Explained on its own its a bit insane but that's part of the fun. Part of the reason I'm such a BeatHead fan is the art direction. The characters are 3D modeled, those renders were then compressed and touched up for the game, a lot like Donkey Kong Country. A few years ago I reached out to the art director of the game, Chuck Eyeler, to chat about it.

Chuck told me that, when coming up for it, he considered that "everything [he] relates to, [he] releates through its head" so "wouldn't it be cool if we stole [it]?" Originally, the players didn't have heads at all, assuming that the Beat Master just took them entirely. But this was later changed to their heads being swapped for their pets instead. The game itself, perhaps obviously, was inspired by MTV (down to the fake song titles popping up in the bottom left corner of each level.) Some of the few that have played BeatHead consider it one of the first rhythm games. I'm not entirely sure why, because the gameplay has little to nothing to do about rhythm. It doesn't matter how in sync you are with the song, the point of the game is to collect tiles. Those don't change according to how much you match the beat. The characters only hop as fast as the song does, but that's the only influence the music has on the gameplay itself. That isn't to say the music (composed by Don Diekneite) isn't any good.

At first, Chuck told me that the characters were modeled on a Macintosh in Super 3D, however after I asked him again recently, he told me it was Swivel 3D. Maybe he used both? But for any BeatHead fans out there, it was one of these two. BeatHead was never released due to poor field testsing. According to Chuck, "at the time it felt like no one got it. No one cared. We had a field test where we made #25 in a week and Street Fighter made $1025. I wish we could have talked them into just leaving it there to see what happened." Because of this poor field test, BeatHead didn't make it further in development. The game is somewhat repetitive because of that.

Chuck, unfortunately, doesn't have anything left of BeatHead. All of his units have been sold off and the last one to leave when to High Scores arcade in California. Photos of the cabinet itself are also scarce, having been posted by High Scores on Facebook when they brought it into their location in Hayward. Upon asking for better photos, High Scores agreed, but never followed through.

I think a remake of BeatHead would be pretty neat. It's a lot of fun playing against someone else instead of against the computer. I could see this being expanded to more players, maybe even online. Wouldn't be too hard to develop given its a somewhat simple game, but I don't know enough about game development to really make that judgement. If you want to play BeatHead yourself, it's been emulated in MAME for quite some time.

Anywho, I thought I'd talk about the making of the show a 'lil. I came up with Moe, the main character in the art room at my high school. I want to say Sophomore year? I drew him, inked him on a separate sheet using the light table in the storage room where me and a friend would hide in and then I (for some reason) pasted him on some black poster board. Moe lived on the art room cork board until the end of the year. He was intended just to a chill, rebellious horny teenager.

Later on, when playing around in Blender, I decided to model him. Originally I went with a halftone look (you can see this on my Newgrounds account). I had a short film storyboarded where his TV is getting a bad signal so he gets up to bang it, but the TV sprouts legs and starts banging his head in return. The two chill out and leave the set entirely to go get a soda from the machine out in the void. It was cute, but, I pretty quickly lost steam on animating the thing.

At an estate sale I found a text book about the structure of language that had a cover made out of paper sculptures of students. I thought a show that looked like this would be cool and after some development I ended up pulling out the Moe and TV models, giving them flat materials like they were made of clay, and the rest is kind of history I guess. I came up with Jane later because I felt the boys couldn't do a ton on their own and I don't really have any girls in my library of OCs. Good thing I dead because out of the few Rec Room fans there are, a lot of them are also Jane fans. When I came up with the show I wrote a script and sent it to a few friends. The team is composed of just a few friends from high school (the voice of Moe was my friend before I even made him!) and some new friends I've made online. I haven't made a cent off the show so far but that's okay, we're doing it for fun.

The show itself was inspired a lot by Club Mario, these little segments they used to have on The Super Mario Bros. Show reruns in the 90s. It's just a super-90s take on the old peanut gallery format of show where you have a guy or two host a cartoon and he does stupid shit between breaks. Pee-Wee's Playhouse, which also followed the peanut gallery format (satirically) was also an inspiration. I'm not entirely sure why I went with a 70s basement for the set, but, I wanted something chill and playful and I figured what's more inviting than some old rec room downstairs that you chill out in and play a few games. Moe's developed a bit more since his first designed, not visually but narratively. He's in his mid 20s now, same as Jane (same as TeeVee too I guess... visually speaking?) He's a little smarter than he was intended to be, but at the core of it he's still the same.

Anyway, I'll probably be posting about Rec Room here more in the future. If anyone wants to check it out and send me an email about what they think, that'd be cool.

I dunno, it's kinda hard to have a semi-professional life online as an archivist and documentary producer while simultaneously wanting to be an indie artist animating my series and chatting about my favorite shows and just shootin' the shit. So I'm gonna try working on how I portray myself on the net a bit, starting with moving my blog.

I started Mimeohead a while back because I didn't like how professional I set myself up as on my Substack page, Carousel. Funnily enough, Mimeohead ended up just being another outlet for semi-professional research articles. Well why can't it be both research ventures and just whatever comes to mind. The name Mimeohead (my-mo-head) came from the device called a mimeograph, one of those old copy machines they used before XEROX. So this blog was just intended to print out my thoughts. I don't think I've been doing a very good job with that. So here we are. I also thought I'd go ahead and move the blog from Blogger to my website. I have more control over it and I noticed that Google never indexed the blog so hardly anyone can read it. I also just don't like Google as a company, who happens to also own Blogger. (Too bad I can't really leave YouTube if I want to continue making money...) If you want to read the older posts, you can find the Blogger version here.

That's all I got. I should probably be keeping up with this new version of Mimeohead way more than I was earlier. We'll see.