Eurogamer Expo 2011, what a weekend! Played lots of games, met loads of people and I annoyed the Lead Developer from Star Wars:The Old Republic (long story)…but best of all? I got to meet Graeme Boyd, best known as AceyBongos from XBox Live. We sat down on the Friday afternoon and had a quick chat about Gears, powerpoint, Cons and our new favourite charity!
Me: First of all, congratulations on the Gears of War 3 mention.
GB: Oh, thanks very much, what I’ve played so far I’ve really enjoyed, it just seems a lot smoother or fluid for me, its just constant gratification. Its the first time I’ve been in credits for a game, so I’m delighted.
Me: Got some boring questions first, then some fun ones. How did you first get into the gaming industry?
GB: Good one, it was a lot of luck, a lot of luck, but also some real hard work. I went to uni and did English and Film Studies at Aberdeen and coming to graduation I had no idea what I wanted to be, those qualifacations aren’t great for going straight into a job. So I went and done journalism as post grad in Edinburgh and didn’t really like newspaper journo, as it seems a bit aggressive and didn’t really sit very well with me so thought “I really like video games, so why not try and write about that?”
I applied for a job at CVG magazine randomly just to see what happened and it kind of just came through, I actually went for the interview when I was on a work placement at PC Gamer in Bath and had to apologise and ditch my work experience but they were really good about it. Everything just fell into place from there on, and here I am.
So it is partly hard work, its not just enough liking games, the academical grounding and really knowing about the games feature heavily and if you want to be a writer, you have to write as much as you can. If you want to specialise in marketing you have to really know those areas. You just have to keep applying and hope luck falls your way too.
Me: With working in Microsoft, do you have any favourite moments and least favourite moments?
GB: In my job, theres a lot of really really cool stuff in this job, but theres a lot of powerpoint, spreadsheets and project management as well, which I do actually enjoy, but at 11pm at night when you’re neck deep in a spreadsheet its not fun. I mean, when you spend so much time working on campaign launches like Gears, I’ve spent 18 months working on it, but not had the chance to play the game yet so I’d like that to be better.
But at the same time I get so many cool opportunities, like E3, Gamescon, Halofest at PAX Prime which was just amazing, Call of Duty XP Weekend, GAMEfest and Eurogamer is just fantastic. And obviously, getting the chance to play games in these kind of environments kind of makes up for being so busy when the game actually comes out. And then the really good thing about going to those things is meeting people like yourself, meeting people from the community, meeting people from social media sites, thats definitely the most fun part. A lot of what I do is working with the community websites (twitter/facebook etc) is always good too.
Me: Of the games being shown at Eurogamer, what are you most looking forward to playing?
GB: I’m a big CoD fan, so I’m really looking forward to MW3. I’ve been playing a lot of Black Ops multiplayer lately, and therefore, I’m also incredibly excited about Battlefield 3. I played MW3 at CoD XP but haven’t had a chance to play BF yet, so I’ve had a word with a friend from EA so i think he’s going to try and get me into BF so hopefully I’ll get a shot of that.
I’m also really excited about Forza because I love my racing games. Skyrim, I didn’t actually realise its playable here.
Me: I’ve had a quick go of Skyrim, so much better than Oblivion, only, if you do get a shot of the demo, don’t talk to the dog. I found a dog and hunter owner and after talking to the owner then dog, the dog yapped happily and then I crashed the system!
GB: (after laughing about the dog bug) The thing is though, I think people forget is that Oblivion was essentially a launch title, right? It came out 3 or 4 months after the console launched which is incredible to think it’s been, what, 6 years now? And it was huge and amazing and life destroying (maybe a little soul destroying too) so I can’t wait to play Skyrim, its just having time, theres so much good stuff coming out so I’d say those are probably the big four for me.
Me: One game that I’ll recommend you try is Anarchy Reigns, on the PS3 demo, I’m not a big fight game player, but that was real good fun, totally insane.
GB: Good stuff, oh another game I should mention is Mass Effect 3, its my absolute favourite game franchise…
Me: Which brings us nicely to the next question; what is your favourite game?
GB: ME is such a big game, and you spend so much time playing. Its the first game of that type that I’ve played right through. First one I’ve played right to the end, second one I’ve played right to the end putting in dozens and dozens of hours, I mean, I’m married now with a one year old son so like….but I know with Mass Effect 3 I’m gonna do the same, Its the one game that I totally devote myself to. Absolutely love it, think its amazing.
Me: When you were younger, were you a sega boy, or nintendo boy?
GB: Nintendo! Yep, definitely, through and through. I started off with an Atari ST, and I was like “people with games consoles pfft, thats not a real computer, I’ve got an ST at home” but then I got a Gameboy first and then followed that with a Super Nintendo. I was a proper fan boy as well, when I was 12 I wrote a six issue fanzine. So yeah, absolutely Nintendo.
Me: Resident Evil or Silent Hill?
GB: Resident Evil, to be honest, I’ve played a lot more Resi than SH and Resi 4 particularly is still up there in my top 5.
Me: Thats the only Resi game I’ve yet to play
GB: You know its available on Games on Demand now for £14.99?
Me: Yeah, I know its there and that you’re getting flack for the wrong pricing. Its an easy mistake to make though.
GB: It wasn’t a mistake though, thats the unfortunate thing. The prices are set by country so its a different price in a number of countries. I think we need to be more transparant about those differences. It was 1600ms points in America and that got reported everywhere, which obviously isn’t ideal and misleads people, arcade games are the same everywhere so I can see why people are upset/angry about it. But pricing is set locally.
What I would say is though, everyone who tweets me, upset about it, is good stuff because it all gets reported back through and it makes people aware that users have noticed. So please, keep that up.
Me: Pro Evolution Soccer or FIFA series?
GB: It used to be PES, hands down, I imagine theres quite a few people like that, infact I remember there was a time, when I was a games journo that I wouldn’t even entertain FIFA and we played PES literally morning, lunchtime, evening at work, it was the one game that we played socially in the office. But now, for most people I think, its gone the other way and its FIFA. Although I think this year PES is looking better and I think its maybe closing the gap again a little bit.
I just think FIFA now is so polished, before it was lacking the deep gameplay, but now they have that too, its like FIFA is just going up and up. I really hope that PES can get back up there and make it more of a competition again, from its heretage it deserves to be joint top of the table with FIFA.
Me: Possible bias here, but Resistance or Gears of War?
GB: Have I played Resistance? Think I played the first one, so yeah…Gears by default. The experiential theatre that Resistance 3 has done seems really cool. Seems an ace idea, would love to hear from someone thats taken part in that. Anything that enhances the experience of the game is always good and great to hear about.
Me: This one is a wee bit more tricky; Halo, CoD or Battlefield?
GB: I’ve always got a soft spot for Halo so lets get into the CoD/Battlefield thing. The arguments really annoy me. To me, they’re such different games once you get past the fact that you’re a soldier holding a gun. Totally different games and built in such a different way. You can see the tradjectory that they’re both on are different too.
Battlefield is about the larger scale, tactical and vehicular roles, the team work cooperation, and if you play BF like that, then you’re going to play an amazing, amazing game. I loved Bad Company, Vietnam campaign and multiplayer.
CoD is like your action, run’n’gun, over the top set pieces and I love that as well. I don’t want to choose between them, I think I’ll have an amazing experience playing either one. But if you go into BF and play like you’re in CoD, you’re not going to like it, and vise versa for CoD playing like Battlefield. But to me, thats wierd, it’s like saying that you can’t enjoy two different movies, you have to align yourself to one or the other.
Me: You’ve been doing a lot of work with Special Effect recently, what got you involved with them?
GB: I was actually thinking about this the other day, I can’t actually remember what it was. I think someone mentioned them on twitter so I kind of just dropped them a line to see if I could help them out with their game library, because we were launching Kinect at the same time and the interesting things that could be done with motion control, so I think I hooked them up with a couple of Kinects and then we just got talking about what else we could do.
They’re genuinely really nice, lovely people, an the things that they’re doing just now is some amazing work. Mick that heads them, this sounds really soppy, but he’s a real inspiration and loves and believes in what he’s doing so thats a good thing. They’re great ambassadors for the games industry and I think that we, as gamers, should be really proud that they’re doing that kind of work and giving a different angle to the ways games are seen by the wider world. Playing on the fact that games can be a positive force for change is a really good thing.
The other thing that I really love is that they emphasise activity, the stuff that hey do to raise money is often very active or very physical so this summer I’ve lost tonnes of weight because I’ve done a 10k run for them, which involved a lot of training and we played football last week (against Arsenal legends and celebrities). Don’t get me wrong, the people that do gaming marathons, 48hour gaming marathons to raise money for charity is brilliant and I applaud and support them for doing it, but I think its so positive that they encourage the gamers to do more active things to raise money, especially when its a charity about people with physical disabilities. I think theres a really good message in there, that as an industry, we’re supporting them and helping them out. I love them, I could talk all day about them, they’re such nice guys.
Me: With Special Effect in mind, I’m trying to create a cookery book base on foods and drinks found inside games. Proceeds of which, I want to put towards Special Effect. Do you have any “meal” ideas from any games that I could use?
GB: Wow, that’s a phenominal idea, its going to be quite limited isn’t it? Which is quite good, but also quite challenging too. I suppose a way to look at it would be to look at the brands in games. In GTA so you could have a “Gutshot” burger and I can’t remember what the fried chicken was called in it, so you could look at the brands in games, I wouldn’t mind trying that burger though.
Follow Graeme on twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/AceyBongos
for more information on SpecialEffect go to http://www.specialeffect.org.uk/ and see what YOU can do to help this brilliant team or find them on Twitter and Facebook.
Suzi Inspired 