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Tuesday, March 30, 2010
MHT Exclusive: X-Play’s Sessler, on PAX East and local gaming
By Rodney H. Brown
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One of the most anticipated and heavily attended panels at the recent PAX East gaming show at the Hynes Convention Center was the X-Play Live panel, featuring the staff and anchors of the long-running game review show on Comcast Corp.’s G4 channel. The founder of X-Play and its co-host along with Morgan Webb, is Adam Sessler, who is also the editor-in-chief for game content for all of G4. While Sessler’s often vitriolic reviews of bad games make him a must-see for gaming fans, he generates a great deal of hate-mail — or ‘hate posts’ on the G4 forums — for his consistent calling out of certain popular games as badly made.
Sessler spoke exclusively with Mass High Tech’s Rodney Brown prior to the Sunday morning panel, at which he wanted to make it clear that his wife is not an “Eva Braun-like decoy” he uses to cover the rumor that he is gay, as his Wikipedia entry once said.
Q: What do you think of the Boston game development community?
A: Obviously Boston on the East Coast is probably one of the larger hubs. There is a little development compared to what is on the West Coast, obviously with Irrational Games and Harmonix, and there are others — and 38 Studios obviously — out there in the outlying areas. It is slowly becoming more like what maybe Seattle is like. It has the nascent qualities of where that was, that or maybe Dallas 20 years ago.
Q: PAX is very big for independent game developers. What about the local indie scene?
A: It’s so funny. I am so aware of indie games, but I think half the time I don’t even know where they are being made. They kind of just manifest themselves out of the ether and impress me. I think the indie games scene, since that is where there is so much growth and that’s where so many young developers are getting their toe-holds in, that Boston and other places — as long as you have a couple of people and you know what you are doing — you can start making games there. You don’t need to sort of latch yourself to a large, established developer.
Q: What’s the best thing you have seen so far at PAX East?
A: The one that really stood out to me, there’s a game from a group called Twisted Pixel — who haven’t impressed me over the years with The Maw and ‘Splosion Man — this game Comic Jumper. I think this is the one game that they kept on wanting to make. It’s such a wonderful melange of different classic game styles. Just in the 10 minutes I saw, the writing, it’s sharp. The voice acting, it’s quick. They seem to understand a lot of the mistakes that larger developers are still making these days.
Q: How has PAX East been for you, a PAX veteran?
I have always known that PAX is good. It’s this wonderful collection of fans. It kind of reminds me that, despite the kids that leave the hate messages on all of my posts online, that really it is a really nice community. I am a little bit surprised at the publishers that have been at PAX West not choosing to come to PAX East. I’ve gathered that they have tried to see what the situation was like to see if it was worth their time, but more or less, it’s PAX West in a larger population center on the Eastern seaboard. I don’t know — it’s kind of obvious that this was going to be very successful. I am looking forward to see how it grows over the years. The East Coast is woefully underserved with stuff like this because people like myself and so many of the developers are out on the West Coast.
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