Reviewer's Tilt

In a recent post to what he may not have realized is a public message board, 3D Realms' assistant to the VP of Naked Woman Blowing Up, Brandon Reinehart, made the following shrewd observation:

I love how you guys [here he's using the royal "you guys" to represent a hazy amalgam of everyone who's ever been mean to him -ed] make these ignorant statements that marginalize the development process and the people in it.

Blame it on Romero I guess. Before Daikatana the game industry fan buzz was a positive place with a lot of people who had passion about games. Now its just jaded pieces of shit droning on about how much the industry sucks.

Aside from the part where he attempts to bolster his argument for a return to positivity by badmouthing John Romero, I agree with him completely.   Though I've certainly written my share of industry fan buzz, I consider myself to be primarily a game developer.  That I've shipped more games this year than Brandon is due to the fact that I was lucky enough to remain largely unmarginalized and should not be seen as a reflection on his skill at assisting the Vice President of Naked Woman Blowing Up.  This reminds me of how another group of "jaded pieces of shit" - high costs - marginalized profits for land developers in China.  Like Brandon, Liu Daotong, director of Shanghai Real Estate Trading Centre, remembers a time in the early years when "both the developers and buyers seemed to have no limits."  Daotong is referring to return on investment (ROI), but he could just as easily be talking about passion for return on investment.  I know that a lot of you reading this are not game developers, and so you may not understand completely what I'm saying here.  Let me try to make it more personal by rephrasing it as a handwritten letter from Brandon Reinehart that will be packaged with 3D Realms' flagship product for 2001 - an elaborate presskit announcing the delay of Duke Nukem Forever to 2004:

In an attempt to foster some much needed positivity, we've decided to bestow an award on our favorite positive quotes from the game press in 2000.  In an attempt to appease the statistically insignificant, non-developer, jaded pieces of shit portion of our readership, we've titled the award "Reviewer's Tilt", "tilt" being employed in its purest American McGee sense to indicate that the reviewer is completely fucking insane.

The Winners:

Chet:

Psychedelic experiences may have fueled the original, trippy Alice in Wonderland stories. But events far more potent than any narcotic are behind superstar computer game designer American McGee's macabre, unnerving riff on Lewis Carroll's classic.

-Noah Shachtman, Wired Magazine

Erik:

To live life is to don a mask each and every day. Our true selves are seldom exposed to the world at large; to show everything to the people we must share our existences with would be to risk the ultimate rejection. We are what we think others want to see, and we live our lives doing this each and every day until it's impossible to tell where the mask ends and we begin. A mere decoration becomes a metaphor for humanity's hard time on planet Earth. We are the masks we wear.

-Greg Orlando, Daily Radar review of Majora's Mask for the N64

We'd like to congratulate Greg Orlando for defeating this category so forcefully that it broke.  If it returns next year, it will be renamed "The Greg Orlando Award" because his Majora's Mask review is going to win it again.