Chris Mandra, 57, just released his first video game. I think this is really great. Despite modern talk about portfolio careers and the death of tenure, the idea of embarking on a completely new career in your 60th year on earth seems surprising. Now, at 44, I sometimes fantasize about setting off again, venturing into the unknown, perhaps writing a travel book, or getting that master's degree I never got. But that won't happen. There are too many forces holding me back, too much inertia from the mortgage and kids, and the idea that I have to learn everything from scratch. What Mandola has done is nothing short of extraordinary.
Mandla brightly admits that he knows almost nothing about the game. “I'm not a very good gamer,” he says as we chat. “I've only played a few games.” He says his father got him an Atari 5200 when he was a kid, and he became pretty good at his Defender. Apparently some of his friends even had game consoles. “But that was it,” he says. His wife suggested he buy her a PS2 in 2004 to play GTA, but she mainly wanted to listen to radio stations. More recently, in 2014, she bought a PS4 to play Destiny after hearing that video games were becoming bigger than the movie industry. “I played the whole game with a hand cannon because I didn't know any better,” he says.
His passion is music. He holds two master's degrees from the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University, one in composition and one in computer science. He has released more than a dozen albums to date, most of which are his 7-minute long psychedelic music, even the shortest songs. He plays in a band. During a memorable show in 2012, the didgeridoo player went into cardiac arrest and collapsed on stage. “There were two fans in the audience, one was a trauma nurse and the other was a man who was teaching him CPR. They both jumped on stage and started giving him CPR. They performed CPR until paramedics came and took him to the hospital,'' Mandla recalled. “Literally, and there's no exaggeration in what I'm about to say, he was given CPR for 90 minutes. When they took him to the hospital, they were preparing him to be an organ donor. They underwent all sorts of procedures five times.'' Their protocol was to end with an electric shock to the chest. And his doctor said, “Listen, if this were me, I'd like you to do this again.'' So they did it again, and his heart came alive. ” Three months to the day, Mandla and his band redid the show, which they dubbed the “Resurrection Show.”
However, Mandla tended to avoid the idea of pursuing a career as a musician. He believes he can make more money outside of music and use that money to pursue his passion for performing and recording. That is, he has served as a music teacher, a consultant for a security systems company, an audio engineer for a hearing technology company, a producer for US National Public Radio, and more. That his last job coincided with his idea of buying his GTA to listen to radio stations.
His most recent job is teaching high school computer science. He quit his job at a security software company in 2022, thinking it would be easy to find another job. “I've always been blessed with jobs. I've never had a job that big, so the fact that it took him the better part of a year to get this job was really shocking. “It made me humble,” he says. “As a 57-year-old man, there aren't that many opportunities.'' Still, he enjoys changing jobs. “I'm learning a lot about the younger generation, what's important to them and how they think about the world,” he says.
The road to Mandora's first video game release began in 2019. “Panic posted the playdate on his Twitter on May 22, 2019, and I saw it,” he explains. “And the history of recording and turntables was on my mind because I happened to know a guy named David Giovannoni, who discovered the oldest recording of the human voice ever made in 2008. It was on the front page of the New York Times. “Sound was originally created in 1857, 20 years before Edison invented the phonograph. I was thinking about how people used to use turntables and phonographs to do things like: suddenly record something, play it backwards, speed it up or slow it down. They're no different from people like Grand Wizard Theodore, who discovered scratching and cutting. And I talked to Grand Wizard Theodore about this, and he told me “I was in my bedroom and I had a record playing. It was so loud that my mom told me to stop it.'' He put his hand on the record and stopped it, then moved it around a little bit. And he started scratching music. ”
All of this is going through Mandora's head when she stumbles upon the release of Panic's handheld version of Playdate. “If Playdate didn't have cranks, I wouldn't have been interested because I've never owned a Game Boy and I'm not a gamer,” he says. “But it was Crank that inspired me. Without Crank, I would never have come up with this idea.”
The idea was to use a crank to rotate the turntable, and the details of what would become a direct drive quickly came to him. The game is set in 1927, the year Mandla's parents were born, the pivotal year in which Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic and the Talking Picture debuted. The stage is the office of her DAC Vector, a play on her RCA Victor, and her girlfriend Hilda Voxpop, a famous soprano, takes part in recording the album. However, the turntable that supplies her backing track is malfunctioning. “The motor on this one is broken, so you, the only intern at our disposal, have to crank her music at the right speed,” Mandla says. “And if you make it too fast, because she has perfect pitch, she'll make a flat note and get angry. If you make it too slow, she'll make a sharp note and get mad.” , and will be angry.”
Other singers in the game include a Cab Calloway-like singer called Tungsten, and a precocious child actor modeled after Shirley Temple and played by Mandora's child, Fifi. Bootlegger Sweets Maxon was voiced by Mundora's friend Lizzie Dean Holyfield from an apartment above her. However, Mandla only recorded scratch tracks, which she had to do the best she could, until she passed away in 2020. This game is dedicated to his memory.
Mandla had a background in computer music, but needed help with programming. In 2016, he met developer Dimitry Zhukov while working at hearing technology company SonicCloud, and the two hit it off immediately, even recording music together under the name Osaka Birds. “It's funny because he's about half my age,” Mandla says. “Even though I'm older than his father, I think he's one of my best friends.” Mandla explains his idea to make his Playdate game, and Dimitry is also keen to participate. Agreed. “I did all the storyboarding, dialogue, music, recording, performance, mixing, and editing,” Mandla explains. “Dimitri did all the coding for me, except for a little bit of coding that I did to recombine the music, and he did a great job. As far as it goes, it was basically perfect. He solved the problem that I couldn't. I didn't even know if it was going to be a problem because I was so low on memory space. , we had to optimize the GIFs on the record, otherwise the whole thing would crash sometimes.”
But what's it like to make video games when you're a total outsider to the game industry? For those of us who cover the industry, we know it's full of toxic fans, ruthless executives, and It often appears to be marked by a soul-destroying sense of urgency. Mandola has not experienced anything like that. “It's an incredibly positive situation when it comes to the gaming industry and the people I've met,” he says. “I've never met anyone who I thought was cheating or unkind. For example, Alastair Law, who created the 'Tapeworm Disco Puzzle', he was just interested in things. “I feel a great affinity for him because he's one of those people who does it.''He said, “Why don't you make a Sega game?'' [Dreamcast]?Would you like to make a game for Game Boy? Then he does something like a pop-up book. ”
Mandra adds that Panic has been extremely helpful over the years. “Everyone there wants you to succeed. They don't care if it's a racing game or a word search or anything else. You have an idea. He added that every game developer he's met so far has been happy to chat and share advice. . “I have never met more supportive and positive people in any field in my life,” he says. “But is this the gaming industry? I don't think so. I feel like we're the cool kids on the fringes of the gaming industry.”
So. His 57-year-old Chris Mandra just released his first video game. And it worked very well. Since its release in his Playdate catalog in 2023, Direct Drive has won awards for innovation in gameplay at his GMB Game Awards, and was named “probably the best work in his catalog to date” by Edge magazine. ” was praised. “People noticed it and responded to it, which is just extraordinary,” Mandla says. “I wouldn't have expected that.” He added that working on Playdate was fun. “We have this amazing community where everyone is trying to elevate you. I think it's like a renaissance in gaming for indies and people who just want to do cool things.”
Mandla believes he could not have entered video games through traditional routes. He doubts anyone at the game company would have hired him (and that's not even considering ageism, a long-standing problem in the industry, as recently discussed on Kotaku). He cites a Hungarian idiom that roughly translates to “find the little gate.” He had to find another way. If the main gate is locked, there is always another way.
Considering the current state of the gaming industry, with companies blaming mass layoffs in part for sluggish console sales and rising game production costs, one small innovation: Crank. It's interesting to think about what inspired someone to create something. People who have only played a handful of games in their lives. Nintendo in particular has shown time and time again that small changes like this – a stylus or his Wiimote – can generate new ideas and new audiences. If console makers focus on thinking beyond the horrifyingly complex control pads, who knows what kind of games will be made in the future, or who will be making them.
But let's celebrate Mandla's accomplishments. The 57-year-old is making waves with his debut video game. And I'm in awe. “If I can do this, you can do it, and anyone can do it,” he says enthusiastically. “You have to be inspired, stay true to your vision, and check off the boxes that are important to you.” Mortgage payments are shit, that's enough to make you reconsider your deferred plans. is. And what's more, Mandla is happy with his new found home in the gaming industry, suburban or otherwise. “I feel very well rounded and I feel like I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.”
