April 6, 2008

| Alligator Blood Beats Supergerms! >>

Terrific interview with Boštjan Cadez, the creator of Line Rider. I wonder: If you could somehow tally up the total cultural impact of something like Line Rider, what would it be roughly equivalent to? An indie band’s new album? A minor hit cable TV show? Something smaller? Something bigger?

(FYI, Snarkmarket’s TCI is approximately equivalent to a single mid-January stump speech by a third-tier presidential candidate. I just checked.)

We’re in this weird phase where bizarre niche hits, powered by viral internet jet fuel, can be really huge… but still somehow invisible.

Re: Line Rider-as-technology, not Line Rider-as-web-phenomenon, I liked this bit of explanation:

Anyway, I enjoyed procedural animation because it didn’t involve frame by frame ‘slave’ work, which I was always too lazy to do. But procedural stuff gets boring, monotone and predictive very fast. It especially bugged me with VJ-ing. Pre-coded stuff was too much like video — too much in the past — and even if it was reacting to audio in real time, it looked always the same. So I started thinking about how to find something which had the best of both worlds: something which I could change on the fly, some way of animating stuff by just drawing it.

I think there’s a lot of potential in that “best of both worlds.” Think: Spore, Crayon Physics, and things yet to come.