Excerpt on Main Street
~New Author Spotlight~
Pajamas on a Sun Stained Beach
(A story somewhat supposedly based upon a true tale…)
Manuscript synopsis
Paul Jones Palin is a deeply depressed, severely stressed, self-medicating dysphoric agoraphobic on the verge of suicide. He’s made and lost fortunes, married and divorced three times and is terminally ill. Alone in a post 9-11 New York City P.J. struggles through the not-so-great recession with neither health insurance nor hope. Just when things couldn’t get any worse…
But it’s not just his disease that’s killing him – it’s the irony!
“Pajamas On A Sun Stained Beach” is a work of fiction that chronicles the dying thoughts of a drowning man and not only explores biological death but also the death of our dreams. Within 112 pages the manuscript covers 50+ years of the character’s life (1954-2010) and uses the death of the American dream as a basic subtext. This book is intended to not only work in published form but is also adaptable to film as well as a blueprint for video/computer gaming.
Chapter IV/Excerpt #1 of 3: Weedville Gaming, Inc (WVG, Inc.)
Time’s the meanest thief I’ve ever seen
He rips off your youth then steals all your dreams
Sets it up so no one gets out alive
He’d steal the pennies off a dead man’s eyes…
~Papa Haha~
On Wednesday, March 25th, 1987 Paul Jones Palin developed his first computer game called DragClick™. It was based on a simple car racing idea he had toyed with in his head for years. Nothing too fancy – just some down to earth car crash crap.
Being less than computer savvy, he placed an ad in The Village Voice classifieds seeking college students with an interest in becoming game artists. Once he recruited two such eager students, both who were attending the New York School of Visual Arts, P.J. had them sign circuitously worded, but binding, non-disclosure agreements. He then worked alongside them for several months. Together they designed a crude but functioning model of the game he had in mind.
The next few months of Palin’s life were dedicated to finding game publishers to further develop, then make available, his game to the general public. After three or four presentations and meetings with said publishers he found one that agreed to handle and further develop his project. On Monday, July 20th, 1987 P.J. signed a contract with MYW Enterprises for the rights to promote, market, and distribute DragClick™.
Coincidentally enough, the owner of MYW Enterprises turned out to be one Michael Wayne. Mike use to be one of Jonesy’s guitar students back in the day when he was still teaching music. Over the years they became good friends and great drinking buddies. When MYW Enterprises was later sold, Wayne moved to Florida. He was one of the few people Palin was truly sorry to see exiting his life.
Once the completed version of DragClick™ was finalized, (which was one of the earliest games to utilize AdLib’s Music Synthesizer Card that was of course later replaced with the Creative Labs Sound Blaster card when AdLib eventually filed for bankruptcy), the publisher launched an inexpensive but effective promotion and marketing campaign. Retailers ordered it and the gamers bought it. Shortly thereafter a steady flow of cash streamed into his bank account.
At first his game was only available on CD, then later on DVD to play on personal computers. The stream of money began to grow along with the popularity of his creation. In the early 1990’s one of the larger video game console manufactures took notice of the DragClick™ sales numbers and made Peege and his publisher an offer they’d be foolish to refuse. Neither, Mrs. P’s little blue eyed, be-freckled, befuddled, bashful and bewildered boy from Baltimore, nor his publisher, were foolish men when it came to money.
Over the years he came up with a few other gaming ideas which he developed in the same fashion as he had with DragClick™. While most were moderately successful none seemed as popular or as lucrative as his original project. A whole new fad in the gaming industry had emerged called First-Person Shooter technology (a.k.a.: FPS tech) which allowed players to see the game as if through the eyes of the game’s protagonist.
This was soon followed by Third-Person Shooter technology (a.k.a.: TPS tech) that allowed the player to see an avatar on screen in the third person view. Unfortunately, as 3D libraries emerged they literally killed the market for proprietary interfaces and none of Paul’s current games even incorporated FPS or TPS. So, as one would anticipate, sales of his products diminished as time went on. But that slump ended, luckily, by the end of the 1990’s.
As to be expected, most computer and console based games appeared to have reached their commercial saturation level and people really wanted something new. Beside the fact that our ever diminishing attention spans were getting progressively shorter; once you played these games a few times they became rather boring. After all, you probably got quite a surprise when a monster was behind the door the first time you played some game, but by the tenth time, well, the thrill was gone, baby, the thrill was long gone.
Luckily, computer operating systems were upgrading and becoming faster. Improved CPU technology along with quicker graphics accelerators and lower cost Internet high-broadband connection accessibility had completely changed the playing field. Now gamers were demanding more complex game engines and finally developers had the platform that allowed them to meet this demand in order to give the people what they wanted.
So shortly after the beginning of the new millennium, Wednesday, January 5th, 2000 to be exact, P.J. Palin had come up with a new idea of creating a computer game that Internet users could participate in with one another while on-line. This would not only allow for more multi-player participation and interaction, via a game server provider, but would also offer a new distribution pipeline providing a broader and virtually universal user base. Interactive gaming was just about to begin another light-year leap into the future.
Over the years many individuals had launched websites on the Internet. This would usually involve not only time and money, but some ability in writing html, or chunking code. Then after doing all of that you had to somehow get people to come to your website. This was akin to placing a billboard ad on a desert road and hoping somebody would cruise by and see it. In other words, web traffic was generally pretty hit or miss.
But these were the early days of ever growing social networking sites. The advantages of these sites were they were free to subscribe to and provided templates that were easy to use in constructing the pages for your site. Best of all, they offered a built-in network of other subscribers that you could then “friend” in order to build your own network. Several of these became hugely popular with web surfers. One such high traffic social networking site in particular that caught Palin’s attention was: www.MyFaceBucket.com.
By Stevie B © 2011
To be continued on January 31, 2011.
