Q&A Part 1 - The GMTK Origin Story (Patreon)

Okay, so this first answer is in response to questions from OSW Review, James Law, Joshua Good, and Jake, who all asked about my background and the creation of GMTK.

The caveat on this one is that I really don’t like talking about myself and generally find this sort of thing uncomfortable. But if you’re interested then please have a read! 

Okay. Who is Mark Brown... well, I’ve always enjoyed making stuff about video games. When I was young I wrote little books about my favourite games and drew maps of imaginary levels. But when the internet happened, I could now share my nonsense with the world. 

I had a Pokemon strategy guide site, where I stitched together huge maps of the game using emulator screenshots. And a site where I shared custom items I made in The Sims. But my biggest thing was a site called NinSprites. 

This was an archive of sprites from Nintendo games - the little 2D graphics of Mario and Samus and whatnot. You’d have to play the game in an emulator with all the background layers disabled, make Mario do all his animations, and take frame-by-frame screenshots. It was a lot of work!

The Spriter's Resource as it stands today. A lot has changed but it's still using the logo I made many years ago!

Anyway, the site eventually evolved to become The Spriters Resource - which is still going today! I use it for GMTK sometimes, which is always funny. The forum was big too - people still say “hey, I remember you from the Pixeltendo forums!”.

Then, a little while later, I teamed up with some of the friends I met there to make a more traditional gaming site. It was unimaginatively called British Gaming Blog (hence my Twitter name, britishgaming), and had the usual stuff: news, reviews, opinion pieces, even some events coverage. 

One of the many site designs for BGB. I made new ones in Photoshop all the time and made my beleaguered friend Jon turn it into HMTL every few months.

And I really enjoyed it. I wrote for the site almost every day for a few years, before and after school, and decided that this is what I’d like to do: to be a games journalist! Now how the heck does one achieve such a thing?

I volunteered for some sites, like Ready Up (after responding to a call for writers that somehow ended up on the Xbox 360 dashboard). And I did some paid freelance for sites like The Escapist and Games Radar. But I could never land a job interview because I didn’t have enough experience.

So I tried to expand my search a bit and applied for an internship at Wired UK. I got the position and spent a month travelling into London each day to write stories for the website. After that, they decided to keep me on, working part time and working remotely, doing stories and stuff.

A huge article I wrote for EDGE magazine. EDGE is really well respected in the UK and, as a kid reading it, I never imagined I'd ever write for them.

This was my big break, really. Now, places couldn’t say I didn’t have experience! I applied for a job at Pocket Gamer and half the interview was about how cool the Wired offices were. I got a part time job doing news for Pocket Gamer, and between the two roles (plus, a little freelance for places like Eurogamer, EDGE, and Videogamer), I was set.

A few years later, the editor of Pocket Gamer left and I was asked to take over. So I left Wired and was put in charge of PG as a full time job. This meant I was hiring people, setting the agenda, and tackling tricky issues like dealing with PR people, fighting fires on every front, tackling tricky ethical issues with the ads department, and trying to juggle my vision for the site with the directions coming from the site’s directors. 

I mostly enjoyed my time there. The travel was great (with PG I went to Paris, Barcelona, Bilbao, Cologne, San Francisco, Tokyo, Helsinki, Amsterdam, and all around the UK). I wrote some good articles. And it was great to be a part of such an interesting and dynamic industry of game developers. 

The baseball we gave to Big Indie Pitch participants. Sadly, not my photo - I can't find my ball!

My favourite thing we did was The Big Indie Pitch. This was a bit like speed dating. A bunch of journalists, publishers, indie stars (we had people like Rami Ismail and Mike Bithell do it), and experts sat at tables, and then developers would go from table to table and show their game off in 3 minute pitches. We’d provide feedback and pick a winner. 

Unfortunately, I was rarely that proud of my work at Pocket Gamer. The site design was and continues to be atrocious, there was a lot of political nonsense in the company, and my own disinterest in free-to-play (which didn’t even exist when I started at the company!) didn’t really suit an industry that was marching ever closer to be dominated by in-app purchases and ads.

I had many job titles at Pocket Gamer. This was the last one before I quit. I made my boss agree to give me this silly title while he was drunk.

I also just wanted to make more stuff. I spent so much time in Skype calls and looking at traffic that I didn’t get to write much outside of strategy guides for Angry Birds (my strategy guides gave Pocket Gamer some of its best traffic ever, which was nice). So I went back to making stuff in my free time!

Which is how Game Maker’s Toolkit came about. I had always been interested in video stuff - I had attempted some Let’s Plays at British Gaming Blog and did some reviews and round-ups at Pocket Gamer. Got to give credit to James from PG for teaching me the basics of using Adobe Premiere. 

But when I saw video essays, I was hooked. My favourite, of course, was Every Frame a Painting. Tony’s videos were short and to-the-point. He didn’t have to appear on camera. And he talked about film in such an interesting way - talking about the hows and whys of film production. Not what the story was about, but the techniques used to achieve that story. It was fascinating!

And so... maybe I could do that for games? I mean, I had been interested in the magic of making games ever since I heard the developers’ commentary on Valve’s games. Hearing about the genius decisions behind games like Half Life and Portal really gave me an appreciation for, and an interest in game design, and I had been reading about it since then. 

The actual start of GMTK is a bit silly, though. I was idly thinking about how cool it was that Zelda: Skyward Sword had a bit where the music changed when you walked from shop to shop. And I wanted to tweet about it... but couldn’t find a video on YouTube that showed it off. And I thought, well I have Zelda, a Wii, a capture card, and Adobe Premiere - I could just make it. 

The original thumbnail for episode one. What was I thinking?! A screenshot, a murky brown rectangle, a really tall font. Yikes.

But the idea quickly evolved and mutated. I mean, it’s very similar to what LucasArts was doing with iMUSE, wasn’t it? And I remember reading about some cool musical stuff in Mario Kart 8. Oh, and don’t forget the way the music builds up as you solve puzzles in Portal 2 (I heard that in the game’s commentary!), or the way Luftrausers builds a dynamic soundtrack based on the ship parts you use. I could do a video essay!

This was really exciting. I was supposed to be working but I couldn’t concentrate. I was googling for more examples, pulling games off my shelf to make a pile of stuff I must record. I went to my brother’s house after work and borrowed some Wii U games. And got down to business. I wrote a script. I recorded game footage. I started to layer it together. I finished it, uploaded it, and tweeted it out. 

And the response was pretty great. I had built up an audience from all my different writing jobs so I got about 3000 views in the first few days. And really lovely comments. This spurred me on to try more stuff. 

I wrote a list of ten video ideas. I can’t remember them all, but I had videos I ended up making or consolidating into other videos (Toki Tori 2, detective games, maps, Super Metroid), and stuff that actually wasn’t suitable (things like Game Boy demakes of console games and games that got changed in different regions). 

But I obviously ended up making way more videos than that! And to cut a long story short, I started a Patreon, received enough support to go part time at work, and then enough support to go full time with GMTK at the beginning of the year. This is now my sole job and outside of a few rare freelance gigs, speaking engagements, or consultancy projects, I focus myself on GMTK and the Patreon. 

Hooray! I hope you found that a tiny bit interesting. If you have any questions about anything in here please do chuck them in the comments and I’ll reply. 

Okay, that’s like 4 questions down, 70 to go...