Flint Dille - The Gamesmaster: My Life in the 80s Geek Culture Trenches

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Copyright 2020 by Flint Dille

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Set in Dante

epub isbn : 9781644281543

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Dille, Flint, author.
Title: The Gamesmaster: Almost Famous in 80s Geek World / Flint Dille.
Description: Los Angeles, CA : Rare Bird Books, 2020. |
Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019051700 | ISBN 9781644280126 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Dille, Flint. | Video gamesDesign. | Motion pictures
United State20th centuryAnecdotes. | Video game designers
United StatesBiography. | ScreenwritersUnited StatesBiography.
Classification: LCC GV1469.3 D54 2020 | DDC 794.8--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019051700

Contents

A Fascinating Collision in Geek Culture History

It was sometime in the spring of 1985. Steve Gerber sat across the table from me in the conference room at the Sunbow office in Westwood. Wed been there long enough to stop noticing the traffic outside. We both smoked cigarettes and had scripts in front of us. Mine still had the perforation stubs on the side because it was printed on my daisy wheel printer. His was Xeroxed. We were working on the central scene of what would become Transformers: The Movie . Namely, we were trying to figure out how to kill Optimus Prime, mortally wound Megatron, and leave Hot Rod a little bit responsible for the death.

Prime, of course, couldnt lose. Megatron had to kill him through treachery. The bones of the scene were there and had been since the beginning. This was all about fitting together the nuances, the details.

Steve wasnt really on Transformers , he was on G.I. Joe , but we all helped out in a pinch. He was arguably the best story editor in the business, and animation writing was his second career. Hed already had an epic comic career, creating Howard the Duck and writing God knows how many comics before coming to LA and getting into animation. He and Joe Ruby had created Thundarr the Barbarian . He didnt have a lot of time. A friend of his from New York whod just moved to LA was coming for lunch.

So we were reading the scene, imitating bad actor voices for the characters. Id sketched the geography of the scene in stick figures because I was the only person in the animation business who couldnt drawexcept for maybe Steve. We were laughing, having fun. Neither of us had any idea that the scene wed been working on would scar a generation of kids, or that thirty years later Id be doing an interview for the Blu-Ray disk edition of Transformers: The Movie.

Hildy Mesnik stepped into the room. Your lunch meeting is here

Send him in, Steve said. Flint should meet him.

A minute later, a guy with an ammo bag came walking in. He had long hair, but he didnt seem like a hippie. He was something different. Intense. Focused. He reminded me of John Lennon. We told him what we were working on, and it turned out he had a problem too. He was working on a Batman graphic novel. I wasnt really sure what a graphic novel was. Unlike Steve or Marty Pasko or Buzz Dixon or Roger Slifer, I wasnt really a comic book guy. Id read the usual comics when I was a kid and took the DC side of the Marvel vs. DC argument of the late sixties, but Id stopped reading comics sometime around junior high, and except for occasionally wandering into the comic shop near UC Berkeley, I hadnt thought about comics again until I met these guys.

His problem was a fight between Batman and Superman. Didnt seem like much of a problem to me. Unless Batman had some kryptonite, it was game over. It was probably game over even if he did have kryptonite, as Superman could fly really fast and turn back time, or he had freeze breath or heat vision or could punch Batman all the way to Mars if he wanted to. Worlds Finest didnt make any sense to me. Batman was smarter, arguably, but sometimes Superman had a super brain, too, so even that wasnt certain.

They were patient with me, explaining that Superman was more like the Fleisher Superman (I only vaguely knew what that was) or like George Reeves in the TV show, not like Christopher Reeve in the movies. I could sort of see that, though George Reeves versus Adam West still didnt seem like much of a fight. But I just listened. After all, I was writing a scene in which a robotic Walther PPK was fighting a semi-trailer truck and they were the same size in the scene, so it wasnt like I had the logical high ground.

Anyway, we worked out an elaborate scene. Batman had prepped the battlefield. Hed rigged bombs in a building. I didnt think bombs would hurt Superman, but I was told, Theyll keep him busy.

It was a good enough answer.

We moved over to our scene. I said I wanted Optimuss death to feel like Davy Crocketts death in the John Wayne version of The Alamo . Id seen that movie when I was five, and it became the centerpiece of my early childhood. Steves friend hadnt seen The Alamo . Instead, the movie that inspired him the same way when he was a kid was called The 300 Spartans . And by now youve probably figured out that the guy was Frank Miller and that the Batman comic book he was talking about was the fourth installment of T he Dark Knight Ret urns.

Ive told this story a lot of times to a lot of people for a wide variety of reasons. Transformers fans love hearing about how Transformers: The Movie was created. I talk about it in lectures at the USC film school, because that scene is about something a lot bigger than Frank or Steve or I, or even Transformers and Batman. To me, its about the incredible burst of creativity that happened in the eighties and in other golden (okay, or silver, or platinum) ages.

Introduction

This is a story about being in the right place at the right time. It was the mid-eighties, one of those golden eras in my life that violated probability. A magical period when there are so many coincidences, serendipitous events, and unique and improbable people that the normal rules of life seem to have been suspended.

For me, it was having an all-access pass to the geek eighties and working with an amazing collection of people who laid the foundations for what would be popular culture decades later.

So, yeah, its a memoirbut its also about something a lot bigger than I.

It will never be 1985 again, but it would sure be great if we could drag some of 1985 into the 2020s. Lord knows we could use the fun. So somewhere in here is a piece about a golden age, and howhopefullyto inspire another one.

While I believe everything in this book is the truth, the reality is that I function more like a fictional character in this book than an actual person. It even feels fictional as I write it down, but everything youll read here would pass a polygraph, and most of it has corroborating witnesses.

As this is being written as a memoir and delivered in the linear form of a book, it is almost impossible for me not to turn chaotic, random events into a narrative. That is how the brain works, and its also why memory is tricky. Because we all know that the real world is not linear. It is non-linear, chaotic, uncoupled and coupled at the same time, and at best all we are working with is a very limited data set. Some of it has been forgotten, some of it is unknowable, and some of it is hidden. Thats how life works. We make narratives and tell ourselves stories, literally, to make sense of the world.