Ain't it Gory

The following is a reposting of what I just wrote on Westwood's facebook page:



Here is an old Westwood game I am sure you have never heard of. I wasn't actually sure it was ever released until I was sent this video yesterday by Brian. My faulty memory remembers it haven been shelved, but then sometime afterwards I heard that some other company was interested in picking it up and publishing it. I'll try to remember to ask Louis or Brett next time I see them.

Most of the artwork was done by the late, great Rick Parks. It was all orginally done in EGA on the PC and just ported to the Apple IIgs. I still don't think the PC version ever came out. I know I did some work on it, but honestly can't remember what exactly. I remember we had a lot of goofy fun picking the name before settling on Ancient Glory. Everybody internally called it "Ain't it Gory."

Retro Gamer - Lands of Lore

Issue 67 of Retro Gamer is finally out unless you live elsewhere in which case you already missed it. Not sure why the U.S. is a month behind. Why issue 67? Because that is the issue with the long over due "Lands of Lore" article. Damien McFerran actually interviewed Rick Gush and myself over two years ago, back when I was living in Brisbane. Damien's finishing of the article was interrupted by his wife having a baby, his triumphant return to the Tour de France and drafting Obama's Presidential acceptance speech. Did that come off as funny or mean? I was trying for funny. Writing it a little off at the moment, I'm watching the Emmy award show and I'm a bit upset Neil Patrick Harris wasn't in the red and black Dr. Horrible uniform. Why would he go back to the white uniform when the red and black one was so much more evil?

Okay, sorry. Seriously Damien's wife did have a baby. Again, congrats on that! Then the article was originally supposed to be in issue 64, but the editor felt that that issue had to many "making of" articles so he decided to push it back.

Unfortunately, the layout artist of the issue was too smart to publish the picture I gave him of members of the team. Actually, it is a picture of the "Eye of the Beholder" team, though it was pretty much the same people on "Lands of Lore." Note to the guy who wrote the Wiki article, Westwood did not split from SSI over artistic differences. Westwood became a part of Virgin Games, though we still provided a lot of help, support and love to our friends over at SSI while there were doing the EOB III. And if you don't beleive me, you'll have to deal with my bad-ass self from the early 90's in the picture. Oh yeah, don't mess with me!

It might be obvious by now that I am really just typing away trying to add some meat to this post to balance out the two pictures. I don't want to actually post a copy of the article itself until it has been off the shelf for a few months. It a glorious 3 page article with a nice shout out to the late great Rick Parks. I think you should rush right out and buy at least two issues. I did.

Rick Parks @ The Mount Charleston Lodge

Two years ago I posted An "Ode to Rick Parks" where I talked about Rick 'The Center of the Universe' Parks complete with an old Westwood Studios video that he can be seen in. I forget how came up with that nickname 'Center of the Universe' for him, but it embarrassed him to no end.

For those of you not familiar with Rick, he was an artist who did a number of pictures on the Amiga and then began working at Westwood Studios as a video game artist. Here is a link to the Mickey Mouse Glass, but note that on an Amiga monitor you wouldn't be able to see all the pixel dithering, it just blended together. But it does prove that it was hand drawn, not scanned in. Here is another link to limited edition, signed prints for sale of "Park Avenue Evening" that Rick painted for a National Parks competition.

Sadly Rick passed away on April 16, 1996. I still remember being on the freeway, driving back into town when Mike called me on my cellphone to give me the news. I pulled over to the shoulder and sat there for a long time.

Anyway, since that posting I have gotten about half a dozen emails from people who knew Rick and it has been great hearing from everyone of them. For awhile now I had been wanting to create a Rick Parks fan page on Facebook, but after looking into it a few minutes ago, I decided against it. I'm not really an 'authorized representative' of the late, great, Rick Parks and Facebook would appear to frown on unauthorized pages of that nature. Oh well.

However, one of the things I had done to prepare for the fan page was to take a drive up to the Mount Charleston Lodge (www.mtcharlestonlodge.com - I removed the hyperlink because Avast tells me it found a trojan virus when I clicked on the 'special events' link on their page! Could be a false positive, but I'm not taking any chances.) and take a picture of the mural he had painted over the bar back in 1977. Click on the images for a larger version. You can still see his signature complete with the 'circle dot in the square' down on the lower left.

When I was a kid, my mother used to take me and my brother up to the lodge during the winter time where, after playing in the snow, we would sit around the fire pit thing that is in the middle of the room and drink hot chocolate under that mural. I remember thinking once if it was difficult to paint something like that because of all the ladders and stuff you would need. I don't remember if the stupid deer head was mounted smack in the middle of it back then or not. It was kind of a kick, to learn years later, that Rick had painted it. Another guy at Westwood had talked to the owner about it, saying he knew Rick. The guy didn't believe him and said that it was painted by, and I quote, "Some hippy kid."

Ode to Rick Parks

I was exchanging emails about Eye of the Beholder with the other day with Irene who goes by the handle Sentinel69. I was pointing out which avatar portrait from the game was based on me and which were other Westwood employees. The portraits were done by the late, great Rick Parks (aka the Center of the Universe). So I got to thinking about him and decided to Google him. I found the dedication video that was included with Lands of Lore 2 after he passed away.



Oh man, watching that gets me right in the chest. He was such a great guy. The way he is laughing and such on the video was the way he always was. He was always in a good mood and just uplifted any situation. If you were wondering why he appears kind of stiff in the video, its because he has some other medical problem that eventually led to his neck being fused so he couldn’t turn his head from side to side.

When Rick first came to Westwood he was so out of our league. He had been playing around on his Amiga drawing pictures, and getting some fame among Amiga users for doing so. I just tried searching for some of his Amiga pictures but struck out. The one that I remember the most was a simple picture of a Mickey Mouse drinking glass. Another had a man and woman holding a torch and walking away from the camera with purple marble pillars on either side.

He also did the mural of the Excalibur casino in the old ‘Strip Joint’ (as in Las Vegas Strip) employee cafeteria in the Mirage Hotel and Casino. The cafeteria used to be full of parody art about the other casinos such as a statue of David representing Caesar’s Palace where the statue is posed as if he was embarrassed and trying to cover his nakedness. Ricks mural was the scene where the young King Arthur is trying to pull Excalibur out of the rock but having trouble and even his horse is holing onto his cloak and trying to help pull.

The mural above the bar in old Mount Charleston lodge above Vegas was his as well done sometime in the 70’s. He did some a lot of work at Siegfried and Roy’s house, some mural on a boat owned by Donald Trump and much more.

Brett and Louis (Westwood’s founders) told him they really couldn’t afford to pay him what he was worth, but they worked out a deal where Rick would get time off to do other projects because he really wanted to do work on the computer because he thought it was so fun.

He brought the quality of Westwood art up so much. Not just with his own work, but just by his presence, everybody else’s work as well. I know I got a whole lot better after he started to work there. I remember thinking my pictures for DragonStrike were much better than anything I thought I was capable of at the time.

Now since all that is making me kind of sad, let me end this with a funny story. I mentioned this all started with the emails I was writing to Irene aka Sentinel69. So I just assumed the 69 was the typical number thrown onto the end of handle as the sexual reference. (In Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure voice) “Sixty Nine Dude!”

Years ago one of the in things to do was to steal the yellow plastic table numbers from Carl’s Jr. and put them on the dashboard of your car. I had the number 68 on the dashboard of my very sporty Toyota MR2. (Just tried looking for a picture of the Carl's Jr. Number thing online and again struck out) Several times I would have a girl in my car say something to the effect of, “Shouldn't that be 69?”

I would reply, “No I wasn’t born in 1969, but now that I know where you mind is let’s say we skip dinner and just go back to my place.” I won’t comment on the success of this particular pickup line because a gentleman never tells. (That and I'm sure you are sick of the baseball analogies.)

Anyway, what makes this funny is when I went looking for Rick Parks stuff and found this video I noticed it was actually put onto Youtube by Irene. Except on Youtube she signed up as Sentinel1969. I’ve been busted by my own joke.