Remembering Sparlatacus
Posted in video games on 04/05/2017 07:13 pm by c5My game developer friend Kim Okkerstrøm died in 2014. I’d found his games inspiring and I’d gotten to know him a little over the years. I’ve created a tribute page with some thoughts about his work and our interactions.
A Sparlatacus Retrospective
I feel a bit of deja vu, remembering hearing of Shawn64’s death through you as well. This is sad news.
I played through perhaps a dozen Johnny games during a formative time, and I think I’m still influenced by their haphazard appeal. Every few months or so over the course of this past decade I’ve searched online for “Sparlatacus” and “Mr. Kubus”, hoping to find him still making difficult and unpredictable games.
I enjoyed reading your tribute page. It’s a little surreal for me to put a face to Sparlatacus after all these years. I loved reading the conversations you had about his views on the afterlife, dreams, and the creative process. Kim said he cast aside what other people wanted and simply made what he wanted to make, with a devil-may-care attitude. I must say that’s definitely the lesson I took from his work. To this day that’s probably good advice for me a lot of the time.
There were a number of developers making games around the same time whose work fell into a similar category for me–something like “bizarre and moving”, or “disturbing and unforgettable”. Many seem to have disappeared or started working under another pseudonym. It’s weird times we’re living in; there’s a bizarre contrast between playing a person’s deeply intimate, personal, creative work and at the same time never really learning anything specific about them. Thank you for writing that tribute and allowing me to learn a little bit about Kim.
()