First Bits - An Interview with Mel Hauser
April 5th, 2005 - Posted by Mel

(Note. The below blog entry features Mel-related profanity and rambling insights. Those with tender sensibilities should read no further and spare their virgin eyes.)

For reasons which escape both me and common sense, Dave has made it quite clear that I can pollute the news page with my own special brand of bullshit evangelism. So, I figure I’ll drag my way through something resembling introductions – once the sticky pleasantries are all out there, we can move on to more interesting development-related issues. In the coming weeks, I’ll be talking up the writing process behind PWX, character development, aspects of story mode, and any other pie I happen to have my grubby little thumb jammed into.

But instead of hamming it up with some forced bio quirkiness, I’ll just post excerpts from a WGU-related interview that I did with a guy named Steve Vavra some time ago. Steve’s a cool cat who actually runs his own wrestling-oriented print ‘zine out of San Diego, and we conducted a little propaganda bit in the summer of 2004 about all things Pro Wrestling X.

Enjoy. Questions and the like can be sent through the proper channels.

SV: First things first, how are doing Mel?

AMH: Wonderful. It was 109 degrees in Vegas at night over the weekend, which is the kind of surreal apocalypse weather that makes for good writing.

SV: Can you bring us up to speed on what you’ve been up to since your internet writing days? You were pretty busy for a while there, what happened?

AMH: I can answer both questions pretty simply. Priori, not much. I recently got married, I’ve been holding down freelance PR gigs and juggling side projects. Pretty standard shit for the local writing culture. I whore my pen out wherever it’s needed. Secundo, I guess you could just sum it up as the arduous process of growing up. There’s a bit of logic by a writer whose name I’ve forgotten that goes something like this: the moment that you spend more time waxing nostalgic about the days you’ve lived, you’ll be doing it until the day you die. I sorta hit that even keel. Whatever-Dude, Schwah.com, Retrocrush, DDT Digest, Xavier Doom’s Slayground, all amazing sites with their own unique vision, all stuff that I was honored to contribute to, but those salad days are pretty much done. I can’t sit around trying to entrance my supposed peer group with lofty stories about the golden days of the NES while bills are piling up like shit on my kitchen table and I’m learning about IRAs. It was magical stuff, but when I try to go back in that direction, it comes off like a joke.

SV: But you haven’t signed off completely. Tell us about Wrestling Gamers United.

AMH: Ha. Obviously not, or who the hell would be reading the lucid mumblings of a writing nobody? WGU is probably the first project that I’d say I’m genuinely full of piss and pride over. It’s an awesome gig, headed by an awesome guy, dealing with a project that’s simply fucking awesome.

SV: How did you get involved?

AMH: Like everybody else, I was just a fan of wrestling games. I used to frequent the same message boards as Dave Wishnowski, who is the brains and balls behind the WGU movement. We’d just sit around and bitch up a storm about the current project and how insulting it was, and how there was no precedent for upset gamers to vent their distaste at the people who were pimping these shitty games. So the whole premise was that we’d set up the first union for game fans to unify their sentiments, to draft a kind of a charter and wrap it around a fist. Take all these names and all this anger and just break some big company’s face with it.

SV: How did that turn out?

AMH: Were you mesmerized by the quality of the last wrestling game you bought?

SV: The last Smackdown game I bought was pretty good.

AMH: That’s the thing. They’re all ‘pretty good’. But there’s no reason that a major software publisher who’s made great games before should be currently pushing titles that are best summed up as ‘pretty good’. That’s insulting to the consumer.

SV: How did the WGU decide that it wanted to make a game of its own?

AMH: Well, we were pretty sobered up and stupid after we went out there and told these fat ass grosseros that we had thousands of gamers marching in a united front for a better game and they basically hung up the phone on us. Everybody was ready to go home. We did what we set out to do. Then fucking Dave..

SV: The guy in charge.

AMH: Yeah, decides that there’s no reason why we can’t make a game of our own. Something completely different than the current product, something that takes all these voices screaming for change and focuses them towards something proactive. It’s a very Canadian mentality, if I might go off on a racist tangent. Rather than sit around bitching and whining about the dreaded ‘man on top’, it seems like a completely viable option to go out and do it yourself. I’ve never met an American independent software designer or guy at a little fish level with that clarity of thinking, who would just go “Let’s see if we can do this.”

SV: So is the game in production now?

AMH: As much as it can be on the shoulders of people who aren’t getting paid. We have a very small, tightly-knit group of guys and girls who do what they can on the weekends when we aren’t working our day jobs. But what we have put together is amazing, all things considered. A basic working game engine, concept art, characters and venues, renders and animations. It just needs that little push to get the ball rolling.

SV: What can you tell us about the game? Will it have the benefit of a license?

AMH: We went around and around with that notion at the outset of the game’s design, when we were sitting down and putting all the cards on the table. What we finally reasoned out is that there’s no license that we can afford that would be worth the investment. God bless the indy federations of the world, but when you have a budget on a boot string, do you want to shell out a few hundred bucks to get a logo for a promotion that nobody’s ever heard of, or would you rather pay an artist to make a dozen create-a-wrestler textures with that cash? That’s how we had to look at things. And there’s also proprietary issues, the moment you start taking on more creative input outlets, the more the potential for convolution grows. You go from a very focused design process to trying to placate people: “My hair doesn’t look good, I do that move with more impact, if someone uses my character on a banner I want two grand more on my contract, etc.”. It’s a really hairy situation.

SV: How much fan input does the game really have then?

AMH: An unprecedented amount. Our supporters have their own board (at www.yucube.com) where they can throw up a post with a question and get it answered in the same day. They can tell us point-blank that they hate an idea, or love it. No major gaming project in our genre has that sort of exposure and dialogue going with their consumers. They usually just roll out some fat bitch with tattoos and a beanie to sell the idea of “we’re for the people”. That’s become a really popular ideology, but to paraphrase Chomsky: when you’re the fucking problem, you can’t also pretend to be the solution at the same time. These guys aren’t hungry and they have absolutely zero reason to change the way they do business.

SV: I hate to wrap it up but we only have two pages for this. So if you would, please tell us something we don’t know about Pro Wrestling X.

AMH: We almost wound up making Virtual Pro Wrestling 3 instead, but that’s a long story that AKI’s lawyers would probably be displeased by. Awesome guys, though. Everything you would hope for from a developer whose work you idolize.

SV: Thanks for your time!

AMH: Always a pleasure.

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