Nathan-Martz
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Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster preview: Tickle me, Double Fine
"One of the things that I'm personally really passionate about -- the reason I'm in this industry -- is that I want to see our medium be more than it is already," Double Fine's Nathan Martz, and project lead on Once Upon a Monster, confided in me at a Microsoft press event yesterday. "Our human experience is so broad and yet our industry deals with such a narrow slice of it." Martz explained that the project was conceived with the express purpose of generating joy. "I wanted to explore emotions," Martz said of his goal going into development. "For me, the best one is joy. The early example of this is a girl I was dating at the time. She asked me if I had a 'happy' song, a song that you hear and it just makes you feel great. Everybody has a happy song, and that was originally the name of this project: 'Happy Song.'" I'll admit it: Playing a bit of Once Upon a Monster was a happy experience, one I think would be even more so for families and kids a little younger than myself.%Gallery-116735%
Double Fine tells how it got to Sesame Street
The announcement that Double Fine's next game would be a licensed (!) Sesame Street (!!) game for Kinect (!!!) was something of a shock. In an interview with Gamasutra, studio head Tim Schafer and project lead Nathan Martz explained how the project grew out of a shared love of Muppetry and an original idea that just happened to be perfect for the franchise. Martz came up with the idea for an "uplifting" game during the same Amnesia Fortnight event that spawned Costume Quest and Stacking -- a game that involved "cute, furry little monsters, making music and having fun," as Schafer described it. As work continued on the prototype, which already featured cute Henson-esque monsters like "Marco" (above, the one who isn't Cookie Monster or Elmo), the idea of pursuing the license came up -- and then when Sesame Street and WB made a deal for games, Double Fine saw an opportunity. The game focuses on the Sesame Street idea of the "Whole Child Curriculum," teaching social and emotional skills as well as healthy living habits. In addition, though, Schafer asserts that it will be funny. He calls Sesame Street a "secret comedy show" and intends to keep the same tone in the game. "They're satirical -- they don't just make bland shows for kids, they make them actually funny," Schafer said. "I think that's important for the kids and especially for the parents who watch them together. We're hoping that this is something parents play with their kids."
Double Fine's second THQ game coming in early 2011
Yesterday, Double Fine and THQ announced Costume Quest, the first downloadable project in a two-game deal, due this Halloween. According to THQ, the unnamed second project is a third-person adventure and is "scheduled to be released in early 2011." It's not clear whether this game (one of four "smaller" games from Double Fine) comes from the mind of Lee Petty, Nathan Martz, or Brad Muir -- the other three developers listed during Double Fine head Tim Schafer's talk at Develop -- but we've asked THQ for clarification. Given what we know about the three other titles, the unnamed game could be anything from "sort of retro but also new" (Petty's) to one that "focuses on gameplay mechanics" (Muir's). Frankly, we can't imagine why anyone would base a whole game on the lives of gameplay mechanics. Do they just come in and fix your gameplay?
