Here at Hello Games we love Christmas. Any day of the year you can ask any of us how many sleeps it is until Christmas, and we can tell you. Today is nine sleeps ‘til Christmas.
In the spirit of Christmas, we’re giving away gifts! Our free Santa DLC turns Joe’s world into a winter wonderland, sprinkling snow and presents across the land.
It’s your job to collect the gifts on a brand new vehicle! Introducing the Christmas QuadBike! Powered by holiday cheer, this speedy, bouncy ATV will change the way you play Joe Danger Special Edition.
You’ll be able to download the Santa DLC for free from XBLA on the 21st of December, but you’ll have to be quick, Santa disappears after Christmas and so does the awesome ATV!!
Whenever you release a game, there’s a scary time period when you’re waiting for reviews to come in. What if people hate it? What if they find horrific game-breaking problems? What if they say mean things!?
Luckily, people seem to be enjoying Joe Danger Special Edition. Which makes us feel all gooey. Here are some of our favourites:
Ok, we’re all a little bit too excited right now… But with good reason! Joe Danger Special Edition is OUT NOW on Xbox Live Arcade!
You can even start it downloading from your PC at the marketplace!
During Joe Danger Special Edition I tried to record a video of us making a level.
We got this instead, a behind the scenes look at how levels just kind of ‘happen’.
We read a lot about all the problems with the games industry, and how it’s all miserable. You won’t find any of that in here.
This video features Alex and Gareth. They recently joined us at Hello Games and we love them like brothers. We all hang out together every day and then occasionally we release a game. Hopefully those games are as fun to play as they are to make.
The Lab is our biggest addition to Special Edition, and it’s actually where Joe started life. It was our testing ground for new ideas and from day one we built elaborate Assault Courses to test controls and handling.
This video is from 6 weeks into development on the original Joe Danger, and I remember recording this with my laptop on my knees.
We built these crazy levels first, and then we tried to make a vehicle that could play them second. To begin with that was a wheel, and then it became the motorbike.
Eventually this grew into what we now call the Lab, which is new in Special Edition.
This video is from a Microsoft play test, and it’s the final level in the Lab. It looks hard, but I wish you could have heard him laughing at every crash.
Joe Danger Special Edition is going to be releasing on December 14th for 1200pts.
That is next Wednesday. Next Wednesday we will all download it together, and we will compete on the XBLA leaderboards.
Next Wednesday people will play the Lab for the first time. Next Wednesday someone will be the first to earn every achievement in JDSE… actually that probably won’t happen ‘til Thursday…
It makes you think though… mainly about next Wednesday.
Some days are normal, and boring. Other days are worse, they become night, and you have more bugs to fix. Lots of days go by like that.
Then there are AMAZING days. Days like this one, when we hear that Joe Danger Special Edition has gone GOLD. These are days when we laugh, and hug each other. Days when we do a little dance, then Dave does an impersonation of Ryan, and nails it.
These are days when we sit back, and remember those nasty days of bug fixing, and smile, because they were actually fun as well – now we look back.
What does going GOLD mean? It means that we’re going to be able to release soon. It means we’ll all be on the leaderboards together soon. It means someone will be the first to unlock the Pink Monkey soon.
We don’t know when, but we know we’re staying awake until then, and you will know as soon as we do.
Let’s all remind ourselves what we’re waiting for…
Announcing a new game is always super exciting, it’s also really really nerve racking… It’s our baby, and we’re sending it off to school. Let’s hope it makes some friends!
We sit and read every comment with our fingers crossed that they’ll be nice to our poor little child. Thankfully, the response to Joe Danger Special Edition has been crazy positive, and we haven’t had to sort out any bullies. Yet.
We’re trying our best to spread the word to as many places as possible, and to explain what we’re up to as well as we can… which isn’t always that well. Mainly we send Sean out, he’s not very good at talking to press, but it gets him out of the office.
Then we sit back and read what silly things he’s said, and never let him live it down. Bless him.
Eurogamer asked us if we’d like to be on their podcast, so we sent Sean down to Brighton to talk to them. It’s literally an hour of nonsense. Warning, contains anecdotes about driving around Germany with a sofa and getting arrested for working late.
GamesIndustry.biz is a website that talks a lot about the business of games. We have no idea how Sean got on this one. I guess that means we’re a business? I’m going to tell my Mum, she’ll tell her friends.
In this interview Sean starts 26 sentences with ‘I think’ and the other 5 sentence with “I don’t think”. In his accent it would be “Oi tink” and “Oi don’t tink”. That’s a lot of thinking.
We talked to Edge Online about the differences between working with Microsoft and Sony – Sean says: “Microsoft are a bit like your Dad and Sony are like your crazy uncle”. Next time we’re going to practice what we say beforehand.
Phew! You’ve no idea how good it feels to be able to talk about Joe Danger SE coming to XBLA! We are so bad at keeping secrets… Please don’t ask us what our bank details are. Here’s a trailer that will hopefully help get you beautiful XBLA players as excited as we are!
If you look closely you’ll spot some of the new additions. For instance there’s a pink monkey. We believe this is a first for games.
Stop the Internet Presses. We’re announcing a new game!
That’s right, we’re bringing Joe Danger to Xbox LIVE Arcade, and what’s more it’ll be in a Special Edition. At long last our friends will be able to play it, and Sean’s brother. Well, they’ll download the Trial, after that we’re not sure.
Joe Danger Special Edition contains the original Joe Danger plus almost double the gameplay again, including new environments, new levels, and new characters – all created especially for Xbox players!
This has been such a hard secret to keep. A woman in the book shop asked me if I was looking for a special edition yesterday, and I started to cry. We’re just glad we can talk about things again. We promise more posts in the future.
We’re still hard at work putting the final touches to Joe Danger SE. It’s actually 5 in the morning now, and we don’t know how to get blog posts to release at a set time. I think we’ll just stay up until 9am when it gets officially announced, and click submit.
I’m just going to put some scores on the XBLA leaderboards while I wait.
After hiding away for over a year. We’re super super excited to announce our next game! Joe Danger: The Movie. It’s kind of a sequel to Joe Danger, but it’s mostly something entirely new!
Sean said we’re making a game for every person who’s ever come running excitedly out of the cinema, made a gun with their fingers and done some pretend fly kicks. Then there was an awkward silence.
We’ll be unveiling the game properly at Gamescom next week. We’re currently filling a van up with goodies and getting ready to go on a roadtrip to Cologne! After that we fly straight to PAX. If you want to see the game first, email sean@hellogames.co.uk.
Think of us hurtling down the Autobahn, on the wrong side of the road, while you sit at home with your delicious hot tea and biscuits.
Did you ever get so into what you’re doing, that you forgot to stop for tea?
Well that’s kind of what happened to us for the last year, except instead of tea we mean eating, sleeping and leaving our little office. We still obviously stop for actual tea (we’re not crazy).
Anyway! We suddenly realised, we better tell other people about this new game we’re making. I’m in the middle of getting everything ready so we can announce it. Sean said I can show off one thing from the game RIGHT NOW, as long as it’s not obvious what the game is.
So here’s a cupcake with a face on. He is important.
We’re getting it printed out six foot tall for our stand at Gamescom and PAX. If you’re going to either of those, you should totally come by our booth.
We will have tea making facilities.
Email sean@hellogames.co.uk for press details and to arrange a meet up at Gamescom or PAX!
Hello Games is looking for a bright new bee, to be almost entirely splendid and join us in the quest for full awesomeness. Here’s the “job description” – make fun games, drink tea, win awards and talk nonsense.
We’re looking for anyone who likes games, and kicks ass. Specifically we’re really interested in anybody willing to walk on hot coals and climb vast mountains (at the same time), just for the chance to make the games they love. Basically you’re us, but probably younger, better looking, not as grumpy and you consume less tea.
Your duties would be mainly centered around testing the game to ensure optimal levels of funkiness are maintained on a daily basis, with the possibility of jumping into development to reinforce us in any area you’re comfortable with.
You’ll be testing our latest games day-to-day, but you’ll also be exposed to things that will astound you… think of it as a gateway drug for the games industry.
Desired Experience
We’re looking for someone new who loves gaming, is hard working, ambitious and enjoys learning. Here are some other things we’d love you to have:
Testing experience is a definite plus, or at least be prepared to QA ‘til your face bleeds.
Be prepared to wear many hats, we’re an open and varied team.
Have a skill in an additional area whether that be art, design, audio or programming…
Proven dedication to gaming… maybe you’ve got a related degree or write a gaming blog or just some other gaming related tomfoolery!
Right now we’re still a tiny team, imagine what we’ll do with your help! Drop us an email explaining why you’d be an amazing addition to our team, along with a CV and a portfolio of any work you may have to Jobs@hellogames.co.uk to apply. Drop what you’re doing and come join us!
We don’t have Thanksgiving here in the UK, but Hello Games really like food, so we celebrate it anyway.
Can you imagine some people still haven’t even played the multi-award winning Joe Danger yet? Just for those patient people, between the 23rd and 30th of November you can purchase Joe Danger in the American store for HALF PRICE. That’s just $7.49 for what many are calling the “Game of the Year” on PSN (mainly this was our Mums… but they know their games). That’s the cheapest 30 hours of death-defying, stunt-biking, high-octance gameplay you can get ANYWHERE.
We love Joe Danger, but sometimes he gets a bit lonely. To keep him company we’re releasing some awesome new characters for Joe Danger, and each comes with their own unique style, new motorbike, crazy new moves and special collectibles. Grab a new character to show off your new skills in multiplayer, get new highscores or use them to record hilarious replay videos!
We thought it might be nice to ask the community for their suggestions for new characters and here is what they came up with (don’t blame us). Firstly we have the ghoulish, undead Knight “Sir Bonehead’, collecting Holy Grails to undo the curse of the Lady of the Lake. We’ve also got Joe wearing a Chicken suit, with egg-cellent (sorry) new special moves like “The Red Rooster” and “Cock-a-Doodle-Danger”!
The most popular suggestion by far was for a playable Monkey (of course), so say hello to “Chuckles the Chimp”, you mightn’t know his name, but maybe his Fez will be familiar (sorry).
Just for Thanksgiving we decided to let loose Joe Danger’s turkey-chomping, Native American brother “Geronim-Joe”. By far the hardest part of creating this character was deciding on the name… should he have been “Joe-ronimo”, or maybe even “Joe-ronim-joe”? I think we can all agree that “Geronim-Joe” was the best compromise. Good work everyone.
We really hope you enjoy your new characters, now go and spread the word
You may remember we announced a level competition a couple of weeks ago. Perhaps you forgot? We haven’t!
It’s taken a very long time to go through all the entries. We literally had a lot of entries, but there can be only one winner. Except in this case, where we picked three!
First Prize goes to borito_crocodile, for their level “Hard Target”
Second Prize goes to BRENDON-75, for their level “Maximum Risk”
And finally Third Prize goes to Szerman, for their level “Double Impact”
We have gotten in touch with the winners, and cool stuff will be winging their way to them SOON.
All the runners up have also gone up on our Showcase. They are all GOLD!
In case you were wondering, most people forgot to name their levels. No problem! We named all the levels ourselves instead. The winning levels are named after Van Damme films, and the runner’s up are named after Steven Seagal films. Draw whatever conclusions you would like from that.
Hello Games have left their first offices behind. This is a scary thing. We feel naked.
We had to move though, our office was tiny and oxygen was running out.
Our room was four walls, and no windows. It was hot, and bland, but we’ll miss it. I’ve spent some of the best days of my life here and things will never be the same again. It was the belly of the whale and the walls tasted of success and sweat.
Hide and Seek never worked well at our old office...
After the room was empty, we all just stood and looked around, remembering the day we moved in. Then Dave tried to hold my hand, which was awkward, so we left.
It turns out this is what goes into making a game:
13 monitors
7 retro consoles
6 computers
5 TVs
4 men
3 dev-kits
2 laptops
1 Microwave
Our new ebay listing...
Grant is drawing pictures of what our new office should look like. It has wings.
Sometimes we don’t post anything on our blog, because nothing has happened and that’s ok. Sometimes we don’t post on our blog, because way too much is happening and it’s all too exciting, and we have barely slept in months.
This is one of those times (where we haven’t slept in months) and we are sorry.
For all the people who are asking, coming soon are the results of our competition! Thank you so much to everyone who has entered, you are amazing. This is the last day so get those final entries in.
Also, coming soon, exciting Joe Danger news.
Oh and some Hello Games news too, that almost no one will care about… apart from us, who think it’s awesome.
