From here on out, I'm posting updates to a new blog at http://thenicestpeople.tumblr.com -- stop in and check it out.

This didn't happen. That's okay, I still fully plan to make this movie. I'll make a few adjustments and possibly launch another fundraiser for it soon, so I hope you all aren't sick of me yet. This has so far been one hell of a learning experience, and with vision and focus renewed, i feel confident in pledging to you all the best damned movie i can make, and the best you will see on the subject -- not for my efforts alone, but also for the efforts of a handful of incredible people who've offered their efforts and advice. I am not the least bit deterred. Those of you who've pledged your money, your time and your faith have been hugely inspirational, and I owe it to you all to keep going.

Have a good night.
-spinach

You Meet the Nicest People Making Videogames derives from an old Honda ad campaign for the Cub, a motorcycle. The ad illustrated everyday people riding motorcycles -- a far cry from the bike gang imagery that sprung into many people's minds at the time, reinforced by movies like Easy Rider. That ad -- more specifically, the sentiment behind the ad -- is exactly what I'd like this documentary to echo. I'd like to see more everyday people making videogames.

Why videogames? I really like playing them, and the way I see it, the more people with wildly varying ideas there are making videogames, the more interesting stuff I have to play. Just kidding (sort of). The act of creation itself, in any medium, is deeply satisfying and somewhat therapeutic. The overall goal is a more actively creative culture. Videogames are another outlet, with its own facets of the human experience to explore. And any kid with a computer can make a game or three.

On that note, this documentary is being made in parallel with, and will be followed by, a number of workshops for at-risk students in Silicon Valley. If you'd like to know more about, or help out with, that effort, drop me a line.

Thank you, everyone, for your time and support.

Once completed, this movie, its promotional material and even the raw footage will be released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license. I've got a few reasons for this:

-I've benefited greatly from free/open source software for years now, and so my contribution to the culture pool should reflect the same freedom.

-With something as easily copied as digital video, it's much easier -- and more beneficial in the long run -- to give it away than to restrict licensing and pay for all the publishing and distribution centrally.

-I want to see this grow far beyond the interviews I'm collecting, and the best way to do that is to leave the project open for others to modify. My favorite contributions so far have been offers to help make this movie better -- an audio mix, a musical score, voiceovers -- even additional filming (more on this later)! Culture is, at its base, a collaborative creation, and I'd love to see this project move forward in that spirit.

Giving it away, though, isn't enough. Simply having a movie online for people to watch whenever they might stumble upon it is a good way to go ignored. So, in the meantime, I'm fashioning a plan to set up screenings in whatever theaters I can connect to. If any of you reading this can help out on that front, please do!

You can find out more about the Creative Commons at http://creativecommons.org/

-spinach

Eugene Jarvis' career in arcade games spans most of the video arcade's history. After his first videogame, Defender, became an overnight success (and, along with Rally-X, introduced the scrolling playfield), he and Larry DeMar (his collaborator on Defender) quit their jobs and have been working for themselves ever since. Jarvis has since made a number of games spanning a number of genres, the common thread among them all being a raw humor and a tendency to place players in impossible situations from the drop of the coin. Jarvis' current studio is Raw Thrills, Inc. (www.rawthrills.com)

George Moromisato (http://neurohack.com/) is an astrophotographer and sometimes game maker. His two titles, Anacreon and Transcendence, have each seen well over a decade of sporadic development. Space is his subject of choice. He has a blog, linked earlier in this post, in which you can see his photography, his games, and some of his other writings -- be sure to check out "A Very Short History of Humanity" (http://neurohack.com/earthguide/History.html).

Peter Lu is a student at UCLA, and so far his output is completely erratic. This is entirely by design, I'm sure, as he'd said in an interview on the subject of his game Cave late last year, "I do not plan on committing myself to any type of narrative or any type of game just yet." (http://www.bitmob.com/articles/interview-with-cave-developer-peter-lu) At the moment, he's got a few other irons in the fire, including a one-switch game, Roulette, and Tower Defense, an arcade tower defense game.

Topher Florence is the incredibly subversive author of Sonic 2 Special Edition (http://lparchive.org/LetsPlay/Sonic%202%20SE/) and the DocFuture Show (http://www.youtube.com/docfuture1), and such games as Mike the Cat's Legal Defense Fund (http://blastprocessing.blogspot.com/2009/08/mike-cats-legal-defense-fund-demo-2.html) and Platformopolis (http://www.platformopolis.com/). In much of his work, he explores the absurdities of '90s pop culture and the age when videogames moved from the limits of small storage space into the age of multimedia, odd as it was. The beauty of it is, he just about always plays it straight. Amidst all the flat, supersaturated colors and cheesy tv guitar riffs, Florence's work highlights an era of videogame history anyone else would've told you is best left forgotten.

Brenda Brathwaite (http://bbrathwaite.wordpress.com/), founder of the IGDA's Sex Special Interest Group, is a longtime industry veteran who had gotten into the field in what was a very different time for computer games. Most remarkable, however, is her current series of game installations, "The Mechanic is the Message" (http://mechanicmessage.wordpress.com/) which, as the name suggests, is a set of games that transmit "the full range of the human experience"* through play alone.

*taken from the site's front page

Hunty (http://www.studiohunty.com) has a number of card and videogames under his belt. His videogame output tends to be informed by carnival and electromechanical games that predate the microprocessor, and he describes his predilection toward such games as his "pinball problem." This appetite for classic gaming lends his own output a personality you don't often find in this medium, which tends to regard its history as obsolete.

Kirk "kirkjerk" Israel (http://alienbill.com/) makes more games than you can keep up with. He's a creative force, across a few crafts and forms, the embodiment of the Crap Art principle that "the practice of art should be primarily explorative, and the creation of art should be discovery rather than invention." (http://crapart.spacebar.org/) He is a regular participant in the Klik of the Month Klub, the administrator of an open forum of creative works about love, and an all around alright guy. Check out his Vengeance of the Gods trilogy, a series of games which are essentially statements of how much eternal punishment -- eternal anything, really -- must suck.

So, when I launched this project, I didn't quite understand how the rewards in Kickstarter worked -- I thought pledging a certain amount would get you a certain reward and every reward at lower amounts on the list. So, that's pretty much the way I'm doing this. Everyone gets a sticker!

Probably the first thing anyone's asked me about this project was who I plan to interview. I've spoken with a few people about interviewing, and I've got kind of a list, but rather than give you a lame list of bullet points like the backs of so many videogame boxes at retail, I'm going to take a moment to tell you a little about each of them.

For $5.46 and a couple hours of cutting paper, I got 1,000 flyers! Just in time for South First Fridays (http://www.southfirstfridays.com/) here in San Jose -- it's an art walk, which is like a bar crawl, but dignified. I'm dropping these things off everywhere I can. Libraries, cafes, restaurants, offices, places like that. Everyone likes movies, right? I figured it'd do some good to reach out past the indie gaming sphere and see about getting people talking. You can print out the flyers, yourself! Just save the attached image, print out a copy, and go make copies at your cheapest copy center. Then, do a bit of cutting and voila! You've got flyers! Put them in places where people who play games go! Put them in places where people who watch movies go! Put them in places where old ladies play bingo! Let's get the whole world in on it!

http://forums.selectbutton.net/viewtopic.php... -- that's this year's thread over at SelectButton.net

that post is a little sparse -- check out last year's thread: http://forums.selectbutton.net/viewtopic.php...

and the question that started it all back in 2007: http://forums.selectbutton.net/viewtopic.php...

A few recommended Mario romhacks:
http://www.auntiepixelante.com/... -- Extra Mario Bros., commonly attributed to ATA (I have no idea who this is), is a completely new set of levels designed in homage to Metroid. It's a hack of Super Mario Bros., which means Mario cannot go back to the left, and yet this is still a game of exploration. Try it out if you haven't.

http://www.freewebs.com/goldenyoshi/index.htm -- Super Mario World 2+ and Super Mario World 2+2, both products of Golden Yoshi (with help from others, I can only glean from the sparse news posts), are new levels for Yoshi's Island.

Play whatever romhacks you can find, and if you're feeling antsy, make one yourself! If you've got any recommendations, please do leave a comment!