Good Morning Gato # 88 – Con Rot

Somehow, I am risen. With Gato’s help, and a solid week of sleep, I seem to be back among the living. At least, enough to write a Good Morning Gato.
(more…)
2 Comments March 16, 2012

2 Comments March 16, 2012

6 Comments March 2, 2012

4 Comments February 24, 2012

It has actually been 28 days since our last post here on the Ska Studios blog, hence the movie reference and glassy-eyed Gato. I know a lot of you look forward to your weekly Gato fix (which has become more of a monthly thing), but we’ve been working like mad to finish our game, prep for GDC, and get geared up for PAX and–let’s face it–Gato is not photogenic. In the meantime, enjoy some crabs and a big roundup after the break!
(more…)
7 Comments January 27, 2012
I live in a freezing apartment in upstate NY. Rent is $750 a month. I buy groceries at Wal-Mart. I buy clothes at Target. I drive a 1994 Honda Accord that was a hand-me-down from my sister. Yet, somehow, this happened:
“The guy that made this game is nuts.”
As the sole creator of the upcoming Xbox Live Arcade game Dishwasher, Silva found himself the poster boy of Microsoft’s efforts to “democratize game development” at the Game Developers Conference. The Utica, NY independent gamemaker shared the stage with game design luminaries like Tomonobu Itagaki and Peter Molyneux at Microsoft’s GDC keynote.
The 26-year-old from Utica, N.Y., paid his way through college by scrubbing dishes at a diner. That job might help him become the Quentin Tarantino of video games: He used it as inspiration for “The Dishwasher,” in which the title character becomes a ninja and slashes his way out of a kitchen overrun by villains.
“James has quit his job… it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.” James Silva quickly became one of the stars of the GDC this year, and the video Microsoft created to highlight his game and one-man-team ethic showed that it knows how cool James Silva is. Microsoft desperately wants a piece of that cool.
For the record, Microsoft never quite came across as desperately wanting a piece of my cool, but I thought that quote was too good to leave out. The XNA team are just about the coolest bunch of geeks I’ve ever met; it was awesome meeting up with them for classy San Francisco dining–I got to meet the team behind the tech that the Dishwasher is based on and they got to meet the guy behind the game that shows off their tech. There was a lot of mutual gushing.
8 Comments February 28, 2008