Joystiq

Speaking of games, do you actually play games? Like video games or board games?

I do. I'm a big fan of video games. I just don't have a great deal of time for it anymore. I have two kids, which takes up a lot of time and a wife who does not play. Well she plays some games but the things that she picks are few and far between. Usually they are not multiplayer so I can't play with her. But yeah, I have Xbox 360 at home and a Wii as well. Lately I've really gotten into Marble Blast Ultra, which I never expected to really get into. I know. It does sound ridiculous. It's not a game that I thought I was really going to get into but I've really been enjoying it.

I've been playing a lot of multiplayer on Xbox Live and I continue to be amazed. Even though I think I'm pretty good at a game, I'm surprised at how much better other people can be. You're in a multiplayer situation and you're like, 'Man, I am working as hard as I can and these people are running circles around me. It's like they are magicians. I literally do not know how they are doing what they are doing.' [laughs]

How cool is your family with your job? How does that dynamic work?

It's interesting. I think everybody is happier because I'm happier. You don't want your family members to be constantly complaining about how they wish they were brave enough to take a chance and do what they want to do. "I've really got to quit this job.' You don't want to hear that over and over. The fact that I'm in a place where I want to be makes it better for everyone.

That said, it's good and bad. I'm certainly home a lot during the days and I get to spend more time with my kids than I would if I was working a 9-5 and commuting to and from work. It's not like I'm sitting around playing Marble Blast Ultra all day. Just at lunch, usually. But there's quite a bit of work for me to do and on top of that I do a fair amount of traveling on the weekends. That's when shows tend to happen. The traveling is very hard on everybody, I think. For you are a traveling musician, you are like a character from a Journey song. [laughs]

It is a weird thing to be that guy but I kind of am that guy. I keep my touring schedule as light as I can and I do these really short trips. So, I'll do like a weekend and play two shows and then be home again. I couldn't ever do these extended to three weeks trips into the Bahamas. It's just not appropriate for me, for my life.


What was your very first show like? How did that happen?

Well, really the first thing ... I mean prior to this stage of my career, when it was all a hobby, I had been in a couple bands in New York and our friends would come out and see us play. I've done some work with my friend John Hodgman who was a writer, who had a live writing series and I would play music for that. So, it's not that I've never played in front of people before. But doing a show for fans, the very first time that happened was when I found out at the last minute that I was going to be in Seattle for a weekend and I had an evening free. I had been using this website called eventful.com which let people demand me in their town and then I can see how many people are in a city who want to see a show by me.

And, I noticed that I had 75 demands in Seattle, which was odd because I've never been to Seattle before. So, I send a message to these people and said 'Hey I am going to be in Seattle this coming weekend. I don't know anything about venues or booking them or what's available or what's good, but if you find a place that is free that you think with work with this let me know.' And, within 24 hours I had a bunch of people respond with options and I picked this little place that held about 80 people and set up a show there. It's essentially a build-up show. [laughs]

That was the beginning of it. The first time I never really experienced doing a show where more than two to three random fans who were not actually my friends showed up.

And where do you tend to play now? In small clubs or colleges or ...?

It's mostly clubs and theatres. It depends on the city but the annual has become really huge, the annual has become like probably 800 or 900 the last time I played in Seattle, which is enormous. Generally it's in a 200 to 400 range with a few exceptions obviously of cities like Seattle that are for whatever reason larger.

Yeah. What's the biggest group you've played before? You've played at PAX. There is usually a pretty big crowd there.

That definitely is the biggest crowd I've played in front of. I think it was 8,000 last year. And, that's a big crowd.

It's bizarre. You hear everyone talking about how an arena rock band gets so big. They don't like the big arenas anymore. They miss the intimate, smaller shows, and it's true. There is something that happened where part of what I like about the show is that I get to actually talk to the audience ... literally. They say things to me and I hear them. And I say things back.

Once you get at a certain point it kind of gets so large, you can't hear anything that anybody is saying because other people are saying things at the same time. And, so with a crowd that big I find myself, I find that I just have to sort of ignore the crowd, which is equally half the fun, the back and forth that I have with the crowd.
I am not saying that I don't like to play for enormous crowds because it's also kind of incredible but it's just a very different feeling from playing in front of the crowd that I am used to playing in front of.

You'd been establishing a name for yourself as a sort of geek musician, and then "Still Alive" comes along in Portal, and suddenly it seems like a lot more people know who you are. Was that what it was like on your end?

Yeah, it was definitely huge for me. I have had the same experience where, you know, there are fans who are from that core of pre-Portal fans, when it was just the stuff I'd done on my site and, you know, that was not insignificant. I was already amazed by the number of people who knew my music at that point. And then, yeah, when Portal happened it was definitely a terrific explosion. You know, there were people who had never heard of me at all before who became fans because of Portal. And it just cast a much, much wider net. And you know, the way these things work, they need to run across you and your music a few times before they decide to buy something, or even to come to your site and see what's going on.

It's rare that someone listens to a song and then immediately it's like 'I love this person, I want to buy all of their stuff.' So, yeah, in that way it was sort of timed perfectly, because there was all this background radiation going on, with you know, "Code Monkey" had been kinda a hit and, you know, the "Thing a Week" stuff generated some buzz. So if you were on the the internet the chances are I'd come across your radar once before and then the Portal thing hit. It was just so wide spread, that you know, it just brought everything further along, that much further along.

Did you know someone at Valve? How did that come about in the first place?

Well I was touring in Seattle. Actually at that same venue, that was the first venue that I played in Seattle, although this was now a different show and someone came up to me and said 'Hey, we work at Valve, would you be interested in writing music for games?' and I said 'Well, sure!', and then a few weeks later I was in their offices meeting with them and playing an early version of Portal. And after sitting down and talking with the writer of that game, we all sort of realized -- oh, this would be a great thing to do and this would be a nice match-up of our sensibilities for me to write a song in the voice of this character.

And was this the first time one of your songs was sung by someone else?

Yeah, yeah kind of, yeah. I think that's probably true. Yeah, I think that's certainly true. And of course from the very beginning I knew exactly who I was writing for, so I had to sort of figure out what key to write it in before... before I tried it.

Are you comfortable with the 'nerd' label, or are you worried about being pegged like ... the new Weird Al?

Well first let me say, there's worse things than being the new Weird Al.

Very true.

Al is a very talented man and a very significant man. He really ... you know, I'm a fan and he's done good stuff and he does not have a bad life Al Yankovic, let's just say that.

I know, he's still making songs today, it's amazing.

I know! I don't want to call it a comeback, because he never really went away, but he has had a bit of a resurgence of late. And, you know, the nerd thing? Personally I don't mind being called a nerd or a geek and we can talk about the difference between those and the different definitions forever, but sure ... It's true, I like that stuff. I fit in that category.

I guess I have a small, a twinge of, you know, 'Oh is this really the best thing' when I notice that's always the way I'm introduced to someone. But the thing is you don't really get to decide what people think of you, and how people describe you. And being a fan of music and musicians myself, you know, I'm familiar with the thing that happens to a band or artist where they do something, and they're known for one thing, and then they spend the rest of their careers trying to be known for something else.

I think that kind of thing can really drive you crazy as a creative person. So I try not to worry about that too much. I have geeky songs and I have songs that are not geeky at all. I have funny songs and I have sad songs and the people who like those things find them. I hear about it; I do a mix of stuff at shows.

Sure, everyone sings along to the zombie song because everyone likes to be zombies. But then, there are pockets of people who really enjoy the sad song that I do about becoming a parent, you know and who might come up to me afterwards and say 'That's a really inspiring song. It spoke directly to my heart' or whatever. It's a nice thing. I get to be many things to many people and to the extent that I have to be labeled a 'geek musician' or 'internet superstar' actually helps people find me and become familiar with the music. That's a good thing.

The Tron commentary that you did for RiffTrax, how did that happen?

Well, I was doing a show in San Diego and Mike Nelson lives there and Bill Corbett was visiting. I don't know if they were recording something or what. It was probably my friends Paul and Storm, who are musicians, singer-songwriter musicians who travel with me and play shows with me. They may have had a connection already but anyway, at some point it came to light that Mike and Bill were coming to our show.

We, being big fans of theirs, arranged to say hello to them and get them nice seats and all that. I think I even made Bill come up and do the line that is sung by robots in my song "Chiron Beta Prime." So that is where we met them and I guess it was a mutual fandom thing. At some point they said, 'You guys should do RiffTrax with us. And we said, 'Yeah, OK, sure! That's awesome!'

Have any of your other songs been licensed for use in other games or are they talking you about that? Even another Rock Band track?

Actually, I don't know if they plan to do more. I certainly be thrilled, if they do. But, but I don't think any music has been licensed for other games. I haven't heard anything. You'd think that offers would just be pouring in from the big game companies. 'Will you please write the ballad of Halo IV?'

Right, like what about writing a song for Call Of Duty?

[laughs] People are always surprised when I tell them that I haven't gotten a lot of offers from game companies to do more game music. But then I point out that the Portal song is a very unique kind of game music and it plays to my strengths almost perfectly. You mentioned of doing Call of Duty 4. I would be completely lost if I do the music for that game. That's just not my thing. Unless they wanted one of the characters a sad song about his falling in love with his gun, or something, like that.

One of our other writers is a Brookline native. He wonders when are you going finish "Brookline" and officially release it or has someone from Brookline gotten to you?

[Seriously] I don't know what he's talking about. [Laughs]


Nice. Well played. What about PAX this year? Do you have anything special planned?

Not yet. I am working on a couple of things .. a couple of ideas. But I don't want to say what they are now because they may not happen. Certainly there's pressure to do something new and interesting. People don't want to come and get the same old show. That's the problem anytime you play. I always try to mix up the songs and constantly introduce new songs and pull stuff back from archives that I've stopped playing. But that said, PAX demands another level of interest. So we'll see.

You are self-proclaimed fan of math and science. Do you do anything with those currently or are they just sort of hobbies and interests?

No, and really it's because I don't have time. I would say that if I no longer needed to sleep, I would use that extra time in part to return to my hobby of building robots. Which is the other thing I would do if I wasn't musician. For awhile I was really into making robots. You know, building circuits and programming basic stamp boards and stuff like that. It's just another very very satisfying thing to do; to assemble something from pieces and then watch the completed thing do what you wanted it to do. Its a very exciting thing. But, you know, as they say, kids take up a lot of time.

Will Wright has sort of left game development and is working on some robotics project now.

Oh, is that true? I hadn't heard that. That's interesting.

So you guys have similar tastes in that area.

Yeah.

So the last question is what every creative person loves to hear: what's next? Are you working on a new CD, are you just focusing on touring? What's new?

The DVD has been occupying a lot of headspace for me for a while. So now that is done, my current plan is actually to take the summer off from touring, and do little creative exploration. It's very easy to get stuck in a loop especially when you are doing live shows. You're always either getting ready to go, or you're away on a trip, or you're recovering from just coming back from a trip. You don't have any time on the ground to really work on stuff.

So I am gonna spend this summer daydreaming and messing around with my instruments and equipment which is supposedly my job. And I say that because i have to remind myself that that is in fact my job. So I don't know precisely what's next. Lot of things have come across my radar. Regardless of what else I do, I'm sure that I will continue to record songs and release them as they come. When I have enough I'll put them on a CD and put that out as well. But for now I don't have any large projects that I know that I'm gonna working in the future. I'm sort of in this exploration phase to figure out what that might be.

Thank you so much for your time, I appreciate it.

And thank you for yours.

<< BACK COMMENT

The good news? We've got a copy of Jonathan Coulton's latest project to give away. It's a double-disc set that features a DVD full of videos from his "Best. Concert. Ever." that was filmed in San Francisco last year, and a CD packed with the music from the same event. That's over 20 tracks, the accompanying videos, and a nifty plastic-free box to hold it in.

The bad news? You have to read through our entire two-part interview with him and send us a footnoted and bibliographed book report on it. Okay, just kidding. But if you're the slightest bit interested, it's there for your reading enjoyment. Once you've moseyed through, leave a comment here telling us what your dream job would be.

• Leave a comment telling us what your dream job would be
  
• You must be 18 years or older and a resident of the US or Canada (excluding Quebec) – sorry! These aren't our laws :-(
  
• Limit 1 entry per person
  
• This entry period ends at 12:00pm ET on Wednesday, July 8. We'll randomly select 1 winner at that time to receive: one copy of Jonathan Coulton's CD+DVD project "Best. Concert. Ever." (ARV $19.99)
• For a list of complete rules, click here

Microsoft announced at their E3 keynote last month that Last.fm would be coming to Xbox Live. We're working on an interview with key players at both Last.fm and Microsoft to bring you more details about the collaboration soon. However, we can share one tidbit: today we spoke with Christina DeRosa, a general manager for XBL, and she let us know who the service will be available to.

"Silver users will be able access what we're considering a trial period of three hours a month, which comes with video advertising. Gold users will have unlimited ad-supported access, so they can use it 24 hours a day. There will also be a premium offering on a subscription basis from Last.fm, that will be commercial free and will also have more sophisticated personalization features, like Loved Tracks."

Last.fm's subscription prices are currently $3.00 US (€3 EU or £3 GBP) per month, so you'll have to shell out an additional $36 a year if you want to avoid the ads and have full access to their service. You'll also need a Last.fm account, in case you haven't set one up already. Luckily, that part is free.

Well, it's definitely true. Blizzard has killed LAN support in the upcoming StarCraft II, and here's the official word from Bob Colayco at Blizzard PR:

"We don't currently plan to support LAN play with StarCraft II, as we are building Battle.net to be the ideal destination for multiplayer gaming with StarCraft II and future Blizzard Entertainment games. While this was a difficult decision for us, we felt that moving away from LAN play and directing players to our upgraded Battle.net service was the best option to ensure a quality multiplayer experience with StarCraft II and safeguard against piracy.

Several Battle.net features like advanced communication options, achievements, stat-tracking, and more, require players to be connected to the service, so we're encouraging everyone to use Battle.net as much as possible to get the most out of StarCraft II. We're looking forward to sharing more details about Battle.net and online functionality for StarCraft II in the near future."

So, let it hereby be noted that pirates killed the LAN parrrrrty.

Chris Sigaty has been a faithful Blizzard employee for thirteen years and served as the lead tester on the original Starcraft. He's worked his way up the ladder on various titles, and is now hauling the reins of three different races as the lead producer on the followup Starcraft 2. Additionally, he's the rhythm guitarist in Level 80 Elite Tauren Chieftain and has a rockin' metal head of hair.

We sat down with him recently to talk about the much anticipated sequel, which became a trilogy somewhere along the yellow brick road of development. Blizzard is still hoping to release Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty later this year, featuring the Terran single-player version of the game along with all three races in the multiplayer that you've come to love like a dear friend ... a dear friend that sucks up all of your free time and enjoys kicking you in the ribs when you're down.

Read on for all the Starcraft 2 goodies we could squeeze out of him, and find out why this title is poised to glue more butts to seats very soon.

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The original game was praised for it's voice acting and the storyline in the single player. Did you guys bring back any of the original voice cast or did you recast completely? I remember there was a story that you weren't ...

Actually we did. We brought back, so far, currently we have the original Jim Raynor, who is the main character, and then we have a few other returns, specifically this character Mengsk who is kind of the opponent or the enemy of Raynor, is back as well. Those are the two that jump out as being the biggest right now. Then there are a few we decided to change, or couldn't find the same actor, or just decided that we wanted it different -- there's more of it so we wanted to change who the actor was or whatever. So, we tried where it made sense, i guess would be the best answer to that.

The unit portraits have all been fully updated and look a lot better. What changes did you make there?

"Now they're actually moving their lips phonetically with what's being said. "

Yeah, so there are several things: We've done a full face effect system in the actual technology we're using but basically it's a full lip syncing system. It analyzes the waveform that we actually type – there's a bunch of work – and it looks really good. It's pretty impressive at times. In the old games, even in Warcraft 3, it would just muppet, right? And so the whole time it was talking it would just do this [makes puppet hand gesture] and the WAV file would end and it would just stop doing that. Now they're actually moving their lips phonetically with what's being said. And so that's a bit of tech that's in there.

You also fully see the characters rather than through their portraits all the time, you actually see them -- that's a big thing that we're trying to do: put you into what story mode is, what single player is in this game, now you can see them up close and personal. You can see Jim Raynor fully, you control him, you move him around the environment, you say what characters you want to talk to, what technologies you want to buy, and there's a lot of story elements in there so you can explore as much or as little as you want. For example, you start out in this bar on a planet and you can go click on a corkboard and learn about some of these things that are in this world and what it means to Jim Raynor, and who he is and where he's at.

Something that might not effect the game, but a lot of attention to detail.

Yeah. A lot of people love the story, and so we used to tell that by you read a wall of text that comes down or scrolls up as the intro to a mission and you kind of get some story out of it and then you can play. And now it's stepped up so you can click on the objects in the world as much or as little as you're interested in reading.

So you guys have the benefit and the disadvantage of 10 plus years of the original, it's become such a massive phenomenon. Probably no one predicted it would be such a hit in Korea where it's huge and televised ...

Still!

It's so popular there. So going in, a lot of people have said, "Wow, when they created 3 factions in this game it really made just a perfect multiplayer RTS experience." So now you guys are going in making a sequel. Is that sort of daunting because you have quite a legacy to live up to?

Yeah. I mean it's definitely ... it's been an interesting journey, you know, walking along a very narrow cliff, if you will, as far as what's okay or not. We've tried to do what we think is fun and new and innovative while we're also, as I said, hearkening to the legacy. And there are so many different people to try and keep happy at the same time. So yeah, it's definitely challenging, but we've done this and all of our games seem to have some bizarre expectation, or huge expectation at this point because we've been pretty successful with these things, and yeah it's a challenge but at the same time we're kind of used to it.

From my perspective, I think we're striking the right balance, that makes sense to us and to the public for the most part. Occasionally, you'll have people who disagree with that, but from our perspective right now multiplayer is playing great, it's certainly got that core feel about it again, and then the single player is very different, but ultimately once you get down into a mission you're still playing this great, fun RTS game and we've put a lot of effort into making sure each of the missions are a different sort of mechanic and feel to them too, so in their own right they're fun little kind of mini-games in themselves. So, a lot of effort to strike a lot of different chords, and i think we've actually struck the right ones.


In the first game, single-player was how most people learned to play. Is there any sort of a tutorial now? It seems like a steep learning curve to people who haven't played it.

So in the original Starcraft we actually didn't have a tutorial in the traditional sense or a full-fledged tutorial You just played, and the first couple of missions were simple, and hopefully you picked it up. In Warcraft 3, we actually did a full tutorial mission, and they tried to be storied, but they were more about, "Here's how you select a unit, and here's how you move it" and so on.

"RTS is kind of a more hardcore genre in general, it's very overwhelming to a new player,"

In this game, currently, we are including a couple of missions that are easier, and then allowing the player to learn as much or as little as they want to via tutorials. Ultimately, that's not fun, we decided, but that's how we're doing it, so it has a little bit of both elements to it right now. But what we're very hyper-conscious of is, the world has changed, you know? RTS is kind of a more hardcore genre in general, it's very overwhelming to a new player, where, "Wait, so okay. I just move guys, is that what I do?" Well, no actually, you also have to construct a base. "Oh, what? And I have to gather resources, and I have to spend them and I have to get supplies?" And it can be really overwhelming.

So we do want to step people into it, we're doing that by ramping the campaign, but we're not spending a ton of time on it because we want to get you into missions that have different challenges and mechanics so you can spread out as well. So we're trying to strike a balance there.

What's been the most challenging aspect? Has it been the new single-player mode or has it been striking a balance between the new units and multiplayer?

You know, for me, the biggest challenges have been the right ways to do the single-player experience ... just getting into this thing we've never done. We've done multiplayer games. I had a lot of faith that we could step into that for sure, and I had faith even in the story mode, but it was just getting it there and ... it's very hard to share where it's going to go, even to development teams or across the company until they can really get in there and see it.

And so stepping out into it as there were original discussions and everything there are a lot of different reactions and all that. So that's been probably the most challenging thing. Battle.net is just big -- what we want to do in the long run is big. And so that's a challenge. But as far as what to do, you know there's a ton of great things out there. Our services have always been pretty cutting edge or defining. As far as Warcraft 3 and running out with a nice matchmaking system and all that we sort of want to set the bar higher again with this, and there's tons of ideas there, now it's just pulling it off -- story mode being the most completely unique and different, that was probably the most challenging.

<< BACK COMMENT NEXT >>

So the story is broken up into three parts ...

Uh-huh. It's a trilogy at this point.

Yeah, you buy the different ... each race is a different title. Now, from my understanding you can play multiplayer with any one of those titles, right?

"You buy the core original product and then you get the ... basically the extended version."

Ah, well, the way we're thinking of it internally is, it's very similar with what we did with Reign of Chaos and the Frozen Throne for Warcraft 3 or Starcraft and Brood War. You buy the core original product and then you get the ... basically the extended version.

Like with Starcraft, you couldn't come in and buy, say, Brood War because you'd be unable to play the original game.

Right. That's not the intention right now. The intention here is we've traditionally broken them up where we tell the story of the different factions all in a fewer number of missions, and there wasn't this story mode anyway, so it was very difficult when we started talking about telling the story of a single character like Jim Raynor and doing it in this very short, compressed timeline and still allowing some of these big things that we wanted, which is where you pick your technology, you pick the way you want to enhance your army and what things you want to do as you go through, and even missions themselves, and doing that with some very small number of missions just wasn't feasible and the other option of doing 90+ missions ... to ship it that way was just not reasonable either.

So this was the right decision for us and it's got the same amount of content that we've done in many of our games previously. And yes, the multiplayer is fully fleshed out and you can completely play. Even in the single player Terran campaign Wings of Liberty you will come across and play at least as Protoss for a very short amount of time and experience all of the different factions against you. And the other thing that single player does is introduce units and other things you won't see at all in multiplayer.

Like I said before, we don't actually intend single-player to train you to play multi- because it's very different, but at any rate, when we come up with the next one then it will tell a different perspective and then our intention right now is to go Zerg and then Protoss. But the multiplayer will always stay consistent and be balanced between the three races from launch.


When Starcraft came out, you later put out a Nintendo 64 version of the game. Have you guys thought at all about consoles with this?

"We talk about consoles all the time"

Yeah, we talk about consoles all the time. And when's the right time and what's the right game ... at this point we're not talking. We haven't made any announcements that way and we're not really talking about consoles.

For Starcraft.

Yeah, for Starcraft. In RTS there's been some great games that have come out recently that have changed the game. They've come up with some interesting schemes for the controls, but it's just never been the same.

Yeah, it's a completely different experience.

I think, interestingly, first-person shooters have come along and they are fully playable now on console controllers, but still, there's definitely been some good moves in the RTS direction but I don't think ... once you have the mouse and you can select groups and so on it's just a very different experience.

At this point, are you guys your own biggest competition? Because when you think about it, Starcraft is pretty immersive. It's not a sit-down for 30 minutes kind of a game, you generally tend to play for a long time. Warcraft was the same way, WoW is the same way. Diablo 3 is coming out soon too and follows the same mold, so you guys are all competing for the same parts of the same pie it seems.

Yeah, well ... (laughs). I wish it was a problem. Just looking at our track record and what we've done -- we don't release games until they're ready and we tend to separate things in a way that it just seems to work out, so it's not a big concern. I think what you're talking about though does exist a bit because of the original games and expectations because now this is Starcraft 2 ... what's it going to do better? But I think we've really hit the right chords, I think it's going to be okay. It's certainly a challenge and if Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 did land at once we'd be in that situation, but I think right now were moving into a world where all these things can all coexist, and certainly the timing of it has an ebb and flow as well.

Blizzard is famous for saying, 'We don't ship it until it's done.' Do you guys set internal deadlines? Or do you just work on it until you feel it's ready?

No, we do. We set internal deadlines. It's a matter of trying to figure out, you know, some of the big questions that have to be answered before those deadlines really mean much. And so certainly we do set our own deadlines and what ends up happening, at least with all the games so far, is that we kind of get to this point where people are having a good time playing and then we know, "Okay guys, now we need to really get it out the door." And we've crossed that point with this game, but there's still a lot of work and polish to do before we get it done. So we're targeting this year, but we won't ship it until it's ready.

Well, that seems to be good thing. Thanks for your time, Chris.

Thank you! And we'll see you back here in July.

<< BACK COMMENT

Blizzard's main company headquarters are, much like any other, located somewhere inside a massive corporate building complex, this one deep inside Irvine, California. Once you get past the guard gate and make your way inside, it's not quite like most business parks. For one, Blizzard has its own ginormous Orc Wolfrider statue guarding the front doors.

There's enough lush green vegetation around to conceal a Fallout-style vault, or a mechanized army of robotic dragons ... which might be where your monthly World of Warcraft fees are going. At least part of that money went to pay for the company's own sand volleyball court, where brave employees reenact that scene from Top Gun.

What other secrets does the place hold? Read on to find out, and browse through the 99 images in the gallery below, which sadly doesn't include the photos we were asked not to show or talk about. Hopefully they'll let us do that soon. For now, let the speculation begin ...

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It's been nearly two years since we were first embarrassed in a StarCraft II multiplayer preview, but we recently got our long-awaited shot at redemption. During the interim, we've logged countless hours with the original StarCraft and its Brood War expansion (having picked up new, digital copies for a mere $15) in order to prepare for this opportunity. The bad news? We still managed to get owned. Although, in our defense, we were playing against some hardcore fansites, and the setup of Blizzard's recent hands-on event was not unlike being dropped into a televised StarCraft tournament match in Korea with an announcer saying, "Okay, and ... GO!"

That's the bad news. The good news is that StarCraft II looks simply amazing, and it plays even better. After you've pounded your brain with several hundred hours (for some of you, it's probably thousands of hours) of StarCraft, and you fire up StarCraft II, it's like being jolted by 1.21 jigawatts of mouse-clicking rapture -- which, thankfully, also numbed the pain of our ongoing losing streak.

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Seven minutes and six seconds, to be exact. That's pure, raw, Starcraft 2 footage coming at you just beyond the break, and it features Terran, Zerg, and Protoss units going at it. If you're still not sated, try out the direct video file here (it's 250MB), free from flash encoding.

See how much you can resist trying to move the screen around with your own mouse, continually forgetting that – alas! – it's just a video. For us it happened right at the very end when that swarm of Ultralisks started pounding on that poor Terran Command Center. Ouch.

To kill time until the game ships (hopefully) later this year, be sure to check out our new hands-on with the multiplayer and our interview with lead producer Chris Sigaty, both coming later today, and the new images in the gallery below.

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Unless you've been competing in a Starcraft lock-in all week, or living under a rock in the sub-Saharan desert somewhere, then you heard the news that Michael Jackson died yesterday in Los Angeles. As strange as the guy was in his later years, he made an indelible mark on the world of music which carried over into the world of gaming.

If you were an arcade rat back in 1990, then you probably spent time playing, or at least listening to Michael Jackson's Moonwalker, which featured the singer doing battle against baddies and rescuing children by performing dance moves and using "Dance Magic" powers, i.e. spinning around and screaming "HOOOO!". Yes, for real. The game featured simultaneous three-player action, and includes a robotic MJ that appears when Jackson meets up with Bubbles the Chimpanzee.

True story -- and there's more. Read on after the break for more about Moonwalker and a video clip of vintage arcade play, along with the other video games Jackson appeared in.

[Thanks for suggesting this, Judd and Niko]

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We still haven't had any confirmation of a Portal sequel, other than, you know, designer Kim Swift and Valve's lead marketing director, Doug Lombardi mentioning that the game is probably coming. Now internet songster and Portal theme -- "Still Alive" -- composer Jonathan Coulton has chimed in as well.

We recently interviewed Coulton about his upcoming "Best. Concert. Ever." CD & DVD set (look for the full interview soon where we'll be giving a copy away), and the first thing we asked him about was how his song for Portal 2 was coming along. "I haven't started it yet. I honestly don't know ... I haven't spoken to them in a long time about it, so I don't know much at all about their plans for Portal 2 and what they're thinking of doing," he told us. "And that's the truth, that's not an 'I signed a non-disclosure agreement and can't tell you what's going on' answer. I really don't know."

So it's still a non-confirmation of nothing, but it sounds like he may be on tap to write something for it. Maybe. Possibly. Speculatively. Hope is "Still Alive" (we hope).