Major Rachel Rutherford
Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault
PC game
Check it out -- I'm immortalized. I first found this character, named after me, about a year ago. There are only two game designers in the world who would do this: Ben Palmer or Gregor Whiley.
Or possibly, one of the guys at Beam who worked with Ben years ago, when I gave everyone toy guns as consolation-prizes after Microsoft cancelled our game. The guns were incredible -- about four feet long, intricately made out of heavy black plastic, with big blunt foam-tipped bullets and a handle you could pump ten times to maximize how far they'd fly. They were strong enough to fly eighty feet -- down a hall if the ceiling was high enough, or across one of those field-like, 60-desks-in-one-open-area rooms. We took them down to the parking garage to have wars.
I bought fifty of these guns at Toys R Us, during the Computer Game Developer's Conference, then enlisted help to fly the 4 hockey bags of armament back to Australia where I, and Beam, lived. Ahhh, yes, the days when I spent my salary on weaponry instead of theatre props. Not much has changed.
Anyway, I appreciate the homage. Here is where I found the image.
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Several hours later
At the time, these toy guns were the perfect gift. They made us laugh, gave that little "ooo" of a good toy, were an outlet for disappointment & grief, and became legendary. Now, though -- in light of Iraq and our wretched political situation, suddenly it doesn't seem so amusing to see a little drawing of a gun in an American's blog. :(
I comfort myself, however, that Ben is English and Gregor is Australian. I have evidently left some positive imprint of Americans.
3 comments:
Brilliant! You could beat Laura Croft any day!
My own philosophy is, "Walk softly and live by your ethics." A person of integrity is respected everywhere.
It was heartbreaking, to have that game cancelled. We had all the rare stars aligned -- a brilliant game designer, an equally brilliant 3-D engine guy, two hot & aligned producers, and a publisher with the funds to build it. It's like picking up your cards and finding a royal flush.
But then Microsoft decided that every game had to be X% more profitable, and ours didn't make the new cut. We needed a mourning ritual.
And, to take a little more responsibility -- I think by my living in Australia, I wasn't at home at headquarters in Redmond to protest and defend the game, so it was an easy game to cut early.
Requiscat in pacem, Mustang.
Now I'll have to see if I can find the game for sale...
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