HEART OF NEON is...
I have a text card near the start of the film. The card describes how the global video game industry has a very large dollar valuation. Yesterday it occurred to me that the valuation I quote was made in 2021. I should find a more up-to-date number, which I did. The most recent valuation is lower. In three years the global video game market has change significantly. It’s not a shock. It’s just a reminder that nothing stands still. Change should be expected.
This is all pretty self-evident to anybody paying even the slightest bit of attention to the world. It’s still shocking to me, though, the number of people who resist change. Any kind of change. I can see why people don’t like change that’s thrust upon them. That doesn’t alter the inevitability of it, though.
HEART OF NEON has always been envisioned as a roadmap to the various changes imposed upon gamedevs as the practice of selling and marketing video games matured over the decades. The changes thrust on Jeff were rarely of his making. Most often he was feeling the pressure of market expectations: consoles are the target technology, and so these new development techniques are to be employed; marketing requires this much of an ad spend, or now you need to lure prospective players into “wishlisting” you PC game on Steam otherwise, well, y’know… obscurity…
Jeff’s way, and by association Giles too, is to not worry about any of that. They find a way. If they had a formula for success, they would probably have a few more toys around, have some odds and sods around the farm taken care of that have been pending for a while, but that’s not really what I mean. One of the keys to Llamasoft’s longevity is that they are blissfully uninterested in what the imagined market forces are really doing. They don’t let the cart lead the horse, if you get my meaning. Games first.
And of course that’s reductive, but the point I’m getting at is the thing that is the very content of that text card I started this blog with. Big numbers. Jeff has never sought investors to whom he would become beholden. Llamasoft never became a financial instrument to be leveraged, mortgaged, traded or sold. Jeff & Giles are masters of their own destiny. That’s what I admire about them. I have seen a few video game business documentaries that talk about board meetings and rounds of funding while all I really wanted was the nitty gritty game design stuff. It’s the craft I care about, the people who make it, who play it, who love it. Business from that perspective may as well be just numbers.
It does sort of beg the question: If I don’t like numbers so much then why do I talk about them in the film?
Big numbers dominate the culture I find myself in. Movies in particular, especially in the wake of the perceived failure of Todd Philip’s Joker sequel. It might be a bad film (I hear it’s not terrible) but it’s this measurement of a film’s artistic merit by opening weekend box office ticket sales that strikes me as the most abhorrent. Big numbers are a trap. Look at the wave upon wave of video game industry layoffs, brought on by, well, many factors I suppose, but word around the water-cooler points the finger at a misreading of the pandemic video game audience uptick by executives and investors as some kind of new pro video gaming future, when it was always going to be just a phase foe stressed people who suddenly had time on their hands and a palpable need for escape. Who has time for video games normally..?
I digress.
I think for the most part the wider world understands video games like they understand movies. Big numbers = big success. I talk about big numbers in order to establish how Jeff is _not_ about that. How does Jeff, who has never been a bread-head, survive in an industry obsessed with short term profit for four decades?
What I love about Llamasoft is the hand-crafted, unhurried but always polished creations they put into the world. They may not be corporate but they collect the maximum benefit from the technology they create (i.e. the Neon Engine). I like the efficiency. I like the self-sufficiency. I love the single-mindedness that generates new video game joy every other year or so. I want more of that.
PS I was very sad to learn of the recent passing of Jeff’s llama, Maya. It was an honor and a privilege to meet her briefly in 2017. She will be missed.