Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Two seconds of fame...

Well... more like 1.2 seconds, hehe.

Here's another great TED Talk, this one by Dave Perry of Shiny Entertainment, discussing the progress of video game graphics and the medium as a whole. There's a pretty slick progress video about six minutes into the clip showing the graphical evolution of various game genres, and the basketball players I made in 1999 for NBA Live 2000 appear for... you guessed it, exactly two seconds hehe.

I've never been proud of or happy about any single minute I spent working at EA, or of anything I created while I was there. I never was a basketball fan either, ending up on the NBA Live team somewhat by accident when I'd applied to work on Need for Speed, and I basically consider it a wasted few years of my working life, but, I was pretty stoked to see my stuff included in a TED vid. You can see my basketball dudes at 7 mins 10 seconds.

The World of Warcraft stats he discusses are pretty humbling too, and although this video was released on Ted.com just last month, it was recorded over two years ago. Those stats are a *lot* higher today. Scary! :)

Anyway, enjoy.


5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Haha, once I saw the Ebay page when people were selling their WoW characters, I thought of one of my friends whose doing the same. I think he's charging about 50$-80$ for his level 70 characterS. With an -S at the end of it. He plays that game way too much, haha

Vlad said...

I'll begin with a quote from the video: "Video games are fun, engaging, and leaving your brain vulnerable to be programmed"- That's something we all should consider. The amount of influence video game developers hold over the entire world is immense. No more is it books or teachers or parents that make us who we are. The new generations will be entirely what people, like you Mike, create in the virtual world.

There doesn't seem to be a way back in time to prevent this. So best we could do is hope this change is for the best of the world.

-vlad

Anonymous said...

it also seems that your game was the one where 3-D Mmodelling was first used. Nice.

And speaking of modelling people, do you have a set of schematic drawings of a pilot by any chance?
They're harder to locate than I first thought.

Lotus / Ramasurinen said...

Heya Doug. Nope, 3D modeling had been used in games for a good 4 or 5 years by the time I got into the industry. Don't have a pilot drawing sorry, just have to go on photos. Organic stuff is always harder to model than mechanical unfortunately.

Anonymous said...

Oh, I didn't really pick up games until 2002 or there abouts.

And, thanks for the advice on the pilot aswell.