Five: Sam Bishop
by Marc N. Kleinhenz
Comic Related's Five interview series takes the brightest minds from the journalistic and game development worlds and asks them to expound on their personal benchmarks of the videogame industry, exploring the crucial components of narrative, music, gameplay, graphics, and character.
Sam Bishop is editor-in-chief of TotalPlayStation.com, one of the longest-running PlayStation-focused sites on the web. Since TPS's foundation as PSX2.com in 1997, he has managed to build the site into a leading destination for PS content while juggling multiple positions in gaming PR and editorial; he has headed up the Sony section of major sites like Gamers.com, has contributed to various multi-platform magazines from Future Publishing and Ziff-Davis Media, and contributes regularly to IGN's myriad gaming channels.
Sam is also a (semi-) regular guest on Podcast Beyond, one of the web's finest podcasts.
Plot point/character beat/story twist
Big reveals often happen in a game's eleventh hour, and while I love the subtlety shown in things like Portal's behind-the-stark-walls peeks or full-on reveals like BioShock or the original Metal Gear Solid, nothing made my jaw drop like the moment (SPOILER ALERT!) in Deus Ex where you wake up to find yourself in a jail with a disembodied voice guiding you out of your cell and the prison you're in only to realize... it was a secret part of the very base you started in when you first fired up the game. The reveal of Majestic 12 and all of the wild conspiracies in that game were fantastic, and they all unraveled at the same time in a way that let you as the player actually realize what had happened. These people - this base - was right under your nose the entire time you were running around as a new recruit for hours.
Such an amazing game, and easily my favorite one of all time.
Song and/or soundtrack
We've seen an amazing explosion of the breadth and complexity of soundtracks in recent years as scoring gets done in 5.1 and Hollywood composers have jumped into the game, but for every massive GTA soundtrack compilation, there's always just one song that totally hooks me. The first was probably the Moon Level theme from Duck Tales on the NES. I love that song so much that I had it as my cell phone ringer for ages (I think I'd better make it the ringtone again, actually). It was my litmus test to see how down you were with old-school games -- so if you could name that tune when someone called, you instantly shot up 20 cool points in my book.
If we're talking about a full soundtrack, though, it's definitely Chrono Cross. I'm pretty damn sure Yasunori Mitsuda sold his soul to the devil to be able to make that soundtrack, because it's just hours of amazing little two-minute loops that manage to somehow have a hook, a sweeping swell, and then drop right back into being just background noise a lot of the time. Hands-down the best game soundtrack I've ever heard, and I still listen to it to this day. It's just a shame Mitsuda sort of burned out after that, because nothing he's done since has had nearly as much oomph.
Gameplay mechanic
This is actually a tough one. There've been an awful lot of pretty huge advancements since games started out as little clumps of dots or vectors. Since my memory fails me as to some of the older stuff, I think Portal's, well, portals can certainly stand in as a major (and literal) game-changer. The sheer mind-bending power of slipping through any two points in a three-dimensional world are pretty wild, but then including things like momentum and angles just made the whole concept absolutely exhilarating to figure out.
I think plenty of credit has to go to Valve and the original Narbacular Drop team at DigiPen for realizing that they had a really good idea but didn't try to go too nuts with it. But keeping the mechanic reined in a little, it kept things from being so mind-blowing that one's head tended to shut down from being overwhelmed. Instead, curiosity and experimentation became encouraged, and that rarely happens when one very simple mechanic is put front and center of an entire game these days.
Graphical effect
This is sort of a toss-up for me, being that I didn't come across it until much later, but both Bungie's Marathon on the Mac and, of course, Quake on the PC were sort of seminal moments for their respective platforms in catalyzing the idea of mouselook in just about any game presented from the first-person perspective - hell, for nearly any perspective. I realize there's probably someone out there that's screaming at me for not including that Future Shock Terminator game or something in there, but as far as huge turning points in the actual visual presentation of a game, nothing had more impact than Quake.
Plus, the Quake Engine (or id Tech 1, or whatever they're calling it officially now) was hardware accelerated (eventually) which offered resolutions and filtering options I'd never seen before. There was nothing like going from software with its piddly resolution, lower framerate, and pixelated textures to a buttery smooth, liquid-like view of a dark, rusty, downright scary world I'd explored so much before as a blocky, jerky mess.
Regardless of what it looked like as it matured before being utterly trounced by all the purely accelerated things the Quake II Engine (and further mods) would bring, the original Quake (and Marathon) granted players the option to move and look around with a kind of precision and freedom that hadn't really been seen before - at least, not in such a high-profile way. It doesn't hurt that they were both amazing games, too, and obviously we all know where Quake stands in the grand scheme of literally industry-shifting debuts. Much of that came down to that engine and the way it opened the door for hardware acceleration.
Character
I'd love to just default to one of the old Nintendo characters, but, to be honest, most of them are more or less one-note creations that have stayed pretty much the same since the mid-';80s or so. Instead, I suppose I'll go far more recent. John Marston from Red Dead Redemption is easily the best lead Rockstar has ever created for one of their games. He wants to be a better man, to leave his past behind him, and yet he's put over a barrel repeatedly by the very kinds of people he used to associate with in years past. The scheming and blackmailing and genuine pleas for help from a whole world that seems on the cusp of becoming something else entirely is such an amazing backdrop for a guy who can shoot the wings off a fly at 50 paces but instead is trying very desperately to become a better person by sheer will alone. It's admirable, and it's a damn fine vocal performance mixed with some really subtle motion capture and great writing that all comes together to make the game insanely likable. Maybe even someone to be admired.
The Five Archive:
Crispin Boyer
(05.02.10)
Russ McLaughlin
(04.01.10)
Chris Dahlen
(03.02.10)
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