Pac-Man As Pot Head 58
1up.com has a look at the history of drugs in games, from the pellet-popping days of Pac-Man to the industrious sales efforts of the GTA games. From the article: "As games drew a wider audience, not to mention a wider variety of creative talents (some pretty weird stuff reportedly went on at the Atari offices in an evening), they necessarily drew on a wider spectrum of influences and inspirations...some of them chemical in nature. There have been games that were probably made on drugs -- Rez springs to mind, or the Virtual Light Machine -- and even reviewed on drugs, when A.C. Styles dosed the office coffee pot at Die Hard Game Fan."
Re:Interesting but not surprising... (Score:3, Insightful)
What I immediately think of whenever I see a story like this is that Simpsons episode where they go behind the scenes (I think at Itchy and Scratchy) and Otto says something like "man, what were you guys on when you came up with that?" And the writers respond "Um, we'd just ordered a big bucket of chicken wings..."
I worked at one of the companies involved in one of the games mentioned in this article and while yes, some of the employees are definitely recreational drug users outside of work (no different than any other company, really), I can assure you everybody was completely sober and straight during company hours. The game industry is far too competitive to be at anything but your natural best... the worst drug anybody did at work was Red Bull. (Though oddly enough, we also ate a large quantity of chicken wings... coincidence?)
People who do a lot of drugs like to justify it to themselves by telling everybody how creative it makes them, and articles like this try to reinforce that. Well, in my experience, while illegal drugs can be fun (and I don't deny doing the occasional d00b myself once in a while), they do nothing whatsoever to enhance creativity. You're either creative or you aren't; a drug isn't going to change who you are. All drugs do in the workplace is make you less productive.
I'm fairly sure, based on my experience with drugs, the game industry, and life in general, that none of the games mentioned here had anything to do with drugs whatsoever in terms of their creation. (Except in some of the few recent cases where they're an actual gameplay element - but in those cases, it's generally been so poorly implemented that it almost seems obvious that those who designed and programmed those elements have no experience with the drugs in question whatsoever, in the workplace or anywhere else.)