Serious Business

It often takes you a long time to take yourself seriously.

I’ve loved music and videogames since I was a kid; no surprise there. But I’ve never seriously considered anything close to a “career” in any of those fields. After all, I’m not a videogame professional and I’m not a musician. How can I be? I never really studied games or music, and going simply by instinct doesn’t sound very serious to me, which -being a “serious person”- is a sort of thing that does matter.

On the other hand, my pals at Heavy Boat are professionals in the videogame world. Some of them -gasp- even studied this stuff! And yet, sometimes it feels they don’t take their achievements very seriously either. We tend to minimize our little feats, it seems. After all, we’re just playing, right? How can you take seriously something that’s fun?

In the end, what we did do to move forward was take each other seriously.

I started as a kinda-regular visitor to the Heavy Boat office back when it was no more than a single small room. Friends and relatives crammed in there together to celebrate the one-year anniversary, toasting under a cloud of mild amazement that it had all survived that long. It was also quite crowdy when we raised our plastic disposable glasses to commemorate the second anniversary, but the place was now considerable larger, as was the number of Heavy Boat employees. You could say I was one of them from the start, but I’d always been the man who wasn’t there; as there was obviously no need for an in-house sound designer. When and if that need came true, then they’d better hire a professional… we’d taken this little experiment quite far, so whenever the time came to get serious, then I should step out and let the grownups take over.

There’s even more room and people in Heavy Boat now, only a few months after the two year celebration. Heck, there’s even enough room for me coming in, doing my stuff in part-time fashion, and coming back home to the rest of my activities. Looking back we have more than 10 games under our belts, and from my little corner of responsibilities, I think you could say they at least sound… decent. Some of them might even sound quite good, which -come to think of it- must imply that I’ve have actually studied videogames and music in some unorthodox fashion, ‘cause… where does all this come from, then?

So that’s probably the thing. They’ve taken me seriously, I’ve taken them seriously; but now that after more than two years I should probably start talking about us (yikes), well… then maybe what we’ve all always done was to treat our work that way. After all, this is serious business.

Which doesn’t mean it can’t be fun.

Guillermo Crespi

Screenwriter, Professor, and bonafide Heavyboater.