AlphaGazette #03: Galloping Gourmands On The Go | SC03 – Hamburger Heaven

During my Microsoft days, I was once in an anything-goes 'blue-sky' meeting, where we were pitching absolutely bonkers ideas for a new game, because in the early days of X-Box, no one really knew what they were doing, mainly because many of us had never really worked on games before, including the Creative Director, an experienced manager of developers. He wanted to make something really out there, as he put it. In other words, a first-person shooter, but cooler-- everything had to be cooler than the last thing you did. So we spent hours trying to figure out how to make it unique, but all I remember was that the gameplay could be whatever, as long as it was surreal.

Sounds so cool! but what does it even mean? There is no thing you can point at and say "that's surreal," because it's a concept that draws it's meaning from context and juxtaposition. Looking back now, it's laughable, because we didn't even a character in a game yet. This was in the pre-Unreal days, with no off-the-shelf product to start with. Everything had to be built from scratch, and we didn't even have an engine.

To no one's great surprise, the plug was pulled on the project after only a few months. I don’t remember much else, except that one artist came up with an idea for a gun that shoots bees and turned them into honey. To be honest, I had forgotten all about whatever this was until years later, when I was designing a sandbox environment for another ill-fated project. There was a base camp called Hamburger Heaven, a 50's diner with diner-themed weapons shooting various condiments. Like many small businesses, it failed.

The spirit of that Atomic Age, retro-futuristic Hamburger Heaven lived on as cartoon-colored psychedelic dream until it blossomed into a whole planet. Generally, it is a safe and easy place to explore, as long as you can read a map. The dangers are not necessarily aggressive, merely curious, and thus it is best to steer clear of large plants and trees.