Monthly Archives: April 2014

Hooray, the Owl Turns One!

Exactly one year and ~4 hours ago (on a much nicer and warmer day, by the way), we sat in a very old man’s super fancy office, listening to him read a 1000-page contract at a pace slower than hair grows. It was the last of a series of tedious steps which I, gracious as I am, let Hackenstein handle entirely on his own, so this is all I know about what happened there.

But now here we are, one year later, during which literally nothing happened (except for The Day, The Wizard, our nomination, the cancelling of our nomination, and some other small stuff of course), ready and psyched for another year of sort of being around!

So I guess, yay for us and Happy Easter to you!

Crabman out.

To Be or Not to Be Nominated: A Totally Official Statement

Well, cat’s out of the bag then, eh? Time for a Totally Official Statement™!

In case you missed it, The Day got nominated for Best Serious Game in the German video game awards (Deutscher Computerspielpreis), along with Scorpius Forge’s Evolution: Indian Hunter and Kalypso’s Rise of Venice. Naturally, we were pretty excited about that, which is, also naturally, when things went awry.

Long story short, bureaucracy happened. That’s how we roll in Germany, after all. The details are not at all exciting and, in our opinion, the DCP’s business how they want to communicate them to the public, but since there’s some vaguely misleading information going around, we’re gonna give you a brief rundown of what happened.

1. The jury couldn’t settle on a winner, so after long discussion they decided to drop the category. We’re all a bit sore about that, but it’s not as simple as “Just pick one!”, sadly. It certainly had nothing to do with none of the games being worthy of recognition though.

2. We were all consulted on how we wanted to handle this going forth. They offered to treat us as regular nominees and to include us in all promotional campaigns and whatnot, and while Kalypso voiced some concerns over that solution, they initially agreed to go along with it since the rest of us agreed it was for the best.

3. Some other things happened that we’ll discuss at another time, but while all of this has been a little frustrating and disappointing, the staff has been nothing but kind and courteous during their efforts to work out a solution, so I’m not all too happy about some of the articles’ implication that there was any kind of funny business or cover-up going on. We were all blindsided by this, staff included, and they handled it with as much compassion and consideration as one could’ve hoped for.

Bottom line, we’re not psyched it played out like this, but we can’t fault the people who are now taking flak over this either, and while a controversy is always good publicity, it doesn’t feel quite right to throw those who did their best to help us out under the bus.

That is all.

Official Crabman out.