The Xbox 360 version of RCR was memorably bumpy. I think that I may eventually have to just start hiring people to do some of these ports eventually because my time may be better spent making new games than porting." I think that I do have a few more ports that I do want to get out there, but I don't know.
"With Shakedown I am in a bit of a tricky spot because now a lot of people are expecting it to be ported to so many platforms and so I'm kind of in a corner here where I think some people are probably just saying well, I'm not going to pick it up for this that or the other, because I'll wait for whatever else that I want to play it on," Provinciano says. It might actually be too much of a good thing. After all, his games have been uplifted by fellow developers, DOS hobbyists, retro-minded gamers, and comedy fans. Provinciano doesn't seem to let the doom and gloom of modern game development cast too much of a shadow over his work though. It's at once easier than ever to be an indie developer, but much harder to be a successful one. The market is oversaturated it's harder to get noticed. I still get all the emails and stuff, but back then I was almost embarrassed by how much coverage I got sometimes, where every time I put out a tweet there'd be a news article like, 'Check out this new image from the game.' I'd be like, wow, that's so humbling." "It was so neat, but now it's harder to necessarily get the coverage and get the attention. We want you to come down and be on a panel.' And it was really fun, it was like this crazy ride," he says. I was getting so many opportunities for 'Hey we want to show your game at this show hey we want you to come down and do a talk. "The whole idea of being an indie was exciting. The likes of Fez, Hotline Miami, Journey, FTL, Spelunky's Xbox 360 remake, and more saw release some of those from lone developers, others from tiny teams. It released in 2012, when indie games were still in what Provinciano calls their "15 minutes of fame." It may have been harder to get console licenses back then, but it was a landmark year for the scene. After working for some other studios, like Propaganda Games, he got "the courage" to go full indie, debut his one-man studio Vblank Entertainment, and focus on the development of Retro City Rampage full-time-that project, in particular, starting in the early 2000s as just a Grand Theft Auto demake.ĭeveloped as a sendup of the 1980s, pop culture, and then-modern Grand Theft Auto, Retro City Rampage was an early hit when indie games didn't conceivably have a crazy amount of competition like today. Provinciano's professional career in games started at Digital Eclipse in 2004, where he worked on emulation-focused projects such as Midway Arcade Treasures. It's been a long journey from tinkering with Klik and Play in the 90s to leaving his larger studio job to become a self-sufficient indie developer. The PSP port that almost didn't get finished for Retro City Rampage actually released digital-only in 2016, four years after the game's debut on PS3, PS Vita, and PC. "The DOS one to me is really cool because it fits on a floppy disk," he says proudly. He famously made a MS-DOS port of Retro City Rampage. | Vblank Entertainmentĭeveloping for defunct platforms is Provinciano's thing. I need to finish the new game.'" Retro City Rampage began development as a Grand Theft Auto 3 NES demake. So I did take a little bit of time away from Shakedown to work on this PSP port of RCR, but then I just kind of had to smack myself and just say, 'hey, hold on, I got to stop dawdling away with this PSP port. "I was like, 'You know what, I really would like to finish that PSP one.' So I was working on it and the hope was to release these UMDs, but then Shakedown took priority. Then he got word that UMDs were ending production, which kicked his desire to develop for the dead platform back into gear. "I had done a partial PSP port of RCR way back in 2009, but the Vita came along, it was a much healthier platform and so I scrapped that and went with Vita," says Provinciano.
But the peculiar design ethos of UMDs was still enough to inspire Provinciano. When I got a PSP as a teenager, I tried to break the disc of Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep out of its plastic prison, thinking that wasn't where it belonged. It was the best of both worlds half cartridge, half disc, all strange. UMDs, of course, were the plastic-encased, itty-bitty discs that for some baffling reason Sony thought were a sound lookalike for the cartridges used by Nintendo's consoles. To understand where the priorities and curiosities of developer Brian Provinciano lie, perhaps all you need to hear is what he told me over Skype just last week: "My biggest regret in all of entire life was that I wasn't able to get UMDs made for the PSP version."
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