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Hawken employees genderflip CEO's sexy lady poster, have a laugh
Hawken publisher Meteor Entertainment has a handle on the gender equality gig, with ladies making up a solid half of its executive branch, according to a female employee's post on The Hawkeye Initiative. "Our gender awareness standards, compared to the industry at large, are top shelf," she writes. "We are talking Amelia Earhart in Atlantis, at a five star resort, getting a mani-pedi from Jensen Ackles. I have it good." But CEO Mark Long (a dude, if that wasn't apparent) had a penchant for the sexy lady poster above (on the left, if that wasn't apparent), and the writer didn't particularly care for it. It was blown up to poster size and placed in his office so that it was the first thing the writer – and all visitors – saw upon entering, and the last thing when leaving. "This little lady's undermeats have been the open- and close-parens to my work world for the last six months," she described. "I loathe this picture." So she did something about it. The writer roped in a co-worker and artist, Sam Kirk, to whip up a gender-swapped version of the poster, which they named Brosie the Riveter. They blew it up to the same poster size, and on April 1, they swapped it with the female one in their CEO's office. When Long saw the poster, he flipped. But then he came up to the writer and said something truly touching: "That was a brilliant prank. You called me on exactly the bullshit I need to be called on. I put up pictures of half-naked girls around the office all the time and I never think about it. I'm taking you and Sam to lunch. And after that, we're going to hang both prints, side by side." And so they did. The end.
Blacklight sequel going free-to-play
The sequel to Blacklight: Tango Down is going to lower the price in addition to the, uh, tango. Zombie Studios CEO Mark Long told Big Download that the sequel to the downloadable FPS, called just "Blacklight" for now, will be released under a free-to-play model, instead of the traditional one-time purchase fee attached to the original. "The full game will be free along with premium content that can be purchased in-game," Long said. "Blacklight will feature a large number of improvements based on the player feedback we've gotten. And we hope going free-to-play will close that loop so we can respond even faster to player preferences." And hopefully give Zombie more resources (read: money) with which to implement those responses, no doubt. The new game will use Unreal Engine 3, but won't use any assets from its predecessor. New weapons, new levels, and new "mech" vehicles will be featured -- the latter of which can be seen in the single released screenshot, above. Since it looks totally awesome, we're guessing that's going to be a microtransaction-based item.
