Have I Made A Difference?

One of the things I aim to do in this blog is to keep from turning it into a journal. It's great to talk about how I feel or what I've done lately. But the last thing I want to do is turn this into a LiveJournal where I talk about my reoccuring depression every other post. No one's into that, we're here to talk about the games. But I have to bring this up.

From the announcement post of The 90's Arcade Racer, John Marine leaves a comment:

You (and/or the developer(s) of this project) would reach hero status if this project ever materialized. I certainly applaud your desires for this one. SEGA Super GT/SCUD Race sucked my coin wallet dry. I've played that more than Daytona USA, and MANY more than Indy 500. I like Daytona USA though I've played Super GT more than Daytona USA and Indy 500 combined. Best of luck to you with this deal.

Truthfully, I don't feel I deserve credit for the creation and persistence of The 90's Arcade Racer.  I upped the donation to 90 quid ($143) which gets me a logo on one of the cars.  Yet there are at least two people who donated 750 quid ($1189) which is a hell of a lot more than I did so if we're assigning a person's value by how much they donated to the project, then I'm not terribly important.

So how about working on the game?  Well, I got in touch with the guy, exchanged a few words and I threw out some ideas.  I also offered to help work on the game, even for free.  Yet the guy politely said no.  Money-wise, he's going to get the 10K pounds he needs.  He's currently in touch with a publisher and the game has a great chance of being on PC and Wii U (Unity engine is now Wii U compatible, oh joy).  It's understandable because A. it's his baby and I don't think he wants someone else messing up what he's done so far and B. he lives in Greece, I live in the USA...kind of hard to coordinate game development with people on the other side of the globe.  So The 90's Arcade Racer is out of my hands, even though it never was in my hands...you just hope for the game's best now.

It's just discouraging to me to see all this Sega racer stuff fly by me...  Look, they ported Daytona USA to XBL/PSN.  Look, El Semi and Bart made Model 2/3 emulators.  Look, Sumo Digital makes two Sega All-Stars Racing games (puts the Hornet in the second one).  Look someone made The 90's Arcade Racer.  But all I could do was play cheerleader in a small Blogspot and say "yeah that's awesome, I'm stoked."  But I had no say in any of these things.  The fact I became a fan of this Sega "franchise" so late and how it suddenly flourished in the last few years really is pure coincidence.  At least I think so.

Geez, I wanted to help Sega but most every time I tried to make a move, I miss my chance or I get shut out.  The only things that come to mind were the Daytona USA 2 image compilation on Photobucket and first soundtrack uploads to YouTube.  The Daytona 2 Forza 4 cars were great but were practically busts in terms of actual downloads.  Back then, these things were exclusive, now it's common knowledge amongst Sega fans.  Maybe these things were part of a Butterfly Effect but I'm not sure.

Then I moved on to this blog which I thought would be a great venue to get ideas about Sega racers and game design on paper.  Over the past three years, I don't know how many regulars I really get because my stats are so botched from these Google spambots and image searches.  But there have been a couple of times in past few months that I looked at the blog and thought "Damn, this is really stupid."  Am I posting things that move Sega racers in a POSITIVE direction and not just preaching to the choir?  Doesn't help that the one racing game I worked on so much in the last year was not even a Sega racer...it was Super Sprint and even still, it wasn't THAT well-received and I still hover in and out of wanting to work on it again.

I feel like I was born at the wrong time.  I also feel I wasted so much energy on frivolous things that don't mean anything now or in the near future, like Counter-Strike maps, Rock Band, and Xbox Live achievement points.  There's no telling if I did a good job trying to promote Sega racers.  I hope I did.  I'm not asking for pity messages but that's what I've been thinking the last few days and I'll move on to more fun-tastic racing game posts.  I'm trying guys...until then, now you know how I feel and I'll be back real soon.