EDIT: Site is 403ed. Comments thread is now a list of who got what and what to do with ‘em.
Wow. This appears to be the motherlode. If you read our Warren Spector interview last month, you’ll have probably been excited by the section where he describes interviewing twelve gaming luminaries as part of his University of Texas Master Class in Video Games and Digital Media. Talking to everyone from Richard Garriott to Blizzard’s Mike Morhaime to Id’s Tim Willits, in sessions you’d want to be a fly on the wall for. And now you can, as in a bandwidth-destroying move, the University of Texas has posted all thirteen lectures.
Get them now before the internet collapses.
(I’m not even joking. I was tempted to not blog it until I’d downloaded them all, as a quick technorati search reveals only Primotech and Spector’s blog has actually publicised them so far. But I do this thing for you, yes, you. JUST YOU.)
This is what he said about these lectures in our interview…
“I’m teaching a course at the university of Texas, where I’ve been inviting – well – gaming luminaries to talk to me for three hours, from the perspective of, “Hey – I’ve known you for 20 years, don’t try to con me and let’s talk about the stuff that typically doesn’t get talked about.” It’s part of an oral history project – because we are all still alive. Well, not all of us – Dani Bunten’s gone and a couple of others. But we’re getting to the point where the pioneers are not going to be here forever. We need to get it recorded for future generations before it’s lost, in the same way that lots of early film history is lost. Gone. Never known. I don’t want that to happen to us, as I really believe that videogames are the medium of the 21st century, in the same way that movies and TV were the medium of the 20th century. We have to preserve our history before it’s gone.”
I couldn’t agree more, really. Spector also provides a watching order, if you’re interested in doing it chronologically…
- 1. September 10, 2007: Warren Spector (Intro Lecture)
- 2. September 17, 2007: Patricia York (HR Director, Disney Interactive Studios)
- 3. September 24, 2007: Harvey Smith (then Creative Director, Midway Austin)
- 4. October 1, 2007: Hal Barwood (Game Designer, Screenwriter par excellence)
- 5. October 8, 2007: Matthew Bellows (GM, Floodgate Entertainment)
- 6. October 15, 2007: Marc LeBlanc (Designer/Programmer, Mind Control Software)
- 7. October 22, 2007: Mike Morhaime (President, Blizzard)
- 8. October 29, 2007: Tim Willits (Lead Designer, id Software)
- 9. November 5, 2007: Seamus Blackley (Talent Agent, Creative Artists Agency – also, “Father of the Xbox”)
- 10. November 12, 2007: Paul Weaver (Director of Development, Junction Point Studios)
- 11. November 19, 2007: Gordon Walton (Co-Studio Director, Bioware Austin)
- 12. November 26, 2007: Richard Garriott (Creative Guy whose title I don’t actually know, NC Soft)
- 13. December 3, 2007: Richard Hilleman (Guy With No Title – and proud of it – at Electronic Arts)
Only downloaded Spector’s intro so far and watched a fragment. I sense I’ll return. This actually feels kinda important.
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I made a torrent of the Tim Willits one
http://torrents.thepiratebay.org/4066283/Tim_Willits(id_Software)_at_Warren_Spector________s_UT_class.4066283.TPB.torrent
Really interesting talk, especially the interview but also Willits’ Presentation. Have Fun watching.
ouch, bad link. download here:
http://thepiratebay.org/tor/4066283
sorry.
Thanks, sbs, I was hoping someone would put that one up.
Unfortunately, these were made available prematurely. They’ll be up again later on after we at the University of Texas do some tweaking.
If all of you like this so much maybe you’d consider helping us fund the next series! We had a shoestring budget, with promises of help from various folks but not much actually materialized.
I hope you don’t cut anything. My only criticism is that the mic doesn’t appear to be on for a minute at the start of some of these and the audio goes a bit off-sync at some point in the Harvey Smith video. Aside from that not sure what you would want to tweak.
As far as the next series I think if you a set up some kind of donations thing you might get a good bit of support.
Would be interesting btw if this (and the archive for that matter) expanded its focus to be more international, because while you have to start somewhere I wouldn’t mind hearing from European or Japanese devs as well.
Sharon – Unfortunately, I’ve learned when it comes to money, don’t count on anything until it’s in your hand. How much are we talking here to cover costs? $200 total? $10,000? $12.99 tax? (Ooh, this really is the place to ask, as the folks across the pond could donate a fiver, and it magically turns into a, what, $12 now or something?) In the meantime, do you mind terribly much if we share what we have amongst our small little group here?
SBS – Thanks! I’m pulling/seeding using my magic work connection, I limited it to 1Mbit upload, but I’m only seeing c. 10k down and 20k up…we do some traffic shaping (right now it’s set, not dynamic) so that might be it. I might turning on encryption, see if that helps or hurts. Once yours completes I could try and toss a torrent together…can you have a torrent incorporate existing torrents? (i.e. Could I have one that uses my seed files for, say, the harvey one but could start pulling from the willits torrent that’s already out there?)
[b]Sharon:[/b] I think that with a series of clips as popular as yours, the most viable thing at first would be merely hosting a torrent for the particular videos.
Though I of course don’t have access to your traffic charts.
Does YouTube accept videos this long? It’s not as if the image quality is particularly important (in the ones I’ve watched anyway).
I think 10 minutes is the limit for Youtube videos. But it could be chopped to several parts.
YouTube videos can be longer, there’s a limit to file size uploadable. Thanks for the torrents, guys, anyone got the rest?
nabeel
Otherwise it’d probably be possible to make an arrangement with Google Video.
http://dl.127001.org/movies/spector/
This is all the ones we could find so far. If anyone has any others, feel free to email me at my nick @ my website (without the www, natch) and we’ll mirror them
Here is Seamus Blackley.
http://rapidshare.com/files/97209667/seamus_blackley.part1.rar.html
http://rapidshare.com/files/97249064/seamus_blackley.part2.rar.html
http://rapidshare.com/files/97283569/seamus_blackley.part3.rar.html
Enjoy.
cheers bludr, that video has now been added to the mirror frymaster posted ( http://dl.127001.org/movies/spector/ )
Awesome community spirit, Frymaster, bludr and lifeless!
Thanks a lot guys.
Still 7 left.
Frymaster, check your email ;)
Shortly, only Richard Garriott (12) and Richard Hilleman (13) will be missing. Anyone got them?
system shock forever and ever
I did get #12 & #13 (one of the best) – so who should I contact?
maze: if you email me [my username] at 127001.org we can sort out mirroring them
I’m uploading what I got so far (which is roughly what you can also download from the other links at this thread) to Wuala (see http://wua.la for info). It’s a distributed online storage which is in closed alpha at the moment, but speed is usually very good because the files are spread over a lot of hosts.
If anyone is interested in an invite to that system (especially people who have videos not yet widespread) you can contact me at my uni-koblenz (de) mail account, which starts with “sma” and ends with “xein”. Not writing it out here, spam protection, ya know :). We can start a group for these videos then and try to puzzle them all together.
Thanks to Maze we now have Richard Garriot
We just need 6,7 and 13 now
http://dl.127001.org/movies/spector
6 & 7 are on their way. Frymaster, I’ll email you links again when they’re up.
Sorry I can’t just host them for everyone, but I don’t have a great deal of space or bandwidth, and my cable upstream is pretty pathetic for starting torrents with.
Muchly appreciated, guys; looking forward to the last two.
nabeel
These are some of the most interesting, entertaining and informative pieces I’ve ever seen about the game industry. Thanks everyone for the hosting and contributions!
Is there more to the Garriot video? It looks like it was cut off with about 40 minutes to go…
No, he meant Dani Bunten, who used to be Dan Bunten.
(I know. It’s a reference to a previous boo-boo).
I’ve got the following files & sizes (according to windows) but no sufficient webspace of my own to upload them to nor any knowledge of how I should make a torrent of them, so contact me if you’ve got a place I can upload/FTP them chtulie(at)hotmail(dot)com.
01 – 219.267kB
02 – 278.815 kB
03 – 276.971 kB
04 – 271.743 kB
05 – 242.174 kB
06 – NA (couldn’t get it, haven’t seen it since)
07 – 264.549 kB
08 – 248.866 kB
09 – 290.016 kB
10 – 45.723 kB (I haven’t seen a complete version of this yet, so it seems likely that there was some technical trouble when recording this guest)
11 – 287.113 kB
12 – 239.933 kB
13 – 287.651 kB
Getting the remaining two, thanks a bunch!
nabeel
My FTP at home uploads really slowly for some reason so I’m going to be able to mirror all of these eventually, but the selection is limited for now.
http://www.ninjadodo.net/temp/spector/
thanks to everyone for the videos, they offer amazing insight into the industry. I only watched Garriot’s and Willit’s (I know, big names appeal) but I’ll check out the others asap.
it’s a shame that despite being in a game design school (france) we rarely get guests as interesting as those featured on these videos :-(
A little remark: Like Soren pointed out, the R.Garriot video is in fact broken. Does anyone have a working copy?
thanks again.
andreadst: You mean Spector isn’t a big name? :p
My paul weaver is incomplete, does somebody has it?
The person who was uploading Garriot was doing it while afk and neither me or lifeless noticed it was incomplete at the time we moved it to the live download; he’s since reuploaded it (if you look at http://dl.127001.org/movies/spector you’ll notice it’s jumped up in size by 90 meg) and he’s uploading #13 as we speak
As long as it’s just people in this comment thread our mirror should be OK but I’m going to talk to wireplay / jolt / virginmedia and see if any of them fancy putting up a proper mirror – we can only afford about another 250 gigs worth of bandwidth ourselves
…aaaaaaaaaand that’s the full set
…unless someone has a copy of Paul Weaver that _isn’t_ only 45 meg, that is
I’ve created a torrent to help distribute the load a bit
http://www.gameupdates.org/details.php?id=2265
if you can please use this instead of the web, and seed if you can
we’ve got arround 70Mbits allocated to the torrent so it should fast
cheers
Frymaster, and everyone else who has sent/hosted/torrented, thank you :)
>we can only afford about another 250 gigs worth of bandwidth ourselves
I’m uploading the remaining ones right now (7, 9, 10, 12 and 13 still to go) and my host is pretty generous with the bandwidth so between our two servers and the various torrents it should be fine, I think.
http://www.ninjadodo.net/temp/spector/
(this Paul Weaver is also the 45 meg one, sadly)
lifeless, do you have a direct link to the torrent? My Opera insists on using its own torrent downloader unless I save the torrent to my computer.
I’ve already got all the files, but will happily upload to those who haven’t got it yet.
Zuffox: http://dl.127001.org/torrents/Warren Spector Master Class Videos.torrent
also looks like gameupdates.org have bots which auto download new content to seed, so there are a few fast servers seeding it now
I just (finally) finished watching two of them. (Spector and Harvey…hm, that should be a TV show…) So, is there someplace we can discuss these?
i just want to say. you guys are awesome, thanks a lot for the re-host.
er, nevermind… move along!