Rescued Interview – TheCatamites

When I was at Destructoid, I was tapped to do their newsletter. They wanted it to have that old Dtoid flavour, which made it feel like I was providing a pleasanter alternative to actually visiting the site, which had become an ad-ridden, SEO-driven hell-hole.

In order to spread the word, they asked me to create a monthly special issue to incentivize people to refer their friends to sign up. Bizarre. I can’t imagine asking someone to sign up for a newsletter. Unsurprisingly, few actually went to the effort of getting access, even though the special edition was me interviewing interesting developers. And by “few” I mean it was maybe two people. Literally.

And while we’re on the subject, most of the newsletter subscribers were just bots. I’m not sure how many legitimate inboxes it was landing in. So, when the site advertises that 20,000 people are signed up. Bots. I’m not sure they realize that. I certainly didn’t tell them.

Anyway, since very few people got to experience the interviews and they are now completely inaccessible, I’m going to start posting them here. First one is with TheCatamites of Anthology of the Killer fame. It was sent out September 30, 2024.

TheCatamites Vs. Zoey

ZOEY: How did you get into game development? Did it hurt?

THECATAMITES: I found a Final Fantasy fangame online as a teenager, and it turned out that to play it, you needed a resource pack from a shady website which was also just hosting cracked versions of RPG Maker itself. So, in the tradition of everyone that’s used the engine, I skipped playing other people’s games and went straight to making my own… The 20 years since have been a long, directionless fugue as I service my addiction to placing furniture and tiles around to make virtual basements. Maybe this is happiness…

ZOEY: Are your parents proud?

THECATAMITES: They are mystified but supportive. I only told them in the first place so that they wouldn’t think I was just spending all my free time torturing small animals or something.

ZOEY: Do you have a day job? If so, how do you fit game design between being a slave to society and the sweet oblivion of sleep?

THECATAMITES: I am a salaryman, working on databases, in a way it’s just like playing Phantasy Star if those guys spent the whole game in menus and weren’t able to leave the house. A different kind of waking dream…

After work I am generally able to muster up 30-60 minutes of attention for my own projects in between eating and so forth. So I have to make the kinds of game that lend themselves to being worked on in little modular chunks – where I can be like “OK, that’s enough time to make half of one level,” “That’s enough time to do X amount of drawings,” since otherwise I’ll lose motivation and crash.

In the past I also used to supplement my time for real work by writing dialogue and ideas into a SQL Management Studio window while I was at the office. Of course, I would NEVER do that to any current or future employers reading this newsletter because stealing is wrong…… Who knows how many works of art we have collectively been spared through noble honesty about these matters.

ZOEY: Do you actually play video games, or are you just a big faker?

THECATAMITES: I fake it – a funny thing about working on games for me is that it feels like it totally satisfies the “playing videogames” urge. Most of what I know about the format comes from digging through reference sites for my funny screenshots collection. But every so often I still get a horrible longing to pick up a Dragon Quest or the kind of long, rambling action game I’d have no interest in ever working on.

ZOEY: What are your goals as a game developer? Do you want to keep it small and scrappy or do you want to sell out to a large corporation so you can afford groceries?

THECATAMITES: I’d like to keep doing it the rest of my life and become gradually unintelligible to myself in the process. Like every time I work on something, I feel like I start out with some set of goals or desires and then watch helplessly as they’re mangled beyond recognition by the process of actually making the game. But then by the time it’s done I’ve usually managed to convince myself that the end result was what I wanted all along. So it sort of feels like gradually Ship Of Theseus-ing my own brain into some new thing that’s unknown to me.

Ultimately, I just want whatever will let me keep working the longest, and it feels like being involved in the official games industry in any way is the opposite of what would be good for this. But I know I’m lucky to be able to hold a different job that pays the bills.

ZOEY: What do you recommend people play if they’ve already played through all your games, but the beast inside of them has not yet been quieted?

THECATAMITES: Check out ones by gurnburial, Lilith Zone, mkapolk, Graceless Games, magicweedoo, Jake Clover, CAM’s Copper Odyssey… In a weird way it feels like videogames now have wrapped back around to where they were in the mid-2000s: the industry itself is completely empty and demoralizing, but there’s a higher chance than ever of encountering surprising and exciting work outside of it. Just go onto the new releases page on Itch.io and keep scrolling until you see something that horrifies you.

ZOEY: What’s the best way to get your game noticed in today’s market?

THECATAMITES: Send it to the police station wrapped in a severed hand.

ZOEY: What’s a really embarrassing thing that you did in high school that haunts you to this day?

TheCatamites: Glenn Branca was playing Dublin with his 100 Guitar Orchestra thing, and I signed up to play in it because, like, I didn’t know how to play anything on guitar but the whole thing was that all the guitars were all tuned to a single note, right… So how complicated could it be..? I lasted a whole day of fondly imagining myself as Lydia Lunch 2 before terrified clarity hit and I had to back right out.