Bill “Phosphorous” Sears passed away today. I never got the chance to meet him, but his art graced a number of games I worked on, and I’m going to miss him.
About 10 years ago, my friends Rich and Iikka started making games as Digital Eel. They make games with style and a touch of insanity. I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to work on almost all of their games as a tester, starting in early beta stages, often before much of the game is fleshed out – there’s an engine there, but gameplay may be wildly unbalanced, the UI is still in flux, missions or levels are really limited. That sounds kind of painful, but I assure you, it’s fun.
Partly because Digital Eel makes games that are enjoyable to play, and that’s evident even in early half-finished versions. But mostly it’s fun because I get to have opinions about gameplay, storyline and the like, and those sometimes make it into the game. Nothing like seeing your requirements in the finished product to make you feel a sense of ownership.
There’s a fairly small group of guys (people, but they are in fact all guys) who have been beta testing Digital Eel games. Early, Rich started calling us the Fearless Testers – that’s even the label he put on us for the credits. My friend John Slade and I decided to unionize, in the event that a dispute ever broke out, to give ourselves collective bargain leverage. Or something. We might have been drinking at the time. So we dubbed ourselves “Fearless Testers Union, local 256,” a number chosen both to imply that we had a lot of people behind us, and because hey, powers of 2, we’re nerds.
Digital Eel is Rich and Iikka, but it’s also Phos. His brain-melting art graces the box design for Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space, which is one of my favorite games of all time. It’s funny, and challenging, and beautiful, and profound, and I’ve played and replayed it dozens of times. His art and his sense of weirdness is all over Digital Eel’s games. I’m proud to have worked on games with him, and I’m sad that I won’t get to do so again.
Farewell, Phos. I hope its weirder than you imagined where you are, because it’s less weird around here without you.
Fearless Testers Union, Local 256, at a recent meeting.