Buck Rogers XXVc

Restalgia

Arcade dieselpunk.

Kane’s Ship like a tropical drink. Scientifically plausible pulp. Sweet with a sting.

Pizza playtesting on Mike Pondsmith’s floor with the Tal and SSI team for the game that was released as ‘Countdown to Doomsday.’

Deciding that Kane’s color was RED because factions had colors on the board game. So did planets.

But would people paint their spaceships in the future?

How could you fit in the turret?

Reality Vs Playability.

Sometimes, a single image triggers a flood of memories — especially when you haven’t seen it in 30 years. I’m sitting here looking at an image of Killer Kane’s Rogue from the Buck Rogers XXVc Roleplaying game and I wish, for a moment that prose was not sequential, because all of the thoughts come back in a composite flood that I have to deconstruct in order to get them across, but it’s the flood that I wish there was a name for. It’s not nostalgia, because you don’t really get nostalgic for things you created and worked on.

It’s a different feeling.

It’s the feeling of a cluster of experiences and ideas that all flood together to become something I’ll call Restalgia.

You’re back in a moment and a tangle of thoughts.

This can all spin a hundred ways right now, but for the next few paragraphs, let’s talk about Restalgia because at the exact moment I’m writing this, I’m revisiting, not exactly the creative process, that moment where you see the image in your head and feverishly try to catch it before it warps itself away like a ghost, because that’s what inspirations are, in a way. Ghosts you are trying to put substance in.

I have to break into this for a moment and explain the metaphor that is coming. I’d always wanted these ships to become plastic model kits. In the mid-80’s I had no idea that model kits were going to become a thing of the past, and that’s sad, because they provided some of the most important real world education the Atompunk Generation (mostly boomers) got. But the model kits we had were made of plastic and we used Testor’s Model Glue. And as I learned at Summer Camp when we our whole class was making P-51 Mustangs, the blue is based on butanone which dissolves plastics, for connecting parts of scale model kits. Therefore, you are slightly dissolving the plastic to ‘weld’ it together. The dissolving is destructive and as every kid in my summer camp on the rainy days when we built models learned, a wrong drop permanently deforms your model.

The point is that in order to put the pieces together, you have to dissolve them a little bit — destroy them a little bit. The hope is that nobody will see the seam and destruction.

And that is not unlike them the moment where you have to connect fantasy to reality with that mysterious Testors model kit mental glue that bond fact and fiction together hopefully seamlessly without showing a bunch of glue smudge. It’s that moment of execution that has to be perfect.

And in the moment here, and it didn’t end up perfect, was where we were trying to tie in the idea of Killer Kane’s spaceship ripping around the solar system, leaving a trail of treachery, adventure and enemies in it’s plume trail.

And here it is. This is the picture that shipped in the box with the game. The more I look at it, the more I like it, but also I mourn that there wasn’t one more pass. Digital art didn’t exist in 1988 when this was probably drawn, but if it did, I’d love to see this all the way rendered out. One more beat of thinking about it. Does this really match the diagram below? Could we see the pilot, maybe, and get a sense of scale? Could it look a whiff more real?

Games, have to hit that Testor Seam between Realism and Playability. Too real and you have a sim. Sims are educational, but the aren’t a lot of fun. Goofy kids games are fun, but they aren’t that replayable when you’re older than, say, 7. (But let’s not pretend that I haven’t spent hours trying to figure out how Candyland could be a great Confectionary Combat RPG or The Game Of Life could become a practical guide to decisionmaking in real life).

So that’s the wave of thoughts that come back when I see Killer Kane’s Rogue.

Kane’s Rogue is the glue that holds a spaceship to a character. Killer Kane is a great character who’s rarely been played for all he’s worth. Felix Silva on the Buck Rogers TV show just didn’t do it. He wasn’t handsome enough to be a romantic competitor to Buck. He wasn’t charming or suave enough to be get under Buck’s skin. He wasn’t capable enough to have you really worried about who’d win a fistfight, a gunfight or a space duel. He has to be Basil Rathbone to Buck’s Errol Flynn.

He and Buck are the first and second best pilots in the Solar System. Who’s first and who’s second depends on the day. They’re also involved in a complicated set of relationships with Wilma and Ardala. Kane was engaged to Ardala until Buck crashed into the 25th Century. He got jealous, stupid and devious when he saw Buck with Wilma. He did everything stupid than any guy afraid of losing his girl does, just writ large in a space fantasy. He tried to bully, sabotage and finally duel Buck. He behaved so badly that Wilma broke off the engagement and then Kane found himself in the arms of Ardala Valmar a seductive, scheming and wiley adventuress who ultimately is driven by the same thing that drives a lot of Princesses without a fortune and that is restoring her fortune while losing none of her freedom or submitting to anybody.

Kane and Ardala are both villains who became villains by not reacting well to life’s setbacks. This might not make them people you want to know, but they’re hopefully fun to watch and fun to play. They’re not intrinsically evil, they’re just amoral and use the fact that they feel they’ve been cheated as justification for cheating others. Haven’t we all been there at some point in our lives?

But back to the thread. Killer Kane’s ‘Rogue’ should be a physical manifestation of him. The red is for exciting (and maybe a something to do with Mars) and somebody who wants attention because that’s what he’s been deprived of. It’s the hot flashy race car. He wants people to see his ship and surrender. And most do. Did we capture that with this ship? Not really. We’re most of the way there, but not really.

Another tricky thing is that this isn’t his personal fighter. We’re making a roleplaying game after all, so he’s got to at least be able to fit four people in it. This ship doesn’t feel 4, though when you see the diagram below, you’ll see where the four fit and the innards. Realistically, you don’t need four windows on a spaceship, but in order to ‘read’ the diagram, you have to feel four people in it with room for a couple more. It doesn’t feel that way. It feels like a 1 seater and that’s why the turret is confusing. Maybe seeing the pilot for a sense of scale would help.

But the exterior doesn’t match the innards and that’s the regret I feel in the restalgia. We should have playtested more. The artist should have done it with us, or, at worst, we should have given him some ideas.

And the problem with Restalgia is that there’s always a sense of Re-gret that comes with it if you didn’t get it right the first time. It’s something left undone. A Testor Model Parts that didn’t come together right. They have to be sanded and painted again. They can get to good enough, but you just wish you’d gotten it right the first time.

The Bad News for us kids was that Testor’s Model Cement had a unique odor which I associate with childhood (along with the paints) allegedly was toxic, caused people to hallucinate (google Glue Sniffing) and was either ‘banned’ or restricted and the later products never worked quite as well and models lost some of their fun. Or maybe I just missed the ‘high’. But like so many other things, models kind of passed into history. Now we do things digitally and they can be endlessly done and redone without that moment of welding damage. You get something and you lose something. It’s like music from the same era. There was a time when the whole band had to get it right at the same time to record a song. There was no autotune, mistakes were made and the world less perfect, the trick is this. Perfect isn’t pleasing to humans, because, like Kane (and Buck,Wilma and Ardala for that matter) humans aren’t perfect, and perfect is strangely antiseptic and offputting to us. So now, we have to figure out how to de-form the seams in our models to make them not perfect. At least that’s my theory this morning in August of 2020 as I write this).