As of the 22nd February, Jump:Button will have a new home.

It’s good to be among friends…

Jump:Button was recently contacted by a prominent US-based gaming culture web site, with the idea of starting up a regular column there similar in content to what you’ll find on this site. Given the quality of content produced by the site and the amazing people who write for it, the opportunity was too enticing to walk away from.
    More details on this exciting venture will be provided soon.

Every gamer has one: a collectable; a gaming-related possession that fills them with nostalgic pride.

It’s blue. Trans-Atlantic blue. Size 10 (for kids), bright yellow stripes on the sleeves, cloth patches all over…

Ask me when I became a gamer—when I moved from being a kid who played Hanimex sets that plugged into your black-and-white TV and had 7 variations of Pong; when I ceased being just another primary schooler who’d begged their parents for an Atari 2600 for Christmas; when videogames ceased being just games and actually became ‘important’ in my life—and the best answer I could give would be, ‘The day my first patch was sewn onto that tracksuit’.
    Some thirty years ago, Atari had a thriving kids club in Australia, and one could earn a cloth patch from Activision by simply sending them a photo of your TV screen displaying a particular score.
    Each patch announced your achievement. And, over time, I earnt 19 of them.
    I joined the Save a Chicken Foundation. I became an official member of the Activision Ski Team. Became a River Raider, Flying Ace and Trail Blazer. I got inducted into the Explorers Club (alongside Pitfall Harry), and the Bucket Brigade. And I even made the rank of ‘Leader’ in the Order of the Supreme Starmasters.
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Already labelled as one of the greatest original songs ever used in a videogame, ‘Still Alive’ from the closing credits of Portal has become something of an internet phenomenon. But the real surprise has been the overwhelming international response to one young woman’s achingly beautiful rendition on YouTube.

Of all the games released in 2007, only a handful garnered the kind of critical praise that was lavished on Portal, one of five titles featured in the Half-Life 2 bundle, ‘The Orange Box’.
    Based on a student-designed project called Narbacular Drop, the first-person action/puzzle game went on to receive numerous awards for its original and unique gameplay and dark, deadpan humour. Diabolical spatial puzzles melded with fast-paced action, an endless array of hilarious and memorable monologues (mostly about cake!), and the birth of a new kind of friend: the companion cube.
    But it was the game’s closing credits song, ‘Still Alive’ that—for many people—put the icing on the metaphorical cake in terms of the game’s brilliance. Written by Jonathan Coulton and sung by Ellen McLain, the song not only provided a twist ending to the game through its lyrics, but proved to be incredibly infectious.
    Almost immediately, gamers the world over began to post the original song on the internet as MP3s and YouTube videos. And with them, all manner of re-mixes, parodies and cover versions.
    Noting the growing phenomenon and inspired by the news that Coulton was to be playing a live gig at an upcoming Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, gamesetwatch.com posted the blog entry, ‘Apperture Science Rocks: The Top 12 “Still Alive” Cover Versions’.
    The entry caused an overnight sensation with gaming culture sites across the globe linking back to the original post.
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I smell mulch.

It’s dark, and I’m virtually naked—wearing nothing more than a gas mask and a pair of slippers—when a voice inside my head starts talking like a 1950s public service announcement.
    ‘Stay Calm,’ it says. ‘Stay off the streets. Don’t open your door to anyone, especially if they smell like mulch.’
    I look down, slowly. These are not my slippers. Suddenly, my bottom becomes very itchy…
    I swear only a few seconds have passed, but I have a beard down to my chest and my feet—now slipperless—are wet and cut up. I pick up the phone to ring a friend, but I’ve not even finishing dialling the number when an agitated male starts shrieking out of the handset about the kind of weird stuff that goes on in the back rooms of game companies. He mentions a toy gun; one that glows purple and shoots smoke rings when you pull the trigger.
    The line goes dead.
    Keen to account for my lost time, the hint of purfume that’s clinging to my body and my sudden hankering to chew straw, I investigate further.
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Playing games is not enough for PhD student, gamer and uber-geek, Bhautik Joshi. He wants souvenirs.

If UK-born Sydney student Bhautik Joshi isn’t constantly at academic parties, surrounded by intelligent, sophisticated women sipping Baileys on ice, then he’s doing something wrong..
    The mere fact that he’s spent the last four-and-a-half years doing a PhD on ‘the automatic generation of tetrahedral meshes from segmented anatomical voxel datasets’ alone makes him interesting. But having turned that research into a way to recreate creatures from early first person shooters into three-diemensional paper models puts him into the enviable realm of uber-geek.
    ’Despite growing up in the 80s, I kind of missed out on the whole console thing,’ says Joshi, ‘and I found myself drawn pretty strongly to PC games. I started out on the platformers (Commander Keen, the original Duke Nukem), graduated to the adventure games (Space Quest, etc.) and then was subsequently floored by first-person shooters. It started with Wolfenstein (where I made my first custom modifications using MS-Paint and a lot of patience), and I followed the technological development of Rise of the Triad, Doom, Quake, Unreal Tournament and Half-Life, all the way up to current games like HL2.’
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Kirsty Baird—the heart, mind and soul behind a videogame that puts players in the dirty shoes of a young, homeless girl—speaks about where her compassion comes from, and why she badly needs a holiday.

For 10 minutes beyond the appointed start time for our interview at Melbourne’s Fed Square, filmmaker-turned-game designer Kirsty Baird and I sit at a cafe and unknowingly wait for the other to arrive.
    She’s outside in the fresh air, while I’ve taken a seat inside the small, trendy space of the cafe. So when she does stick her head in the door and spot me, in her characteristically brazen manner, she calls to me across the heads of several other patrons.
    Moments later she’s relocated to the seat opposite me (soy smoothie in tow).
    Apologies out of the way, she confesses she would have been happy to continue sitting in the sun, watching the human and automotive traffic of the busy Flinders Street/Swanston Street intersection all day; a too-rare moment of peace in the midst of what have been a busy couple of years.
    ‘I’ve got things I should do, but I don’t want to,’ she admits. ‘I just don’t feel like doing anything today.’
    Her admission reeks of weariness. And who could blame her? Kirsty’s is the hyperactive imagination behind Street Survivor, an RPG currently in development, which places the user squarely in the shoes of a homeless girl and pits them against all the obstacles a real-life street person would confront.
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Or: how i am 8-bit—an art show devised out of an unbridled love for 80s videogame nostalgia—came to be.

PRESENT DAY: 2006

Just to be clear: I’ve never actually kept a real diary—not about this, not ever.
    Sure, I made a few haphazard attempts at blogging, but life (i.e. laziness) always got the best of me. Hell, I never knew that i am 8-bit would drop, explode, and plume into the mushroom cloud of a brand that it’s become. No one did (except my mom, who thought my 3rd Grade Science Fair revelation for flavoured shoelaces would change the world). That’s like Da Vinci anticipating a best-selling book that, centuries later, would depend so heavily on his Mona Lisa as a plot device, that he had some toga-wearing lawyers draft a residuals contract. Yeah, okay, dropping Da Vinci’s name is a bit much—but here’s my story anyway, foggily remembered and thoroughly tweaked for dramatic purposes!

REWIND: Saturday, July 17, 2004

When I walked into Gallery Nineteen Eighty Eight in Los Angeles today, I didn’t know shit about curating an art show. I wasn’t nervous; I just wasn’t confident either. But I had an idea—and I had to get it out of my head, regardless of the reaction.
    Thank god Katie Cromwell and Jensen Karp, the owners of the gallery, were children of the 80s. (Finnigan, the resident gallery dog—an adorable, yet snappy, Mini Pinscher—is far too young to remember Burger Time). So I pitched them my crazy plan: to gather a bunch of artists together and have them paint their old-school gaming memories.
    There are so many iconic characters that constantly get overshadowed by the Halo’s of the world. But if you think about it, Mario, Donkey Kong, Sonic, Mega Man, Link, Q*Bert—these are the celebrities of the gaming mega-verse—and they’ll far outlive any crappy excuse for a modern mascot like Lara Croft. Big tits only get you so far. Besides, I prefer modestly proportioned ladies, anyway.
    Well, Jensen and Katie went for it.
    Woohoo! (Sound effects always look weird typed down.)
    Having come from a journalism background, one that involved writing about pixels and polygons since I was 15, they weren’t worried about my inexperience. At least it didn’t seem like it. There was an instant bond between us. One of those unspoken nods. We knew we’d cover each others asses, fill in the blanks, roll with the punches. Or at least that’s the impression I got—otherwise we were in for a lot of fucking trouble.

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