Way back, before the turn of the century; that’s the year 2000, (Yeah, that turn of the century – and only if you believe the 21st century started in 2001) myself and a group of other artists did a super quick project for Pangea Software. Apple was about to refresh the original gumdrop iMac’s with a new graphics processor and need some games to show it off. Brian at Pangea had had some other successes with shipping games directly on the Apple’s platform and was willing to give it another go. Out of the 2 1/2 month effort, came Cro-Mag Rally – a fun little Mario Kart-style game that follows a band of cavemen and women as they race through a variety of tracks each representing a different landmark era in the evolution of civilization.

About a month ago, the game was re-released for the 3G iPhone and it now lives on. Apple, in fact, just made a new ad for the iPhone featuring the game as a center piece. Watch it here.

When I started the project, I was still working at Thomson. When I finished the project I was working at Motorola – I was also newly wed. That was a very busy summer – not unlike this one actually – except without all the job changing and marrying and stuff.

I had taken a trip to Hong Kong right after Brian and I had gotten in touch with each other. So, I took advantage of the 20+ hour flight to do some sketching for the game. Here are some to enjoy. They have always been some of my favorite pencil doodles. The “Caveman Industrial Designer” has become bit of an icon for me.

Enjoy…

I also had the privilege of creating the characters; Brog and Grag. I think that’s cave speak for boy and girl. Anyhow, for some reason they ended-up looking a bit like Neanderthal versions of a certain bride and groom. She married me anyway. Whew…

Cheers,

J.

I’ve been busily working for the last couple days getting Jenn’s site all back in order. Not only did we migrate her from Blogger to WordPress (like I did), but we also redesigned the entire site adding a lot more content and a brand new look.

It’s still early and I’m sure we’ll tweak some, but everything is mostly in place.

Being totally new to WordPress, it took a while to get used to their componentized templates and heavy use of PHP for stitching it all back together. Easy work for some, but maddening for a first-timer.

I thought I’d give a shout out to some of the developer’s out there that lended their wares to the effort.

The JavaScript slideshow gallery on the front page is from Jon Design’s Smooth Gallery 2.0. It was a fairly easy incorporation and seems to be fast and quite flexible.

The other is Dagon Design’s Secure Form Mailer plug-in. I had reused the PHP scripting from my old site and got it to work, but it felt cobbled together and offered little in terms of spam protection. We’ll give this plug-in a try and hopefully Jenn’s inbox will stay clear of unwanted mail – or not more so at least. Head over to Jenn’s contact page and drop her a line…

Hey all! As some of you may know, Jenn and I have been having issues with Blogger. Everything worked fine for almost two years, then suddenly we couldn’t post images and then, over the last couple weeks, we couldn’t post anything. The posts show-up in our dashboards but they never get re-distributed back to our server and thus to you.

After some attempts at contacting customer service with a miserable lack of results (thanks, Blogger) we’ve dumped Blogger and are now serving up our own WordPress sites. Bear with us as we update stuff. I’ll be trying to maintain links to images, but the permalinks to articles may have shifted in the upgrade. Let us know how it’s working on your ends.

Cheers,

J.

Also this week come the public announcement that the XBOX 360 Wireless Racing Wheel has won an IDEA Silver award.

I mentioned in my very first post what an awesome project this was to have worked on. I guess Businessweek noticed too!

I got home form work today and my latest issue of wired was in the post. One of the cover headlines reads “Coffee Science: The Perfect Brew”. I thought, it must be an article about Zander and his Clover machine.

Sure enough. I was right! Woo hoo!

Awesome work guys! Don’t let the mothership steer you too far from course!

 
J.