Category Archives: animation

Someday we’ll find it, the Portal-ZIM connection?

The INVADER ZIM factor in the making of Portal?

Some gamers out there might get a smile out of this (I know I did!)

Got this email on the ol’ fanmail account a few days ago, and though I usually don’t make a habit of waving fanmail around, prancing about like a lunatic, this was one that stood out a bit.  That’s not to say that getting fanmail isn’t always nice, but now and then you get something from people that had something to do with something you yourself are a fan of, and it makes you realize that everyone else writing to you is shit.

I kid!  Stop with the sad eyes.  You know what I mean.

Anyhow,  I asked  Jeep Barnett if it was cool to reprint his email here for you guys to read, and after he edited the email, removing all the racial slurs and threats to kill the President and such, he said okay.  Thanks, Jeep.

(No, he does no misspell my name.  I sometimes write it out without the O for a more staccato effect.  No kidding.)

Hey, Jhnen! No, we don’t know each other. However, I have a bonus INVADER ZIM Fact that I believe even you aren’t aware of!

FACT:

Valve’s “Portal” may never have existed if it wasn’t for Invader Zim. It’s true! I know this, because I’m one of the programmer’s who worked on Portal and predecessor, Narbacular Drop. Here’s how it went down…

For our final year at DigiPen IT, our game team wanted to create something awesome that would become DigiPen’s “flagship” of the year… to take us to independent game festivals and propel our budding careers. After a lot of design work, we came up for the portal/puzzle concepts in Narbacular Drop (and Portal).

However, we were missing a key ingredient: artists! While I was at DigiPen, the art and programming students were generally kept apart, except for the final year where artists could choose to work with a programmer game team. There was a very limited supply of art teams that wanted to work on games, so the programmers had to pitch their game to them and pray to be selected.

Well, that year there was only 2 art teams and 15 programming teams, so we knew that we’d have to have a kick ass impressive pitch. We built a small prototype of the game to show them and did a lot of thinking about potential art styles that would make the game an attractive pick. We finally decided on a sort of “twisted fairytale” theme and in our presentation we used JTHM and Zim as examples of the direction we were going for.

I honestly have only seen a few episodes of Invader Zim (I really enjoyed it, but never got around to watching them all), but I love JTHM and Squee (also the Bad Art Collection was awesome). Others on the team are huge fans of Zim. And as it turns out, the art team that decided to work with us were also rabid fans of Zim. Mentioning it in our presentation made our game stand out and was a key factor in acquiring the art team.

So the teams worked together for 8 months, made Narbacular Drop, that went on to great success, got the whole team picked up by Valve, made the spiritual successor Portal, and the rest is history… all thanks to Invader Zim! And in Portal itself, maybe you can see some of that morbid humor that your work inspired in us.

So… thanks!!

And thanks for putting so much time into the 31 facts posts! I’m a slow reader so I’m a little delayed on finishing them, but I was throughly surprised and entertained! I’m especially glad that I didn’t need to be a Zim nerd to enjoy them. I learned a lot and it’s inspired me to add the Zim DVDs to my Netflix queue.

-Jeep

INVADER ZIM Fact #31: Encounter at Bloaty-point

Can’t have a final ZIM Fact without a ST:TNG reference, right?

You can, actually, but it’s too late to go back now.

Looka that artwork up there!  Thanks to Vincent Perea for the beautiful likeness and for being one of the three people who read every single one of these entries.  Check out Vincent’s work over at HIS WEBSITE! I am currently ahead of him at a Words with Friends game by ten million points.  Vincent did all that shmancy artwork for the Misadventures of PB Winterbottom, so he’s pretty good at what he does, but he can’t match my masterful use of the word ‘fart’ for more points than he’ll ever see in a lifetime.

In case you forgot, I started writing these at the start of the month to coincide with INVADER ZIM airing for just one month only, this grizzled month that we’re now seeing come to an end.  That ZIM was actually airing I can’t say I verified with my own eyes as the only things my television is hooked up to are a power outlet, a receiver, and a variety of gaming consoles.  If ZIM was back on the air I didn’t see it, but some people have told me they’ve been watching it, enjoying it, and even not throwing up while watching it and they seemed liked reliable sorts.

I probably had more fun writing all this stuff than anyone had reading it, and that’s pretty much what it’s about – my selfish enjoyment of myself.  Still, I wanna thank the people who’ve been checking these out tirelessly and even those who can’t stand this shit but have been enjoying the show all these hundreds of years.

It’s people like you who make me a bit sorry that I don’t have anything better to finish off the month with, having counted on getting something rare and amusing to leave you off on.  The “rare” video interview with Rikki Simons, the voice of Gir,  I’ve been promising over the past weeks turned out to be sort of a bust as it’s just the usual thing only this time worse.  I searched around online for other interviews with the guy and found some pretty bad stuff on youtube, and this lil’ thing I’m uploading for you isn’t that much more informative.

Still, we had some fun, and I, for what it’s worth, this video is at least new, and I know some of you guys are just completists.  That’s something, yeah?

Anyhow, thanks again, and have fun.

Rikki Simons and Eric "da fist" Trueheart in happier pizza restaurants.

Actually, a bit of info on the video:  It’s apparently a fragment from a documentary about voice actors by “Ani-Mazing” Magazine, one of the many publications I’ve never had the pleasure of taking with me to the bathroom.  The thing never got completed, and Rikki was actually the last person the filmmakers interviewed.  That’s just what the guy told me who gave me this thing.  If you ask me, AniMAZING Magazine should have stuck with magazines because the interview sucks as far as interviews go, and the sound and camera work is just awful.  The title of this last post comes from something the interview touches on, that Rikki, besides playing the lovable GIR, also played the lovable Bloaty the Pig.

Sorry!

Anyhow, here’s the thing.  Knock your socks off if it’s your cuppa.

Until the future!

CLICK TO PLAY

INVADER ZIM Fact #30

ZIM Facts, say your peace, for the reaper is giving you the bloody eye.

You’re not a kid anymore, INVADER ZIM Facts!  You’d better shape up and get your priorities straight because it’s not all fun and games now, you hear?  No more galavanting around and thinking you’ve got forever to leave your mark.  You see the dark at the end of this tunnel you just thought went on forever and ever now, don’t you?  I know you do.  There’s just one more day of this left, so I hope you have your affairs in order before I take you out behind the shed and put you down with the ol’ shotgun.  That’s right, just like we did Grampa.

But you’re here for today, and isn’t today, right now for that matter, this very moment all that we truly ever have?  Live for this moment, try not to think about the horrific nothingness of the void that awaits in so little time, the empty dread of having your being dissolve into zero, and then that which isn’t even zero, for even zero is something, and you shall simply be nothing.

Forget I said that.  You just try to have fun, yeah?  Good.

Wow.  30.  How about that?  Did you ever think we’d get this far?  I sure didn’t.  I’m walking around looking over my shoulder every couple of seconds, wondering when some of the people featured in these entries will decide I’ve said too much, and try to take me down, or when a rift in space-time will open up like an angry, white-hot anus in the very fabric of things, and shit out a time-traveling toddler bent on revenge.
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INVADER ZIM Fact #29

Future-Baby, huh? More like Future-LIE-by, am I right?!

This shall be the twenty-nineiest post of all, no doubt about it.

I’ve been thinking about Future-Baby a lot since yesterday, probably same as you.  So here’s this person writing from the distant future, born just days prior to where we are in the present, and yet he’s still going by “Future-Baby”?  Does that add up to you?  Are they still a baby, and if so, do you refer to someone as a baby decades after they were born?  Is adulthood determined entirely by the condition of one’s body, is baby-status based on the same criteria as that?  I’d posit that one could look baby-like long after they were born, trapped in a body that, physically, appeared to be a baby’s body, but that that person’s experiences would change them into something that wasn’t infantile at all.

Future-Baby wrote me a very non-baby-like letter.  Babies don’t write letters, right?  So what’s this person’s deal?  To identify yourself as being from the future from the point of view of the person you are addressing in the past is one thing, because that’s kind of cool and fucks with your head in a pretty neat way, but then to say you’re also a baby?  That’s just playing your hand in such a way as to let the reader in on how messed up you are inside.  Future-Baby, indeed.
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