You may have seen this announcement already, but here’s the post where we spill our guts on all the details. Can we do this?? YES! Can we do it without screwing up, live, for the world to see? Probably not. That’s the theme of this announcement video. Watch it, first, and then read below for how you can be a part of the show!
First off, a lot of people have wanted to know what’s going to happen to their CO-OP iTunes feed. You won’t have to subscribe to a new feed as CO-OP Live will go right into the same CO-OP feed you’ve been using. While we’ll be recording live, once we’re done the show will be re-compressed and uploaded as per the norm and those of you unable to watch the shenanigans (oh, and there will be shenanigans) as they happen will still get the full show delivered to you later Tuesday night. The same series of download links will also be available.
Big thanks to Dylan Kenney for the new theme song we’re going to be using starting next Tuesday! He’s a fantastically talented musician and his music fits the soul of our new show and the new/old logo perfectly! Why is this logo new/old instead of just new? Because it’s what indie game designer Phil Fish originally came up with wa-hay back in the day when we were first slapping our show and our business together! He’s also the creator of the upcoming game Fez and the creator of the Area 5 logo at the top of this page.
That original CO-OP logo was deemed by some powers that be that it wasn’t “gamer” enough, but we’ve always had a soft spot in our collective heart for it and with the launch of a show that will hopefully involve you as much as it does us, it honestly felt more fitting. CO-OP Live should eventually become truly, er, cooperative. We couldn’t have gotten this far without you and now it’s time to bring you into the act. Make sure to follow coop_live on Twitter and during certain times of the show we’ll be using that to talk directly with you. Revision3 apparently has some kind of live chat-room software that could possibly be up by next Tuesday, so keep an eye out for that as well on the Revision3 CO-OP page, though I don’t have the details yet as to how/if it’s going to work.
Essentially, the course of our new show is thus: we’re going to shoot and mix game review/preview, interview and—a first for us—game demo segments live on the show. We’ll have as many guests on as we can as per the CO-OP norm and once a conversation is over, we’ll bring in you, the audience, for your thoughts on what was just said. Now’s your change to tell Ryan and I, directly, that we’re idiots for not liking Demon’s Souls. Also, you’ll have your chance to make fun of us to our virtual faces for making extremely hyperbolic claims or badly forming our sentences as we’re not going to be able to edit them out like we normally do. What, you thought we only edited around gameplay footage? Oh ho ho, if you only really knew the kind of shit that’s hit the cutting room floor… Well, I guess now you will.
We have a lot of plans for other kinds of segments we can introduce thanks to this new format, and most of them would have been impossible in the original CO-OP format (can you say: musical guest?). Still, our goal is to keep as much of our style as we can. We want conversations, not talking heads. Criticism, not just score run-downs and we want to shoot the show in a way that isn’t just static cameras locked to some people in the center of the screen. Our goal is to make the Area 5 mark on the live format and apply as much of our style to it as we can, even though we’re going to be on a regular set instead of shooting guerilla-style about San Francisco as we normally do.
But that’s not to say that pre-edited work is going to go away! We’re actually hoping that the live format saves us enough time that we can go back to making Area 5 Snacks and other shorts. We’re going to have to work up to that, though, so please be patient with us as we work out the kinks in our live show and really spit-polish it to that sheen that we’ve all come to know and love in our more traditional work.
So what about CO-OP? Technically, CO-OP is a separate IP and we’re signing a separate contract with Revision3 for CO-OP Live. That means it could, technically, come back. Will it? Not soon, no. Not unless someone wants to sign a deal with us to do it again, but we’re still very open to the possibility. Our work with the new, resurgent, so-cutting-edge-that-it-practically-bleeds Electronic Gaming Monthly will be the most immediate place you’ll have to see our edited work. So far all we’ve done for EGM is gameplay clips, but that’s going to change, and soon. You’re going to like what we/they have in store :)
Our hope, though, is that CO-OP Live can be even more important to your gaming entertainment life than even CO-OP was! So come back every week. Chat with us directly, comment here or on the Revision3 forums and let us know how we can improve the show. Our new format is going to make us more versatile than ever and more able to quickly adapt to changes and suggestions and while we’re definitely going to need your patience while we get things running smoothly (we think it’ll take us several shows), we’re also going to need your help in making it its very best!
matt chandronait