knockknock.biz luggage tags. Photo courtesy of justinph.

I guess it's finally time for me to level up.

It was the summer of '99 when I convinced my then editor to send me on a tour of the U.S. videogame industry. When I finally returned three weeks later, my head was still spinning. I felt as though I'd seen the future of entertainment. It was then that I made it my mission to put NEWSWEEK's coverage of this growing medium on the map. I did that in print, with cover stories on the Japanese launch of the PlayStation 2 and the spread of online gaming. I did it online, with the debut of the blog N'Gai Croal's Level Up. I did it on television, with appearances on MSNBC and CNN. You all watched me push, prod, praise, scold, discuss and debate videogames across multiple media, both mainstream and enthusiast. That's because my editors were prescient enough to let me apply my talents and establish my reach beyond the magazine, from co-blogging with MTV News to writing a monthly column for Edge and more. For this, I say to them all, thank you.

Having achieved all of this, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that I've accomplished what I set out to do ten years ago. And now it's time for me to take that decade’s worth of accumulated knowledge and do something else with it. After Friday March 6th, my passions will take me beyond the world of journalism. I’ll be wearing many hats on this new journey: videogame design consultant, media strategist, consumer technology reporter, columnist, blogger and, as always, provocateur. You’ll be able to keep track of my various adventures at ngaicroal.com, and feel free to reach out to me via email at ncroalbiz@gmail.com. It’s been a pleasure conversing with all of you, and I look forward to continuing our dialogue in the years to come.

Cheers,

 ngmoco founder Neil Young 

On June 18th, Level Up broke the news that EA Blueprint boss Neil Young was leaving Electronic Arts to launch his own company. Last Friday, we caught up with Young by phone to procure some additional details about his venture, named ngmoco. The "affable Brit," as we described young in our previous post, was happy to spill some of the beans, while keeping others secret for later. Here's what we learned, presented in our handy Just the FAQs format.

What the heck is ngmoco?

It stands for Next-Generation Mobile Company.

I repeat: what the heck is ngmoco?

Young plans to focus on developing and publishing games for iPhone class mobile devices.

That's it?

No, there's more. "I want ngmoco to feel like 1st party for the iPhone," says Young.

To read the rest of our Just the FAQs exchange with Neil Young, click on the link below. 

Level Up has just learned that Electronic Arts veteran Neil Young has left the company for an unspecified "new project," on which EA Games label president Frank Gibeau wishes him the best of luck. During his 11 year tenure at EA, the affable Brit captained such projects as the ahead-of-its-time alternate reality game Majestic and the well-received licensed game The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Following that, Young was put in charge of Maxis during the production of Sims 2 before being promoted to vice president and general manager of EA Los Angeles, where he supervised Medal of Honor Airborne and Boom Blox. Before his departure from EA, Young was heading up EA Blueprint, which was exploring the creation of adventurous new intellectual properties with smaller teams and budgets. We're working the phones to find out where Young will land next; as soon as we find out more, we'll update you.

In the wake of Young's departure, EALA bigwig and Westwood Studios founder Louis Castle will take over EA Blueprint.

To read the the full text of the email from Frank Gibeau to the team at EA Games announcing Young's departure, click on the link below.

Grand Theft Auto IV and Wii Fit have scored headlines for shifting public opinions about videogames by deftly tackling the respective subjects that inspired them: crime and fitness. Now comes Metal Gear Solid 4 ($60; konami.com), whose major themes derive from a most unlikely place: President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address warning against the dangers of the military-industrial complex.

Well before last October’s hearings into possible abuses by real-world contractors like Blackwater, game designers became fascinated with the character of the hired gun, including such pro-mercenary titles as Raven Software’s Soldier of Fortune (2000) and Pandemic’s Mercenaries (2005). The appeal is perhaps obvious, but psychologically telling: placing you in the role of a merc gives you access to all the cool ordnance you’d find in the glut of Army games out there, but without having to deal with the annoying hierarchical command structure that comes with the armed forces.

MGS 4 isn’t the only game looking skeptically at the post-9/11 corporatization of military functions—clips and quotes from Eisenhower’s 1961 speech were prominently featured in the trailers for both Army of Two ($60; ea.com) and Cipher Complex (not yet released; ciphercomplex.com)—but it’s by far the most thoughtful, even if its premise is not particularly original. Yes, a villain from the previous games turns up in the Middle East with yet another plan for global domination and, yes, only your lone hero—the prematurely aging Solid Snake—can stop him. But creator Hideo Kojima clearly has more on his mind than a repeat of the hide-seek-and-shoot mechanics that have made him the master of the genre he calls “tactical stealth action,” which emphasizes patience and strategy over the simple pleasures of run-and-gun.

When Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment senior vice president Jason Hall stepped down from his post in February of 2007, Level Up was there for an exclusive first interview. The press release announcing his exit declared that Hall would enter into "a first-look videogame and feature film development deal through his wholly owned production company, HDFilms Inc," and last May, we got a glimpse at one of his first projects in an embryonic stage. The project in question was a proposed 15-30-minute "Jackass"-meets-"Game Head" television show in which Hall would alternate between interviewing/playing games with celebrities and videogame luminaries--and stunts like pepper spraying his assistant. We weren't quite sure what to make of it at the time, and not long thereafter, we put it out of our mind entirely--until February at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas, where Hall jointly interviewed the Level Up staff and Geoff Keighley.

Last month, Hall invited us back to his offices on the Warner Bros lot--located in the same bungalow as those of "300" and "Watchmen" director Zack Snyder--to show us three episodes of the completed product. Titled "The Jace Hall Show," it's now a five-minute Webisodic series available for download through Crackle and Xbox Live Marketplace, and we've got the exclusive trailer for the show above. Below, in today's installment of Just the FAQs, we grill Hall about exactly what you can expect from his "Curb Your Enthusiasm"-meets-"Jimmy Kimmel" take on videogame culture.

What is "The Jace Hall Show"?

It's a five minute weekly video show that covers lifestyle, entertainment, celebrity and culture as it surrounds videogames.

Free or fee?

Free on Sony's Crackle service. You can also get it in HD on Xbox Live Marketplace for 80 points?

Are you really going to make me do the math?

That's $1 U.S.

Cool. Who's hosting it?

Uh, Jace Hall.

Duh. I knew that. Did his mother really name him "Jace"?

To read the rest of this installment of Just the FAQs in its entirety, click on the link below. 

 Spore, developed by Maxis and published by Electronic Arts 

Last month, as part of our ongoing obsession with Media Molecule's upcoming Playstation 3 game LittleBigPlanet, we threw out the idea of the developers turning their 2-D prototype Craftworld into a full-on game, while allowing levels to be exchanged between the two games using a common extensible markup language, or XML. We wrote:

Here's how it would work. Media Molecule would produce 2-D Craftworld versions of all of LBP's art assets, each tailored technically and aesthetically to both the the capabilities of the specific platform and the visual style of Craftworld. Marry that to our theoretical Media Molecule Markup Language (MMML for short), and we now have a system by which a level created in LBP could be exported as a small data file to Craftworld and vice versa, just as easily as a Web page can be authored once and read in various browsers....

Games like Echochrome and Spore are, like LBP, partially or entirely built around user-generated content. In the case of Echochrome and Spore, they're also multiplatform, as we're suggesting Media Molecule should do with LBP/Craftworld. Some of those platforms have similar technical specs, like Spore's support for PC and Mac. Others are radically different, as with Echochrome (PS3 and PSP) and Spore (PC, Wii, iPhone, DS). As more developers build games that support user-generated content across multiple asymmetric platforms, it only makes sense to design their file structures in such a way that much, if not all of that user-generated content can be shared across each and every target platform.

At the end of our post, we promised to reach out to the teams behind Echochrome, Spore and LittleBigPlanet to find out how XML-ized each of their titles had become. According to our previous reporting on the upcoming game Spore, we knew that the PC and Mac versions could exchange data, while the owners of the iPhone, mobile phone and DS versions could share only share levels with users of the same specific platform. We conducted an email interview with Spore senior development director Eric Todd to get some more insight into the XML-ization of Spore; here's what he had to say:

 Echochrome, developed and published by Sony Computer Entertainment

Last month, as part of our ongoing obsession with Media Molecule's upcoming Playstation 3 game LittleBigPlanet, we threw out the idea of the developers turning their 2-D prototype Craftworld into a full-on game, while allowing levels to be exchanged between the two games using a common extensible markup language, or XML. We wrote:

Here's how it would work. Media Molecule would produce 2-D Craftworld versions of all of LBP's art assets, each tailored technically and aesthetically to both the the capabilities of the specific platform and the visual style of Craftworld. Marry that to our theoretical Media Molecule Markup Language (MMML for short), and we now have a system by which a level created in LBP could be exported as a small data file to Craftworld and vice versa, just as easily as a Web page can be authored once and read in various browsers....

Games like Echochrome and Spore are, like LBP, partially or entirely built around user-generated content. In the case of Echochrome and Spore, they're also multiplatform, as we're suggesting Media Molecule should do with LBP/Craftworld. Some of those platforms have similar technical specs, like Spore's support for PC and Mac. Others are radically different, as with Echochrome (PS3 and PSP) and Spore (PC, Wii, iPhone, DS). As more developers build games that support user-generated content across multiple asymmetric platforms, it only makes sense to design their file structures in such a way that much, if not all of that user-generated content can be shared across each and every target platform.

At the end of our post, we promised to reach out to the teams behind Echochrome, Spore and LittleBigPlanet to find out how XML-ized each of their titles had become. First up is Echochrome associate producer Kumi Yuasa, who's based at Sony's Santa Monica Studio (the game itself was built at Sony's Japan Studio). As it turns out, PS3 users can share the Echchrome levels they create with other PS3 users, but not with PSP users. Similarly, PSP users can share created levels with each other, but not with their PS3 counterparts. We asked Yuasa about this; here's what she told us via email:

 Promo image for the 1983 film "Never Say Never Again," courtesy The Nostalgia Factory 

When we saw the news this morning that Criterion Games' much-debated-then-much-praised Burnout Paradise would be coming to PC, we were more than a little surprised. That's because in the past, the studio's creative director Alex Ward has made some playfully disparaging comments about gaming on PCs. So as we were Googling for one of his previous statements on the matter to throw into this morning's High Score post, we came across a statement that he had made previously to...us. Here's the exchange we had on the subject back in the fall of 2006:

What about PC gamers? You've been critical of the PC in the past. What would you say to someone who's finished F.E.A.R., they've finished Half-Life 2, they've finished Quake IV. They've seen their little brother rocking out with Black on the console, and they want to know, "When is Alex Ward going to show me some love?"

Never. I'm just being totally honest. I could lie, right, and say "Maybe you'll see a PC game from us in the future." No.

To see the rest of what Ward told us back in Fall 2006, along with some screenshots and the full text of the press release, click on the link below.

 

To get some more information on tomorrow's announcement of the Rubik's World title for Wii and DS, which will be published in the fall by The Game Factory, we conducted two separate interviews. We spoke first with the game's Dutch developers: Two Tribes managing director Martijn Reuvers, and the company's creative director Collin van Ginkel, who also serves as lead designer on Rubik's World. We also spoke with with David Hedley-Jones, senior vice president for the Rubik brand at Seven Towns, which owns the Rubik's Cube IP. Here's what they had to say:

Whose idea was it to make a Rubik's Cube game?

David Hedley-Jones, senior vice president for the Rubik brand at Seven Towns, credits The Game Factory with the original vision for this licensed videogame. "Game Factory approached us," he says. "They were obviously aware that there's a whole new craze going on about Rubik, which has been building over the last four or five years, reaching a critical mass last year in 2007 and carrying on this year as well. It's a great time to get involved with a brand and an iconic image that's appealing to a whole new young generation."

I want to know more about the game, but this Rubik's Cube revival is interesting. Did Seven Towns drive that, or did it happen more organically?

"It was fairly organic, to be honest," says Hedley-Jones, citing the slew of programs at the turn of the century that looked back at significant pop culture events, many of which devoted time to the Rubik's Cube. He also points to the independent World Cube Association, which bills itself as an organization which "governs competitions for all puzzles labeled as Rubik puzzles, and all other puzzles that are played by twisting the sides, so-called 'twisty puzzles'." He adds: "It's also been featured a lot in movies and advertising in particular over the last five or six years, which obviously creates a great brand awareness."

Advertising? You mean like that Playstation 3 launch commercial?

Absolutely. "They came to us and asked us if they could use the Cube in their advert," says Hedley-Jones. And in a wonderfully recursive example of life imitating art imitating life, Game Factory publicist Damien Sarrazin told us that when his company and developer Two Tribes went to pitch the Rubik's World concept to Seven Towns, one of the pieces of video they showed was that very same PS3 ad. "The commercial with the PS3, where you see actually the Cube being deconstructed, is the ancillary idea of our game concept," Sarrazin says.

I'd like to hear from the developers now, thank you very much. Are they Rubik's Cube experts?

To read today's installment of Just the FAQs in its entirety, click on the link below.

At Nintendo's media event in San Francisco a few weeks ago, we made the acquaintance of The Game Factory publicist Damien Sarrazin. He was there to show off the first of an intriguing series of relaxation games for Nintendo's DS handheld. But as we chatted, Sarrazin casually mentioned another title that had yet to be revealed, this one involving the Rubik's Cube license. The combination of a mainstream brand and an unannounced title was too intoxicating for the Level Up staff to resist, so like Activision and Aerosmith, we locked up this announcement exclusively. We've also scored an interview with the game's developer (Two Tribes) and the owners of the Rubik's Cube intellectual property (Seven Towns), which you can peruse by clicking here.

To read the Game Factory press release that will be crossing the wires tomorrow, click on the link below.

It's a warm Tuesday night at the Olde Fort Pub in Ft. Thomas, Ky., just across the river from Cincinnati, and the regulars are rolling in with the early spring breeze. The Reds game is on the big screen, but no one is watching. Kid Rock wails from the jukebox, but no one is listening. The pool table is lit, but no one is playing. Instead, the crowd is cheering on Casey Niehues, 23, as she rips off a blazing guitar solo on Guns N' Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle." But Niehues isn't really playing guitar; she's playing Guitar Hero, the wildly popular videogame.

As a virtual GNR plays on the flat screen behind the bar, the petite blonde supplants Slash by pounding colored buttons on the fretboard and strumming the plastic "string" on her ax, a game controller more akin to Fisher-Price than Les Paul. But don't try telling these revved-up rockers they're playing a game. "It's just totally different," insists Clem Fennell. Barmaid Rachel Wallingford hollers over the din: "It makes you feel like a rock star."

But as the band Boston (a Guitar Hero act) might say, it's more than a feeling. It's a cultural high-tech phenomenon that is changing the way we interact with music. Listening and watching aren't enough anymore. Now we want to play along. Millions of us are doing it, including gray-haired gaming newbies who still think Grand Theft Auto is a felony. Since Guitar Hero debuted in late 2005, nearly 15 million copies have rolled out retailers' doors, according to market researcher NPD Group. An additional 1.83 million copies of Rock Band, a new game involving guitar, bass, drums and vocals, have sold since it launched last Thanksgiving. In each game, you play along by pressing color-coded buttons on your instrument in time to colored dots coming at you on the screen. The more dots you hit, the better the song sounds and the more points you earn to get deeper into the 58-song set list. Together, the two multiplatinum hits represent a $2 billion market, analysts say.

Behind this rock-and-roll fantasy is Harmonix, a Cambridge, Mass., game developer staffed by rock-star wanna-bes and game geeks. The creator of Guitar Hero, and now Rock Band, was founded in 1995 by two quirky artists, who turned their musings as MIT Media Lab partners into a booming business. Today, these old college chums, Alex Rigopulos, 38, and Eran Egozy, 36, oversee a staff of more than 200 in the former offices of Harvard's Russian Studies department, where spike-haired and tattooed employees zip around on Razors among the detritus of musical instruments, both real and simulated. "It looks like we're having band practice," says online community manager Sean Baptiste as he strolls past a giant gong used to call staff meetings to order.

Harmonix's history is the classic "Behind the Music" story of the 10-year "overnight" sensation, complete with career setbacks and band breakups. In fact, Harmonix lost the Guitar Hero franchise when game giant Activision bought it, along with the game's plastic guitar maker, two years ago. So Guitar Hero III, the latest version, is now playing for a different company. But Rigopulos and Egozy hooked up with MTV, which acquired Harmonix in November 2006 for $175 million and bankrolled Rock Band. MTV, part of media giant Viacom, gave Rock Band the star treatment, with promotions at the Video Music Awards and even its own "Behind the Music" episode.

Having created a monster market in musical pantomime, the challenge for the gaming glimmer twins is topping themselves. But Rigopulos and Egozy don't seem daunted. Lounging on couches inside the "Star Chamber," a soundproof room where Rock Band plays on a continuous loop on a massive TV, CEO Rigopulos (a rock drummer) looks goth in his black hoodie, while chief technical officer Egozy (a classical clarinetist) looks preppy in his chinos and button-down shirt.

Read the Full Story Here

 Electronic Arts' famed "Can A Computer Make You Cry?" print ad, which departing exec Bing Gordon helped create 

Once we got wind last week of William 'Bing' Gordon's impending departure from Electronic Arts, we quickly sought a pre-briefing, to which the PR teams at both Electronic Arts and Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers graciously assented. We spoke by phone yesterday evening with Gordon, whose laconic California drawl belies one of the industry's most colorful and outspoken characters. Last night's chat, however, found him in a more contemplative mood, as he looked back at his tenure at EA--where he's credited with everything from creating the EA Sports brand to founding EA's studio system--and forward at the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead as he enters the dizzying world of venture capital. To give you a sample of our conversation as quickly as possible, we've given Gordon the Just the FAQs treatment, but we plan to publish a more complete Q&A from our wide-ranging conversation in the days to come.

Why did Gordon decide to leave Electronic Arts for Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers?

Three reasons. First, he's comfortable with the partners at Kleiner Perkins. "I've known the leading partners at Kleiner since John Doerr and Brook Byers made a founding investment in Electronic Arts in '82," Gordon told us. "Then Brook went on the board, and Brook was kind of the cool guy on the board; deeply believes in entertainment and entrepreneurial possibilities. So he shaped my thinking about what a board member can be."

Over the last decade, Gordon has stopped by Kleiner Perkins from time to time to see what they've been up to. This, he says, resulted in him being invited to join the boards of such Kleiner Perkins investments as Amazon and Audible. "I kind of have 25 years with them. Like 'em; get my best reading list from them. So that's kind of the first thing: long experience and love for the Kleiner way of doing things."

What's the second reason?

With an empty nest looming as his daughters go off to college, he's been wondering about the second act in his American life. "I've got 15 more years to do something—might be cool to do something else" says Gordon of his thought process. "The first thing that popped into my head was Kleiner. Just unbidden, popped into my mind."

And the third?

To read the rest of today's installment of Just the FAQs, click on the link below.

 The Hospital Fees mini-game from Bright Light and EA's Monopoly

After we spent a good 20 minutes playing Electronic Arts' Hasbro, we were intrigued enough by it to set up an interview with the developers at EA's Bright Light studio in the U.K. On Friday, we spoke by phone with creative director Matt Birch and producer Darren Potter. We'll try to bring you the entire interview at a later date, but for now, here's a sample of what we discussed in another installment of Just the FAQs.

Monopoly has been around forever. What's different about this?

The highlight of EA's Monopoly is a mode that they're calling The Richest. "The idea with The Richest was to take advantage of the speed of computing to make a game that a modern family could sit down and play in 20 or 30 minutes," says Matt Birch, the game's creative director. Think of it as the speed chess version of the game you know and love.

Interesting, but vague. How does it work?

For The Richest, your goal is still to amass the most wealth, but here, you keep score with assets. The more properties you own, the richer you are. When you land on a property that no-one owns, it's yours. But when you land on a property that someone else owns, you have to give them one of your properties as rent--and vice-versa.

I get that. But what's with the speed chess analogy?

To read the rest of this installment of Just the FAQs, click on the link below.

 Monopoly, developed by Bright Light and published by EA Casual 

Last week at a media event in New York City, Electronic Arts unveiled its take on Hasbro's enduring Monopoly. It's currently in development for Wii, 360 and PlayStation 2, with the Wii serving as the lead platform. The game will be released this fall by the EA Casual division, at the same time as the relaunch of Hasbro's board game Monopoly Here & Now: The World Edition, so named because Hasbro is retiring such famous spots as "Boardwalk" and "Park Place" with the names of cities from around, um, the world. We played it at the event, where EA's reps were focused on showing off The Richest, a new spin on Monopoly that blends mini-games with a sped-up version of the classic gameplay for a clever, highly entertaining version of Monopoly whose playtime is measured in minutes, not hours. See below for the press release, and be sure to check back for the newest installment of our Just the FAQs interview series, in which we speak with the title's U.K. developers.

To read EA's press release, click on the link below.

 Dilbert's Punchline mashups on the recently-relaunched Dilbert.com Web site

This morning, Scott Adams and United Media officially announced the upgrade relaunch of Dilbert.com., the companion Web site to Adams' long-running comic strip. With the relaunch of the original site via a soft launch last week, Dilbert has officially moved into the 21st century, with features ranging from Dilbert's Punchline (which lets you test your wit against Adams' by rewriting the punchline to that day's strip) to animated shorts. Adams was kind enough to spare some time for an email interview; here's what he had to say about Dilbert 2.0--and whether or not the nation's cubicle drone-in-chief has more of a future in videogames. Read on.

How long has Dilbert 2.0 been in the works?

The planning started a year ago. Obviously the technical work has been concentrated in the past several months.

What inspired it?

Dilbert is an early adopter, like most of my readers. I was the first syndicated cartoonist to include an email address in the strip and incorporate reader suggestions (1993), and the first syndicated comic to be offered on the Internet (1995). More recently we were the first to offer a widget for the strip. As the technology evolves, we look for ways to make Dilbert more participatory.

Many of the changes on the new site are a natural evolution, such as the color strips and the improved archive search. But the mashups are the exciting part. People like to talk more than they like to listen, and this makes Dilbert more of a conversation than a lecture. (More social, if I can use that buzzword.) You can see from the early volume of responses that the mashups are going to be huge.

How are the Cartoon Mashups going to work on your new site?