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64 CommentsHow a love of making things and the US Air Force inspired Ger Tysk to cosplay.
Anatomy of a Cosplayer
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Ger Tysk makes woodworking look effortless. As wood chips and splinters fly, sticking to her shirt and rebounding off her plastic safety goggles, her face remains as still and calm as water. Her arms move back and forth, the wooden block in her hands an extension of her limbs, pushing it through the saw and flipping it over to push again in one fluid motion.
Tysk is in her garage in the middle of Arlington, Mass., where she has banished her car in favor of a workshop. Floor to ceiling, the walls are covered with shelves and hooks sporting saws, wrenches and blades of all sizes. A pile of wood blocks and dowels sits in one corner, a dedicated station for spray-painting in the other. A bandsaw, router, lathe and two tables with half-finished projects clutter the room.
The spread on...
Feature
32 CommentsThe ballad of Bryan Heitkotter, a man who turned Gran Turismo into a dream job
Test Drive: From Gamer to Racer
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Bryan Heitkotter isn't a superstar. Not to most people. He's a guy, a normal-looking dude in his early 30s, not ugly, but not a stud either. He lives in Fresno, the same city where he grew up. His parents live nearby. He's got an older sister. He'd like a family of his own one day, but he doesn't have one to speak of right now. He enjoys playing video games.
Like most people, Heitkotter has goals. Things he'd like to do one day. Dreams.
Unlike most people, Heitkotter's already realized most of them. In fact, he's one of a kind. Until late last year, no other American could ever claim to do the things he's done. He's a record-holder, a winner and a champion.
Bryan Heitkotter is a professional race car driver. But he's not just any race car driver; he's the first American to go...
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30 CommentsOver two years of interviews, Vlambeer tells Polygon the inside story of how it beat the clones and launched the best-reviewed iOS game of 2013.
Cloned at Birth: The Story of Ridiculous Fishing
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"I think 'overwhelmed' is the right word," says Rami Ismail, the business half of Dutch design duo Vlambeer.
The interview is over. The story, told in pieces at least a hundred times in bars, at hamburger joints, on stages and in private circles of up-and-coming game developers, has now been told for the first time in its entirety. It is a story about the little guy getting bullied and making a stand. And winning.
It is the story of Ridiculous Fishing, and how two men from the Netherlands rallied the worldwide community of independent game developers to take on the practice of game cloning and reclaim their invention to launch what will become (for a time) the best-reviewed iOS game of 2013.
Only when the tale is told, all at once, in a rush, do the men themselves fully realize...
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26 Comments"[At E3 2012], people I’ve long admired asked, ‘How is the indie game development scene in Japan?’ I didn’t know what to tell them." -Yohei Kataoka, director of Tokyo Jungle
BitSummit Rising: Japan's Indie Ambassador
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"I really like people who are individuals, like mavericks," says James Mielke, a six-foot and change, bleached-blond ex-pat. "Japan does not reward that kind of behavior normally. It has a village mentality. Like when shit happens, people keep their shit together. They don't raid or loot Best Buy and they don't set cars on fire. All of these young people who are full of hope and promise, they just go into a salary man job. They end up being the guy who chain-smokes and drinks himself to death. Jumps on the subway because he can’t handle the pressure or jumps on the train tracks. It is really tough here for the average Japanese person."
Mielke is the organizer of BitSummit, a conference designed to galvanize Japan’s fragmented indie game community and introduce it to Western...
Human Angle
102 CommentsA day in the life of a working-class game hero.
Ciji is a Robot Jockey with Something to Prove
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Once upon a time, Ciji Thornton was a rock star.
Kind of. During the height of the Guitar Hero boom, Thornton made a name for herself as one of the hardest rockers of the plastic guitar.
"I was up on stage with thousands of people watching me," Thornton muses about her performance at the 2009 Gamescom Instant Jam in Germany. "How many people spend thousands of hours, days, years learning to play real guitar? And I come out with my plastic guitar and play on stage in front of thousands of people in another country."
Though Thornton has been competing in one form or another since 1998, she didn't go pro until 2006 at the Midnight Gaming Championship in Texas. Her first sponsor was a gaming apparel company, she recalls, who offered to customize her personal Guitar Hero instrument in...
Human Angle
60 CommentsMeet the people, problems, motivations and games behind this year's PAX East Indie Megabooth.
We Built a Booth
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Kelly Wallick can't stand still. She's hurtling left and right, forward and backwards. She's racing down aisles. She's putting up signs. She's building stuff in one place, and telling others to build stuff in another. She's saying hello to old friends and to people she's never met before. She's making small talk and big talk. She's on the move, scooting around forklifts and cardboard and monitors and people. She's nervous but excited; she has a tentative confidence. But this is what she anticipated, and now she's putting everything in its right place. She's home.
It's the afternoon before PAX East 2013 in Boston, Mass., and Wallick is standing at the heart of her baby. She has been at the head of a six-month-long project, one with the potential to better the lives of hundreds of...
