Saturn Side 1 was released this Tuesday. Reception has been pretty positive so far! I'm pleased with the results!
The final product is what I consider to be my best work so far and the best distilled articulation of my vision for the project. But this was a difficult episode to produce, and my original timeline for producing it slipped several times.
Part of this is a mix of personal circumstances. I've been working through a lot of Gender Stuff. I had a brief stint as CTO of a failing startup sandwiched between frustrating period of unemployment. I've now doing better on both fronts. I always struggle with how vulnerable I want to get about some things, even on a friendly space like Cohost, but I've reached the culmination of multiple years of exploration and now have a much better grasp on my identity, which has improved my mental health immensely. I started a bit of freelance work last week that's going to get into full swing this week, and there's a decent chance it will solidify into full-time employment or at least enough steady freelance work to pay the bills.
The other part is that, well... producing high-quality game history documentaries is hard. It can be frustrating to see how often game history is treated with little care towards actually getting it right or challenging the old misconceptions and assumptions. This is especially true on YouTube, where countless folks seem to place more effort into the façade of their KALLAX bookshelves stocked with rare games or rehashing tired old console war arguments rather than exploring and analyzing a rich history that goes so much deeper than that.
There were a few production challenges along the way, and I learned a lot more about how to produce these videos that will help me going forward... These episodes are essentially a bunch of shorter videos chained together. I find that style works better than trying to dedicate one episode per game in most cases. Part of that is because there are so many games to cover that some are going to get just a few sentences in a roundup segment. The other part is that I don't really think games like Gale Racer or WanChai Connection are going to do numbers on their own, but they are really fascinating to look at in the grander scheme of things. I like to think of looking at console releases chronologically as a mosaic of games that paints a picture over time. We'll see various trends come and go as we move through the pre-rendered CG backgrounds phase of Resident Evil and Final Fantasy VII, the first burst of stealth games with Metal Gear Solid and Tenchu, and even region-specific trends like the influence of Tokimeki Memorial on defining dating sim mechanics that eventually show up in quite a few other games.
But what I've found is that the size of the episodes can easily balloon. I didn't set out to make a 35 minute review of The Mansion of Hidden Souls, but it felt natural when I was making it. A lot of reviews are going to be more straightforward, but it's nice to have that flexibility to go down the rabbit hole when I want to. I love the idea that there's some malleability to the form of the reviews to include digressions like System Sacom's history. Pulling on those threads and discovering how much is there when you dig a bit deeper is one of those things I've loved about making the videos so far.
That's also what caused Saturn Side 1 to become a two hour video when I originally thought it would only be one. There is something about a two hour video that feels like four times the effort of a one hour video. It's just a huge chunk to pull together into a cohesive package. It's two hours for each pass of review and revision... it's more segments that need to be carefully juggled... it's more giant video files that I've been manually backing up until I can set up a proper NAS with cloud sync.
The next video I do, PlayStation Experiment episode 2, is targeting a one hour runtime. I'm just going to stick to the reviews for this one. It's going to cover four games, but at least one of these is obviously going to be a big one.
- Twinbee Taisen Puzzle Dama
- Kikuni Masahiko: Jirushi Warau Fukei-san Pachi-Slot Hunter
- Motor Toon Grand Prix (JP)
- King's Field (JP)
The reception to The PlayStation Experiment and Saturn Side has been really great so far, and I'm so happy that there's an audience for this kind of take on game history documentaries. I'm really looking forward to continuing making these videos and sharing them with everyone!