gwax's rumblings

I’ve been in Seattle the past few days for Penny-Arcade Expo (PAX) and, as usual, the “Pitch Your Game” panel car­ries a spe­cial degree of import for me. The premise of the panel is that audi­ence mem­bers are given 15 – 45 sec­onds to pitch an idea for a video game and have it judged (harshly) by the panel. Those mak­ing it past this ele­va­tor pitch are admit­ted to the sec­ond round where they go into greater detail on their idea. Finally prizes are given to the best three ideas. It is impor­tant to note that the met­ric for deter­min­ing the best game idea is a com­bi­na­tion of hilar­ity and enter­tain­ment qual­ity, hav­ing noth­ing to do with mar­ketabil­ity or gen­uine qual­ity. Hilarity, of course, ensues.

“Pitch Your Game” is not just one of my favorite parts of PAX; it is a favorite for much of the Fort-Awesome crowd. Having come to PAX a num­ber of times, we’ve come to regard plan­ning ridicu­lous game pitches as a time hon­ored, evening, hotel room tra­di­tion. This year, in pitch plan­ning we came up with a num­ber of hilar­i­ous ideas, as well as a flood of hor­ri­ble and/or unspeak­able ideas. Additionally, we came to the real­iza­tion that any crappy pitch can be made more amus­ing by append­ing “with JRPG ele­ments; also, it’s a rhythm game” (ex. Angry Badger is like Sonic: The Hedgehog but you can’t run fast and the main char­ac­ters a drunk; also it has JRPG ele­ments and it’s rhythm game) (the real hilar­ity comes after numer­ous repetitions).

Eventually, we nar­rowed our­selves down to a rea­son­able num­ber of pitches: Mexican Gear Solid: Tactical Stealth Immigration, Underground Railroad Tycoon, and FEMA Presents Al Roker’s Hurricane Alley 2011. Eventually, these pitches all went splen­didly in the panel and made it to the sec­ond round. After call­ing Friday a night, head­ing to bed and falling asleep, Riad and I appar­ently kept pitch­ing ideas (this is much like other instances of my sleep talk­ing that I have been informed of). Amongst the ram­blings of my sleep, Bigtime, who was awake at the time, over­heard me say, “so you’re in the desert, but you’re bones, and it grows.” This phrase so intrigued me that I decided that it must be my pitch.

My ptich went a lit­tle some­thing like this:

Me: “I’m not entirely clear on some details since a lot of this was related to me by a friend who heard me ram­bling in my sleep. However to the best of my fig­ur­ing, the prophets of old came to me in my dreams and bid me pitch a game, in exactly these words: So you’re in the desert, but you’re bones and it grows.”

Entire room: [per­plexed silence for a few moments]

Panelist: You should stop sleeping.

Me: There’s more.

Panelist: Is that a threat?

Me: Maybe.

Panelist: No. Just no.

The end result, for me, was not the sec­ond round but to have con­founded the panel and the entire room into stunned silence was absolutely priceless.