Sean Murray Cliffski is a jerk. He’s not really. He’s lovely - the Barry Manilow of games, in fact. I just wanted to get your attention. Apparently, this is the only way to do so.Last week, Cliffski called Epic's Mark Rein a jerk and everyone got very excited. I haven’t read the internet lately, but judging by the reaction, presumably name-calling is rare.
A bunch of us indies were doing a panel at the Develop conference together, and Mark Rein interrupted us. Later Cliffski posted about it on his blog and Kotaku, 1UP, Eurogamer and more picked it up.
Now, as it happens, I’ve met Mark Rein a couple of times before. He seems to be the only big development name who actually attends most of the talks at game conventions, and I hope he keeps doing so.
I first came across him when I worked on a game prototype that used Unreal. I couldn't use the website, and mailed the webmaster to get a new UDK login. Mark replied. Instantly. At 4am his time. On a weekend. Just to let me know he’d reset my password. He’s Epic’s main salesman, so that's not good customer service, it's just weird. I expect he doesn’t sleep: he waits.
Six months later I bumped into him in the queue for a buffet at GDC and he remembered what I was working on.
I was already biased to like him, though. Writing a mod for UT was my first introduction to proper game programming. At the time, Epic was tiny and the name was ironic. CliffyB sent me feedback on one of my levels and I once spoke to Epic's founder, Tim Sweeney, on IRC.
Mark is what most people would refer to as a “character”. He's one of the loudest mouths you’ll ever meet. He writes emails on his phone whilst you're trying to talk to him. He appears to be powered by some sort of nuclear battery and if you could listen to his thoughts they would be chanting “UDK, UDK, UDK”, to the rhythm of “USA, USA, USA”.
He’s one of those people I guess who has a lot of the traits of being a jerk, but I don’t think he is actually one. Basically, I sympathise because I have that problem too.
So I think Cliff was wrong, but from where he was sitting I’d have drawn the same conclusion. Being interrupted is generally rude and if Cliff can’t write what he likes on his blog, then fuck it, let’s all go home.
It's just strange that the story was so widely reported and almost all the comments were supportive of Cliff. Very few people questioned if Mark was actually a jerk, or hated indies. Presumably like me, most people at the talk actually heard what Mark said, not what Cliff thought he said.
No one seemed to have a problem with Cliff's assumption that everyone working on Gears Of War was a macho testosterone-fuelled idiot, either. Which is strange, because my assumption is that the artists and programmers at Epic are some of the world’s most talented (and very geeky). Judging by the messages in the credits to Gears Of War 2 they absolutely love what they do, too.
The day before that happened I said that XBLA is a "slaughterhouse" for indies at my own Develop talk, which got equal coverage everywhere. The actual theme of my talk was that indies are totally awesome on PSN and XBLA. Which I think is really valid and interesting, but there's no way I'd click on that title on Kotaku (they went the monkey route instead, which I respect).
Somebody who can type faster than I can speak transcribed it here. If you scroll down to the very bottom you’ll see that after an hour of talking very fast about something very different, it was the last six words I spoke. I was so excited to have finished my talk without dropping the ball, that I dropped the ball in celebration.
On the plus side I was suddenly being quoted lots of places, and Joe Danger sold 2.3 times more copies that day. On the down side it’s a soundbite that doesn’t really make much sense without the previous hour of statistics, facts and context. It also makes me sound like some irrational PS3 fanboy, which I may or may not be.
Obviously, XBLA isn’t literally a slaughterhouse. I could have said, “It presents a high-risk opportunity with a great upside”. That would be equally true, but it’s just not the way I talk, and I don’t know anyone else who does either. For instance, this morning I have already called six different people names far worse than jerks.
The industry is just so whitewashed of personality that when someone says something normal, everyone has to grab for it like some sort of slippery pig before it escapes. Please nobody let Tim Schafer get away.
Whenever I write anything for the press, I genuinely have to be really careful to make sure it can’t be summed up in a clickable "interesting" sentence, because if it can, then that's all anyone will see and EVERYONE will see it.
I understand how those news sites feel, though. When I write one of these columns, I judge its success on the number of clicks it gets. It’s hard to judge if anyone gets any value from them, and I'd hate to know how few people really read to the end. Presumably most people don't, and I don’t know how I’d tell.
Besides, if you think XBLA is a slaughterhouse, you should check out WiiWare.
Hello Games is a small, new independent game developer based in southern England. Its first game, Joe Danger, is available on PSN right now. You can read other entries in the series here.