PAX West Adventure Panel w/ Ron, Ken, Roberta, Al, Jane and Dave (Gilbert)

[Glokidd]

 

So this panel is bound to be waaaaaaay too cool 😀 Imagine Ron chatting to Roberta about the old "Why Adventure Games Suck" article or with Al about LSL and humor in early games or even asking Jane Jensen why Gabriel Knight has SMI Guybrush hair in the first game? 

 

Are there any other Mojo-ers/ees that will be going to see it?

 

I managed to convince the right people that i have to go and managed to buy my Badge/Flight/Hotel today 😀 

It will be my first time to Seattle or even to a Con. Definitely a few bucket list points will be checked off on this trip

Edited July 13, 2022 by Glokidd
Realized that "Dave G." in the title wasn't enough. There at least 2 Dave G's in adv. development lol

[OzzieMonkey]

Man...I wish. I can't afford an overseas trip atm and it falls right on my final assessment period for uni. I'm still bummed I didn't go to Pax Australia the one year Ron was there to give his speech. 

[Jake]

I’m going to try and attend. 

[Ascovel]

Will you be at PAX, Jake? Would love to meet you. I'll be at booth 650 presenting a VR game called Mixture.

 

There will be a rollup with a Moth Knight.

[Jake]

My badge doesn’t seem to have ever shown up, which isn’t exciting.

[LowLevel]

It was a great session and a stellar panel! 😃 Watch it here:

 

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1581145334

 

Things that I liked:

• Roberta hijacked the very first question and started immediately to promote their new game.
• Lowe was, expectedly, a great source of impromptu jokes.
• Jane Jensen being there.
• Ron’s t-shirt.
• The question about their best and their worst puzzle!

Things that I didn’t like:

• It was so focused on questions about the old times that there were few mentions of their new games. RtMI was only tangentially mentioned.
• How on earth is it possible that nobody asked Jane Jensen if she expects to make new games?

@Jake : did you manage to attend the session?

 

P.S.

I'm not sure if it's OK to cross-post something that I also wrote in a different site, but I wanted to share my thoughts with this community as well. Let me know if cross-posting isn't appreciated. 🙂

 

[Laserschwert]

Loved the panel! The constant Stan-like promotion of Williams' new game was a bit annoying (especially towards Dom's interesting questions), but apart from that I really enjoyed everybody's stories. Kudos to Frank Cifaldi for keeping it well balanced and on track all the time too. And man, Lowe is still sharp as a needle. I hope he'll return to write a (non-LSL) game at some point.

Edited September 4, 2022 by Laserschwert

[Kroms]

Just thought I'd give a little shout-out to Wadjet Eye/Dave Gilbert. They've put out gems, and the best of them can proudly stand shoulder to shoulder with collective favourites. Please play Technobabylon and Primordia if you haven't.

[ThunderPeel2001]

1 hour ago, Kroms said:

Just thought I'd give a little shout-out to Wadjet Eye/Dave Gilbert. They've put out gems, and the best of them can proudly stand shoulder to shoulder with collective favourites. Please play Technobabylon and Primordia if you haven't.

 

Agreed: The Shivah, The Blackwell Series, Unavowed. All wonderful adventure games.

[ThunderPeel2001]

I really can't blame Roberta jumping in and talking about her game given the awkwardness of Frank not nominating an answerer. Somebody needed to jump in. And in her defence, her current project is remake of Colossal Cave -- the first ever adventure game, so it was directly related to Frank's question (even if she got a tiny bit sidetracked explaining that she was remaking it, which sounded a bit like an advert for a couple of seconds).

 

Thankfully after that awkward opening it got great. Everyone loosened up. It became more of a roundtable and was really enjoyable! Frank did a great job!

 

Re: "Adventure games are dead." I agree with Ben Croshaw that other games just stole all their mechanics and made them redundant. To most gamers an action game with adventure game mechanics is more fun than those mechanics by themselves. 

 

Ron: "Nothing is more boring than an adventure game trailer" 😅 So true

 

Fun internet rabbit-hole fact: Roberta Williams is one of the women posing on the cover of "Softporn Adventure", the original game that Al Lowe remade into Leisure Suit Larry.

 

Edited September 4, 2022 by ThunderPeel2001

[cinnamon]

I haven't watched the whole discussion yet, but I got a chuckle when they were asked to define the adventure game genre, and they really failed to. They offer some characteristics and design principles but many of the games in the genre, a lot of them theirs, would be disqualified based on those.

[ThunderPeel2001]

True.

 

I did like Al's comment about how nobody up there had had any formal training. A bit of inspiration. 

[madmardi]

I had no idea that Al made Donald Duck's Playground! Probably one of my most played games on the C64!

[Remi]

3 minutes ago, madmardi said:

I had no idea that Al made Donald Duck's Playground! Probably one of my most played games on the C64!

Goddamn classic. 

[Ascovel]

On 9/4/2022 at 10:49 AM, LowLevel said:

 

• How on earth is it possible that nobody asked Jane Jensen if she expects to make new games?

 

That's the question that I stood in the long QA line to ask at the end. Unfortunately, they only took 2 questions from the audience, so I didn't get to 😕
On the other hand - with Ron, Ken and Roberta working on new stuff, it might have been underwhelming, if she has said to have no new game plans plans at all.