Sometimes projects end smoothly, without any problems or drama. But sometimes… there’s a monkey wrench thrown into those plans.

I hated ticket games. They are annoying, loud, and they break all the time. Please, people constantly tried to cheat and steal to get prizes!

One of the best things about working at an arcade was the (basically) unlimited tokens. Whether I got them by repairing machines (the rule was simple – if a token didn’t hit the coin box you could take it), trading in free token passes included with each bi-weekly paycheck or just scooping (think of it as borrowing!) out handfuls from behind the counter, it would be hard pressed to find me tokenless any given day of the week.

LAN parties are the source of some of the bestest multiplayer gaming ever (and I’m all about multiplayer). There are few things more rewarding than being able to shoot someone on your computer and hear, from a room down the hall, “Aw, what the fuck?!” Doubly so if you can hear the pounding of some mouse-on-mousepad frustration.

Once Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters started to get good reviews, the big marketing push was only a matter of time. Not only was the game doing well, but now we’d get to see television ads and giant posters with our game on it. It was extra special for me because, since Ratchet & Clank has always been about the gadgets, clips of what I had contributed to game were going to end up on TV.

There was an imbalance in games.

A ton of games have ‘behind the scenes’ content locked away in them. In these games you can usually see concept art, assets cut from the game, beautiful backgrounds used as reference for the game’s environment, and much, much more.

What it was missing was programmer art.

During the development of a new game it’s not uncommon for a level or two to occasionally fail to load. Maybe there’s some outdated built data on someone’s machine or perhaps a change went in that hasn’t been tested in every level yet. There’s all kinds of problems, and if you are on debugging machine, you’ll see the callstack and be able to tell the right person that needs to fix it what’s up. But artists, they don’t have a debugger, they don’t use a callstack. They rely on the output of warning messages to help them know who to go to when a level fails to load.

And Ricardo, one of our programmers, was getting a lot of visits from the artists.

You see, it just so happened that the last message that was seen by the artists when a level …

My pinky finger is killing me.

I don’t even use my pinky for Gitaroo-Man.