Okay, first I'd like to say sorry if his was asked before. I haven't bee on these forums much due to the fact that my life "doesn't run at a smooth 60 frames per second", if you know what I mean and I was ultimately curious what real devs thought of it.

I know the movie is old, but since I don't have time to watch movies most of the time, I didn't see it until recently. Even though I thought the movie was funny, it was plain wrong in terms of how the industry was presented. Since most people don't have a clue how it really works, no one would notice or really care. I guess it's because I take this industry VERY seriously and hate to see people make a joke of it. I guess it's because I fought tooth and nail to get as far as I did coming out of a place where such opportunity doesn't exist with little encouragement and no competition to keep up my spirits. No, the movie didn't anger me, just thought it was poorly executed. They could have at least used (or faked) real dev hardware, code and a bit of spotlight on other areas besides test (but I guess test is the easiest department for non-game devs to understand), but that's just me. Ultimately, I understand the purpose of the movie was humor, not to be educational.

I thought the movie was awesome. No, it didn't accurately depict the gaming industry, but what would be the point in doing so? The makers of the film played off a lot of common stereotypes and misconceptions, which I felt added to the movie. I think being in the game industry made it that much funnier to me.

Funnily enough, I was visiting a studio a year and a half ago where I saw this super nice sports car. Out of the car stepped out this dude that looked just like that JD? dude from the movie. My coworkers and I were all like 'holy shot, it's the dude from Grandma's Boy!' Turns out he was the CEO of the company [wink]

I thought the movie was pretty funny. Anyone who takes comedies too seriously should relax and realize its a movie meant purely to entertain. Plus, I always wanted a car bed sooo :)

I enjoyed the movie. I mean, if you really want to be educational about things, you pretty much need to throw away every movie and TV show ever made. Well, except for Office Space.

With an exception of the technical stuff, the work politics and retardation were pretty accurate :P

I met a "real life" JP once too. My small programming company was asked to design a 3D educational game for a university professor. Everything sounded great until we showed up to the first official meeting. The professor walks in and behind her is this 15 year-old kid in a black trench coat with sunglasses, thin gloves, and an aluminum briefcase that contained his laptop. Come to find out, the "whiz kid" had already completed most of the project. And by "completed", she meant he had found some 3D game maker software and hacked together about 50 different script files.

We were being asked to figure out why his scripts were so slow and kept crashing the game. Needless to say, we did not go forward with the project.

Oh, and Grandma's Boy was a fun movie. I kept wondering how the main character managed to program his game without a dev machine, but maybe he just diligently typed in code with his controller.

I loved the movie.

Would have been a great tandem marketting strategy with the Westwood "Guys can you tweak the graphics on level 3?!" commercial.

Another little plot screw-up. At the end, they play the game to determine who created it?? As if the person creating a video game MUST be the best player of said game.

Quote: Original post by DaWanderer
I met a "real life" JP once too. My small programming company was asked to design a 3D educational game for a university professor. Everything sounded great until we showed up to the first official meeting. The professor walks in and behind her is this 15 year-old kid in a black trench coat with sunglasses, thin gloves, and an aluminum briefcase that contained his laptop. Come to find out, the "whiz kid" had already completed most of the project. And by "completed", she meant he had found some 3D game maker software and hacked together about 50 different script files.

We were being asked to figure out why his scripts were so slow and kept crashing the game. Needless to say, we did not go forward with the project.

I'm picturing this and it's pretty funny. That must have been the world's most awkward meeting. Please tell me you grilled him about the technical details as much as possible.

Quote: Original post by Ravuya
Please tell me you grilled him about the technical details as much as possible.

Oh yes, and it was a completely lost cause. "What do you mean what engine did I use?" "What's wrong with re-reading my data file each time through the loop? It works!" And my absolute favorite: "Loading everything into the level at once is too slow. Maybe we should just require the user to have a fast machine."

Quote: Original post by ChurchSkiz
As if the person creating a video game MUST be the best player of said game.

I can attest that this is definitely true. I wrote a little 2D spaceship shooter in high school that supported two players. After spending a few months writing and play testing, I challenged my buddy to a round. He completely destroyed me and I was baffled as to how this was possible.

Quote: Original post by DaWanderer

Quote: Original post by ChurchSkiz
As if the person creating a video game MUST be the best player of said game.

I can attest that this is definitely true. I wrote a little 2D spaceship shooter in high school that supported two players. After spending a few months writing and play testing, I challenged my buddy to a round. He completely destroyed me and I was baffled as to how this was possible.

Yeah when I went to DigiPen as a teenager I raped a guy at his own space game.

On a more sophisticated level you have games like pac-man and donkey kong, which the developers didn't even plan for beating so I'm pretty sure they could never do it themselves.