![\"I](\"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/stills\/hitchhikers\/movie--gargle-blaster.jpg\")
It’s done. Thank God it’s done. It’s Miller time! Well, that’d mean something if I were a drinking man. As it is, I’m a man who still needs to drop chapter stops and author the DVD, and once that’s done, and I’ve verified with my own eyes that the whole thing doesn’t look, sound or read like crap, then it’s time to duplicate like there’s no tomorrow, because there’s only a tomorrow until April 10th.<\/p>\n
Since I’ve crossed the Rubicon, so to speak, by completing the content, I’m confident enough to open the door for pre-orders<\/a>; the discs will ship at around the same time as the DVD’s premiere at OEGE (April 11th). <\/p>\n A few fun facts about the for-all-intents-and-purposes-finished-product…<\/p>\n One thing I’m very happy with on PDF Level 2 is the writing. It’s a bit of an odd thing to be proud of writing that has to share screen real estate with a little window of video game footage, and therefore by definition can’t be very long or details, but that’s just it – it’s very concise, and very non-judgemental. One thing on PDF 1 that I would not do again was the thing where I made fun of the Channel F Tic-Tac-Toe game – that might be borderline OK on the site, but the DVDs, if they’re being presented as a history timeline, should not be judgemental. Some of my own opinion and interpretation does naturally work its way into Level 2, but presented with a bit more professionalism. Other than that, however, games that you might not associate with each other end up clustered together if that proximity serves to help tell a larger story. In some cases I’d bookend stuff, or find the occasional ironic pairing (not hard to do with the 2600 games in 1987…), to make a point, to illuminate some bit of history, or – occasionally – just for laughs, just for the sheer ridiculous irony of it… or occasionally the sheer bury-your-face-in-your-hands “I can’t believe they did <\/em>that”-ness of it.<\/p>\n Some of the games covered in the later years are stuff I wouldn’t normally play, or had never played before. But part of any project like this is stretching your own comfort zone, and I had a little epiphany that not everything from the NES era was bad. Now, I still think that it’s an era where the kind of off-the-wall experimental stuff that hit us in the 2600\/Intellivision\/Colecovision era vanished due to marketing departments strong-arming designers into delivering only what the public seemed to expect and want (i.e. 30,000 Super Mario<\/em> and\/or Metroid<\/em> knockoffs). I think that’s a problem that we still have today to some extent; there are oddball games all the time, but they frequently don’t get the attention that yet another sequel to yet another franchise would get. It’s rare for, say, a Katamari Damacy<\/em> to actually break through and get some mainstream love. That I can learn to stop worrying, hang up my NES-era hang-ups and learn to love Hang-On<\/em>, shows that there may yet be hope. I clearly need to develop my late ’80s\/early ’90s gaming vocabulary. Who knows? Maybe there’ll yet be a Level 3 out of this deal.<\/p>\n But not<\/em> this year. For the love of all that is holy, not this year. I’ve cranked out two video game documentary pieces in excess of three hours, not just in the same 12-month period, but with release dates barely 40 days apart. That’s just crazy<\/em>.<\/p>\n In excess of three hours, you ask? Oh yes. Level 2 is longer than PDF 1. Here’s how it breaks down:<\/p>\n 1972-75 – 5:57 This effectively puts us at 3 hours and 3 minutes. I used to work in increments of 15 and 30 and occasionally 60 seconds. Have I done a single short-form piece since going solo? I have not. I’ve done a 30 minute talk show pilot and three DVD projects in excess of three hours (one of those DVD projects being a box set running closer to 12 hours). Still, despite all this longform love, I don’t think I’m gonna go try to produce any newscasts anytime soon.<\/p>\n The previews are kinda-sorta incorporated into the end credits, and they cover PDF 1, the CGE DVD set, and…something else. The next thing that I’ll be turning my glutton-for-punishment compulsive-writer brain to next.<\/p>\n Its task done (for now), the Avid is powered down just in time for some nasty storms to roll through the area; once I’ve double-checked the 1983-87 segments and assured myself that there are no game-killing boo-boos in there, the PDF stuff will be deleted from the machine at last and I’ll start a crash edit on another thing that has to be ready in time for April 11th: a looping DVD previewing All My Fine Products to an unsuspecting (but hopefully not unwilling to buy) public.<\/p>\n It’s an awfully strange way to make a living, this. If indeed it can be considered anything that can be mistaken for a living. But I can think of a lot worse. Which brings me to this little slice of my life that constantly sits in one corner of the Avid’s dual-monitor desktop:<\/p>\n I refer to these as notches on the digital bedpost – basically, the major projects that have been produced on this machine in the past 12 months. I’ll probably be adding at least one more before the year is out – and these are just the video projects.<\/p>\n\n
\n1976 – 4:37
\n1977 – 8:46
\n1978 – 9:17
\n1979 – 7:38
\n1980 – 8:37
\n1981 – 13:19
\n1982 – 41:12
\n1983 – 34:21
\n1984 – 14:33
\n1985 – 8:08
\n1986 – 8:13
\n1987 – 14:57
\nEnd Credits & Previews – 3:35<\/p><\/blockquote>\n![\"Buenos](\"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/earl\/hizzouse\/q1-09\/notches.jpg\")
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