ShiftyLook

» see shiftylook.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

In 2012 I was a working engineer in Ankara and ShiftyLook was a company betting that a meaningful number of adults missed games from 1982. Dig Dug and Xevious are both 1982. Mappy is 1983. I was born in 1984, on the other side of a continent, so the nostalgia this thing was mining was one generation up and one region over from anything I could have felt.

It opened on 9 March 2012 as a division of Bandai Namco Games America, with Robert Pereyda as editor in chief and a brief that was unusually clear for a corporate side project. Namco owned decades of arcade properties that had stopped generating anything. Rather than remaking the games, ShiftyLook would hand the characters to comics people and see what came back.

What came back was around twenty webcomics running on the site, updating on schedule, drawn and written by professionals who were paid for it. Bravoman and Wonder Momo got the most attention. There were three animated series as well, twelve episodes of Bravoman and thirteen of Mappy: The Beat and five of Wonder Momo. There was a browser dating sim called Namco High, co-written with Andrew Hussie of Homestuck, which is the single strangest sentence in this obituary and it is accurate.

On 10 March 2014, two days after the second anniversary, the site announced that updates would stop on the twentieth. The archive stayed readable for another six months as a courtesy. On 30 September 2014 shiftylook.com went down entirely and everything on it went with the domain.

~ the case file ~

~ the back catalog problem ~

Every large game publisher is sitting on properties it cannot afford to make games out of. A modern release costs too much to gamble on a name that last sold anything thirty years ago, so the catalog just sits there depreciating while the trademark renewals come due.

ShiftyLook was a cheap answer to that. A webcomic costs a rounding error against a game budget and it keeps the character in use, which matters legally and matters for anyone deciding later whether the name is worth reviving. Pereyda described the job as looking at forgotten properties and sleeping properties, which is a nicer way of saying the same thing.

~ what it actually made ~

The output was better than it needed to be. That is the part people remember. A corporate content initiative aimed at keeping trademarks warm does not usually attract creators who care, and this one did, partly because the source material was strange enough to be fun and nobody was watching closely enough to interfere.

Udon Entertainment printed hardcover collections of the strongest strips before the end, which is why some of this survives on paper at all. A planned Galaga volume never made it out. Everything that stayed online only went dark with the domain in September.

~ the shelf it left behind ~

Jim Zub, who wrote for it, explained the ending plainly afterward. Management above ShiftyLook changed, the new people did not see how it fit their plans, and it was wound down. Casy Casoni's public statement said they had battled the video games abyss and won and now needed to move forward, which is the sound an executive makes while switching something off.

Nothing was failing. There was no lawsuit and no collapse in traffic that anybody reported. It was a line item inside a Japanese holding company, and line items inside holding companies do not have to be losing money to be cancelled. They only have to belong to the previous person's plan.

~ what the cabinets got instead ~

The properties went back to sleep and mostly stayed there. Bravoman and Wonder Momo had both been dormant for decades before ShiftyLook woke them, and after 2014 the only place either had recently existed was a site that no longer resolved. Namco kept putting Dig Dug and Galaga into compilation releases, which is preservation of the games rather than of the characters.

That is the quiet cost of the whole experiment. Two and a half years of new material was made for a catalog nobody else was going to touch, and when the division closed, the material went with it rather than back into the catalog. The Udon volumes are the exception and they are why any of it can still be handed to somebody.

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