GDC 2008: Yahtzee Does X-Play

It wasn’t until I was shaking Morgan Webb’s hand that the absurdity of the entire situation came crashing down on me.

We were back stage at G4’s stage area, just off in the left corner of the Lobby of Moscone North, waiting for somebody to get something set up so somebody else could start rolling film on Adam Sessler interviewing Yahtzee. Yahztee had been through makeup already (which took all of 30 seconds, apparently he has very good skin) and some strange guy had run a microphone up the back of his shirt, and now we were waiting.

We’d run over the questions that would be asked, shaken everybody’s hands and stretched the small talk as far as it could possibly go, and we were waiting. Waiting, waiting, waiting. That’s TV. You don’t bring 25 guys, most of whom belong to a union, and expect things to happen like clockwork. Waiting is a fact of life in TV. It’s like war: You spend what seems like an eternity waiting to spend a few seconds sweating and dying. That’s just how it is.

So there we were, and Morgan comes back to say hello, and I shook her hand, and we reacquainted ourselves, and it struck me that it had been a very long time since I’d been around any of this, and that I was extremely glad for that. But to be back among these folks, this time on the outside looking in, was a bit odd. Especially considering many of these people had been around me when I’d had my spectacular meltdown at TechTV. They’d stuck with it, I hadn’t, and now I was a guest on their show. Life is too strange sometimes.

They gave us a tour of their facilities, including the awesome production truck with what seemed like a zillion monitors in it. I’d forgotten how much like NASA mission control those rooms always are. That was the best part. But even in there, people were waiting. They just had more interesting things to fiddle with.

The interview came off without a hitch. Yahtzee, Vishnu bless him, was nervous as a school girl her first time behind the bleachers, but he looked steadier than Sessler even, and handled himself pretty well considering he’d been awake for 30 hours, had just spent over 16 hours on airplanes, and had only been in town long enough to change his shirt.

The questions were innocuous. I was kind of hoping they’d tear into him a little, or ask him something terribly embarrassing, but no. “Where did your inspiration come from?” He broke up with a girlfriend and was bored. Some people doodle, he draws things on the computer and does voice-overs. “Do industry people get annoyed by the reviews?” Yes. They do. But they also love being flayed alive by him. People love attention. Also, Peter Molyneux loved the Fable review, so there’s that. Simple, basic, standard stuff.

I kind of have to be glad, considering I’d have had to get on somebody’s case if they asked something off the wall, but I was really hoping they would have. I mean, I’d have loved to hear Yahtzee trying to answer the question “Is your mother proud that you earn money making young men titter by saying ‘twat’ on the internet?” in the thirty or so seconds before I started trying to pull the plug. Alas. Where have all the hardcore journalists gone?

In any case, my disappointment in Sessler’s manners aside, it was a fun time, and Yahtzee, after a few brief moments of terror, enjoyed himself. You can catch the interview on Wednesday night’s episode of X-Play, and we’ll have it up on the site as soon as they get us a copy of it.