Philip Kollar, Polygon:

Though Blizzard had split into multiple teams working on different games, part of Metzen’s approach to keep the culture together was to ensure that those teams still worked together in some ways. To accomplish this, the developer came up with the idea of “strike teams.”

“A bunch of people who are specifically not on the team for a game, who don’t have any sort of connection to the game, come in and look at your game,” says StarCraft 2 director Dustin Browder. “They go, ‘Wow, that’s dumb! I hate it!’ They’re not nice. We don’t want them to be nice. At some point, these games are going to go into the wild, and you’re going to ask people for real money for them. Strike teams are supposed to come in and go, ‘This is really good! This is really bad! I’m not going to tell you how to fix it, but you’ve got to do something.’ And then they walk off.”

In addition to strike teams, games frequently appear before Blizzard’s “design council,” a gathering of all of the game directors and lead designers throughout the company. Between strike teams and appearances before the design council, one thing regarding Titan became clear: It wasn’t shaping up.

If Blizzard’s cancellation of Titan reminded me of how Pixar handles things, “strike teams” and the “design council” certainly sound like a Pixar Braintrust.

Ed Catmull with Amy Wallace, Creativity, Inc.:

The Braintrust, which meets every few months or so to assess each movie we’re making, is our primary delivery system for straight talk. Its premise is simple: Put smart, passionate people in a room together, charge them with identifying and solving problems, and encourage them to be candid with one another. People who would feel obligated to be honest somehow feel freer when asked for their candor; they have a choice about whether to give it, and thus, when they do give it, it tends to be genuine. The Braintrust is one of the most important traditions at Pixar. It’s not foolproof—sometimes its interactions only serve to highlight the difficulties of achieving candor—but when we get it right, the results are phenomenal. The Braintrust sets the tone for everything we do.

In many ways, it is no different than any other group of creative people—within it, you will find humility and ego, openness and generosity. It varies in size and purpose, depending on what it has been called upon to examine. But always, its most essential element is candor. This isn’t just some pie-in-the-sky idea—without the critical ingredient that is candor, there can be no trust. And without trust, creative collaboration is not possible.

I’m sure most successful companies have strike teams/design councils/Braintrusts of their own. It’s just not every day you get to hear about it from the best of the best.

RAC on Song Exploder:

I actually used this application called Melodyne. It’s sort of like Auto-Tune but it’s all done manually, so it’s not really automatic in that sense. You can really mess with a vocal and kind of turn it into this mechanical thing. Really play with the formant. There’s all this stuff that you can do and I use that pretty extensively in this song.

There’s this trick with Melodyne; it’s basically when you remove all the variations, it creates this kind of robotic sound. That’s what I did a lot with Kele’s vocal, not in the verses but during these sections, which I actually got from the video game Portal.

I am a big fan of RAC. Strangers quickly became my go-to jogging album when I lived in San Francisco. As RAC puts it, “a pop album with substance.” RAC’s inspiration from Giacchino’s work on LOST and perspective on remixing versus original work are interesting. Great episode of an incredible podcast.

For those who come here for games industry commentary unfamiliar with his work, check out RAC’s Nintendo Vs Sega and Nintendo Vs Sega 2.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oD83lergBU

To round out their 125th Nintendo Anniversary celebration, Nintendo has released their the same Let’s Plays I’ve been thoroughly enjoying for over a month).

IGN:

Nintendo merely publishing a game that was developed by a third party does not make it eligible - for a game to be considered a “Nintendo game” in our eyes, Nintendo has to have had a hand in the development process itself. This excludes games like Golden Sun (developed by Camelot and published by Nintendo) and Meteos (developed by Q Entertainment and published by Nintendo).

The lack of third-party games published by Nintendo never crossed my mind. A truly impressive catalog from a truly revolutionary company. Again, a story I can believe in.

Producer, musician, and fashion designer Ken Nana has released his debut EP, Welcome to Warp Zone! As the name suggests, the 6-track instrumental EP was inspired by Super Mario levels (keep an ear out for Super Mario Bros. Super Show! samples) and is comprised of futuristic airy beats a la Radiohead, FKA twigs, and fellow future-beat-making, space-minded, skate-punks Infinity Shred.

Download for free at NanaLifestyle.com. Support at the iTunes Store. Cover art by Curtis Parker.

Love this.

John Gruber with Ben Thompson on The Talk Show:

JG: I have a good friend, Matt, who’s a fellow Yankee’s fan. His theory is that there’s two types of sports fans: Stats fans and story fans. Now, anytime you try to say there’s only two types of people, of course there’s a grey zone. Some stats guys are a little bit into the story side and some story guys are still interested in some of the stats. I’m a story guy though, in his telling. I just don’t get into the numbers that much. I believe in clutch hitting. I believe in clutch performance. I know that’s one of the stat’s guys’ things, like the baseball prospectus guys (Bill James, etc.), that there’s a theory they try to backup that there’s no such thing as clutch hitting.

You say there’s no such thing as clutch hitting, and I say Derek Jeter. I don’t see how you could deny it.

The whole Jeter “Farewell” thing is just chock-full of all sorts of statistics and stuff like that. But one of the most amazing ones is (and this is off the top of my head, I’m not going to look it up), he’s played 158 post-season games. A regular baseball season is 162 games and most guys would be lucky to play 158. Even players who aren’t insured take a game off here and there. So he’s played easily the equivalent of a full regular season, all post-season. Which by definition is only against the very best pitchers and opposing teams. Every post-season game is against a team who was good enough to make it to the post-season. And he’s got like a .320 career post-season batting average. Enough that it would win the batting title most years. And that’s in the post-season.

BT: That’s really impressive because batting averages drop significantly in the post-season.

JG: Right. Because the pitching is so much better. So much better. Really, that’s the way to win post-season baseball games, is to have amazing pitching.

Remember the White Sox, when they won in 2006? Whatever year it was. Whatever year the Chicago White Sox won a decade ago, they won the World Series in four games. Their four pitchers pitched four complete games. It was unbelievable. They had four pitchers who caught fire, were just unhittable, and they just went “one, two, three, four. The World Series is over.”

BT: It’s like having a hot goalie in hockey or something. You can just shutout everything else.

JG: And tech is exactly the same. There’s story guys and stats guys.

Reading it back, I am reminded of Jon Hamm’s brilliant opening monologue to the 2013 ESPYs.

I am also reminded why I remain focused on the games industry. I have been fortunate enough to grow along side a budding industry from its toddlerhood (1985) to the behemoth it has become. The video game industry has yet to shake it’s growing pains but its effect on pop-culture at large has been breathtaking to watch. (While writing this, Pharrell released the video game inspired music video for “It Girl”, (and it may be a good indication of what is wrong with the culture).)

Over the course of the next-gen launch, the focus has been on story. None more so than Nintendo. Focus all you want on stats, Nintendo’s story is still one to believe in.