My Future in the Hobby
Entry posted by mos6507
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Well folks, this blog post is a long time coming.
I'm formally announcing that I'm bowing out of the classic gaming scene.
Well, I am kind of describing what I've already done by default. Over the last few years I've become increasingly distant from the hobby. My involvement has waxed and waned. Chimera was going to be the big epic swan song and when Delicon disappeared, it was like all the air going out of the balloon. What I think is really informing me that "it's time" is the fact that Harmony has become so close to what Chimera was intended to be, which is awesome, and yet I'm so "meh" about it. I should be all excited about it! I should be playing around with it and contributing feedback to the project and all that, and I'm not. Groundbreaking stuff is going on and I'm just completely out of the loop. It's no disrespect to the work being done by everybody, it's just me.
When I agreed to make AtariVox boards, I did so more for the opportunity to really learn how to solder than anything else. And I felt it was kind of a "good deed" I could do for the hobby regardless of how much passion I personally still had for it.
What happened is I lost my job around the time I was soldering boards and fell into a depression. By the time spring rolled around I got totally engaged in my other hobby (if you want to call it that) which is edible landscaping and victory gardening. It's something about as diametrically opposed from the Atari scene as you can imagine. Over late summer and into the fall I built a Geodesic greenhouse in my backyard. I've done countless projects in and around the property with more to come when spring rolls around again.
If that weren't enough, about a year and a half ago I discovered a technology called Xtranormal. You've probably heard about it by now with the HTC vs. iPhone or "Explain the Fed" videos which have had millions of hits. Well, I was using it long before anybody had ever heard about it.
There actually is a direct connection between Xtranormal and AtariVox, since Xtranormal uses voice synthesis. Voice synthesis is something I've always been interested in, all the way back to Software Automatic Mouth on my 1200XL, and in the late 90s at a startup called IPyxidis where I created these custom Microsoft Agent characters that used the terrible SAPI4 voices. Now that stuff is really starting to come of age through machinima tools like Xtranormal, or other things I've been looking at. So it's the same thing that made me want to make the speech strings for Juno First that makes me enjoy playing around with the speech on Xtranormal.
It also represents something of a dream come true for my frustrated filmmaker ambitions. Machinima like this has the potential (despite the numerous limitations) to allow me to be a "bedroom" filmmaker in a way that would have been a fantasy when I was 13 years old running around in a Batman outfit in front of a Super-8 camera.
Xtranormal is giving me the opportunity to apply my film school background AND my technical background at once. I actually despise Xtranormal the company, and have gone on to hack and extend Xtranormal's downloadable State software. So I'm just starting to make a name for myself as an innovator in this space. I hope down the line it might lead to paying work, even.
I spent the better part of the last 15 years working in the dot com space and I'm deeply entrenched in mid-life-crisis right now. So for better or worse, I'm looking at machinima as something of a "second act" for me, an escape route out of web programming (which has grown so stale) and into something else that I have a real passion to do.
So I will make good on AtariVox+ one way or another. I'd much prefer to send the boards to AA to sell but the store is down and I have no idea where things stand there. If I have to sell them directly, I will. I may be slacking on actually offering these, but I have never screwed anybody out of their order money. When and if I take money, I will have the boards in a ready-to-ship state, period.
But I wanted to let everybody know where I stand because I've been involved in the hobby since 1994 or so and for those who have seen me as sort of a "fixture" should know why I've become so aloof.
I will still pop my head in now and then. I would like to know what happens with things like Prince of Persia and Ballblazer. I like to playtest games and give constructive criticism. But again, I have to think about visiting here and more often than not I'm too consumed with other stuff to remember to check back here.
I'll probably put some of my stuff up for sale soon. My 8-bit stuff has to go first. That includes my 1400XL prototype and my Black Box/Floppy Board gear. I don't know what the market value is for it. I just want to get it into safer hands as I've moved from apartment to apartment and this stuff has been mercilessly kicking around. I haven't fired up my A8s probably for over 15 years. There's no point in holding onto them, even though I spent countless hours enjoying them as a teen. I keep telling myself I'll do something with them and I never do. I bought a dual-pokey upgrade and never installed it. Stuff like that. It's ridiculous.
I will, however, keep my 2600 stuff for the duration. I need to get a _working_ A/V modded 2600 again to do it. I have one of Chris' boards and it's not in good condition right now. If I can get a 2600 in good working order again (which I need to do to test AtariVox+ anyway) then I'll probably continue to play it now and again. My daughter sometimes asks to play it, which is surprising considering all the other stuff she plays (like Spore or DS games).
I have asked behind the scenes for someone to step forward and finish Death Derby. If there is a loose end I'd really like to have tied up, it's that. Maybe I can twist Thomas J's arm to kick-ass on that game. But I am not going to go back to 6507 assembly again. I can't justify spending the time on it vs. other pursuits, no matter how good brain-exercise it may be. I want to do more right-brain stuff these days.
Just to give you a sampling of what I AM doing, here is one show concept I'm playing around with, which is an unofficial mod of one of Xtranormal's showpacks (Suitz). Only the female characters worked for this, so I built a whole premise behind the show around this. You can see how it's infused with Gen-X nostalgia that might be amusing to AA users:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vrc6kt4r2x8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdQMCIdHIX8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIyq9B4ybRk
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