From Naut to the Top

You could be excused for thinking that the biggest story of E3 was something along the lines of Project Natal, Sony’s inability to keep a secret or Nintendo’s plans to go in to the healthcare market (trust me, next year they’ll announce the Wii Pregnancy Test) – and it’s true that for a while they were the headline grabbers. But in the week following E3, something else has become the real big story within the fallout. It’s a Nintendo DS game from a relatively small company, and it’s done something that isn’t often seen at E3: a real surprise, that comes in the form of Scribblenauts.

The premise of Scribblenauts is relatively simple. You, as Maxwell, have to get through a level with various obstacles to collect a starite – and you do this with the assistance of… well, anything. You can spawn practically any object just by writing the name of it, and it’ll appear. There’s just a few rules: it has to be a concrete object, no proper nouns, no copyrighted words, no adjectives, and only things suitable for a general audience (so nothing naughty, I know what you’re thinking already).

You write it, it’ll appear in the game – and it’ll work. The game is powered by a database system called Objectnaut, tens of thousands of items strong, which classifies what the physical aspects of the item are, so an elephant may be classified as an ‘animal’, and as an ‘animal’ has organic flesh, it can be eaten.

So, if you needed to get a starite out of a tree, you could be simple and write ladder, one would appear, and you could climb up it. Taking another route, you could write lumberjack, get someone else to do the dirty work for you. Hey, go crazy, why not get Maxwell a pogo stick, and bounce on it while on a trampoline. I don’t think that last suggestion has been tested in the game, but it probably would work. If all else fails, you could just use a jetpack.

There has been an element of buzz around Scribblenauts for a while now, the idea is one that when you first hear of it, you think “there’s no way it could work”, but at the same time it’s impossible not to get excited for the possibilities of putting God on a skateboard with a shotgun, and making him fight Cthulhu.

In case you’re wondering, God won.

Excitement built up throughout show as word of mouth built up, with former 1up writer Nick Suttner saying on day 1 that “Keyboard Cat is in Scribblenauts. Game of the show, by far. Mind is absolutely blown.” Videos of YouTube of a Kraken fighting off a stegosaurus, griffin and a jackalope spread like wildfire across forums, with a thread on the NeoGAF forums building up even more excitement about the product as positive impressions flooded in.

The amount of people checking out the show on the E3 floor increased throughout the 3 days of the expo, with more journalists writing about the game as word got around: but nothing caused more hype than a single message board post, number 217 in the NeoGAF thread.

Forum member Feep told his story of playing the game, and his frustration when he came up against a horde of robot zombies. After generating simple items such as a raygun, pickaxe, torches, in frustration, he tried “time machine” – and one actually appeared. Upon entering, there was the choice to go in to the past or the future, and going back in time he found himself surrounded by dinosaurs.

“ I clicked one, and realized I could RIDE THEM. So I hopped on a fucking DINOSAUR, traveled back to the present, and stomped the shit out of robot zombies. Did you just read that sentence? Did you really? I FUCKING TRAVELED THROUGH TIME AND JUMPED ON A DINOSAUR AND USED IT TO KILL MOTHERFUCKING ROBOT ZOMBIES. ”

Post 217 soon became a meme in its own right: posted across blogs, causing thousands of replies, so much so that “post 217” is now an item in the game. Hey, if Longcat can be, there’s no reason why Feep’s legendary tale can’t be: especially when the creative director of 5th Cell, Jeremiah Slaczka, who came up with the original concept, posts on the NeoGAF forums and has been answering questions about the game for the last few months: to the point where NeoGAF is an item in the game itself.
In fact, with the tremendous response caused the post 217, Slaczka posted a picture drawn by the studio’s main artist, of Maxwell riding a dinosaur in to battle against a horde of robot zombies, with a time machine in the background as a present and as way of saying thanks.

But as well as demonstrating top-notch community management, the buzz caught the attention of the media, with glowing impressions from many outlets, culminating in a first: the game of the show award from a major publication being given to a handheld game with IGN, Gamespot and Gamespy all giving the game the highest accolade.

With expectations that the biggest game of E3 has to be the big sequel, the epic title… to see a title like this, one completely different that challenges your imagination rather than just your finger dexterity could mark the start of a departure from the blockbuster or bust view that many have about the gaming industry, and hopefully this will translate in the sales of the game. 5th Cell have done well with Drawn to Life and Lock’s Quest, but will this blow those out the water – if it even lives up to the hype? We’ll see by the end of the year…