GB: So do you intentionally try not to make sense? Or does it just happen?
NF: So be serious for like 10 seconds: Artistically, what I try to do is to try to reach down inside my mind and touch the first little thoughts that seem cohesive and then pull them out and do stuff with them. I believe that when you do that, you will get a nonsensical stream of thoughts that are somehow tied together because it came from one mind. And if you don’t second-guess them, it’s like your unconscious just puts together this dream-craziness. And so when I bring them out into the game, if there’s any themes that are left half-baked or something, I try to bake them so that everything makes sense in a crazy way.
GB: It’s an internal logic that maybe we don’t understand in this universe.
NF: I expect no one to understand it, but when they look at it, they’ll get the sense that there is some crazy logic under the surface. But they don’t know anything.
GB: I mean, really, Pac-Man doesn’t make any sense.
NF: Right, right. Like, look at old games like Super Mario Bros. I mean what the hell? You’re jumping on mushrooms and going down pipes. Like, I like that a lot. I like complete batshit crazy stuff. I try really hard to fill the game with all kinds of interesting fun stuff that if you look at it, it’s just interesting, it’s not vanilla, basically.
We try to operate in a way that we hope we’ll make a really cool game each time that is unusual. We had Weapon of Choice, then came Shoot 1UP. And then Explosionade, and then Game Type.
Game Type was an art game, like a satire game. We actually sold it, I didn’t mean to sell it but we put it on the Xbox 360. It was a satire piece to browbeat Microsoft into the complete stupidity that they executed with the dashboard that year. And it worked, they changed it within like two weeks, which is really fast.
GB: So tell me about that game.
NF: We were heading into Microsoft Indie Games and really committed to it, and we loved doing it. We were getting onto Xbox Live Arcade also with Serious Sam but still we loved the Indie Channel. So Microsoft put out this dashboard update, and they changed to what is the new system basically. They had those little metrotiles. Those little blocks everywhere.
And when you like *bloop bloop bloop* over to Games, they had managed to hide the entire game marketplace under a single tile, and they called that tile Game Type. So Games on Demand, Xbox Live Arcade, Indie Games, everything, was under this one tile called Game Type. Which is nothing but programmer talk for “I meant to call that something else.”
GB: That’s like placeholder text.
NF: Yeah it’s craziness. And what’s worse is, they then went on to not do something normal like cycle the image with box art from games or whatever. They put a photograph of a woman doing a jump kick, and she was wearing a hoodie. And that was the image for Game Type. It was some sort of Dada-ist piece of art, I didn’t know what to make of it. No one could find the games!
So what I did was, I made a game that actually was a complete replica of that new dashboard and what happened was, it had a helper arrow. And it would keep pointing you to what buttons to press to get to Game Type. Because no one was gonna find the games ever at that point. They’d just done their best job to bury digital games.
That dashboard also probably had three times the ad space now. So in our mock dashboard, we made up I don’t know like 15 made-up, funny ads. Like we had “Cat Chat,” which was all cats talking network. We had “Giant Enemy Crabs,” and that was a seafood restaurant that [Sony president Kaz Hirai] was running.
So anyway, you would go to Game Type, and you would find the games, and then you clicked the button and it started a shoot-em-up that featured Hoodie Girl, she was in there. She was your character, and you flew her around, and she kicked and she karate-chopped and she screamed, “Parkour!” because that seemed like the kind of thing that Microsoft would make her say because that was cool.
She was fighting all the ads from the dashboard. So they would come out in different forms and attack her. The game looped, and the background was this wasteland of burning game consoles. So there was Dreamcast and Sega Genesis and Super NES and Nintendo in the background just on fire because shit sucks now.
We crossed over to the digital age and now there’s ads everywhere, you know. And the ads are in front of everything. And I think Music and the Movie section was really far up, too, compared to the Game section. It really pissed me off, so that was Game Type.