I’ve really happy about my USgamer output lately. I keep coming into really great interview opportunities and turning out, in my opinion, very interesting reads. This is not me tooting my own horn; the interesting material is provided by other people. I’m simply here as their conduit.
This is pretty much my ideal form of existence, though: Digging up first-hand accounts and information about the medium and, when necessary, surrounding it with helpful context. If I could do nothing but spend my time interviewing awesome people, I would. I can’t, of course, because barely anyone reads game developer interviews 95% of the time; USgamer gets pretty impressive traffic, but not with material like that. It would be awfully nice if this were a better planet and there were profit in such endeavors; alas, though, I’ll settle for squeezing them in where I can.
Anyway, Takashi Tezuka and his team had some interesting things to say about the new Super Mario Maker update, so that’s a good thing for you to read when you have a few minutes free. You know, if you like knowing what a legendary game designer has to say about one of the year’s most brilliant pieces of software. I feel that should pretty much encompass everyone, though?
Tomorrow, the steam trail to undeservedly sparse traffic rolls on with a first-person account of the making of The Battle of Olympus.
Man, it hurts me to hear that these developer interviews don’t get a lot of traffic. I love all the interviews that you’ve been putting up on US Gamer. So little of these game’s development is made public that it’s always great to read any details.
Maybe people just assume developer interviews are mainly PR fluff and skip them?
I really love the interviews too. Do they have more of a “long tail”? Personally, I usually save them in my RSS feed and read them over the weekend when I have the time.
Not much of a long tail, no. Forum links, extensive social media pushes and retweets and shares… doesn’t do much. Every once in a while they’ll catch attention on Reddit and that’ll make a big different—Jaz’s LucasArts oral history did amazing traffic. Just the nature of web viewing in this day and age; longform reads are not popular except among a small set, hence sites like The Dissolve and Grantland going away.
That’s unfortunate. Keep up the good fight. Some of us out there really love the deep history stuff.
I agree that I often keep these interviews/articles for later reading when I have time. Thanks for putting in the time and effort to publish these pieces.
The history of gaming is as rich as other forms of entertainment – film, music, etc. – and deserves just as much attention and archiving.
Man I love these interviews. The only thing I don’t like is a lot of times is when they just rehash known stuff or read like a press release. I sometimes wish Japanese developers (currently working) could open up a little more sometimes and be less reserved. Like that interview with the Famicom and NES engineer was fantastic. It must be a hard line to walk sometimes to dig for interesting anecdotes without pushing too hard when they clearly want to steer the interview elsewhere. Or having to pre screen questions past PR people. Anyway you recent interviews have been great. Too bad they don’t get more traffic.
Personally I tend to skip videogame developer interviews because they usually tend to be very basic promotional vehicles for the game and responses tend to be something like “We are working on a game, we can’t tell much now, please be excited.”
I do like reading interviews about older games though as there is more potential for real discussion as the marketing train has left the stateion.
When an interview turns out like that, we don’t publish it.
Yeah, I guess I should have clarified that I hardly mean your site, which I basically read every interview posted.
That’s very good to hear! Thank you!
I really appreciate these interviews, and could not be more excited to read the Battle of Olympus interview – easily the most memorable game from my earliest NES days. Thank you for giving us new perspectives into these “old” games.
Both are great Interviews, loved reading them! Good that in these times you still have an outlet in usgamer that seems to be big enough to give you the possibility to reach out to important developers and where you can publish this stuff!
Also good to have patreon so we, the 5%, can at least finance some of your expenses of your other projects.
Keep up the good work and thank you!
So, I was looking up if Good Nintentions on amazon.de is the colored or the black&white version and look where Google sent me:
http://www.1up.com/features/good-nintentions
Wow, I don’t even remember that feature. Doh!