The video game industry is a serious business. Locked away in bunker-like buildings and watched over by anxious executives, developers sit in silence working at their craft, shaping and honing their visions of the future, the past, or ensuring that at the very least it is possible to score a goal in a soccer simulation.
Enjoyment in building something creative has been replaced by the desire to ensure that the average gamer will spend all of his or her free time battling the forces of evil and then play it again on a higher difficulty setting.
This is not the way at Dejobaan Games. This is a games development company that believes that the gaming experience is about fun, from the start of game development to when the gamer finishes the last level.
“We just love having fun writing games, games are just all about fun,” enthuses Ichiro Lambe, founder and president of a company that has received a significant amount of publicity in recent months when they debuted the irreverent base jumping game AAaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! — A Reckless Disregard for Gravity, or “Aaaaa!” for short. The game was nominated for Excellence in Design in the 2010 Independent Games Festival and although they didn’t win, the name is enough to grab the attention even if the full death-defying experience of a controlled descent is only available in virtual form.
Dejobaan Games (apparently named after the Greco-Nordic God of Games and Entertainment!), has been in existence since 1999 and, despite operating with fewer than ten staff members all the while, they have released 13 titles on PC-friendly platforms with a 14th to be released in the next two months.
That game — “A confluence of video games and education, tagline :make math your bitch,” according to Lambe — is currently known as Ooh Ooh Ooh Ooh, Grab A Loop and Mix A Beat.
Lambe is keen to expand on his philosophy for gaming.
“People in the industry think that it’s hard work, not just about playing games,” he says. “I think that’s completely wrong.” Understanding that a great game also needs to have an element of marketability, he asks, “How do you make a game stand out? You can call it Doom, Quake or Halo? Short names like that are sort of boring.” Aaaaa! has a moniker that grabs attention and Lambe concedes that “It’s silly and ridiculous but it tells you everything you need to know about the game.”
In a community that has so many different companies competing for space and attention, it can sometimes be hard for the smaller studios to gain attention. Ichiro acknowledges that the likes of locally-based Rockstar and Harmonix have raised the bar, and with local game giant Turbine being acquired by Warner Brothers, the fight is on to produce credible games that aren’t squashed by the big titles whilst simultaneously grabbing the gamers’ attention. For developers like Dejobaan, the aim is to be all-around different.
“What can we do as a small company to compete? We have to look at the edges, look at what hasn’t been created yet. (The inspiration for)Aaaaa! came from YouTube when Dan (Brainerd, Dejobaan’s gameplay and narrative guru) typed in the word ‘awesome’ and up came with all these videos of people screaming down the sides of buildings,” reflects Lambe. “We thought, can we make a game out of that minus the fear of death and the wind in the hair?”
Ichiro Lambe assures me he has always been a gamer, from the moment he saw Ms. Pac Man on a tabletop console in Japan, to becoming hooked on Space Invaders on the Atari 800 Home Console released in 1979 and widely considered to be the birth of home gaming. He is keen to acknowledge the industry’s debt to the past, saying, “Most games today require you to sit down for ten hours at a time, stopping only when you want to graduate, which is why a game like Aaaaa! is fun to just pick up and play.” It’s a thought I can agree with having finally downloaded it to my own computer and completed my first ten jumps without dying — this game has the addictive nature that characterizes all great games.
The next step for Dejobaan is to continue to surf on the wave of titles that make up their roster and, of course, the arrival of the iPad has significantly increased the interest of game developers to make sure they get a slice of the Apple pie.
Although there is a version of Aaaaa! for the iPhone, the chance to develop games for another platform is a serious consideration for Lambe who believes that “Apple is something that people love. If you move to Apple, that is a conscious decision, and the iPad and the iPhone have made them (Apple) very attractive to developers.”
For now, Ichiro is happy to be part of the growing video game scene in Massachusetts. “Boston is an amazing, vibrant community for game development. Everyone has been really friendly and the best part is that you can go out and have a beer with them,” he says.
That’s something that any developer would be unlikely to do if he/she wasn’t cool with strapping a parachute to his/her back and jumping off a building. The game industry, it seems, is rife with minds like Lambe’s — minds bent on being creative and fun above all else.
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