Just another day at 2PP //  Photo for PA Report by Dabe Alan

Ben Kuchera interviewed us about our contribution to the Double Fine Adventure project for a editorial over on the PA Report.  We love the direction of the site and what it’s doing for the concept of industry news, and it’s an honor to be there alongside people like Gabe Newell and David Jaffe.  Check out the interview below, and if you’ve never been to the Report before be sure to hang out for a while and soak everything in.

The PA Report Interview

 Jak and Daxter return, as crisp and sharp as our memories.

We’ve had the honor of putting together a 18 minute documentary piece on Sony’s HD re-release of the Jak and Daxter trilogy.  It’s always a treat to go back to Naughty Dog and talk to the people there, and this time around the studio was visited by the founders Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin.  Andy and Jason look back at their time with Naughty Dog and how far the company has come since they departed, all while playing Jak HD in the studios screening room.  Neither had played the game since it’s original release 10 years ago, and seeing it now in HD brought back some powerful memories.

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By now there is a good chance you have heard about the Double Fine Adventure.  It’s the biggest story in the gaming press so far this year, plastered across major news sites and personal blogs around the whole web.  But it’s not just gaming news, it’s real news.  TV stations are talking about this.  The financial sector is looking at what has happened.  Literally overnight, what seemed like a modest pitch for a 400k project exploded into a multimillion dollar statement about the modern games industry.  There is the way that things have always been done, but now there is an ever growing list of new alternatives.

We're proud to announce that we've partnered with industry legend Tim Schafer and Double Fine Productions for our most ambitious project to date.  "The Double Fine Adventure" is a Kickstarter campaign to raise funding for Double Fine to create a new adventure game while we document the entire process from beginning to end.  To the best of our knowledge this is something that has never been done before.

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Back in the early days of 2 Player Productions (circa 2007), our bread and butter was producing videos from live chip music performances.  We probably made about a hundred of them, with a good portion collected on the Blip Festival 2006 and 2007 dvd releases.  We don't have the time to work with the chip scene like we use to since we moved away from the east coast and took on other projects, but we're still trying to keep the spirit alive by hosting our own bi-monthly chip shows here in Portland.

This month we're featuring two pillars of the Philly chip scene, Animal Style and Cheap Dinosaurs, who will be supported by Oregon native Dakota Clark.  Just In case you missed our previous show, we now have some videos up for Bud Melvin and Covox.

Bud Melvin Live at Dataport

Covox Live at Dataport

PC Gamer contacted us not long ago interested in some footage to feature in the latest edition of their digital magazine.  We put together a little teaser along with a sequence of Notch coding at his work station.  We think it's facinating to watch Notch work, we hope you enjoy this little bit of insight into the creative process!

During our time filming at Mojang for the Minecraft documentary, we had the chance to cover the development of another game that was taking place alongside of Minecraft.  This game, which would eventually come to be named "Scrolls", would be the main focus of Jakob Porser, long time friend of Markus "Notch" Persson and co-founder of the company.  

Concieved by Jakob and Markus durning their time working together at King.com, the idea for Scrolls became a reality when Minecraft's success led to the founding of Mojang.  While Markus continued to work on Minecraft, Jakob would lead the development of Scrolls.  He would soon be joined by Markus 'Junkboy' Toivonen, Daniel Frisk, Mattis Grahm, and Henrik Pettersson.  The tactical card game would feature detailed art and 2D animation, a drastic change from the blocky open world of Minecraft.

The Scrolls documentary will be a multi-part series chronicling the stages of the games developement, as well as the hardships faced by Mojang along the way. 

We have two new shirts available in the 2 Player merch store, both are designs born from the DVD release of "Reformat the Planet" and our talented friends at Fangamer.  

"RTPdj" is blue art on a black shirt in the style of the LSDj logo found on the quenisential gameboy music making cartridge.  In a classy homage to the other premier gameboy music software Nanoloop, we have the "Formatloop" shirt with pink graphics on grey.  Both are quality American apparel shirts with front and back printing.

These are the first shirts we've had to support a project, and since it's something of an experiment they are super limited.  Like really, really limited!  Maybe if we sell out of them today we'll see about doing another run, or maybe we'll try a different design.  Would anyone be interested in getting a 2PP logo t-shirt?  Let us know!

Students learning with the Minecraft Teacher - New York, NY

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Here's the screening schedule

And the programming schedule

Fellow Portlandians!  Join us for the reboot of DataPort, Portland's new night for live chip music!  Visit the facebook event page and let us know you're coming-

RSVP for DataPort!

LIVE MUSIC
Saturday, July 9th 2011
8:00 pm @ Backspace Cafe
115 NW 5th Avenue
Portland, OR
$8 · ALL AGES

We'll also be screening our feature-length chip music documentary, "Reformat the Planet" at the Hollywood Theater the following day. (TRAILER: http://vimeo.com/665366)

FILM SCREENING
Sunday, July 10th 2011
7:30 pm @ The Hollywood Theater
4122 NE Sandy Blvd.
$5 · ALL AGES

Poster image by Jon Kay of Fangamer

Infamous 2 from Sucker Punch Studios is now availalble in stores.  We had a lot of fun working with the guys at Sucker Punch on the BTS videos for the first Infamous, and we managed to revisit them early on in the development of Infamous 2 to do a special piece on the comic origins of the series.  The piece was made special for release at Comic-Con, but afterwards it may have been overlooked due to being released at the same time the "Cole with Hair" character redesign controversy was taking place.

It remains a piece that we're proud of, so if you've picked the game up lately and are looking for some more information about it's development swing by the 2PP Youtube channel and check it out.

Now to get back to saving New Marais...

A few years back, we abandoned our official YouTube account in favor of the greener, more cleanly compressed pastures of Vimeo. Since then, YouTube has made some significant strides in the right direction so we thought it'd be worth it to knock the dust off that old login and make our most noteworthy content available for that site's considerable audience.

Chief among said content is the inclusion of Reformat The Planet in its entirety with all new, real-time Annotations. We were really excited to take full advantage of this feature and went out of our way to pack this version of the film with all the trivia and backstories that never came across in the original cut or the DVD's commentary track. So, even if you've already gone through both of those, we've still got something new for ya.

Go ahead and click on this sentence to check it out and take a look at some of our other videos while you're there.

2 Player Productions is putting out an open call for Minecraft players to send us your personal stories about how the game has impacted your life.  These stories will be collected and considered for inclusion in “Minecraft: The Story of Mojang,” the new feature-length documentary in development by 2 Player Productions.

Please submit your story in 350 words or less to minecraft@2playerproductions.com


Not all submissions will be used in the film, but they will be read and considered.

http://www.2playerproductions.com/projects/minecraft

You play Minecraft, and you get that there is more to it then just a simple game.  We want to respect your tremendous vote of confidence by making sure that every extra dollar is invested into improving some aspect of the final product. It could mean anything from being able to interview more subjects to adding international subtitles for the benefit of the game's global community. Whatever it is, we want it to add to your experience.

Production of the doc will continue through 2011 and into early 2012.  We will be traveling to the Mojang offices in Sweden multiple times during the course of filming, as well as numerous other locations around the world to talk to people that have been influenced by the game.  The reward items are being put into production and everything is going smoothly.

If you missed a chance to back the Kickstarter project, stay tuned for info on how to pre-order the standard edition release.

The much anticipated Minecraft doc (judging by our comments section), is now online!  You can visit the Kickstarter page here to learn all about the project, and Gametrailers will be hosting the world premiere of the full 20-minute short.  

The Kickstarter will only be running for 30 days and your donations will determine if we can make the movie or not.  We have a bunch of fun rewards to offer from our friends at Fangamer, so don't miss out on the exclusive Minecraft goods and the opportunity to help us document this exciting chapter in the history of gaming.

PS- If anyone wants to hear us talk about the Minecraft project, we're on the A Jumps B Shoots podcast that went up today dicussing the film.  Click here to check it out!

PSS- And now another one with our firends at Fangamer!  Also some talk about Minecraft, but mostly about how we never finish the games we start.

The Blip 06 DVD features performances from everyone at the 2006 Blip Festival, the main event featured in "Reformat the Planet".  This was our first product release back in the day so it's a little rough around the edges, but we don't have many copies left and once it's gone it's gone for good.  It's a great piece of history for anyone interested in seeing how the very first Blip went down.

The Blip 07 DVD that followed was bumped up to a 2 disc set, again featuring performances from everyone at the festival, but this time we really went nuts with the special features.  Tons of bonus videos paint a picture of the NY scene's growth post Blip 06, with studio sessions and performances from events in New York and Philadelphia.  We also have a full year's worth of Pulsewave ROM fliers from NO-CARRIER, multi-angle performance videos from Blip 07 (edit it yourself in real time!), and a host of weird and confusing Easter eggs you may wish you never took the trouble to find.

For Blip 08 we went in a whole new direction by deciding to focus entirely on the aural aspect of the show and releasing a 2 disc live album.  The Blip 08 live album is seamlessly presented as a complete experience from start to finish, and stands as what might be the best produced live chip music album available.

Fans of chip music new and old couldn't go wrong with any of these products, and now you can get them all together for the special price of $40.

A special thanks to everyone for the warm reception to the announcement of our Minecraft project this weekend.  The Doc is in post production right now and we're aiming to release it for free sometime in February (a valentines gift to Mojang?).

Expect the doc to ultimately be twenty minutes in length and depending on the reception when we release, we may return to Mojang in Stockholm to continue expanding on it. The story of Mojang studios has only just begun, and there are still aspects of the studio that could be explored.  The content we have now takes place during the first week of the studios formation, which is something rarely captured on film and we're grateful to Mojang for giving us permission to be there.

That's all the information we can release for now, thanks again to everyone for being so excited about the doc!  It's a real thrill for us to be working on it.  Mojang is an incredible team of brilliant people, and i'm sure we'll be enjoying excellent games from them for a long time to come.

Watch Reformat the Planet on Hulu!

For anyone outside the country who can’t access Hulu, head over to the Penny-Arcade stream which should work for most international markets.

If you happened to turn on your computer this past weekend, you know that Naughty Dog officially announced the next installment in their massively successful "Uncharted" franchise, "Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception." Over the past few months, we've been spending some time at their studio in Santa Monica, covering various aspects of production leading up to the game's first trailer.

The first half of this short documentary features interviews with the dev team as they discuss the pressures of creating a sequel to one of the most critically-acclaimed games in recent years. You'll also be treated to a glimpse behind the closed doors of the motion-capture and ADR process. And, in keeping with the grand tradition, the doc sports an all chipmusic soundtrack courtesy of Bear & Walrus, minusbaby, failotron, and Nathan Meunier.

Click here to view part 1. Look for the second half early next year!

We'd also like to express our gratitude for the overwhelmingly positive reception the piece has received so far and are especially thankful to Naughty Dog for opening their doors to our cameras. Best studio ever.

First Prize:

• Reformat the Planet DVD set (two discs)
• PAX 2009 DVD set (six discs)
• Blip Festival 2006 DVD
• Blip Festival 2007 DVD
• Blip Festival 2008 Live Album (two discs)
• Bit Boy T-Shirt
• Pixel Pulse Poster
• Chipbender Pin Set
• Maestro: Jump in Music (import copy plays on all DSes, one of 2009’s GOTYs!)
• Game Center CX strap and assistant director pin
• Dragon Quest collectible monster trading figure

Second Prize:

• Reformat the Planet DVD set (two discs)
• Bit Boy T-Shirt
• Pixel Pulse Poster
• Chipbender Pin Set
• Love Plus (import copy plays on all DSes)
• Miniature Fire Emblem DS box
• Dragon Quest monster trading figure

Third Prize:

REFORMAT THE PLANET trailer from 2 Player Productions on Vimeo.

• Reformat the Planet DVD set (two discs)
• Dragon Quest IX sticker sheet (lol)
• Dragon Quest monster trading figure

Honorable Mentions:

• Dragon Quest monster trading figure

Head over to Tiny Cartridge for all the contest details and good luck!

In celebration of Reformat the Planet making the trip to DVD, Penny Arcade will be hosting the film in it’s entirety to stream for free on the PAtv network. The film is broken into seven pieces for your viewing convenience.

Reformat the Planet by itself is only a small part of the entire DVD package. People who decide to pick up the DVD will be rewarded with the follow up documentary “RTP 1.5”, commentary tracks, music making tutorials, a collectors booklet, and tons of other bonus features.]]> Sun, 22 Aug 2010 15:19:32 GMT http://2playerproductions.com/news/current/183-rtp-patv http://2playerproductions.com/news/current/179-releaseparty
The wait is finally over. On August 24th, Reformat the Planet is coming to DVD as a 2-disc set fully loaded with fresh content and tons of bonus material. Featuring a painstakingly restored audio mix, this never-before-seen cut of the film is supplemented by a brand new short, RTP 1.5, that accounts for some of the intervening years since the end of principal photography. Together, they now represent 2 Player Productions' definitive vision for the project.

In addition to filmmaker commentary tracks for both features, the DVDs also include deleted scenes, exclusive interviews, chipmusic software tutorials, music videos, and a beautiful collector's booklet, to name just a few.

To contain all this shiny new awesomeness, we've tapped Fangamer, a unique online store renowned for their quality merchandise and work on the "MOTHER 3" game localization project, to handle all design duties for this incredible package. They've also whipped up some lovely RTP t-shirts, pins, stickers, and discount bundles featuring some of our other products so that you can represent IRL.

Pre-order your copy of Reformat the Planet from their site today!

And to really kick this release off in style, we're throwing a very special chip show in New York City on August 22nd at Le Poisson Rouge featuring performances by Nullsleep, Bit Shifter, and Glomag with live visuals by NO CARRIER -- a classic combo rarely seen under the same roof outside of Blip Festival!

And finally, for the cherry on top: We'll be selling advance copies of the DVD in person THAT NIGHT for a mere $15 so swing by the party on time because we won't have that many on hand prior to the online release.

Sunday 8/22/2010
Reformat the Planet DVD Release Party

After nearly a year of production, 2 Player Productions’ run of the Penny Arcade documentary series has come to an end. Over the course of twenty-seven episodes, viewers were given an unprecedented look behind the closed doors of the Penny Arcade office in Seattle, Washington, providing insight into the inner workings of the Internet’s most successful webcomic.

Revisiting the theme of family introduced in the pilot episodes, the season finale brings the audience even deeper into the lives of Mike and Jerry as they share their thoughts on parenting and the responsibilities of raising a family.]]> Fri, 30 Jul 2010 13:40:46 GMT http://2playerproductions.com/news/current/174-patv-finale http://2playerproductions.com/news/current/173-overhaul 2playerproductions.com has lay dormant for close to a year now while we worked on the Penny Arcade web series. With the PA series coming to a close and some major projects on the horizon, we’ve cleaned up the site and made it much easier for you to navigate. This is now the site we had envisioned years ago.

You’ll find our complete body of work cataloged under the Projects tab. All projects have descriptions and relevant links to the associated material. In place of the forums, we’ve opted to include comment boxes for each article, so feel free to tell us what you think as you move about the site.

Nearly everything has been updated with new content and you can expect to see much more over the coming months. Be sure to follow our Twitter feed for up to date news on new videos and other releases.]]> Fri, 30 Jul 2010 12:35:19 GMT http://2playerproductions.com/news/current/173-overhaul http://2playerproductions.com/news/current/149-patv 2PP Presents "Penny-Arcade: The Series"