I recently returned from an epic West Coast odyssey, bookended by both Macworld and the Game Developer’s Conference. Somewhere in between those major events, I made this:

I’m not really sure how to explain this little project. I developed it in about a week, and the initial impetus for creation actually came after watching this video on YouTube

I suppose if you wanted to be intellectual, you could look at this game as a statement about creativity in the game industry. Entirely too much time is spent meticulously recreating the gameplay of previously developed games.

This is true in both the mainstream and independent game development spheres. Look at the countless Cave Story homages, as well as the countless iterations of games like Super Monkey Ball, Madden, Smash Bros, etc

I’m not saying this is entirely a bad thing. Recreating the mechanics of a classic is a fantastic way to cut your teeth in game development. In fact, there’s something even endearing about this, especially when a game fails to accurately capture the finesse of the original and it becomes fun to discover and exploit all of the bugs in its engine.

But, as the name implies, it’s hard to take Shit Game too seriously. And I feel kind of silly talking so much about it already. Don’t be fooled by the trailer. The in-game soundtrack consists entirely of poptunes recreated in general MIDI.

Download the Windows version — Mac users can play the game through CrossOver or other virtualization software. I may do a quick OS X port when Apple releases Java 6.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 2nd, 2008 at 4:15 pm and is filed under Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.