Playing with the cock

Just a quick note to the readers: This article is going to be filled with lots of cock humor. If you intend to read on, it helps to have faith in the cock and the indie spirit of the wobbly, loose skin hanging from its chin.

I’m not speaking here of the phallus that dangles from the loins of man, but rather the poultry that wakes those men up. To be specific, the issue at hand is the gamecock, a type of chicken known for its fierce fighting spirit and often manipulated into cockfights the world over.

Those words are a superb definition for the two game developers behind Gamecock Media, an indie-spirited publisher that is making an effort to change the way casual gamers view the industry. After several years of working in development and production, Harry Miller and Mike Wilson began to lose interest in the bureaucratic schematic defining the corporate-driven modern gaming industry. Rather, they were interested in keeping it pure and their final big-title project was Max Payne, a game whose rights were sold to Take-Two Interactive, the studio responsible for the Grand Theft Auto franchise.

Miller and Wilson first met through the old Dial-up Wide Area Network Gaming Operation-more commonly known as DWANGO-back in 1995, when the outfit was making their nut with Doom. Soon after becoming fast friends, the two ran separate career paths for a few years, though they eventually met up again and formed the Gathering of Developers (GOD) studio in an attempt to blend their friendship and desire for an independent gaming outfit.

After their friend and business partner Doug Myres died unexpectedly, Miller and Wilson went on hiatus for a while. During that time, the titles that GOD sold to Take-Two were making huge bucks, games like Max Payne, Mafia and Stronghold. The rights the duo sold kept them in lunch money and the success of their projects put them in a position to really focus on indie development without fear of having to once again sell their studio in times of trouble.

Enter the cock. During late 2006, Miller and Wilson formed their newest studio, dubbed Gamecock. The company logo is that of two ever-recognizable cocks, strutting on those familiar scrawny legs and clucking their powerful beaks. The feathers fan out from behind the pair of cocks and they face each other with boxing gloves drawn, ready to duke it out like two spittin’-mad cocks with a bone to pick and gnaw on with wing sauce.

The reasoning for all the cock talk comes from their interest in keeping their studio as down-to-earth as possible, and the phrase “gamecock” has a nice play on words to it: some of their more immature audience will recognize their studio name as a joke involving the word “game” as an allusion to what they do and the word “cock” as some middle-school boy reference to his wee-wee.

Gamecock is a studio that doesn’t reflect much interest in middle-school wee-wee, however. Rather, they have a lineup of games set to release later this year and next that are meant for a mostly mature audience. In fact, their only kiddie-looking game thus far is a release set for spring ’08 called Hail to the Chimp. It’s sort of like Streets of Rage meets the Clinton administration meets The Lion King, in that the game will be a beat-’em-up where the idea is to restore democracy to the wild after the king lion is involved in scandal. The game is tailored to appeal to the younger audience, though it is laden with the sort of references and jokes that only the grown-ups will catch.

Fury, a PC-based shoot-’em-up MMORPG tantamount to Diablo, will be one of the first to rise from the cock during winter of this year. Gamecock will be working with developer Auran, a group of big swinging cocks from Down Under. The Australian developers have been consulting kangaroos for gaming advice since 1995, and they are mostly known for their train simulation games (Trainz, Microsoft Train Simulator) and their work on Dark Reign. This latter experience is what will make Fury one of Gamecock’s golden eggs, as the story will center on medieval-era heroes that are controlled in player-versus-player combat, sort of like a free-sprawling Street Fighter.

There are a few other titles in progress deep within the bowels of Gamecock and this year holds a lot of potential for them to really lay some seed and fertilize their eggs. Indie developing studios are a serious rarity in the current industry, and as this rowdy little cock of a studio takes on the big roosters of the market, the feathers are really going to fly.

Can the little cock find a spot to roost in the barnyard of gaming?

This year will give gamers the chance to show their indie spirit and have some fun playing with the cock.