Monaco! What’s Yours Is Creativity – and, fine – mine.

On the third night of the sixth month of my fifteenth year, I had a dream I thought was real. It had surreal colors, vivid personalities, and yet seemed no different than the normalcy of everyday life. It was like someone had opened the door to the sun, and I had seamlessly stepped from one reality to another. Upon waking, I had no idea where or when I was. As the day passed, I was haunted by the dream’s images. By sunset, I knew I had to do something about it, but I didn’t know what I would do, exactly. Telling someone about it was the obvious solution, but if you’ve ever been a teenager, you know that’s the last thing you do at that time in your life. After running through all sort of improbable scenarios and solutions, I realized that I just needed to remember what had happened. I pulled out a pen, and ignored everything else on my desk as I wrote.

Somewhere along the way, short, choppy sentences turned descriptive, and my pen flowed across the page easily. A while later, I looked up, dropping the pen to the desk with a quiet thud. As O looked at the clock, my eyes widened in disbelief – it was midnight. I had been writing for four hours! I could barely sit still; energy was twitching through every pore of my body. That was when I knew that my dream was to be a writer. It just felt right. Years later, I still get that electric feeling after a particular good couple of hours of writing, just like when I’ve stumbled across something in the wild. I haven’t realized my dream completely yet, because I’ve been off exploring, adventuring, off doing good in other places, and in between each quest I’ve completed, and each item accomplished, I’ve been working on my ultimate dream, in corners, propped up against a tree with a clipboard in hand, at a desk late at night, and in every other moment I can find in a too busy blur of days. I’ll get there on my own terms, and own time.

The thing about dreams is that sometimes, you reach that cold place in the void where you need inspiration. And for me, one of the people who inspires me to complete my dream is Andy Schatz. You see, I’ve known Andy a long time, back to when we were kids, playing a game with a red rubber ball called “Peg”; back when we’d call each other names and make each other laugh and snort milk through our noses. There are a lot of stories I could tell about Andy. Some are written here. Some should be written somewhere else. I should probably sell some of them to the National Enquirer to make some money, now that he’s a big deal, and I’m still an aspiring artist. But, just as I had a dream, Andy had a dream too.

He wanted to make games. Games that stretch the imagination; games that explore worlds that never existed; places we could and couldn’t go; games to instruct; and games to tell stories; and more. In short, he wanted to make art. Now, there’s a real debate going on now, whether games are art or not, and as much as I appreciate debate more than anyone, it’s clear to me that they are art. (http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/04/video_games_can_never_be_art.html). Placing that debate aside for another day, there’s something I want to say about Andy’s dream, today, making games is somewhat commonplace, just like wanting to be a writer has been for thousands of years. But back when we were kids (man, I can’t believe I’m saying that, such an old man comment!), things were different – personal computers were just coming into circulation, and were clunky, slow, and in many ways, difficult to use.

Graphics were at time, just text based characters, or blocky chunks. My iPhone runs games that occupied all of the computing power we had in the early 1990’s – and those computers were generations better than what we had first been exposed to. Andy’s dream back at that time was one of unknowns. No one knew then how the field would grow, how it would change, how it would become what we now have today. In this respect, Andy was saying he had a dream, and he was heading out into the unknown, that black spot on the map to make it happen.

The thing about having a dream that I’ll tell you, and I’m sure Andy would second, is that it’s never easy. In the early 2000’s, he started his own company Pocketwatch Games (http://www.pocketwatchgames.com/), and produced his first game Venture Africa: Wildlife Tycoon (http://www.pocketwatchgames.com/wildlife-tycoon-games), and then a second game Venture Arctic (http://www.pocketwatchgames.com/venture-arctic). Then, while working on his third game, potentially named Venture Dinosauria (potentially and probably my favorite title of the three, as it involves dinosaurs), Andy had a great idea about a new game, and started working away on it. That game was Monaco. (http://www.monacoismine.com/, http://www.facebook.com/MonacoIsMine, http://twitter.com/MonacoIsMine).

Creativity takes many forms. Sometimes you just need to jump off a dune to readjust the fall lines.

Now, despite knowing Andy in the past, I can’t offer any great insights about how Monaco came about, or how it will play, or even how it looks now. What I can say is that he’s poured his heart and soul into the game, and it is looking – and sounding great. Even better, you don’t have to take my word for it, the game recently was previewed – and playtested at the 2010 Independent Games Festival, and the results were stupendous. The game was awarded the 2010 Grand Prize for Best Independent Game, and the award for excellence in design. (http://www.igf.com/2010/03/gdc_monaco_takes_grand_prize_a.html).

While the game isn’t for sale yet, and I don’t believe Andy has set a sale date for Monaco, and this certainly doesn’t complete his dream, I find it inspirational that he’s finally achieving the success he set out for, when we were boys, and we were both heading off into the great unknown. So, if you like games, I strongly recommend you support an artist and a friend of mine when Monaco comes out, and make a purchase. And, if you’re ever looking for an inspirational story to tell a kid who’s interested in games, or some other field that’s unknown, you can tell them about Andy, about how he left into the darkness with a dream, and came back bearing a torch to led people back to the City of Dreams he found.

If you need more information about Monaco, here’s some great links here….. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFnc6Fdhs2k, http://www.indiegames.com/blog/2009/12/interview_pocketwatch_games_an_1.html, http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/02/12/igf-factor-2010-monaco/, http://www.gamedev.net/reference/business/features/igf10Monaco/, http://www.indiegames.com/blog/2010/03/interviews_andy_schatz_loren_s.html,http://kotaku.com/5492806/monaco-award+winner-celebrates-warns-of-potential-nut+kicking