Wait a second, isn't David Jaffe the jerk that said that game journalists were not part of the game industry?
When David Jaffe announced that he was leaving Sony in order to form his very own video game development company it came as no surprise. For months rumors have been circulating that the creator of Twisted Metal and God of War would say goodbye to Sony after fourteen years and form a company that focused entirely on smaller, more casual titles. But while nobody was shocked to hear of his long overdue departure, the name of David Jaffe's new company left a few of us scratching our heads. With all this time planning his getaway David Jaffe and company had plenty of chances to come up with a clever name, so they came up with ... Eat Sleep Play?
That's right, David Jaffe and the founder of Incognito, Scott Campbell (designer of Downhill Domination
It's hard to believe that such violent characters as Kratos and the cast from Twisted Metal came out of the mind of David Jaffe!
and producer of Twisted Metal: Black), teamed up to create a company called Eat Sleep Play. These days you don't see a lot of companies coming up with interesting and unusual names, most developers just end up taking the name of whoever buys them out (just look at Irrational Games, who would later become 2K Boston). While I definitely like that David Jaffe is thinking outside of the box, there's just something about the name that I can't put my finger on. For the past few weeks I have been racking my head trying to figure out why that name sounded so familiar.
This weekend I was going through some old pictures of the Defunct Games staff, trying to pull out some embarrassing pictures for the rest of this year's articles. And then I saw it, a historical picture of our web designer, Patrick O'Connor, passed out on the couch clutching an Xbox 360 control and covered with David Jaffe games. But more importantly, Pat had his official E3 2006 t-shirt, the one with three pictures and says: Eat Sleep Play. To show you what I'm talking about (and completely embarrass Patrick) I have decided to post the pictures ...
For many of you this is a familiar scene, a good friend drunk and passed out on your couch holding a half eaten piece of
A quick Google search will show you that the whole "Eat Sleep" thing has gotten completely out of hand!
pizza and cradling a bottle of alcohol. It would seem as Patrick is doing exactly what his t-shirt instructed him to do; he's eating, sleeping and playing games. Could it be that David Jaffe actually took the inspiration from his company from an E3 t-shirt?
Let's not mince words here, there were a lot of people wearing these Eat Sleep Play shirts at last year's E3, it stands to reason that David may have noticed that phrase and kept it locked in his mind until just the right time. With a year between the final large-scale E3 and David Jaffe naming his company, it wouldn't be too surprising for the creator of Twisted Metal to have forgotten where it came from but like the way those words went together. You see this with
Pat could care less about fighting cancer or helping Darfur, his mission these days is fighting Atari!
music all the time, you'll hear the tune of a song and then months (if not years) later you'll start to hum it and not remember where it came from.
And if that's what happened, does that mean that something good came out of the old E3? Nah, that can't be it, the phrase "Eat Sleep Play" doesn't it make sense in the context of E3. Let's face it, the food at E3 is too expensive so most people didn't do a lot of eating, the parties went on so long that there wasn't much time to sleep, and most people had to wait in huge lines just to try out the games, which as far as I'm concern meant that there wasn't a lot of playing going on. This shirt lies, so maybe it really does make more sense to have it as your brand new company name.
But wait a second, what is that on Patrick's arm? It looks like one of those wristbands people wear to aid them in their battle against whatever disease they are trying to fight. You see those kinds of wristbands all the time for people that are battling cancer or poverty. What is this passed out gamer trying to fight against? If you get close you can tell that he's battling the forces of Atari. That's right, Atari, the company that was thinking about resurrecting Earthworm Jim before they decided to scrap it. Perhaps the real story here is that Patrick likes to wear company logos on his body. I suspect if we had more pictures we would find that he was also wearing blue Sega socks, Konami shoes, and Nintendo underwear. This may not prove that David Jaffe stole the name Eat Sleep Play from E3, but it does suggest that Patrick has bad fashion sense.
