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Jonathan Mak Plays it his Way
By Heather Chaplin
Jonathan Mak
In the mainstream videogame industry, chasing technology is just part of the job. Game consoles change every six years or so, and with every change comes quantum leaps forward in processing power and graphics capability. Every time a console changes — from the Xbox to the Xbox 360, from the PlayStation 2 to the PlayStation 3 — game developers have to relearn the tools of their trade.
Jonathan Mak thinks that this is craziness. Actually, a lot of game designers think this techno rat race is crazy, but what separates Mak is that he's actually chosen to opt out.
Mak, 25, is the new new thing in the world of videogames. His first published game, Everyday Shooter, from his one-man company, Queasy Games, launched through the Playstation 3's downloadable service last fall and has quickly become the talk of game fans everywhere.
Everyday Shooter
Everyday Shooter is a riff on the old-school shoot 'em ups from the heyday of the arcade. Think Space Invaders, Missile Command, or Defender but gone totally abstract and psychedelic with beautiful ricocheting explosions and perfectly tuned, surprisingly deep game-play. (Then imagine all this packed into a rock'n'roll concept album. The game's eight levels are each accompanied by a guitar score composed and recorded by Mak.)
"There will always be those game designers, in the mainstream, particularly, who are chasing the technology," Mak says from his tiny basement apartment in Toronto. "But that's because it's easy to quantify. 'Hey! It's high-definition, check it out. That'll be twenty bucks more!'"
Mak has a funny laugh, somewhere between a kid hyperventilating and cartoon character's "hehehe." He lets it out now. "I mean, I could care less. It's being imaginative that matters — and that's harder to quantify."
Everyday Shooter training level
Mak is part of a burgeoning indie game movement that has embraced the concept of the "bedroom programmer" — a term used to refer to a time before games became such big business and when a designer could program, design, animate and make the music for a game all on his own (and, presumably, in his bedroom if he chose.) It's a retro concept, hip in its backwardness. And Mak is very interested in all things retro. You can see it not only in the graphics and colors of his game but also in the tools he used to build that game. His own computer — 2 gigahertz — isn't even powerful enough to run the newest PC games on the market, and he chooses to program in C++, which is the gaming-world version of showing up to an electronic music festival with an acoustic guitar strapped to your back.
Mak has a degree in computer science from University of Toronto and is perfectly capable of working in whatever format he chooses, so his choice to program in C++ isn't just about being hip. Rather, Mak believes in boundaries as an important part of the creative process. He likes the limits imposed on him by C++. He also likes how straightforward the language is.
"The old stuff is so basic and no nonsense," Mak says. "It's as close as I can get from an idea in my head to seeing something on the screen. In the big-budget, mainstream world, [where games today routinely cost in the tens of millions and take teams of hundreds to produce] they put their ideas through pipelines. I mean they call them 'content pipelines!' So I'm always trying to imagine how that works — you have an idea and you, like, flush it through this giant pipe and maybe three days later you get to see something? It's ridiculous." The swallowed hehehe again. "Can you imagine playing music that way? Or any other art form working like that?"
But there Mak goes again, showing his outsider status. It's the word "art" that gives him away. Part of what separates the indie gaming scene from its mainstream big brother is the conception of the medium as a genuine means of self-expression rather than a high-tech product. Whereas it's typical in the game industry to test games for hundreds of hours before release, Mak says he's not trying to please anyone but himself with his work.
Mak's game Gate 88
"I'm not making a utility for fun," he says, (which is paramount to heresy in the mainstream game industry, where "fun" is considered synonymous with the very notion of what a videogame is.) "I'm just making this thing that expresses what I want to say."
Of course, Mak is lucky in that channels of distribution are open to indie game makers today that were unheard of a generation ago, when hardcore fans passed them around on disks. Besides Internet download, the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 are eager for content to offer in their downloadable services.
ToJam Thing
At least Mak knows he's lucky and pays his dues to the gods of luck. He gave Everyday Shooter eight levels because the number eight is good luck in Chinese (it sounds like the word for prosperity). He refuses to use the numbers four and five when he's programming because they're bad luck (sounding like death and not, respectively.)
Mak says this superstition makes his work a little harder, but not impossible, thanks once again to his low-tech approach. For example, these limitations are not why it took him more than two years to make the game. "Is it hard not to use the numbers four and five when you're programming?" Mak asks. "Yes, but it's not that hard. It's not what held this game back. I mean this game is not a technical feat. It was a creative process. I was waiting for ideas."