I’ve got a really difficult decision to make that has really been weighing on me lately. I don’t know why it bugs me so much; it could be just pure pride, a stubborn unwillingness to admit something that should come much easier. I’m not sure.

When I took my extended leave from machinima in 2000, I left a project in progress, a Quake 2 machinima film-to-be entitled Gumbo. Naturally, when I returned a little over seven months ago, the most logical place to resume my filmmaking seemed to be resumption of that abandoned project. And I’ve been working on it, slowly but surely, ever since, trying to bring that piece into the “modern age” of machinima. I even included a teaser trailer for it at the beginning of Thresh vs. Billox (full match version).

I am of the growing conviction that it would be best for me (and believe it or not, best for machinima, too) to just abandon Gumbo and move forward with other machinima things.

Over the next few blog entries, I’m going to get into the nitty gritty of the decision. Your feedback along the way is, of course, welcome.

Gumbo’s History

There are only a handful of people who are aware of the full story behind this often thought to be cursed project. After the surprising and pleasant public reception of Father Frags Best, I immediately began working on a sequel. Working title was Father Frags Best 2: Joey Frags Better.

Obviously, there was a bit of an inherent challenge in doing a sequel to a film where all but one of the characters are deceased at the end of the first film. But I came up with a script that put Joey in school the next day, where he’d take more of his darkly comic anarchy into a new setting. The concept of the school was exciting, because I very much wanted to push the limits of Quake 2 regarding large crowds, and the new story culminated in a student assembly inside a large gymnasium.

I very much wanted FFB2 to be superior to the original in every way, and certainly bigger in scale. The original FFB was completed, start to finish, in 30 days; I knew this sequel would take considerably longer… and some of what I wanted to do, I knew I didn’t have the skills to do it well enough myself. So, I enlisted a team to assist with modelling, skinning, and mapping. I set out with the goal of having 100% custom content (along the lines of what Bouncers does nowadays). It was exciting, and work began on the set and character design for the film.

Then, something happened. A little incident called Columbine.

In case it’s not apparent why that event would have been a bit jarring to me and to most of my team, let me recap for you what FFB’s “comedy” amounted to.

In the original, the story is, essentially: A crazed veteran father, driven mad by war memories and hallucinations, murders his family at the dinner table, thinking them to be demons. Then his youngest son, Joey, shoots and kills him. Ha ha. The end.

FFB2’s story was, essentially: Joey goes to school the next day. Some friends of a rock-and-roller Joey shot in the first film gang up on Joey at school, corner him, and kill him. Joey goes to hell and then miraculously comes back. He shows up at the gymnasium for science presentations, and as the climax of his presentation, he kills everyone with a massive weapon (the famed BFG). The end.

Columbine was a wakeup call regarding whether one could legitimately find anything humorous in the notion of mass murder at school. It was very much a “what the hell was I thinking?” moment. I consulted with members of the team, and explained to them the matter of conscience, and also the likelihood that if our film was successful, what a lightning rod it could potentially be with the anti-videogame activists. While some of the team wasn’t as bothered as I was, in my recollection everyone agreed that a retool was in order.

So I began to cut up FFB2 into pieces, trying to isolate scenes which were particularly funny to see if they could be washed of their Columbineness if extracted from the context of the whole story. The film shortened considerably, of course, and I wanted to hit 20-25 minutes again. So I pruned down a collection of little short comedy skits, and began to mingle them in. The film still had enough remnants of the original to be considered somewhat of a sequel, but the feel of things was taking on a flavor more akin to the Flying Circus, or Blahbalicious.

Hence, the name Gumbo emerged, to express the jumbled variety of ingredients this film was intended to have.

It was around this time that my personal life began to… let’s just say it started turning for the worse. (That’s a whole ‘nother series of entries which I’ll do when I’m in a more confessional mindset). In denial, I encouraged the team to start planning other projects. Some guys from the old Clan Phantasm joined up with us, and brought along an unfinished project of their own. And so the team expanded, the slate filled up with planned projects, I talked up Gumbo in interviews and chat rooms and forums, I constructed a plan for controlled hype… and…

Boom. I crashed. I can point to all sorts of excuses, events that happened, and so on… but the reality is, I’d let some big personal problems get way out of control, and as such I knocked my own cue ball right off the table.

The ZS team was dead. And apparently, so was Gumbo and all the plans which were left behind. And the man holding the smoking gun was me.

That’s the long and short of Gumbo’s sordid history, until I returned to it in December 2005 as a new man. In my next entry, I’ll get into the things the project has encountered since my return, and why I’m considering setting her aflame on a barge down the river.