Category:Antares Bros., The

Time After Time and Reptalia are two of the oddest Game-Maker games I have encountered. Both are the result of the entrepreneurial pairing of Paul Callahan and James Russell. With an easy game development kit at hand, they chose to advertise their services as custom game designers. Send in a portrait of yourself, and they would scan it in, anti alias it, and slap it on a stock body to roam around a dungeon (in the case of Time After Time) or desert (in Reptilia).

Along with Sheldon Chase and Marty Valenti, these two games are amongst the few examples of digitization I have seen in a Game-Maker game. They are also the least effective, as there is no animation and little attempt to blend the photographs into the surrounding imagery. Also, frankly, the games aren’t all that hot. Still, there’s a certain weird brilliance to the business strategy.

Especially in middle class America, there is a huge market for marginally customized products — stamps, address labels, Christmas cards, pre-formatted business cards; all inexpensive, all a bit tawdry. All of them allow a solipsistic demographic that achieves little and earns both too much and too little to have real freedom to buy meaning for itself. By that reasoning, what better gift for that young gamer in your life than to buy him a slot in a real videogame?

I have no clue if Callahan and Russel found their own success in this venture. I kind of hope so.