n-scoot.
I'll have to act fast—Starhawk is due out on the PlayStation 3 next month.
As people pretty much already guessed, the upcoming DLC for EA's latest SSX title is retro-themed, with a "TRICKY inspired" track, throwback characters and even some old music. [SSX]
A crazy maniac budding entrepreneur is looking to Kickstarter to raise $26,400 so he can buy a whole bunch of Lego bricks.
With those Lego bricks, the Portland, Oregon-based Zachary Pollock hopes to recreate level 1-1 of Super Mario Bros. in its entirety. The whole thing. Pollock estimates that the whole project will take "780,000 lego studs." He says it will be six feet tall and 90 feet wide.
"I want to inspire a new generation of Lego enthusiasts," Pollock writes. "I also want to show people what they have forgotten, that building with Lego can be done at any age. My second goal is to use this project to test the waters for a foundation I would like to start that will work with children doing healing art projects using Lego bricks. This project aims to push the limits of imagination about what you can do with Lego bricks and particularly to break down stereotypes people have about both Lego and video games only being toys.
"I want to show the world Lego and video games can be works of art as well. Last but certainly not least I, and I think many other people, really want to see the entire level 1-1 of Super Mario Bros. made from Lego because it is just FUN! Right now I think we all need a little more fun in our lives."
Preach it, Pollock. We all totally need more fun in our lives.
Late last year, artist Erling Løken Andersen thought it would be a nice idea to set up a website for his Fallout fan art. It was lovely art, coming in the form of posters based on those found on the walls in Fallout games, and in a nice touch, Andersen even uploaded incredibly high-resolution (and vector!) versions so people could print out their own copies.
If you hear the words "professional video game player", you probably picture somebody who is, well, the exact opposite of awesome. As fair or unfair as that is (sorry professional video game players!), that's usually what happens.
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