selectparks - The MDickie Show

Quite a while ago I discovered the following description by the wonderful '--Bob' about a project called MDickie. Bob wrote:

Over the last four years Matt Dickie has produced a string of games using one or another low-end game engine, and in the last few there is a recurring theme: gameplay driven by scripted machinima sequences.

Matt may not have even heard the term before, but he's becoming a pioneer in the field anyway. So far he has followed a theme of 'pro wrestling' in which dramatic sequences lead into arcade action. In the MDickie Show the premise was talk shows ala Jerry Springer, taking the machinima dramatics a step farther by inviting players to create their own perverse dialogues to be acted out.

The next MDickie project finally looks to move away from the wrestling theme into even more cinematic and dramatic territory: a game based on the overblown drama and management aspects of the music industry. Given another decade at this pace, MDicke could be redefining the art of machinima.

I don't know if anyone else in this community has stumbled across MDickie before, but if not he's worth a look. Check out demos of his games at http://www.mdickie.com
Cheers, --Bob

Quite a while after that I contacted Bob to ask if he minded me posting this on SP, and he responded NP, mentioning that what he had written was

Quite a bit out of date now, of course, as Matt Dickie has since released not only his music industry themed product but cinema and reality television themed variants. Unfortunately, the machinima aspects seem to be regressing with the rush to crank out so many game variants. The next project still looks promising, though.

All of that has been sitting in my get-to-it-eventually tray for a good six months or so. But MDickie is as much the "free-thinking rebel that redefines the rules" now as he was back then. You can check out his work here.

Mat adds:

"you may be interested to know that the biggest example of that in my work was when i hit the headlines for protesting Michael Jackson's innocence: http://www.MDickie.com/images/photos/ref_telegraph_mj.JPG

At university, i also made a game that lamented the lack of funding for our course of study: http://www.MDickie.com/hist_2001.htm (see last entry)