Last week, three quarters of team Yarn Spinner was in Melbourne to attend Games Week. For the non-Australians in the room, this is a time of year where the largest city in Australia hosts myriad consumer- and developer-focused events about video games. Devs from all over the country and beyond are in town, so the week is packed with meetups and networking galore.
It’s a real highlight of the event calendar each year, to watch Aussies and Kiwis and SEA devs kick goals and make such an impact in an industry dominated by much larger economies. We love it.
The conference part of the festival concludes with the Australian Game Developer Awards (AGDAs), where the Adam Lancman is given as a career achievement award to individuals held in the highest esteem by the local industry. And this year, they gave it to me.
Congratulations to all of this year’s other winners, and thank you to IGEA and everyone who makes the AGDAs happen each year.
It was delightful to have the award announced by Tony Reed, who welcomed me into the industry and treated me as an equal from the moment he met me as an annoying baby game developer, some 16 or 17 years ago.
Now, I had been warned that I had been nominated for the award when the organisers wanted to check I would be attending the ceremony. But never in a million years did I think that I would win. I had written a speech because my sensible wife had made me prepare something, but as I ascended the stairs to the stage, that all went out the window. I mumbled some generic thanks and blushed and then fled.
You can view that here, as the internet likes to preserve such things in perpetuity:
I’m usually more composed than this. I do, after all, often do public speaking for a living. But it had been a hell of a day.
When I had left my hometown of Hobart a few days earlier, my elderly dog Argos the whopping whippet was elderly but stable. A bit confused, we noticed, but I had decided he had a long time left. As I attended talks and meetings on Wednesday, my mother had called to say he had been poorly for days and her concern was such that she was taking him to the vet. As I entered the theatre for the AGDAs, I learned they had tried some things but ultimately thought this would be it for him—that he would continue to weaken over the coming days and ultimately pass away.
There was nothing discernible wrong with him. He had simply stopped eating, stopped being interested in things, stopped doing his routine activities. After surviving proper afflictions like cancer and infections and so many wounds over the years—with his thin whippet skin and gangly uncoordinated body—it seemed so unceremonious we couldn’t believe it. In my mind as I ascended the stairs to receive this award, I was just debating with myself how he was far too tough for this to be the end.
We’ve loved and lost so many pets over the years to dramatic ends like cancer or collapsed larynx, I had forgotten that sometimes a creature can just lay down and wait to die. It’s so unfair to lose a family member this way, so soon and so quickly.
All the more unfair for it to coincide with this moment where I was being recognised for things I have done over the past two decades of my career. For him, this was his lifetime. He spent it with me, and he was there for almost everything I had done that I was being celebrated for now.
So here, I will tell you that story.
More than thirteen years ago, I had just moved back from a stint in Silicon Valley with my friend, Jon, where we were working on apps and experiencing the techbro lifestyle. We each realised that wasn’t for us, so when the company was acquired and much of the team went off to work for Google, we decided to take the pennies this earned us and go home. Home to little old Tasmania, where we’d try to make a go of this video games thing we’d loved doing since university but never knew could earn any money.
Back in Hobart, we rented a cheap basement office which even then we shared with others. Around the same time, a family friend found a little whippet at the local shelter who had been thrown out on the side of a highway. He was a dorky bundle of limbs with a chaos streak, and we named him for the loyal old Argos from the Odyssey.
Argos was with us through all of it. In those early years we built games for much-loved children’s TV shows and for airlines, and taught game development workshops for Google, Apple, Microsoft and others. That meant travelling the world, and coming home to him again and again.
We also wrote more than 25 books, including a few about making games:
Along the way I met Mars, and we got married. The three of us spent a lot of time together, and Argos was very much part of our family. And now Mars is a huge part of our work too.
At the same time, games in Tasmania were starting to find their feet. We helped found Tasmanian Game Makers, Inc., with the help of the amazing Jason Imms, who has lit a fire under the Tasmanian games industry and inspired so many of the people in it.
We watched Screen Tasmania rise up to meet the needs of our industry and start funding video games. They hired the incredible Alex Sangston, who has only just left (but is very much sticking around the creative industries), and later the brillaint Oli Potter, to run games and industry funding, which accelerated everything we could do, taking us to new heights.
We helped advocate to government for funding, in Tasmania and nationally. And we helped Screen Tasmania run Level Up Tasmania, an expo of Tasmanian games in Hobart. We expected 500 people to visit. At the most recent one, 3,000 came.
And we made Yarn Spinner, for Night in the Woods, kept expanding what it can do, and have seen so many games launch with it.
We’ve come a long way since my Mum bought us two Unity Pro licences in about 2007. Thanks, Mum!
After the AGDAs ceremony, flights were full so we couldn’t get home until late the next night. We touched down at nearly midnight and sped home, hoping we wouldn’t be too late. We sat awake on the floor, holding his little hand and telling him how much we loved him for the nine hours until the vet could fit him in. We carried him swaddled like a giant weak baby, so we could walk him around his garden one last time when he was too weak to stand. And we were with him as the final sedation kicked in, ending his cruelly brief fourteen years of life. During which he had such impact, but too few people knew it.
What a lifetime achievement. Rest in peace, little man.
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