Jerry Holkins, Comedy Hero

I have peculiar taste with comedy. Being funny is hard. It is also pretty easy. It's something we get moment-to-moment. Life is short. It is good to enjoy a good laugh.

I'm certainly not that funny when in my natural (Internet-browsing-in-front-of-a-TV) condition. I consider this as a sad drawback. I am a very overweight male who is naturally shy bordering on social awkwardness. Consider too that I am turning 30. If the World Bank statistics are to be believed, the average life expectancy of a Filipino like myself born in the year I was born in is around 64 years. It is close to the peak, and every thing is downhill from here for me.

Yet, I have had some success with being funny around friends! In class I have become something of a class clown, and more so in my Group Therapy classes, where I soften blows by being off-the-cuff. When I sit with clients, when they tell me their sad stories, I make it a personal win when I get them to laugh, because for a moment, they found a spot that they enjoyed. Or maybe they found it awkward. I hope not. I'm still bad at my job like that.

Consider the video below. It is a clip from the Penny Arcade live documented series, "PATV". Some of you may have strong opinions about Penny Arcade, mostly due to the bad judgement of artist Mike Krahulik, and his poorly stated expressions on rape.

What wins PA for me over and over is the other half of the team, Jerry Holkins. Just listen to the guy. (He's the bald one). Listen to his timing. Especially that bit at the end!

My gosh.

Jerry Holkins is my comedic hero. He takes full advantage of his big vocabulary. He uses these big words to help him time his delivery. It's impeccably hilarious.

I've been listening to PA podcasts and watching episodes of PATV. He really does carry that jovial, spontaneous personality. I don't think he even tries very hard to bring that extra verve in his day-to-day life. I think it comes so naturally it's become interwoven into skin and grafted into his bones.

This is new to me. It's a "Breakthrough" as some call it. I never had a role model who I really felt I could brag to the world and say "yeah, that's the one". I've had heroes. I've had people I admired and loved to watch on TV or listen to music of, or read poetry of. I've had close friends, colleagues, and superiors at work or school who helped guide me here and there. Yet, few of the things I picked up over the years challenge me like the clip right there.

I suppose that's a good thing. Following Penny Arcade is not new. It's certainly not the most novel thing I've done, and I've started to outgrow some of the old standard jokes of their strip. But I do enjoy seeing the behavior of the people behind the scenes. They are by no means noble. Yet, they make no bones about their failings. "This is us. We're not great. But we're honest."

I am challenged to be that kind of honest, in what I write, what I say, and how I share of myself. I hope some of you help me get there too.

Today, I got word that a piece of my childhood died. Today, LucasArts Games is no more.

LucasArts is - was - the game development arm of the George Lucas Film company. The same people that made movies like Star Wars and Indiana Jones started out nearly 30 years ago to try and make money.

What the world got, however, was something else. The studio was a major innovator in the 90's. They made brilliant games like Maniac Mansion, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango, Monkey ISland, Loom, The Dig. These, at the time called 'graphic adventure' games showed people how games could startle, surprise, and make people laugh and think without resorting to the cheap thrill violence people typified video games with (and still do sometimes).

In the broader scheme of game development, LucasArts invented two big things. The first was iMUSE, or the Interactive Music Streaming Engine. It let people synchronize music to what was happening in-game, much like a movie would. Except, of course, this "movie" is one you control, so mood, themes, and tone of scenes were preserved. It helped make awesome stories.

The second big thing came earlier: their development of the SCUMM engine. The Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion (SCUMM) meant that instead of scripting out event after event on code in-game, events could be worked into the game more quickly. It was a big deal with the adventure games, as they
could include cool events taking place on-screen, and a developer could better "direct" events playing out as opposed to breaking out scripted events on code.

Add to the fact that they were one of the earliest to do high quality in-game voice acting and to try make thoughtful narratives, and you have the makings of a resonant legacy.

I think the odd catchment the company had with the Star Wars world, people recognized the brand instantly, and everything associated with them resonated quickly. Behind a young Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer, the company made these daring, different games that were huge hits, even halfway around the world here where I live.

I used to go to my aunt's house every few weekends and I would park myself in front of her PC screen whenever she was done with work. I would go on clicking and clicking a mouse (then a new thing for the early 90's) and play these games. Most days it was Indiana Jones: Fate of Atlantis. That one was a favorite. I would also go to school and people would have something to say about one of their games. We'd catch up and compare notes: how was your game of X-Wing? Where are you now in Full Throttle? I'm stuck at a puzzle in Loom, can you help?

As they also held the licenses to the Star Wars world, LucasArts also played a role in games later on after the 90's. They greenlit games like "Star Wars: Empire at War" by Petroglyph games (which I have so many fond memories of), and Factor 5's "Star Wars: Rouge Squadron" (which I also thought was incredible). There's also a special something called "Star wars: Knights of the Old Republic" by Bioware, which, to this day, is unsurpassed as Star Wars stories go, that no Star Wars movie in the last decade has surpassed. I tell you, whenever we say George Lucas "lost his touch" with the movies, some games churned out were exceptional and deserve the time and attention of millions.

And that's what hurts when I think about LucasArts. There was always so much room to grow, to move to, to try. Yet, they didn't, and as games got more expensive to develop, they dug a trench around themselves with the Star Wars license, and never tried anything else. They had, for the longest time, the Sam & Max titles, of which nothing happened for a decade. They still are sitting on "Grim Fandango" and "Full Throttle". They had "The Force Unleashed," a Star Wars game set in the world of the movies - and it stank. They even made a bad sequel to it, but no good Indiana Jones game has been made for years.

They were making a new game, "1313", hailed by critics as, well, "A New Hope". Well, that got canned too as the company closes. And it's a punch to the gut for me. Now 150 skilled developers lost their jobs, while the parent company, Disney, decided to close it and it would "[minimize] the company's risk while achieving a broad portfolio of quality Star Wars games". Which is insane, given how many great opportunities still say at the back-burner. It's a business decision, and there may be more behind it, but there seems to be a narrowness of thought behind the decision. They could have at least let the current team finish up their work!

It's just haunting. I'm close to my 30's and I do daydream of what I may pass on to my children. While I've come to accept some parts of my past being lost bit by bit, a company that spans 30 years would've been something special to point to my son and daughter and say "those guys did special things, and I can share them with you.". Now I only have dust to point my finger to, and that whisper in my head that whimpers and weeps.