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Artists / Creatives

Owned by Nathan Wailes
Last updated: May 28, 2023
19 min read

Daniel Day Lewis

  • .

Dave Johnston, creator of de_dust and de_dust2

Eminem

This is where I'll include any journey-related information.

  • Wikipedia - Eminem
  • How he got discovered
    • We had pressed up The Slim Shady EP and it was doing pretty well in Detroit. At some point, Wendy Day called me and said “I want you to be on the battle team. I got you a ticket to the Rap Olympics in LA.”

      I went to the Olympics, got all the way to the end, and then lost to the last guy. The guy who won was Otherwize, from LA. It was a local thing. They had a bunch of crowd support there. When I rapped, he went and hid behind a video screen. He walked away while I was rapping. I didn’t have anyone to battle! I’d never been in a situation like that before. I went through a lot of people to get through to the end, and then he walked away while I was rapping. I’m like, “What the fuck do I do?” I was devastated.

      I come off stage. I’m like, that’s it. It’s over for me. This kid from Interscope, Dean Geistlinger, walks over and he asks me for a copy of the CD. So I kind of just chuck it at him. It was The Slim Shady EP. We come back to Detroit, I have no fucking home, no idea what I’m gonna do. Then, a couple weeks later, we get a call. Marky Bass said, “Yo, we got a call from a doctor!” (Source)

  • The transition from being a nobody to being famous happened in a single day, when the video for "My Name Is" came out on MTV.

    • “My Name Is” was the first song we recorded. We recorded three or four that day, in like six hours. One song was called “Ghost Stories” and one was “When Hell Freezes Over.” I feel like there was one more but I can’t remember what it was. We always have this discussion, because Dre says it’s four.

      Paul used to live in New Jersey, right across from Manhattan. He had an apartment he shared with three roommates. I was over, sleeping on the couch. We didn’t have money yet, really. We had already filmed the video, and we saw it for the first time on MTV. It came on really late at night. I was sleeping on the couch when Paul saw it for the first time.

      That’s when it was like, “Okay, this isn’t a joke anymore.” We had kind of felt that, being in the studio with Dre and shit. But once that single came out, my life changed like that. Within a day. Just going outside. I couldn’t go outside anymore. In a day. It went from the day before, doing whatever the fuck I wanted to do, because nobody knew who the fuck I was, to holy shit, people are fucking following us. It was crazy. That’s when shit just got really — it was a lot to deal with at once. (Source)

Ira Glass

  • Ira Glass interview Why This American Life feels so different from other public radio
    • On how he came up with the idea for the show:

      Q: When I first started listening to this American life when it started it was so singular I mean you were doing something that nobody on radio was doing but even when you listen now to All Things Considered, the idea of the storytelling, the style and form you really created has influenced the more conventional news on public radio.

      That was always there; there's a very deep strain in public radio to have a kind of storytelling thing happening.

      When I put the show on the air I felt like, well, you know, every day on on the daily new shows on NPR there's some story and you can't get out of your car and you just get caught up in the people and I was like well somebody should just make a show that's just that like that's that's the stuff we all love like that's the stuff you want to listen to the radio for and I really thought that like, well, I better get to this idea fast because if I don't somebody else is going to; it's such an obvious idea and in a way like that's what the show is.

      I think there are a couple things in the style of the show that made it sound so different than other things on public radio: the fact that I narrate it the way that I do, where I'm trying to sound exactly the same way that I sound when I'm talking, and not like a radio presenter, and then the fact that we think of the show as an entertainment–like, that that's built into the premise of the show, when I started the show in 1995 the premise was public radio was already good at being timely and analytical and giving you the news and doing all these things very very solid and what we want to do is we want to take take the smell of broccoli out of the air like you will listen not because it will make you a better person and a better citizen but you will listen because it will be up it will be an entertainment.


Jake Birkett

  • How to Survive in Gamedev for Eleven Years Without a Hit
    • 1:30 - He has a cat.
    • 4:55 - "Have you ever watched your basement-dwelling, noodle-eating single indie friends get rich while you struggle to feed your family and pay the mortgage? I have, and maintaining motivation on those times is quite tricky."
    • 6:30 - "In my spare time I was working on a kung-fu platform game called Iron Fist that I was very passionate about." [NW: A classic mistake - Picking projects to work on based solely on whether you're passionate about them rather than also considering how likely they are to be successful.]
    • 6:45 - He decided to quit his job when he'd just had a second child, he and his wife had moved to a bigger house, and they had no savings.
    • 7:30 - He abandoned Iron Fist because 1) it was going to take too long, and 2) there was no market for it.
    • 8:06 - He saw 'Bejewelled' and thought, "I could do that", and released a copycat.
    • 7:50 - "So I decided to abondon the game and start on a smaller project. So, the point is, I wanted to ship a game and get experience in shipping a game and see what that whole thing was like, and improve upon that. And around that time I saw Bejewlled. This is the first one. And I liked it a lot, and I thought, "Hey I could make a game like that, but with a different theme, and some levels and new mechanics."
      So I made a Christmas-themed match-3 game. And to save money, I used stock art, stock photos, stock music, and I even used the Comic Sans font. So this game, it actually played pretty well, I still believe, but it looked like ass, and as a result it sold $1800-worth, that's net, not gross. And that's over 120 months.
    • 10:50 - Start with a runway. On the other hand, people procrastinate. Once you start something such that it's difficult to go back, your brain starts to figure
    • 12:30 - It's definitely worth spending money on art and audio. If you make your game look good, it will sell better.
    • 13:50 - He spent $2000 on the art for his next version of a Christmas match-3
    • 14:47 - What he did to get the good outcome from his new version of the Christmas game:
      • He emailed the portals every year and asked them to re-promote his game, and they did.
      • Some portals that didn't take his game at first dropped their standards and took his game.
      • They translated the game to other languages.
      • They doubled the number of levels and created a 'GOLD' version.
      • Lesson: Keep your game alive!
    • 15:50 - He only got $5455 or 6% of the total revenue in the first year.
    • 18:00 - He's gotten lots of offers for terrible contract over the years, and you need to know which ones you'll find cool and will be within your skillset.
    • 18:29 - Say 'Yes' to opportunities.
    • 19:35 - Learn to say 'No' to things.
    • 21:00 - He found it helpful to be around other indie developers.
    • 21:25 - Make friends. Being part of a likeminded group is really powerful.
    • 21:49 - Help people out. You'll get lots of tips and connections by doing this. 'The main reason survived as an indie is that other developers have helped me out.'
    • 23:00 - He used social media to recruit artists.
      • He crowd-sourced localisation.
      • He used metrics and testers.
    • 25:05 - Avoid unhealthy deadlines. Random problems will pop up.
    • 25:40 - He paid the artists up front and gave them some of the revenue on the backend.
    • 26:05 - Mobile is shit.
    • 27:50 - He shows a graph of how much he made at all of his various endeavors: working as a contractor, working full-time, working on his own games, and working in consultancy.
    • 29:10 - He isn't making any more money than he was eight years ago, but it's a lot more satisfying and his quality-of-life is a lot higher.
    • 31:25 - Don't make decisions out of desperation. You really need to explore your options very carefully before deciding what project to work on.
    • 36:35 - One thing to note is that it made 14% of its revenue on Steam, but it only got press when it came out on Steam.
    • 39:00 - Two heads are better than one. It was really helpful for him to work with his wife.
    • 39:05 - Having kids is 'indie hard mode'. He advises that you work hard and try to get rich before you have kids.
    • 41:40 - It makes sense to spend as little as possible when you're just starting out, so that you make mistakes as cheaply as possible, but once you know what you're doing it makes sense to spend larger amounts of money to make the game more likely to be successful.
    • 42:30 - Another tip is to get a cat and stroke it when you're feeling stressed.
    • 43:35 - He shows a graph of his total revenue over 10 years.
    • 44:20 - One step at a time, one punch at a time, one GAME at a time. - Game Dev Rocky
    • 45:20 - All of his games were premium games, so people would pay $9.99 or $6.99 if they were members of a club.
    • 45:50 - He launched a game where there was a 7-minute demo, after which you had to pay to get the rest of the levels.
    • 46:05 - Why he doesn't like free-to-play. He didn't like the tactics that these companies are using to extract money from people.
    • 46:50 - Why he made seven match-3s: For every game he made, he added in features that he didn't have time to do before.
    • 47:40 - Reskinning a game properly can take a few hundred hours.47:55 - He uses Excel to track his time. He categorizes tasks like 'coding', 'testing', 'working with contractors'. He finds that the coding portion is only ~25% of the total time. (Kevin Systrom said the same thing).
    • 49:00 - How do you sustain motivation through the failures? A: Having a family is both a blessing and a curse. You have to provide for them, and so you know you can't fail, you have to keep going. Another thing he did was to take his savings and pay off the mortgage, because he knew that when he got 'hungry' he'd be motivated to work harder. The 'one step at a time' tactic works well. And visualizing the end result helps.
    • 51:00 - Q: Is it a lot of work maintaining old games? A: I did spend time on these up until recently. It's more about maintaining a relationship with the distributors. Recently I've decided to retire those old games and put every thought into my new games.

Jonatan Soderstrom of Hotline Miami

  • Ikiki
    • http://ikiki.sokushinbutsu.com/
    • http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/hakaiman (released 2006)
    • https://theludoffin.wordpress.com/2014/07/24/check-out-time-ikiki/
      • "To say Ikiki has made a lot of games is a massive understatement. At last count, I have found 56."
      • "Hakaiman is a top-down stealth shooter. Ikiki has made a fair number of these top-down shooters, but Hakaiman is definitely my favorite of the bunch. You control a commando type, equipped with an assault rifle and grenades who breaks into a variety of compounds, stealing documents and blowing up servers. While there’s plenty of shoot-’em-up action, there’s some nods to the stealth genre: You can hide in bushes, and sneak up behind enemies and snap their neck sneakily. The level design is fabulous, with destructible crates and walls, and a wide variety of ways to tackle each mission."

Twitter

Summary of how he did it

  1. He got a ton of practice making games
  2. He came across a good idea (Hakaiman)
  3. Importantly, the look of the game and the gameplay were different from the norm at the time that Hotline Miami was released.

Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld of "Seinfeld"

Orson Welles

War of the Worlds

  • The farmer who's interviewed references listening to the radio and hearing the Princeton professor being interviewed, which adds to the effect that this is really happening.
  • They get a lot of details right that makes it sound like a real newscast. They refer to real towns, rivers, etc.
  • I wasn't expecting that the way the aliens would kill the humans would be with gas ("black smoke").
  • There's a disclaimer at minute 39 that this is a drama.
  • The Welles monologue after the break at minute 39 is clearly a drama.

Nipper

  • 2006.11.02 - Blogspot - GameCrush - Interview With A Custom Map Legend (NIPPER)
    • I had mapped for BUILD engine games like Duke Nukem 3d, NAM, and WWII GI before HL1.
    • My first ever map was a horrible attempt at a D-Day map for Day of Defeat beta 1.1. I didn't have much luck with DoD mapping so I figured I would try CS.
    • The first CS map I made was cspaintball, a simple arena deathmatch map. It seems pretty lame now but back then there were no fy_ or aim_ maps.
    • There was a little clan called $tL or something. I was asked to join that clan when I had first started mapping. That clan disappeared pretty quickly except for me and one other member. The two of us then jokingly formed the Cherryclan
    • The Cherryclan was originally just a small group of my first "fans" who would regularly join my listen server to play my maps with me and bots.
    • crazytank started as a thread in forums.joe.to where I asked people what I should put in my next map.
    • Originally I was making maps for me to play with bots. I would create a listen server and just play by myself. Occasionally someone would download the map from me while connecting to my server. I kept making more and more maps and I started to notice the same people would be back every time I was playing a new map.
    • My maps didn't get out much until I found a custom map server that let people upload their own maps directly to the server. They had a website with an upload map area so I uploaded the first version of playground and a few of my other first maps. The server was pretty popular so a lot of people ended up playing my maps from there.
    • Then joe from www.joe.to tracked me down and offered me my own forum. Then after the forum he offered me my own 24/7 nipper maps only server.
    • Do you have any advice for other map makers trying to get started? A: Don't decompile.

Scott Adams of Dilbert

  • 2013.10.12 - WSJ - Scott Adams' Secret of Success: Failure
    1. "Beware of advice about successful people and their methods."
      • "no two situations are alike"
      • successful people's perspectives on the reason for their success are often biased
        • ex: "follow your passion"
          • "In hindsight, it looks as if the projects that I was most passionate about were also the ones that worked. But objectively, my passion level moved with my success. Success caused passion more than passion caused success."
    2. "Forget about passion."
      1. "I have a friend who is a gifted salesman. He could have sold anything, from houses to toasters. The field he chose (...) allows him to sell a service that almost always auto-renews. (...) Observers call him lucky. What I see is a man who accurately identified his skill set and chose a system that vastly increased his odds of getting 'lucky.'"
    3. "Forget about goals. (...) one should have a system instead of a goal. The system (is) to continually look for better options."
      1. "Throughout my career I've had my antennae up, looking for examples of people who use systems as opposed to goals. In most cases, as far as I can tell, the people who use systems do better."
      2. "goal-oriented people exist in a state of nearly continuous failure that they hope will be temporary."
      3. "My system of creating something the public wants and reproducing it in large quantities nearly guaranteed a string of failures. By design, all of my efforts were long shots. Had I been goal-oriented instead of system-oriented, I imagine I would have given up after the first several failures. It would have felt like banging my head against a brick wall. But being systems-oriented, I felt myself growing more capable every day, no matter the fate of the project that I happened to be working on."
    4. Try to produce something that is easy to reproduce in unlimited quantities.
      1. "As for my own system, when I graduated from college, I outlined my entrepreneurial plan. The idea was to create something that had value and—this next part is the key—I wanted the product to be something that was easy to reproduce in unlimited quantities. I didn't want to sell my time, at least not directly, because that model has an upward limit. And I didn't want to build my own automobile factory, for example, because cars are not easy to reproduce. I wanted to create, invent, write, or otherwise concoct something widely desired that would be easy to reproduce."
    5. Try to manage your "luckiness"
      1. "If you drill down on any success story, you always discover that luck was a huge part of it. You can't control luck, but you can move from a game with bad odds to one with better odds. You can make it easier for luck to find you. The most useful thing you can do is stay in the game. If your current get-rich project fails, take what you learned and try something else. Keep repeating until something lucky happens. The universe has plenty of luck to go around; you just need to keep your hand raised until it's your turn. It helps to see failure as a road and not a wall."
    6. The market rewards execution, not ideas.
      1. "Good ideas have no value because the world already has too many of them. The market rewards execution, not ideas. From that point on, I concentrated on ideas that I could execute. I was already failing toward success, but I didn't yet know it."
    7. "there is no such thing as useful information that comes from a company's management"
      1. "When the company announced that it had achieved positive cash flow at one of its several hubs, I knew that I was onto something. If it worked in one hub, the model was proved, and it would surely work at others. I bought more stock. (...) A few weeks later, Webvan went out of business."

Steven Spielberg

Articles / Videos

Books

Steven Spielberg: A Biography by Joseph McBride

Very good book, I blew right through it. There is a second edition out now, but I bought a used first edition (b/c I didn't know about the 2nd edition at the time).

Summary of his path to success:
Spielberg got obsessed with movie-making while around 12 because it was a way for him to be valued by others. His dad acted like a far-less-intense version of Tiger Woods' or Michael Jackson's dad by joining Steven when he wanted to make a movie and by doing a lot of the work at first (direction, etc. just like how a female lion teaches her cubs to hunt by weakening the prey). Eventually Steven got more and more responsibility until he was doing whole movies while still in high school. Once out of high school he was rejected by the prestigious USC film department and instead enrolled at Long Beach. He had been spending a lot of time on the Universal Studios lot and got to know a lot of people there, and when he made a short film and showed it to somebody there he got a job as a TV director (still in his early 20s). That led to a made-for-TV movie gig, and that in turn led to his chance to make Jaws. Jaws is what made Spielberg extremely famous, and the rest of his career is fairly well-known (Close Encounters, ET, Indiana Jones, etc.).

- Unlike many successful businessmen, Steven did NOT read everything he could get his hands on re: making movies. He in fact seems to have read almost nothing other than scifi books, getting all his film knowledge from actual practice and watching movies. It seems likely that watching movies was the movie-making equivalent of reading lots of books about business. [Update: Apparently Spielberg is somewhat(?) dyslexic, although he's apparently capable of reading.]
- Steven had a prodigious knowledge of science fiction novels, to the point where even other people who were obsessed with science fiction were blown away by his knowledge.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park

  • Wikipedia - 6 Days to Air
    • Check out this movie!
  • 1993 - Cannibal: The Musical
  • 2011.03.24 - The Hollywood Reporter - Why South Park's Trey Parker and Matt Stone Now Say It's 'Wrong' to Offend
    • This article gives a good description of the process that led to the creation of "The Book of Mormon".
    • “There was a lot of hopping back and forth between L.A. and New York,” Parker says. “That probably helped the project because there would be, ‘Oh f---, the guy flew out; we should probably work.’ ”
    • “We didn’t understand the whole workshop process,” Parker admits. “Bobby had to explain, ‘We need to cast it and have people there with music stands in a little theater, reading the script and singing the songs.’ ”
    • when we are doing it, I hate it. I’m pissed off and I’m tired, and every single Tuesday I say, ‘This is the worst show we’ve ever done!’ It’s brutal.
    • When they return to Los Angeles, Parker and Stone will have just two months to produce a batch of seven new episodes, followed by seven more after a brief hiatus. Without their usual two weeks of prep before the season begins — and without their habitual five-day writers retreat — they’ll be scribbling ideas on Thursdays and working nonstop till the early hours of the following Wednesday morning, the very day each episode airs, when it is finally locked.

    • Both write, but their chores are slightly different. Parker, the more introspective of the two, also directs, while the effervescent Stone, 39, interfaces with the world at large.

      “He’s genuinely a true artist,” Stone says of his colleague. “I’m more mercurial. I have a temper more than Trey; I’m not proud of it, but I have that edge. Trey avoids conflict like the plague.”

    • Parker spent a semester at the Berklee College of Music before meeting Stone at the University of Colorado, where the latter — from suburban Littleton — was a math major. Both shared a uniquely provocative, anti-authoritarian humor, which they quickly applied to their first movie, Cannibal! The Musical. Cannibal sold to schlock purveyor Troma Entertainment and got them a writing deal with Rudin while they were still in their early 20s. But it wasn’t until they made a much-talked-about video greeting card for Fox executive Brian Graden that they were commissioned to make South Park some 15 years ago.
    • In his down time, the Cruise/Muhammad/Mormon satirist is obsessed with Food Network, and his hobby is designing houses. “I got into this little habit of architecture and building,” he says. “I designed a house in Colorado and one in Hawaii. The idea is supposed to be build and sell — but then I can never bring myself to sell them.”
  • 2016.09.25 - NYT - ‘South Park’: After Two Decades, It’s Still by the Seat of Their Pants

    • A dry-erase board in the room showed a nearly nonexistent third act, all empty ovals stacked like pancakes, as the collaborators kicked around the episode’s story elements: a new American national anthem rebooted by J. J. Abrams; a comically inept xenophobe running for president; and an addictive talking fruit that induces nostalgia for the pop-culture of one’s youth.

      How these pieces fit together wasn’t clear yet. But after two decades of making their show in this stressful, hands-on, seat-of-the-pants way, Mr. Stone and Mr. Parker were reasonably certain they would figure out something.

      • Note the dry-erase board. Consider using it when brainstorming!
      • Note that they first come up with interesting ideas and then figure out how to string them together. This is exactly the same process that Spielberg and Lucas used for Raiders of the Lost Ark, and it's the same process Monty Python used when making their movies.

Misc

Zach Barth

@Misc. People

  • 2017.05.26 - PC Gamer - Meet the indie dev who spent two years making a game in youth hostels abroad
    • Upon finishing university, Johnson planned to create his own game for resume purposes.
    • In 2009, Johnson finished the demo for what was then known as Subvein and invited his buddies from the Soldat community to try it.
    • The forums started growing and what had begun as a hobbyist side venture begun dominating Johnson's spare time before long. Work at an online gambling firm served as a means of funding whichever "cool features" he felt like casually implementing week-on-week, and ultimately financed his ventures abroad.
    • he'd have his head buried in his laptop for eight hours a day.
    • After a while, Johnson decided he'd had enough of the busiest accommodations and moved to a quieter Airbnb-recommended spot in Arequipa, Peru. In Australian dollars it cost nine dollars a night (roughly £5.25/$6.70) to live
    • Once he'd visited the most iconic tourist sites nearby, not least Machu Picchu, Johnson was distraction free
    • "The entire time I was there was filled with self-doubt. Indie development is not at all a reliable way to make money. These things can take off or not, it's a very fickle and unreliable business—it's a fun one—but a lot of the time I thought about this whole thing being for nothing."

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