History will be divided into two eras, before Lemmy&Binky entered the world of Podcasting and after we started Podcasting.

Having successfully taken the web comic world by storm, we felt that our next duty was to take Ricky Gervais off his pedestal and show the world how professionals make Podcasts.

Behold then, and may your ears transcend into a higher plane of existence. An extravagant plane of existence… exclusive, members only, a pay per plane of existence.

Popularity: 12% [?]

So, you’ve finally got that game development job you’ve been waiting for your whole life?

Well done you!

But what’s this? Everyone seems to be talking in some mythical language? “That damn Dreb’s been wheeling since Alpha!” What in buggery are we all talking about?!

Don’t worry, that’s just how game developers speak, and after reading our jargon busting guide, you’ll be able to talk just like a game developer.

And if you’ve not made it into the industry yet, try dropping these beauties in at your interview, and they’ll probably assume you’ve been busting out games for years!

Behold the wordage!

Alpha - A mythical date rumoured to be made up by publishers to scare developers into working faster.

Anonymouse - Rattish looking tester guy no one recognizes, and that you assume is new, but who turns out to have been working there for six months.

Asset Manager - A central repository for your incorrectly named files to get lost in.

Beta - The day you hug your family outside your house, and say goodbye to the dog with a tender rub of its head, before climbing into the back of a taxi to stare in mourning at your waving loved ones, whom you will not see again for several months.

Camracks - The particularly nerdy section of the programming team. Camracks are usually identified by their long black leather coats that they think make them look like Neo out of the Matrix, but don’t.

Deriver - Name given to a designer who is made so purely because they are shit at what they were actually employed to do. They survive by unceremoniously cobbling together “things that worked” in other games with little thought of why they actually worked.

Dreb - A senior employee that never does any work, but goes out drinking with the studio heads and so gets away with it.

Extension - The crucial stage of development where the release date is moved back three months.

Gatekeeper - The privileged member of staff that can inexplicably bypass the company firewall, and whose shared folder is the company’s primary source of Lost, Heroes, 24 and Battlestar Galactica episodes.

Going for a coffee - Going for a whinge.

Going for a ciggie - Going for a whinge.

Going for a meeting - Not having a meeting, but an excuse as to why you’re away from your desk having a whinge.

Graphics Tablet - Performance enhancing drugs taken by artists to make their art better.

Milestone - What the publishers believe has been done on the project in a given month.

Mollying it up - A term often used in marketing departments, or amongst staff when their studio head appears in an interview. “Mollying it up” may include making bold and erroneous statements about the game reinventing its genre, or detailing amazing features of the game that are sure to be chopped out before release on account of them being the rambles of a dangerously optimistic designer.

Nogylop - A back-facing polygon.

Paper beard - The pad of paper taken into meetings in order to look like you’re on the ball, which is generally only used for drawing little faces.

Placeholder - Final art.

Pray-day - A monthly opportunity to find out how much financial difficulty your studio is in.

Poly-pusher - A term used by programmers to describe artists.

Prick - A term used by artists to describe above programmers.

Pulling a Sid - Used to describe a lead designer’s actions when insisting that their name should be on the front of the box.

Previewing - The remarkable precognitive ability of some game developers to be able to read reviews of the game they are working on months or even years before they are even published.

Prototyping - A way of explaining not doing actual work.

Quoquadrahedrant - A really complicated thing to do with polygons your primitive brain couldn’t possibly understand.

Rendering - Something for your PC to be doing so it looks active while you’re away having a whinge.

Rebuild All - Same as above, but for coders.

Schedule - A joke.

Skribb - That weird new guy who gets dumped on that project… you know the one! Tee hee!

Sleep Token - The food, up to the value of five pounds (ten dollars) that is used to justify 5 hours of unpaid overtime.

Smirkey - The bizarre ambivalence felt by smokers when simultaneously joking and crying about the game they are making, as in “Fancy going for a Smirkey Tab?”

Time-stomp - A mail sent out to your long-departed boss at 4am in the vain hope they will notice it was sent out at 4am.

The Brown Mile - The journey from home to work on a Sunday afternoon.

The Sims - The people game developers see out of the window that are mysteriously leaving work at 5:30.

Wheeling - Work-avoidance ritual carried out by programmers, traditionally on Fridays after the lunch time beer. The mouse-wheel is used to periodically scroll up and down a source file, along with a furrowed and intense thinking expression on their faces, and while listening to music on headphones. Sometimes writing “I am bored” into the code, then deleting is used for extra effect. The artist form of wheeling is more sophisticated, sometimes even involving rotating a model around as well as zooming in and out of it.

Wings - A rite of passage in the game industry. Getting ones wings pertains to the first time one has overdosed on Red Bull at 4am.

Popularity: 20% [?]

There are about a bazillion things I miss from my C64. Things which made games games, like SID chip music, flashy loading bars and loading screens. Music which defined the game rather than being some bog standard hip-hop track or something that could have been lifted from any random film. Joysticks with suckers attached to the bottom, and a user manual with instructions for how to program a simple game. These are the things of “proper” computers and “proper” games. These are also things which everybody who grew up with them fondly remembers during pub conversations while getting dirty looks from the scary blokey blokes in the corner talking about football or something.

So I’m not going to go on about those things any more. They’re a given. What I really miss is something that was born out of necessity – a hardware limitation which (as quite often turns out to be the case) resulted in something that not only looked cool, but in my opinion looked better than it’s non-limited modern day counterpart. And that’s the palettised fade. And by palettised, I’m talking 16 colour fixed palette.

Let me demonstrate:

Isn’t it lovely? Isn’t it gamey? So much more visually interesting than:

Yawn. And the thing is, apart from some TV and film credits where they do something swanky with their text fades, it’s something you oh so rarely see in games from which medium they were born. It’s just, “let’s just make the alpha go from 255 down to 0 and that’ll do” over and over and over again.

Somebody somewhere bring back the palettised fade!

Popularity: 12% [?]

For this edition of Industry Top Facts, Lemmy&Binky are proud to feature perhaps the biggest player in the game industry. One who just so happens to be a reader of this very blog!

His (or possibly her) career has spanned decades (probably) and he/she is the most respected artist / programmer / designer / musician / tester / producer / receptionist not only in EA, but perhaps in the entire world. We salute you, EA Guy!

Initiate Factage!

1. There have been some poor games published by Electronic Arts. The primary reason for this is that EA Guy did not do any art/programming/music/testing/producing/phone-answering on them.

2. Electronic Arts was so called because its initials were the same as EA Guy.

3. EA Guy is so modest he/she once hired a team of hackers to replace all occurrences of “EA Guy” on the internet to read “Chuck Norris”.

4. A photo has never been taken of EA Guy because of fears it may be posted on the internet, turn all men/women gay and destroy the entire human race.

5. 90% of EA’s product range was conceived by EA Guy when he/she was idly doodling while talking on the phone.

6. EA Guy receives $3 million annually from royalties from the “Square, circle, triangle” motif he/she developed for the original Electronic Arts logo. Sony only actually hold the rights to the “X”.

7. EA Guy once managed to get Battlefield 2142 working on high settings on a Gameboy Color.

8. EA Guy once told Sir Clive Sinclair what a “rubber button” was.

9. John Carmack, Will Wright and Shigeru Miyamoto are all the lovechildren of EA Guy and Marilyn Monroe/Elvis.

10. EA Guy will not be bullied into buying a copy of Gibbage, but instead bought 10,000 copies with his/her vast fortune, purely because it’s a bloody good laugh.

11. EA Guy has never left a comment on Lemmy&Binky.com :’(

Popularity: 8% [?]

For our second “indieview”, we’re excited to have unflappable seer of truth and justice, Jack Thompson of Thompsonsquire. In case you don’t know who he is, he’s that brilliant comedy character that has been turning up in web-comics right across the internet. Imagine our surprise when it turned out to be a real person!

We’ve been reading his stuff, and he clearly knows what he’s talking about! This is the brave warrior against all that is evil in the world (violent video games, obviously) and his never-ending quest to bring down child-corrupting evil empires like id software and Rockstar North.

We salute you, Jack Thompson! Tell us how it really is!

L&B: Hi Jack! Thank you for joining us! So, tell us how video games cause violence?

JT: Well, to determine the link between violent video games and murderous psychosis, there have been many extensive studies performed on groups of hippies. We made them play a game called Gibbage, created by some murderer-lover called Marshadillo Dondanshell. After 10 minutes of playing they began to show some homicidal tendencies, mainly pulling on each others hair. After 30 minutes of game-play the group began to eat each other’s eyes out, and torture rats with acid. After 2 hours of exposure, every single one of them had begun constructing orbital weapon platforms, with aspirations of galactic domination.

L&B: Couldn’t that just be coincidence?

JT: No! The problem is that gamers seem to blindly defend violent video games without even looking into the facts! For example, did you know that Hitler played violent video games?

L&B: Hitler? Wow! That explains a lot, huh?

JT: Yes indeed! The fact is we have strong evidence to suggest that US Marines found several copies of Doom and Super Columbine Massacre RPG in Hitler’s bunker shortly after the fall of the Third Reich. This evidence is in addition to sections of his Nuremberg address, where he can clearly be heard saying “GTA: Vice City is the shit, man!” and “I got me a score of 12 on Manhunt!”. This is stone cold FACT that anyone can find out by reading things I say in interviews.

L&B: So are you saying that Hitler wasn’t mentally unhinged in any way before playing games?

JT: Exactly! We can see from looking at official records that, before he began playing these vile “murder simulators”, he was a compassionate, well adjusted and friendly guy who regularly got invited to parties and asked to baby sit friends’ small children. He even had quite a stylish moustache that looked a little bit like a Fu Manchu!

L&B: So violent video games caused World War II, then?

JT: Of course! He was a vegetarian painter! What could possibly turn a friendly, animal loving, vegetarian painter into a genocidal maniac? Surely playing on a video game for a few hours is the only thing that could have this profound an effect on someone’s mind? The fact is this conclusively proves that every act of violence committed since the dawn of our species can be blamed on these sick video game “murder simulators”.

L&B: So what about the Mongol invasions?

JT: Errr… Counterstrike.

L&B: Ahhh. Of course… Well who can argue with that?

JT: Indeed! The fact is, an independent study conclusively proves that anybody who disagrees with me plays violent video games, and is therefore a murderer. Who can trust a murderer? No one, that’s who!

Man, I’m so obviously right about every single thing I say!

L&B: You are that, Jack my friend, you are that! So what’s next in
the exciting world of video-game fascism?

JT: Well, I’m currently working on a case to prove that Mario causes gayness.

L&B: Wow! Can we have your autograph?

JT: Racist!

Popularity: 7% [?]