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Friday, February 05, 2010 |
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The Origins of Winterbottom
Matt Korba
Creative Director/Lead Design & President
The Odd Gentlemen
 Early Concept Art for Winterbottom….when he was a dinosaur….and part alien (This was to show the concept of aging with each clone).
Getting a legitimate degree for discussing the racial undertones of Independence Day was only one of my favorite things about film school. The other was watching early silent films. I am still surprised at how well they hold up. I think modern media struggles to create anything that is as charming as silent films. \It’s hard to imagine a time when media could be action packed, hilarious, and suspenseful, without the use of pirates, ninjas or space marines. However, with something as simple as two forks and a potato stars such as Chaplin, Lloyd and Keaton pulled off hilarious routines that are as funny now as I am sure there were when the films first hit theaters.
After graduating from film school in 2005, I humbly passed up my “in” at a Spanish reality television show fetching coffee and began USC’s fledgling Interactive Media program to pursue my M.F.A. I was exposed to a whole new world, fell back in love with video games and found something that interested me more than film production.
Video games interest me and because they are a relatively new form of entertainment, they spark my imagination. It is an industry that welcomes originality and there are still a lot of new ideas to create and implement. Even bad game ideas excited me, just for the fact that they were experimental and never before attempted. The idea that you can create an entire living, breathing world inside of a computer fascinates me. Opportunities to contribute to a new art form are rare. So rare, that it was worth giving up my no doubt successful career as a bilingual barista on Sunset Boulevard to try my hand at create new types of video games.
I went into grad school with a love of time travel. Many of my early projects focused on looping, alternate timelines and multiple realities. I often thought of how a time travel system would work in a game. Surprisingly games had not really explored the mechanics and conundrums of time outside of a narrative context. Let’s face it; the Back to the Future’s NES skateboarding antics didn’t quite cut the mustard.
It wasn’t until Steve Anderson’s Survey of Interactive Media class with a viewing of the short film Tango by Zbigniew Rybczynski was the seed of the time mechanics planted. It’s an amazing rotoscoped animation consisting of single shot of a room where people come onto the screen and perform a single action then leave the room. These actions loop and build with other character’s actions until the screen fills with an elaborate dance. Sound Familiar? It is if you’ve played The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom. I played around with different scenarios to game this system of looping and recording.
 Some Screens from a Sideshow, a short Animation I made in my first year at USC employing the same looping technique as Tango.
One of the first things I did on “Project Clone” was to research how artists implemented time travel in books and movies. I graphed out many of the structures I found. These graphs would become important later on in the brainstorming process for Winterbottom’s mechanics. See if you can tell what books/movies follow which graph.
 Taken from a early slide deck of “Project Clone”
I would often sketch out ideas of what being in multiple places at once would look like in a game. Even from these early images, ideas and rules became apparent. After looking at the images below, it seemed to me that it would be much easier to recognize your avatar and recorded motion from a side scrolling view. I felt that in most 3D action games where the user can switch the camera, there‘s strange disconnect because of the shifting of perspective. Two dimensional left to right motion is easy to understand in games. I felt like I could build off traditional platform conventions with a crazy time mechanic.
 Playing around with what multiple avatars on screen could be doing.
 Clone Bullet Hell (Apparently, I was playing Alien Hominid at the time).
We structured our next form of research around usage of time in video games. Time has inherently been in video games since the beginning. Time limits have existed in gaming since the early days of arcade session based play. In 1985 with the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System, Nintendo introduced the mass market to the “pause” button. In 1987’s The Legend of Zelda, a clock “power up” froze all enemies on screen for a limited time. This is arguably one of the first instances of “bullet time,” which is the digital enhancement of variable speed. In order to break time conventions in platformers, such as The Misadventures of P.B Winterbottom, we needed to set the conventions and fully understand them first. Super Mario Brothers, and it’s many sequels, successors, and clones throughout the 1980’s through the 1990’s set-up a language that can now be referred back to create new genres.
At the time of Winterbottom’s conception, few games featuring recursive replay and recording of actions existed. There was a swarm of slow-motion games at the start of the century: Max Payne, Enter the Matrix, and Viewtiful Joe. However, only recently had games been technically able to record actions and allow for play back. Prince of Persia Sands of Time used a rewinding mechanic as an undo button. This was intriguing, but not really a coherent part of the gameplay. Mario Kart allowed players to record their track run and then race against their ghost data. This was closer to the interaction I was going for, but Mario Kart didn’t really make the player feel attached to that recording. Blinx the Time Sweeper offered a rewind and record button as a limited power-up, was which very interesting but not dynamic in its implementation.
Project Clone was in the running to become the next USC game project after Cloud. The team consisted of former Cloud team members and neophytes like me. For about six months, everyone on the team championed a different game they wanted to make and we worked on concepts, prototypes, and documents of these different ideas. In 2006 the team headed to San Jose for GDC, it was here that I saw Braid for the first time.
The trip was inspiring. Cloud had done phenomenally well and eventually went on to launch ThatGameCompany. When we got back, I pulled Project Clone out of the running for the new game. Even though I wanted to play with time in different ways, Braid was astounding and also a 2D side scroller. That was enough for me to put the game on the self and focus on other things. The team decided instead to make Goodnight Elysium, a dream gardening battle networked game played over bit torrent. I also worked on a research project for the LA Times with a student producer by the name of Paul Bellezza (who would go on to co-found The Odd Gentlemen).
 A Screen from Goodnight Elysium
This might have been the end of the road for Project Clone, but it was only the beginning for Mr. Winterbottom…...The gears just kept on spinning.
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