Magic circles

Arguably, Amped 3 was one of the most significant launch titles for the Xbox 360.

Games released at the launch of the Xbox 360 were always going to be judged by their graphics.
    It was a given. This was the next generation, after all. Gamers had been promised photorealistic sweat on punch-drunk boxers; clothing that flowed with every Spinning Butterfly Kick; draw distances and in-game eye candy that seared retinas and served them up-smoking-on a patina of high definition wizardry.
    For most development studios, then, launch was a no-brainer: be it an original title or a cookie-cut cheap port, pump up the pixels for high-end, low-risk re…

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Cue 70s elevator music, laced with irreverent animation. Cue sock puppets making rude gags. Cue blipcore anime, retro gaming, psychedaelia, smack talk, meat by-products posing as marketers. Cue old cartoons, new illustration styles, hot snowboarding gear, Scooby-Doo plot lines, mashed-up, Communist/hedonist/Indian/Viking mystic awesomeness with a smattering of chill.
    Cue Matthew Seymour, talking. The executive producer of Indie Built Games, his mouth opening and closing. The 15-year veteran of the games industry, saying, ‘Right off the bat, that’s very short-sighted. I mean, we’re trying to innovate here and innovation isn’t only in graphics, for @%$!-sake. It’s in story, it’s in immersion, it’s in gameplay, it’s in bringing a new entertainment idea to people. Or at least rejigging the old ones.’
    Matt, connecting with all kinds of thoughts now, adding, ‘As we all know, everyone stole from the Greek tragedies and Greek dramas; and we’re just retooling those over and over again. But, at the same time, if we’re able to put it into a videogame and make it interactive, who really cares what it looks like graphically, if it’s something you care about? There’s only so many first person shooters you can play before someone says “I don’t give a…”
    Matt’s voice, changing tone, with, ‘That’s where we were coming from. We knew we were going to take a hit for this, but we thought the audience and the press would at least see it for what it was. But everyone gets hung up. I should have known this. I should have known that everyone gets stuck on the graphics thing; and that’s a shame, because to reiterate what I said when we started, it’s short-sighted.’
    Says Matt, ‘Absolutely short-sighted.’

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Matthew is talking about the snowboarding game Amped 3-arguably, one of the most significant launch titles for the Xbox 360.
    Of course, few reviewers saw it that way, with most condemning the title for being just a snowboarding game; supposedly one which lacked the sufficient quota of next-gen qualities. But viewing the game in such a way almost certainly overlooks the title’s major contribution, both as a piece of entertainment and an encapsulement of the art, style and ethos of an entire sub-culture.
    Amped 3 didn’t set out to be a next-gen title. That just happened to be the platform on which it was created; one which consequently allowed for some beautiful panoramas. Rather, Amped 3 set out to be a giant, interactive snowball of pop culture multimedia, seen through the irreverent, yet colourful, eyes of hardcore snowboarders.

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Two female Mormons came to my door this morning; neither particularly attractive. There’s a church of theirs around the corner from my house.

    They asked me if I’d read the Book of Mormon. I told them I was happy with my Christian beliefs. The one closest to the door then said that in the book they had, John Smith invited all to read it and see if his words rang true; if they did then the reader would know that Smith was a true prophet. I pointed out how flawed that logic sounded. Either someone is a true prophet or…

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‘I think firstly, humour, which is severely lacking in videogames.’
    Matt again. London. Talking about the contribution of Amped 3, his words coming through the speakerphone in my Melbourne office several seconds after he’s said them.
    ’Granted, it’s very difficult to do, especially if you throw in the interactive elements.
    ’I think we actually succeeded, along with some other games that have been trying to do it: like Tim Schaefer’s Psychonauts, for example. But we’re few and far between out there and I just think people are begging for humour and for fun and for levity. For not everything to be so dark and such a downer. That belongs in a lot of the other genres-titles like Condemned and Silent Hill and stuff like that-where it really, really works. But not in something like extreme sports or snowboarding.
    ’Right now, Hollywood is begging for some good comedy,’ he adds. ‘They have Click with Adam Sandler, but if you watch the trades the studios are dying for comedies. People want to have a laugh, and we don’t get enough of them anymore, especially with people like George Bush. I mean, he’s just bringing a big downer on the whole scene.

    ’So, bringing humour to the videogame scene was something I very much wanted to do, and was very excited about, having grown up with LucasArts’ stuff (Day of the Tentacle) and Sierra (Roger Wilco) all of which was fun and light-hearted, but still had good gameplay and was very engaging. I think we’ve gone away from that; from when there was a lot of humour and tongue-in-cheek. Then we got all dark and violent, and I thought, “Well, snowboarding is fun and humourous and has that Jackass feel to it! So, let’s go for it!’

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An early 80s videogame complete with 8-bit muzak plays out on the screen; a cross between Pac-Man and Berzerk. I’m picking up people like some kind of Defender craft, racing out of the level rack to the message, ‘YOU ARE WIN!’.
    Cut to some dude talking to me on a snow lift, going up. He says he wouldn’t do it; another, ‘Nice ears’; Hunter (a female boarder) laughs along. Only now do I realise I’m wearing a giant, pink bunny suit and I’m about to snowboard my way down some killer run with a suicide drop at the end.
    The inevitable face plant into powder leaves me half-dead and looking up at a lyrcra-clad crazy chick called Dandelion; a woman who’s clearly just stepped out of (a) her mind, and (b) Olivia Newton John’s videoclip for Physical. Two minutes of scrapbooking on speed (with a 30 second interlude splicing Inspector Gadget, MicroBee graphics and the closing line of a Scooby-Doo cartoon) and I’m choosing what sex I am and the kind of cool Burton gear I want to be wearing.

    Suffice to say, I pick a funky…

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‘Most of the people that dealt with the art and technical direction were snowboarders,’ Matt explains. ‘Utah (where the studio was located) is one of the snowboarding meccas, and a lot of the guys that were actually on the team were actively involved in the snowboarding scene, either as professionals or designing clothes or snowboarding kits.
    ’The art direction came down to pretty much myself, the art director, the story director and three or four other guys. Essentially, we were looking at where snowboarding and music was going, glomming it together with a big glob, and throwing it together with this big eccentric… thing.’
    Words fail Matt, but he continues.
    ’My idea for having all of those different genres and influences in the game was influenced by just how “remote control” we are as people now. Not just youth, but folks in their 30s and 40s. They just flip through channels; they’re completely entertained by surfing through channels, or the internet for that matter.
    ’On television you’ll be watching a cooking channel for 30-40 seconds, go over check some sports out, go over to Comedy Central, check out funny cartoons. Then you’re back and you’re watching some evangelist preacher preach the Word of God, and you’ll find something interesting in that (or amusing). Then boom you’re on some sitcom. And that’s how we live now. We’re so temporary and multi-tasking and have all these different tastes. This stuff that we’ve grown up with is very eclectic and that’s where I was really coming from; having this eclectic canvas that people would understand.

    ’In relation to snowboarding, it’s very much the same, with the humour and the playfulness and the irreverence. It’s all very much in tune and synonymous with my idea to make the game like flipping through channels. In addition, there’s the fact that this motivates the player through the game because they don’t know what’s coming next.
    ’It was quite difficult, because we were so out there, and trying to convince the rest of the team it was the right direction. That was very challenging for me, being the executive producer, and I spent a lot of time going, “It’s okay, we know what we’re doing, it’s not that whacky.” And people going, “I don’t get it”, especially when it’s coming in piecemeal over a couple of years of development. You’re constantly going over to lily skinned geeky programmers, who are brilliant at that, and holding their hands, going, “It’s going to be okay. We’ll be alright. We’ll make it. I know you don’t get it right now, but it’s all going to come together.”‘

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There’s a real pig’s head, talking PR stunts. Body of an autonomatron. Buck Wad’s the name. You just know your snowboarder’s in for something crazy.
    The original inspiration for the character came from Matt standing at a butcher’s shop, looking at a poster that showed how you cut meat; and what all the cuts were called. Intrigued, Matt wondered at how funny it would be if each of those cuts tried to sell you themselves, by talking to you.
    A few conversations later with story writer Erin Conners and four artists and one of them-Bronze Swallow (his real name!)-says, ‘Let’s do a pig’s head.’

    ’It ended up being this really abnoxious marketer,’ says Matt. ‘We love being game creators poking at marketers; you’re able to blow off some steam there.’

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‘We were coming in so hot for launch, as you could imagine. We were going to land this big 747 down.’
    Matt weighing up things now. Looking back, clear of the title and the madness that must ensue from working for literally years on one project, never fully able to get an objective viewpoint.
    ’To give marketing credit, we were coming in so hot for launch on the Xbox 360, that they didn’t have a lot of information. We were going to land this big 747 down right at the last minute, and so the marketing department weren’t getting a lot of assets and information until the last minute.
    ’But we did have crazy ideas, like releasing the cut scenes on YouTube or iFilm and getting some momentum there. I think they did an excellent job on the web site and we worked very closely with Vaccuum on that site (-their logo is ‘We don’t suck’ which I love a lot). But, yeah, it was just tricky, because we were really going where no-one had gone before to some degree and the marketers were like, “What the hell is this? What are you pitching?” And I said, “I’m pitching snowboarding culture.” It was really hard to get people to follow the vision and the understanding the entire development process and at the end the marketers are wanting assets and everything and I didn’t have them. My fault, as much as theirs.’
    ’I really don’t know how to explain why people didn’t get it. Everything from the loading screens to the end game, we were playing with everything and it was like doing a cult film. I felt like Ed Wood, I was just…
    ’I hate to say it, but maybe we went too far. It’s only now that people are saying, “Wait a minute. These guys were trying to do something different, something fresh and unique and original, and they had the balls to do it on a launch game. These guys spent a lot of time-a lot of brainpower-trying to do something different in every pixel.”‘

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Something different in every pixel.
    Matt doesn’t realise that-standing on the top floor of an office, in the middle of London, on a 37 degree Celcius day, ten minutes prior to fire engines hurtling towards the street below-he’s just spoken the magic words. Magic circles through which to snowboard an article.
    ’Something different in every pixel.’
    Yes, Amped 3 is a snowboarding game. But it is also a game where-culturally-there is something different in every major pixel shift. Anime, hip-hop, retro, pop, punk, 8-bit, stoner, classic, psychadelia, toy-figurines-melted-on-a-freakin’-porta-barbie. From the opening screens, to the challenges, cut-scenes, music, load screens, animation, documentation and customisation, Amped 3 sets a record for cramming the most varied array of…

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Words: Drew Taylor