The US Open is in Full Swing!  (Sorry about that. Though, our extensive research shows only 300 people or so have made that same pun online, so it’s not that bad.)

While there are a couple of tennis fans among us, the real treat is what happens to our nearby park (previously mentioned, here and here) during US Open season:

Madison Square Park [is] transformed into the ultimate tennis experience, including giant viewing screens, stadium seating and concessions from NYC-area restaurants, Country, Hill Country Barbecue Market and Rickshaw Dumpling Bar.

An official link is here.

Sadly, convenient dumplings and pulled beef sandwiches are only around until Sunday.  So enjoy ‘em while you can.  (After Sunday, we’ll have to walk a couple of extra blocks for dumplings again!)

p.s. Yes, it’s another food post.  I promise we’ll put up the “results” of the last mix CD really soon.

p.p.s. Oh, and people are still wearing ties etc. on Fridays, if you were curious.

Forgive the late notice, but some friends of the family are coming to town, as per the message below!

The Guitar Zeros, the plastickiest band this side of the Mississippi, is crossing the Mississippi. in a small plastic paddle boat. not really. We’re playing 2 shows in NYC, and would love support from anyone who wants to help us…… please consider telling your friends in New York, if you’ve got some you think might be interested, about our shows and maybe we’ll be so lucky to have some people show up to witness the plastic shredding.

• July 17 @ Lit Lounge in Manhattan
• July 18 @ Union Hall in Brooklyn

The Guitar Zeros is a group featuring some Ubisoft employees that play original music using the plastic peripherals from the recent onslaught of music based games. You can read more about them here.

To get our games done for holiday 2008, our big deadlines happen in the spring and summer previous. So, as you might imagine, there’s a lot going on at Powerhead Games, what with the multiple awesome projects in the pipe, forthcoming client visits, and of course, all the Formal Friday-ing you could ever want.  Between hitting our deadlines, and the New York City heat, it can get pretty hectic at times.  Luckily there’s folks like David Gallaher, writer of the hit web comic High Moon and all around great guy, to remind of two very important things:

1.  Ice cream makes everything better.
2.  Dry ice is one of the neatest things ever.

A Fed Ex guy showed up to the office this morning with a box full of joy in the form of six pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream addressed to “Team Awesome c/o Powerhead Games”.  Flavors include Steven Colbert’s Americone Dream, Sweet Cream & Cookies,  Vermonty Python, Cake Batter, and perennial favorites Strawberry and Vanilla.  As great as the frozen treats are, though, half the fun was disposing of all the dry ice they came packed in.  As seen in the pictures below, my poor memory of sixth grade science class and what happens to a box of dry ice when exposed to a sink full of hot water resulted in turning our humble office bathrooms and hallway into a lost Flock of Sea Gulls video.  Or maybe a Rob Liefeld comic.  Behold the hilarity, and click to embigginate:

(Editor’s note: We probably should have saved some of the dry ice for the next Rock Band night!)

Thanks again for thinking of us, David.  A Powerhead T-shirt is on its way to you, and drinks are on me for the next several years at least.

Our office is located a couple of blocks from Madison Square Park — former home of Madison Square Garden, and current home to the Shake Shack. Once a year the park dons a big bib and gets its BBQ on. That is to say, this weekend is: the Big Apple BBQ Block Party!! Their website is down at the moment. Hopefully, it will be up by the time you’re reading this. In the meantime, here’s a quick summary:

“The Big Apple Barbecue Block Party, Danny Meyer’s annual, free mega-event in Madison Square Park, just announced the participants for June 7 and 8, and we are pleased to see familiar, delicious names. Ed Mitchell of North Carolina will do his legendary whole-hog BBQ, and Chris Lilly of Big Bob Gibson’s in Decatur, Alabama, will be on hand with his pulled pork. Jimmy Hagood of Black Jack BBQ in Charleston, South Carolina, is a notable newcomer, bringing his state’s distinctive mustard-based sauces to a city more familiar with the North Carolina tradition. The New York contingent consists of Blue Smoke, Hill Country, Dinosaur, and the rarely mentioned but worthwhile Rack and Soul.” (Quoted from NYMAG.)

A couple of us will be working this weekend. And more of us will be playing Fourth Edition. But, all of us will be enjoying BBQ.

(Apologies to our non-meat eating cohorts.)

Twice a year, the pedestrian commuters of NYC get a little treat: Manhattanhenge!

For Manhattan, a place where evening matters more than morning, that special day comes on Thursday, May 29h this year, one of only two occasions when the Sun sets in exact alignment with the Manhattan grid, fully illuminating every single cross-street for the last fifteen minutes of daylight.

Read the rest of the quoted article at Newyorkology. Also, there’s a neat Flickr pool with more Manhattanhenge images.

The middle of May was something of a berserk time for us here at Powerhead Games. In the space of one week, we had multiple milestones due for multiple different projects, a client visit, and the sort of computer issues that usually only come from having your offices built on an Indian burial ground. It was like the perfect storm, only without George Clooney dying at the end. We think.

So what better week, then, to have the first ever PHG Mixed CD Swap? Armed with a handful of rules to keep things interesting and the names of three other people to make physical copies of their mix with, a bunch of us set about the time-honored tradition of carefully arranging songs and assembling cover art. The results were far better than anybody could have expected, producing a surprisingly eclectic range of songs and styles while proving once and for all that, to truly know the people you work with, you must first walk a mile in their headphones. For some it was their first mix ever (and how any of them have significant others is a mystery for the ages), while for others it was a chance to dust off old skills while trolling through albums and hard drives long forgotten in search of the perfect obscure Beach Boys cover. While some people had themes for their mixes and others just went with a bunch of songs they liked, one thing is abundantly clear now that it’s all said and done: we’re all secretly in love with each other and can only express our feelings through the poetry of Journey and Avril Lavigne.

Everybody seems to have really enjoyed it, and we’re definitely doing it again next month. In the meantime, if you were to take the fruits of our labors and pile them up on the floor in Jason’s office, it might look remarkably like this:

UPDATE: For the curious, some of us have started putting up tracklists in the comments section. Check ‘em out, won’t you?

As mentioned previously, I was on a recent panel discussing the popular topic: “How to get a job in the videogame industry.” The session was well attended and I had fun taking part (thanks to all involved!). Since there’s already a nice write up on the event here, I’m going to focus the rest of this post on the topic itself…

Helping people get game jobs is an important subject at Powerhead, as we’re in a growth “phase” (phase = most of the last three years). We spend a lot of time looking for “fresh meat” and have some advice to offer to offer. (If you read nothing else in this article, the short version is: DIY. Make cool stuff, show it off, and don’t give up.) That said, we certainly haven’t seen it all. So, to prepare for the panel, I recently took a look at what the rest of the internet had to say on the subject:

Read more

While making videogames for a living has its obvious perks (getting paid for tweaking the graphics in level three, Rock Band nights, and actually enjoying your work to name a few), one of the more unsung benefits is the utter lack of a dress code. Most developers are too busy being happy over you showing up clothed at all to care about your funny T-shirt from the internets or your raggedy jeans, and the resulting laid back atmosphere helps take a bit of the stress off when things get hectic.

At Powerhead Games, we appreciate the chance to let our respective freak flags fly around the work place so much that a few of us have taken it upon ourselves to institute Formal Fridays. Every Friday we put away our band shirts and trusty jeans and deck ourselves out in, if not necessarily traditional white collar garb, the nicest clean clothes we can find. It’s our way of saying “thanks” for the clothing freedoms we enjoy during the rest of the week. Also, suits and dresses are totally awesome.

It’s a small group now, made up mostly of the North side of the office (because South side are made of lame), but we’re growing. Pictured below from left to right: Natasha, Nathan, Chris (me), Christy, Niki, and Greg.

I’m going to be on a panel at New York Comic Con. The topic is “Getting a Job in the Video Game Industry”, and it’s in room “1E15″ on Sunday at noon. (The short answer is, go here.) Please feel free to stop by and say hi. If anyone attends the show “cosplaying” as the Powerhead logo, I’ll hire you on the spot… or run away, screaming. Definitely one of those two reactions. There will be no middle ground.

I’ll post a summary of the panel next week.