Interview | Geoff Ramsey and Jack Pattillo on Achievement Hunter

Interview | Geoff Ramsey and Jack Pattillo on Achievement Hunter

Quite the Achievement….

Greg Giddens catches up with the creators of the hugely popular ACHIEVEMENT HUNTER.

KNOWN MAINLY for their immensely popular machinima series – Red vs. Blue – Rooster Teeth have taken the internet by storm with their unique humour and terrific productions. Their ever growing list of projects, however, are far more varied than just machinima and include a web comic, the Drunk Tank Podcast, live action comedic shorts, and Achievement Hunter.

Achievement Hunter (AH) provides a comprehensive list of videos to help guide players in obtaining achievements and trophies. Run by Geoff Ramsey and Jack Pattillo, Achievement Hunter’s popularity and community has continued to grow, developing with it both its quantity and quality to become a superb destination for Achievement related content.

We were fortunate enough to speak to Geoff and Jack about AH and discuss achievements as a whole and their effect on games.

Resolution Magazine: Why set up Achievement Hunter? What’s the story behind it?

Geoff Ramsey: Well Burnie – one of the guys who makes Red Vs Blue with me – he and I were both huge achievement fans, or to use the less than flattering term “achievement whores”, and we were constantly racing each other to get more achievements – trying to outdo each other for gamerscore – and to that end we were playing at ton of games in our free time and trying to find information about how to get certain achievements online and it was a bit of a crapshoot. You had to kind of go to Google and there were a few site you could go and look at, and there were a few sites with good text walkthroughs but I’m kind of a visual dude, and it really helps me if I can sit down and watch a video that tells me that the flag is hidden here or this is how to pull off a combo. So we were talking about how great it would be if a site like that existed one day and how helpful it would be for us and I said “Fuck it, I’ll just make that site” and decided to do that and add the Red vs. Blue-esque comedic element to it as well.

RM: That’s something I particularly like about AH is the spontaneous humour and banter, is that hard to do? I know you recently had a behind the scenes video [http://redvsblue.com/archive/?id=1252] showing the recording of audio, do the jokes and banter always flow so easily?

Jack Pattillo: That’s sort of the thing; we don’t have any sort of script or anything. Literally Geoff will start a video not knowing what the achievement is – if it’s something I’ve cut and vice versa – one of us has no idea what we’re about to watch, so we just kind of bounce off each other pretty well I guess, people seem to like it.

GR: Yeah it’s kind of a fun challenge you know? And it’s almost like observational humour. I will say there are times where it gets a bit dodgy, for instance I feel like we’ve done 50 Red Dead Redemption videos now and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to think of goofy things to say when a dude is on a horse in the desert; there’s not much to work with there you know?

RM: So with AH always in the back of your minds are you always worried about not capturing footage or do you get the chance to sit down and just enjoy a game still?

GR: Absolutely not!

JP: That’s one of the problems, when I’m at home and playing a video game – and I’m not recording footage whilst playing it – I feel like I’m shorting myself.

GR: Yeah same here, I had to duplicate my capture setup at work at home. The idea of getting an achievement at home without a camera rolling would feel stupid to me, like a missed opportunity. But the end result to that is, when I go home at night and put my kid to bed and drinking vodka or whatever, I think “I should hop on and play a video game, but man I don’t want to open Final Cut and start setting up so screw it”, I end up playing less video games at home than I did before setting up AH. Kind of a double edged sword I guess.

RM: That’s a shame, so it’s more work than play now?

GR: Yeah you take your hobby and turn it into a job you know? Hell of a job to have though, I’m not complaining.

RM: So would you say it’s changed your general view of videogames?

JP: I don’t know about that. I’ve always been a big fan of achievements and stuff but now I feel bad that I jump from game to game when before I started doing this I would sit with a game for a few days or maybe even a month trying to beat it, but now its “what’s coming out next week?” and we have to move on, and we’ve got stacks and stacks of game I’d love to catch up on but I don’t know if that will ever happen.

GR: Yeah, that’s a really good point Jack. I now play games mostly for achievements that lend themselves to videos; you know the most helpful ones we can think of to make like collecting shit, that kind of stuff. So I used to have a pretty good percentage where I was like 60% of the games I played were completed 100% and I’d have all their achievements, and now it’s got to be dismal, it’s got to be in the 15 – 20% range if that. There’s just no time you know? And there’s DLC being released as well so we’re constantly churning out new videos.

Continues…

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