As I realize there are some of our viewers who don’t read our forums, I just thought I’d clarify a couple things. Firstly The Superintendent’s Sorrow is an extra-special bonus update; you will still get your regularly scheduled dosage of LRR lovin’ later today.

We didn’t classify it as a “bonus video” because it technically fits better into the “Music” category, and we put a lot more effort into it than typically goes into a bonus video. We didn’t make it our weekly update because it’s based on a single event that pissed off hardcore fans of a viral marketing campaign and is a little more obscure than our regular fare ;).

So, in the interest of clarifying:

Background

• Bungie (the creators of Halo) had been teasing a major announcement leading up to the Microsoft Press Conference at E3. Allegedly, this was to be a 60-second teaser, followed by a blowout seminar on Wednesday.

• Lots of the teaser images used the cute little superintendent character you see in the video, who showed up on Frankie and Luke’s shirts during PR appearances, on their forums, and in various other places (he would replace the the ads or even the bungie logo on their site at times, and his face was used to cover up a bunch of action figures on their office webcams shortly before E3).

• The “big announcement” was apparently canceled at the last minute by Microsoft, as the FF XIII arrangements were made at the 11th hour. Microsoft rightly didn’t want to upstage such a major announcement from Square.

• As such, around the time of the conference, Bungie started a countdown on their site for the big Wednesday blowout seminar, which, as far as they knew, was still happening.

• Given the relative lack of announcements from its competitors during their conferences, Microsoft canceled the seminar on Tuesday night, leaving Bungie to make apologies for months and months of wasted viral buildup. Allegedly, Microsoft wanted to give the news its own event, where it could be the center of attention . . . which would probably a decent idea, if it hadn’t involved making Bungie apologize for all their own hype.

• Don Mattrick (the head of Microsoft’s entertainment and devices division) later let slip at a party that Bungie was going to announce a new Halo game (not necessarily Halo 4), revealing the announcement in a somewhat less-than spectacular fashion.

• All this (as demonstrated) made the superintendent very sad .

The Process

A couple weeks ago (07/07/08) was Bungie day, and with Bungie Day came a podcast. On that podcast, Luke and Sketch put out a contest to create a new Bungie podcast theme song, with some talk of making a parody of an established song.

I began to think.

When the whole canceled announcement thing went down, I still had Bungie parody songs n the brain, and fell asleep thinking about this Wednesday night. Thursday, I woke up, went to my first class, then sat down and wrote the song in one go. I recorded a preliminary version in one of the breakout rooms in UVic’s computer science building, figuring it was small and relatively soundproof, with the intention of emailing it to Bungie and that being the end of it . . . however, my insecurity paved the way for something more.

Certain that my singing was horrible, and the voice filter was too annoying, I posted the audio somewhere and asked the crew to listen to it and tell me what they thought. Graham’s reaction was along the lines of “we’re so doing this,” and that was that. We hashed out the details of the production at a shoot on Thursday night, and Paul and I spent a bunch of time on Friday photoshopping (and in my case, scrubbing the audio file). Meanwhile, Graham edited a rough-cut without any graphics, which he integrated later on Friday night.

The video went o Revver on Saturday, and finally showed up in its current form just after midnight on Sunday . . . and there you have it.

For more information, obviously, listen to the podcast, where we will discuss both this video, and this week’s “standard” update.

One More Thing!

Yes, of course you can has mp3. Enjoy! 🙂

The Superintendent’s Sorrow