Scribes – July 24th 1998

by Lerako on Jul 24th, 1998

Dear Scribes,
I’m an American and I noticed recently that you can find restaurants with just about any ethnic theme these days. But I’m having trouble locating my local British take-out. Perhaps you could make a section on your website that features the favorite recipes of the Rare staff. You could call it “Rosika Magnifica”. If you don’t do this I’ll never speak to you again.
Anomal5@aol.com

Doesn’t sound particularly British, though, does it? Something like ‘Pie, Chips and a Fag’ would be nearer the mark. Which is possibly why the British takeaway idea never caught on.

Dear Scribes,
Excellent Site, Good Work…
Ok here are some questions and statements I want to get off my chest (as well as the hairs):

  1. Mr Pants looks a bit ‘too’ much like Hitler in a nappy, you’re not German by any chance are you?
  2. Being a Brit I get pretty ape crazy at those Jap companies giving me conversions with huge borders and 17.5% slowdown, then when they do give us a decent conversion it takes them about 2 years to do it. I thank you for giving us such good conversions (perfect conversions in fact) but with the newer games using more of the machine’s power does that mean even your games will start getting bordered?
  3. Does PAL Banjo-Kazooie run fullspeed fullscreen and when is it coming out?
  4. What is it with Rare and fluffy animals? You lot must have pretty twisted minds.
  5. I’ve got $500 so can I have the Perfect Dark ROM pleaseeeeeeeeeee?
  6. WHY NOT???!!???
    Ed Welsby (tyrant.ed@virgin.net)
  1. What, you mean he’s got a ‘tache? So Mario looks like Hitler in dungarees, does he?
  2. We’re not going to intentionally let that happen, no. We’ll just whip the programmers harder.
  3. Yes, yes and the end of July.
  4. Are we the ones comparing cartoon characters to fascist dictators here?
  5. Yes, alright.
  6. Hang on, I said yes. You don’t want it after all? Sod you then.

G’day Bruces an’ Sheelas,
I’ve just had a look at that there Perfect Dark game o’ yours an’ I was jus’ wondering if Jo Dark is supposed to compete with Lara Croft over the hearts and hormones of all the hot-blooded young men out there. If that is one of your goals, do us all a favour, an’ PLEASE try make Dark look a little more real then wot Croft is. See, Croft is just actually physically buggered up. Her tiny little knees would snap trying to carry the weight of her ENORMOUS breasts, her face looks as is she walked into a wall, and her hips are also HUGE. Seeing as how they actually modeled Croft after a real person, they must have rather abstract artists down at Core. So, if you could just assure us that Dark ain’t gonna come out looking whacked like Croft, then… we’ll know.
Also, how long are those job offers going to be available? See, I’m too young to apply now, so I just want to see if I still might have a chance of getting in when I’m all grown up?
That’s all for now.
Snaddon (snaddon@iafrica.com)

The PD team have actually modelled Joanna Dark after a hideously bloated three-armed fish counter assistant at their local supermarket, which is ironic because she’s turned out looking quite normal. Funny how irony works.
We’ve no plans to stop recruiting any time soon – what with the move to a bigger HQ coming up and our original staff target figure of 200-250 still quite a way off, there’s plenty of room for new blood. Unless you’re crap. We don’t really take on crap people, as a rule.

Dear Scribes,
I have found evidence that you are a liar. On the opening page, it says that you are, and I quote, “as nice as a big fluffy sponge cake.” Then in the latest installment of Scribes, you said you were, and I quote, “mean.” Am I the only one who sees the inconsistencies here?? What’s going on? Something had better be changed, or I will have to go around for the rest of my life thinking that everyone at Rare is a liar, which would probably just make me really depressed before I bought your games.
Jonathan Fomby

Were you leaning on a lamppost at the corner of the street when you wrote this? Haha.
Anyway, there are at least two rational explanations for the apparent contradiction here. Either we’re so scandalously mean that we constantly lie about how nice we are, or we’re so stupendously nice that we pretend to be mean in order to bump up other peoples’ opinion of themselves by comparison. Or! It might just be that I don’t pay any attention to what I’m writing.

Dear Scribes,
Is it just me or are American kids getting really scary? I often read through N-Put (the letters section) on IGN64.Com and see letters going something as follows:

Dear N-Put,
Why do all N64 games suck? I mean, dudes, none are awesome, radical, gnarly (etc, etc, and hey, etc,) like they are on the PC and PlayStation! On those games you can rip people’s heads off and drink the blood, while wrenching out their guts, using them as violin strings and playing the violin with a blunt saw instead of a bow! Games with that are really coooooool! A game without more blood than should be actually in all the people in the game just suxxxxx. It would be radical, cowabunga, extreme (ad infinitum.)

Now, although the annoying surf speak is worrying enough, what is their obsession with gore? It’s very disturbing indeed! I have many video-games-playing friends, and while none of us are put off a game by violence, we do not crave it like the kids who write the kind of letters above do….
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking America, after all, I’m half American myself (cowabunga dude… No! Stop it!) but it’s just a rather bone chilling observation, isn’t it?
Alex Duin (nduin@dircon.co.uk)

My own personal experience (i.e. the traumatic slog through my mailbox every morning) suggests that this kind of thinking is far from limited to a single country. There are kids from all over the place, not just America, who want to see their screens dripping with offal at every possible opportunity. Yes, they are strange. Call us the doddering old granddads of the software world, but we can think of better ways to make a game worth playing than by poising buckets of pigs’ blood over every doorway.

Rare lot,
You develop in partnership with N. It would seem that N. has a bias towards the Japanese and NTSC markets. Is this policy supported by you at RARE? How do you program games, PAL or NTSC version first?
Let’s hear it lads, have you sold out or does the PAL market mean more to you. I won’t go on about biting the hand that feeds you but if I’d know you lot would turn into a bunch of twisters then I never would have brought Sabre Wulf.
Pete (pwest@lucent.com)

You’re expecting us to say that there’s no bias, aren’t you? Well, check this out, pal: there’s not. Unfortunately there’s no Nintendo of Britain either, so what do you expect?
We certainly haven’t forgotten that the UK’s our home turf (why else would we bother putting in the extra time and effort to get our PAL conversions running full-screen and at full speed?), but the fact remains that NTSC is the nearest thing to a universal standard, and Rare would go straight down the plughole without passing Go if it tried to develop primarily for a PAL market. That’s just the way it works in the big bad business world…

Dear Scribes,
I was not surprised to learn that you live in Warwickshire, that’s where all the best programmers live. However, you wrote in “RARE TODAY” that you live miles from anywhere. Let me correct you on that. You live near the town of HINCKLEY which is the dreariest, most depressing, skank-ridden smeg-pit in the whole of England. Everyone there has scabs, smells and wears old clothes. It’s so crap that when a fish and chip shop announced 20p off the price of large chips there was a 10 minute queue that went half way down the high street. No really, think about it, that’s bad. All the women there have sexual diseases, and nobody comes out of the nightclubs alive. No wonder you spend so much time programming and web editing – there’s nowhere to go. Oh, I forgot, there’s always LEICESTER, as their tourist board once said “the throbbing pulse of the nation”. My God, someone please put me down, I’m in too much pain….
Your favourite striker,
Alan Shearer, Royal Leamington Spa: the Georgian Khasi of Britain.

And this mysterious ‘pain’ was the reason for your appalling World Cup performance, was it? I think not, sir.
Can’t disagree with you about Hinckley and Leicester, though. “Throbbing pulse of the nation”? “Throbbing pulse of the man slowly dying of some horrific wasting disease”, more like. And even Tamworth and Nuneaton shine in relation to Hinckley. Well, perhaps not Nuneaton. Or Tamworth, really. Er…

Dear Scribes,

  1. Question, WHO THE HELL IS MR PANTS. You see I only recently discovered the Rarewhere? website and after going over it once or twice I am a little confused about this Mr Pants ordeal.
  2. Do you plan to make any RPG’s in the future? Don’t give me that crap about Goldeneye having RPG-like scenarios ’cause that’s bull.
  3. Is it true most of Rare’s games-making stuff goes on in a converted farmhouse?
  4. How ’bout an erotic phone number section on your website HUH HUH?
    From MR SOILED UNDERWARE.
  1. Mr. Pants is a character I ‘produced’ in about 30 seconds one day when it became obvious that none of our artists had the spare time to put together a new render of an existing Rare character for the Survey page. Since his international debut, many people have criticised Mr. Pants for being “crap” and “badly-drawn”. They are correct.
  2. When did we say that GoldenEye was even remotely RPGish? You crazy damn foo’. New RPGs? Dunno, we might do.
  3. Yup. Chickens ‘n’ all.
  4. What, like “Squeeze your banana in Donkey Kong’s face”, that sort of thing?
    Is Underware anything like Tupperware?

Mr. Editor:
After playing 007 many times over I have found something interesting. You may not have noticed this before so I’ll make sure I explain this slowly and clearly. We all know that Bond has a lot to do with killing guards. However, several times in the game I find myself clutching my stomach with sheer joy as a guard keeps running into a closed door. Or, upon shooting a guard’s close comrade he keep swatting at flies or scratching his bum. I suggest that later exploitations of this wonderful engine (maybe Perfect Dark?) that you give the guards the gift of hearing and normal sensory skills. I will miss watching guards strafe or roll into odd and sometimes confusing positions. Hopefully, I can move on and witness a game with guards who are disappointingly surreal. Then, and only then can we have closure on such an extraordinary game.
Regards,
Jacob Casey (Caseyvan@aol.com)

You’ve completely lost me. But to cover my pathetic lack of comprehension, I’ll print your letter and follow it up with a hilariously cutting response: Bum! Poo! Willy! There.

Dear Scribes
…or Tusk or whoever is actually stuck with the unenviable task of reading my (hopefully) semi-coherent ramblings,
Before you toss this letter thinking I’m some ungrateful lout who wants to continue the ceaseless tirade of criticism over a ‘lack of realism’ because computers and chairs and other seemingly harmless office items will (in your game) explode into a deadly fireball if provoked, I wish to assure you that my intent is entirely otherwise. I think the good people at Rare should be commended for exposing the facts about these potentially lethal fixtures of the modern business world. People have been in the dark about this issue for far too long, and it was about time that somebody had the guts to reveal the whole, horrible truth.
In all honesty, I will admit that I too, at first, viewed your claims about the hazards of these items as more than a little incredulous. But did I immediately send in a letter full of scathing criticism, question your sanity or cast aspersions on your ancestry? No. And that’s because I–perhaps unlike other owners of Goldeneye 007–have never launched a high explosive rocket at a computer. I have never fired the entire magazine from a Russian assault rifle into a blue office chair. So if I don’t know how they will react to this, who am I to criticize? I’m sure the game designers thoroughly researched this issue, so I should trust their findings.
But that isn’t the only reason I have for believing in the fatal propensities of these office fixtures. I have heard frustrated people claim in anger that they were going to ‘smash’ or ‘destroy’ their computers. But whenever I see these people again, and ask them, they admit that they did not destroy their computers. I have never met nor heard of anyone who has destroyed their computer. The only logical conclusion that can be drawn from this it that whoever does destroy their computer, not possessing James Bond-like fortitude, is instantly killed in the resulting explosion, and thus cannot live to tell the tale.
The same argument could be extended to office chairs, except that I really never have met anyone who was particularly frustrated by one and expressed a desire to destroy it. But there is even more evidence on the chair front: last week, I happened to watch the ’80s Hollywood action movie Die Hard. If you have seen the movie recently, you might recall (otherwise you will just have to trust me) that at one point, Bruce Willis uses the power cord from a monitor to strap some C4 to an office chair and sends the whole package down an elevator shaft to take out a couple of terrorists who are torturing the incompetent Los Angeles police force with a rocket launcher.
The resulting explosion is huge, with big flames and flying glass in the way that people from Hollywood particularly seem to enjoy. Now, my knowledge of military explosives being at best nonexistent, I feel I can safely criticize by saying that the size of the explosion seemed disproportionate to the meager amount of explosives he used. But then I realized that he had an office chair, and a monitor I believe, which should more than account for the size of the blast.
So in summation, I would like to tip my proverbial hat to the folks at Rare, who, even though they may not have broken the story on office fixtures, are keeping the word out there about how deadly they really are. And for those who still don’t believe, strap some plastic explosives onto your chair or computer. But stand back–the explosion might be a little bigger than you think it should be.
Brian Polis (bcpolis@umr.edu)

I can’t believe you’ve spent so long reasoning this out. Nonetheless, your faith in the GoldenEye team’s overall integrity is much appreciated. Er, thanks.
And as a side note, we accept no responsibility for the injuries sustained by anyone stupid enough to attempt detonation of electrical equipment and/or office furniture within their own homes following the findings of Mr. Polis’ investigation. But we are prepared to laugh like drains if you send us a detailed account of any unfortunate combustion-related incidents.

Dear Scribes,
The Christopher Lambert reference is genius. If I’m not mistaken, this is specifically the line from Highlander where Conner (Lambert) is facing Juan Sanchez Villalobos Ramirez (Connery) in the film’s ‘Yoda/Luke’ rehash. Something about:
“You cannot die, Macleod… Accept it.”
“Heh heh heh… I hate you.”
Of course, with Lambert, this actually may be any one of a countless number of simple titters used whenever the script calls for laughter.
Anon

It’s true. I was actually thinking of the film’s climactic scene where Brenda interjects just as Connor’s head is about to be removed by the Kurgan, prompting Connor to say “Heh heh heh… what kept you?” In retrospect, however, that may have been a “Heh heh” rather than a “Heh heh heh”, so perhaps your example is ultimately the better one. I’ll stop now.

Scribes,
Can’t be ars.. er… bothered writing much and you probably can’t be bothered reading it.
Questions:
1) Is Perfect Dark the follow up to Goldeneye or are you going to make another Bond game AS WELL?
2) Is Banjo-Kazooie going to make it to the U.K before August????
3) Conker’s Quest has been talked about since Mario (64) times, and looked an exciting prospect then (not that I’m into squirrels or anything like that), but everybody seems to have forgotten it? Have YOU?
4) Any chance you might make a realistic racing game (the first GOOD F1 game on the N64 maybe)?
5) Why are all the other companies so BAD at making games??????
6) Er….. got any questions I could ask you?
Much ta. Letter 2 long. By.
Hoofrid! (Hoofrid@aol.com)

1) PD is a follow-up only in the sense that it’s being developed by the GoldenEye team, and it runs on an improved version of the GoldenEye engine. No, we’re not working on another Bond game. Pay more attention in class.
2) Just about. July 31st, as far as we know.
3) You must have some weird ideas about the process of game development if you think a whole team can just turn up for work one morning and spend the day milling around in confusion, having completely forgotten about the game they were working on.
4) Dunno. We might. Who’s asking?
5) Oooh, you bitch.
6) What about “Why is Mr. Pants so crap?” That’s always popular.

Good Day to you Scribes,
Being somewhat interested in Architecture, One was amazed at the plans for your new office. One likes them very much indeed and has a few questions, and suggestions for you. One has included them in your artist’s impression bitmap attached for ease of reference. What? What?
Charlz, Prince of …erm…Somewhere, I think.

You really do have a nose for architecture – you’ve picked out the most important features with unerring accuracy, m’lud. (And thanks for pointing out that they’re bunkbeds before the outraged parents started writing in.)

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