CGN Newsletter #75 – Jan. 27, 2023
“Aw jeez, Rick!”
Justin Roiland's Career Ends in Disgrace
In a shocking development, Justin Roiland, one of the most lauded indie game developers in the world, has been charged with domestic battery and false imprisonment.
Some of Roiland's scandalous text messages have also leaked.
Roiland is the founder of Squanch Games, the studio that created the recently-released hipster shooter 'High on Life'. He also provided the voice over for a talking sports ball in Cliffy B's LawBreakers, a device known as the Emotionally Unstable Robotic Orb.
Cliffy B and Justin Roiland are close friends.
Squanch Games was originally founded as 'Squanchtendo', but the studio was forced to change its name after some subtle pressure from a certain Kyoto-based gaming concern.
Squanch and Roiland have now parted ways:
Roiland is also the co-creator of Rick & Morty, the hit adult animated series. This was a spin-off of an early Roiland creation, The Real Animated Adventures of Doc and Mharti, a Back to the Future parody cartoon that graphically depicted paedophilic sexual abuse.
Roiland performed the voices of both Rick and Morty, and both of these roles will now be recast.
Early in his career Roiland created House of Cosbys, a cartoon that was shut down by Bill Cosby's lawyers after just four episodes, and also Unbelievable Tales, a cartoon about a TV host serial killer who abducts children and slices their faces off.
More details about Roiland's legal troubles here.
Lawbreakers Sells Out
It's the end of an era – the last copies of the PS4 version of Cliffy B's LawBreakers have finally sold out.
The LawBreakers servers shut down five years ago, so these discs for the online-only team-based shooter are completely useless. Yet they make for great conversation-starters, and are arguably an important piece of gaming history, so when Limited Run Games slashed the price of their remaining copies to just US$10 they sold out fast.
And what of Cliffy B himself? Now independently wealthy thanks to his Epic Games share options, Mr. Bleszinski has been enjoying semi-retirement, steadily working on a handful of new intellectual properties. He's hinted that he has a new video game in production, and he might even be in the early stages of making a feature film!
Oh, and he's a published author, too. If you want to learn the shocking true story of his rise and fall, you can read Control Freak, available now wherever fine books are sold.
What Might Have Been: The Wario Movie
As AI art generation continues to advance at a rapid pace, the technology has been put to many a humorous end, such as creating screen shots from movies that never existed. The most striking so far is this set of stills from a non-existent 1980s motion picture adaptation of the Wario franchise:
It is important to remember that what we call AI isn't truly self-aware, like Commander Data on Star Trek; it's more akin to linear algebra on steroids. But even if this is nothing more than a computer program that's been trained to paint moustaches on old Queen music videos, it is far more evocative than just about every real movie made this century.
The imagineers at Hollywood should hang their heads in shame.
Spelunky 64 Confirmed For 2023
Paul Koller has confirmed that we can expect the C64 version of Spelunky to launch this year!
Hot on the heels of the superb ports of Super Mario Bros. and Sonic the Hedgehog, the 40-year-old 8-bit home computer will soon have a lovingly-constructed port of the smash hit game by Derek Yu, with the full blessing of Mr. Yu himself!
There's never been a better time to be a C64 gamer!
The Best Gaming Tweets of January 2023
