Pek Pongpaet

So this is my 5 minute brush with fame. Since 2001, I’ve been involved with the Mortal Kombat video game franchise as a motion capture artist. In layman’s speak, I do the martial arts moves that the video game characters do in the game. When it’s mentioned people always wonder what my involvement was and I always tell them to look on Youtube. To make it easy for me, I’ve decided to consolidate all the stuff I did for the Mortal Kombat games so far in one easy to find blog post.

This was the first MK game I was involved in. So I lied about the title because this is not technically an intro, but I didn’t have anything to do with the intro of this game. However, I feel like this teaser trailer clip is reflective of the work I did for the game. Keep an eye out for a 720 front sweep with a broadsword at 0:34. Ah, those were the days.

I have a little beef with this game because somebody at Midway dropped the ball and as a result, my friend Kevin and I were not credited. That said however, I really loved the intro. Kevin, Carlos (Pesina) and I pretty much did the whole intro. During the 3 man fight, I was Raiden – how cool is that? When it was just the 2 bad guys, I was Shang Tsung and Kevin played Quan Chi. What’s funny is at the time – I had long hair and Kevin shaved his head. I wonder if that had anything to do with the characters we played. Personally I had a different idea of where to take the fight. If Raiden could teleport at will, I would have had him simultaneously fight the 2 bad guys, teleporting all over the place. Imagine a Dragon Ball fight scene where he teleports behind, kicks the guy, guy flies over, he teleports above, bashes them down followed by a lightning bolt. I think that would have been pretty cool.

This game is a departure from the regular MK franchise in that it wasn’t a one-on-one fight game, but a platform fighter ala Double Dragon or Golden Axe from the old days. I don’t recall doing too many moves for the actual gameplay but we were heavily involved in the cinematic intro. Although you see many characters on screen at once, most of it was done by Kevin and I. I got to play Liu Kang in this one. Apparently I ham it up pretty well.

The MK Armageddon cinematic intro was probably one of the biggest undertakings of the MK franchise as far as intros were concerned. All the characters in the MK universe were present for one big battle. This cinematic was fun for 2 reasons: 1 we got to play with weapons and 2 we had to work with a staircase for the pyramid fights. I got to reprise my role as Liu Kang – this time as a cool undead zombie wield double chains.

Recently, my friend Ray and I have been working on MK vs DC. I don’t want to give too much away, but from what I’ve seen of the game so far, it’s going to rock. You guys at E3 are going to be in for a real treat. If only I can get Ed Boon to let me go to E3 on Midway dime. One can dream. Click here for some photos of me doing motion capture for the MK vs DC.

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NewScientistTech reports that eye tracking technology has been applied to the online game World of Warcraft to allow people with severe motor disabilities to play 3D computer games like World of Warcraft (read: waste countless hours) using only their eyes. I say anything that allows disabled people to lead more normal lives is great. But of all the things eye tracking has been applied to, WoW is the best they could come up with? How about locomotion by applying eye tracking system to a wheel chair? Eye tracking for remote control, phone dialing, etc. The applications are endless. Maybe those have already been done to death and I just don’t know about it.

I have one great idea: Eye tracking for car drivers. If your gaze has been steadily off the road while in a moving vehicle, the car could try to wake you up. What about eye tracking for judges? If your eyes are off the competition for a length of time, it could signal you. I know I could use one of those sometimes. Any other ideas are greatly appreciated.

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The teaser trailer for the new Mortal Kombat video game was just released earlier today. My colleague Dr. Raymond Wu and I performed motion capture for this trailer last year in the summer.

Duuuude. I was sooooo disappointed. We spent a whole day choreographing and shooting and this is what they have to show for. I was so looking forward to seeing what they did with all the motion capture footage. Over two thirds the trailer doesn’t even show anything, just a bunch of shapes and text. What a waste. Needless to say, I was not impressed.

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I’ve spent a cumulative total of 30+ hours playing the Flash game Protector on the casual gaming website Kongregate. Thirty hours – three, zero. I know that because the site keeps track of what games I play and how much time I spend. Now compare that to a hit console game like Final Fantasy X – one of the most popular role playing games (RPG) franchises of all time. It took me about 100 hours from start to finish. You might say, “dude you need to get a life”, and you might be right, but I digress and that’s not the point.

The point is that in 1999, Final Fantasy X was a 2 year development project costing over $30 million US dollars involving over 100 developers. Protector was created in a few months by a couple of guys doing it in their spare time for next to nothing. Yet the time I, as a gamer, spent playing the addictive game was a whole third of the time I spent on Final Fantasy X. Every time I played Protector or any other game on Kongregate, I was exposed to advertising. My 100 hours spent playing Final Fantasy X I saw exactly zero ads. Now even though I didn’t actually click on any of the ads, that’s not the point. That just means they need better advertising.

Final Fantasy X sold millions of copies worldwide and made millions of dollars. I don’t know how much Protector makes in advertising revenue. But since it was the number two game on Kongregate for a long time, I’m willing to bet it’s not chump change considering the effort involved in creating it. I think there’s definitely a market for casual games. They are more approachable to a wider audience because it costs nothing, the effort involved in learning to play a casual game is usually lower, and the time commitment is usually less as well.

If I had $30 million dollars to develop games, I wouldn’t spend 2 years creating one game. I’d launch hundreds if not thousands of ships, I mean mini casual games for all sorts of platforms.

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