My mate Craig: “I finally got around to reading Watchmen — it’s top stuff”
Me: “How many Watchmen[1] does it take to change a lightbulb? None — I changed it 35 minutes ago.”
Craig: “It’s August 7th 2008… I’m writing a text message. It’s March 6th 2009… I’m watching a film in the cinema.”
[1] I know they aren’t called the Watchmen but it makes the joke scan better.
This is genius. I think. I’m almost certain. It’s an program in the iTunes App Store that costs £599.99 and does nothing at all except display this picture:
The purpose of the pic is to “always reminds you (and others when you show it to them) that you were able to afford this.”
I’m somewhat surprised Apple put this up, but I suppose it doesn’t actually violate any of the App Store guidelines to ship an insanely expensive app that does nothing at all. Wonder if anyone has bought it yet? And in a world where mechanical wrist watches can cost hundreds of thousands of pounds but keep worse time than a £5 quartz-based electric one, is £599 for a picture on your phone actually a bad deal? If you’re feeling charitable to the app’s author, you could even say this is something of a subversive comment on people who drop the price of a decent car on a jewel-encrusted mobile phone that doesn’t actually do anything the standard one doesn’t. Except shout, very loudly, “my owner is SOOOO VERRRRYYYY RIIIICCCHHHH”.
Wonder if they’d send me a review copy.
My boss brought my attention to this post by Mark Allan Roberts at the Pragmatic Marketing blog. Mark makes some interesting points, but I think he’d be better off applying his analysis to the Nintendo Wii rather than Guitar Hero. He doesn’t seem to be familiar with the history of the product and I think it has lead him to some wrong conclusions.
First, a potted history. In the late 90s, Konami release a series of coin-op arcade games in Japan, Guitar Freaks, which was an entry in their long-running Bemani series of arcade games (which also brought the world Dance Dance Revolution). As these were exclusively arcade games, and gaming arcades are now pretty much extinct outside of Japan, they never made any serious attempts to export them. I saw one once in the Trocedro in London, in about 2001 I think, but that’s the only time I’ve seen one over here.
Fast forward to 2005. Red Octane, a tiny hardware firm, was doing some business making Guitar Freaks controllers for importers but wanted more. They partnered with Harmonix, a games studio who had made some rhythm games for the PS2 (FreQuency and Amplitude) which were critically applauded but sold relatively poorly. Together, the firms produced the first Guitar Hero, then the sequel, which actually turned out to be not a video game at all but a small money printing device that started spewing $100 bills around the clock. Who knew?
Fast forward again to late 2006. Harmonix was acquired by MTV Networks, who saw in Guitar Hero a lucrative way for music promoters to access new markets. Red Octane was acquired by Activision, who promptly assigned another dev studio they own, Neversoft (creators of most of the Tony Hawks series of games) to produce Guitar Hero III. Meanwhile, Harmonix released Rock Band, putting the two former partners into competition which will continue throughout this year with the releases of Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero World Tour.
So, now you can see the first issue I have with Mr Robert’s post is the numerous mentions he made to Activision identifying gaps in the market — in fact, Activision were not on the scene until Guitar Hero was a very well established franchise. However, this is a relatively minor mistake and not the main problem I have with the original article.
No, I think Mr Roberts has misidentified the target market for the early Guitar Hero releases. GH didn’t chase this “family friendly” demographic early on — in fact the two-player mode in GH1 is quite slim compared to later games, and the game is brutally hard from about halfway up the difficultly level solution. It’s true that Guitar Hero tapped into something elemental, but that wasn’t group gaming; it was rather anyone who has ever played air guitar with a tennis racket or even tapped out a rhythm on a car dashboard, which (in turns out) was quite a lot of people. The party games market grew naturally as the guitar shaped controller tends to encourage drunken showboating (not that I would ever do that of course, ahem), and as it grew the developers quickly expanded the two player modes. They added several extra game modes in Guitar Hero II and then further expanded Guitar Hero III to add bass guitar for player 2. The ultimate evolution of this is Rock Band and Guitar Hero World Tour, which allow four players (vocals, lead, bass, and drums) to play the entire song between them, and jolly good fun it is too.
Mr Robert’s analysis of a firm that ruthlessly identified a huge untapped demographic, in the form of families that play together, is much more accurately applied to the Nintendo Wii. It’s a cliche now to say this, but every aspect of the Wii, from the low price, the accessible games, the revolutionary controller (careful to resemble a TV remote rather than a typical button-strewn gamepad) and the advertising (always with the reverse angle shots from the TV to the players in a plain white room, always with more than one player, often with an entire family) was ruthlessly targeted to that demographic. In return, Nintendo have made a money printing monster, and good on them for it.
I used to have a Vauxhall Calibra. One day I replaced it with a Vauxhall Omega (I’m not married to Vauxhall or anything, it just made sense for various long-winded reasons). On that day, I parked the Calibra at a little parking spot near my house, wrote to the DVLA, and declared it SORN. In other words I told the DVLA it was off-road and would not be paying road tax on it.
To make sure this was above board, before I did all this, I telephoned my local council’s Highways department and asked about what, exactly, this parking space was. After all it wasn’t my property, but I had seen other untaxed cars stored in it, sometimes for a long time. They told me it was “unclaimed land” i.e. essentially just a piece of concrete someone laid once which they have nothing to do with. This certainly explains why it is pitted and overgrown with weeds. As such, it isn’t on the public highway, and a car declared as SORN is legally allowed to be there. They were very specific about that.
So imagine my surprised when, sometime during the morning one cold October day, it acquired some big red warning stickers from the DVLA, threatening me with fire and brimstone for not taxing my vehicle. Imagine my further surprise when the car was towed that lunchtime, less than two hours later. There then commenced a very fun four hours for me on the phone.
It went down a little something like this.
I rang the local DVLA office. There was only one guy in that day. I asked why they towed my car after less than a couple of hour’s warning; “it was illegally parked sir”. I asked why they bother with the warning stickers at all but simply kept getting same responses, at rapidly escalating levels of rudeness. I changed tact and challenged why the car was illegally parked; he insisted it was, I said it wasn’t. This went back and forth for 10 minutes until he hung up on me.
Furious, I rang the council, and spoke to an incredibly helpful lady. First interesting thing she said was, yes, my car was legally parked in that parking bay. Second thing was that standard procedure was for the DVLA office to fax to the council a special annotated map showing where each taxless car is parked, so the council can tell the DVLA whether the car is legal or not. She confirmed they had received no faxes about my car.
Incandescent, I went back to the DVLA with this. He refused to believe he’d done anything wrong and continued to babble that I would be taken to court for the heinous crime of car tax avoidance. It took — no word of exaggeration — it took over twenty minutes to encourage him to understand that according to the local council, he hadn’t checked with them, and if he had, they would have told him I’d done nothing wrong. Now, I’m not someone to get rude with people on the phone unnecessarily. I’m well aware that 90% of the time, these people are just doing their job, and getting shirty with the person on the other end doesn’t help.
This was the other 10% of the time. I was exceedingly blunt towards the end. Eventually, by sheer bloody brute force, I managed to cram into this fellow’s exceedingly small brain that All Was Not Well here. Eventually he agreed that the council could ring him tomorrow. I yelped, and asked him to please explain to me, in extreme detail, exactly why both I and the council should be running around sorting out his mistake, and why, for that matter, he thought this was a suitable use of tax payer’s money?
Finally, he suddenly remembered the faxed forms, and sent them to the Council. Less than ten minutes later they faxed back the “this guy has done nothing wrong” form. And then I finally got him into the position I had been working towards for hours of back-and-forth, my boot metaphorically on his throat.
“OK sir, you can come and collect your car now. We’re open until 5:30pm”
“Well, that’s all well and good, but I don’t finish work until then. And in any event, the car is untaxed. I cannot drive it back to my house on public roads.”
“Oh, that’s OK sir, we can give you special dispensation. You will be allowed to drive it without tax–”
“But I still will have no MOT or insurance. I cannot legally drive that vehicle back to where you illegally took it from today.”
(beat)
“But sir–”
“Here’s what we are going to do. You are going to call your supervisor and you are going to call your tow truck driver and he is going to deliver the car back to exactly where he took it from. And I’m not going to call the police.”
(beat)
“OK sir.”
And so he did.
The punchline? I had a chat to the truck driver when he was dropping the car off. He told me that when he collected the car, he had called into the DVLA first, and told them he was sure this was a private parking area and the car was legally parked here. The bloke — the same bloke — told him to “no, bring it in”. Apparently they have quotas. Imagine a local government organisation employing someone, then letting the power going to their head, eh? Unheard of!
I wrote a very stiff letter of complaint to the DVLA management afterwards but never heard back. I should have followed it up with my MP, in hindsight. God, I can feel the anger boiling over right now.
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