OG's BLOG

Is that Crockett and Tubbs? Nah. It’s Tom Symonds and me (that’s me on the right). The Baltimore Examiner came out to my day job at Firaxis and did a story on us and the game industry a few days ago. It’s sort of fun – the story got picked up by a paper down in the Washington DC area and last week during the Democratic convention, it was in the Denver papers. The different stories took slightly different angles, from local human-interest story on the local game developers, to farther-reaching stories about What it All Means as the story moved out from Hunt Valley.

Seems the pundits are interested in the game industry right now. There is some evidence that video games are a bit recession-proof, which poses the question of why. The question has a clear answer to those who would classify us as a vice along with alcohol, tobacco and gambling. It’s a well-known fact that vices are somewhat insulated against recession, so if you see us as a dirty little bit of secret fun instead of a legitimate wing of the entertainment industry, then it makes sense to you that people are still buying video games during these hard times, feeding their addiction like any other.

I’ll leave that to the pundits. In other news, doesn’t it just figure that when I finally do get my picture in the paper, the headline running overtop of it read “Where being a NERD is cool…” The word “NERD” was in bold, right over my head. Nice.

Another day, another comics guest spot. Today’s guest spot is for Tony Piro’s super-enjoyable Calamities of Nature. I’ve been following Tony’s characters for about a year now, and couldn’t resist when he asked me to draw him a guest strip. In fact, I was so jazzed, I didn’t just do one for today, I did one for tomorrow as well.

What? Never heard of Calamities of Nature!? For shame! Go have a look… quick!