Round Up

CONTROLS

Arrow Keys: Walk

Space Bar: Bark

(Downloadable version supports Xbox gamepads,)

HOW TO PLAY

You are Mr. Brown's trusty sheepdog, tasked with rounding up the sheep and locking them into the corral. But beware of shifty snakes and the dastardly hawk, who are all too eager to capture your flock! :( Only the rancher Mr. Brown can get rid of them with his boomerang, but he keeps falling asleep on the job, leaving it up to you to wake him up and guide him towards the attackers.

THE STORY BEHIND ROUND UP

I never met Mi Kyung Kim or anyone who knew her, but here's one thing I'll always remember.

Searching through ancient video game magazines for lost tidbits of gaming history, I once stumbled upon an intriguing article in the short-lived Marvel publication BLiP from 1983. The article was called "Blip Talent Search" and featured the five winning entries from a game idea competition. Most of the games kind of seemed like Donkey Kong or Pac-Man likes with some extravagant theme slapped on, but one entry caught my attention in particular: Mi Kyung Kim's Round Up. Instead of your typical maze or platform action game, the concept felt truly unique at the time, and what little description the magazine gave made it sound like a thoroughly thought-out game. (The drawing below was made by the BLiP artist.)

The contest made me curious whether any of the games or their creators ever made it to an actual game, but when I started looking up Mi Kyung Kim, the results left me quite distressed. It turned out she was killed in a ghastly train car shooting when she was only 27. (Long before mass shootings became a sordidly common occurrence in the US, the LIRR Massacre shocked the public with its aimless brutality and death toll.)

Aside from the regular news of the day, I found an obituary from Columbia University, where she worked as a library aide at the time. 

"She graduated with a B.S. in 1988 from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and had pursued freelance work in computer programming, graphics and animation until she joined the Mathematics Library (...)" I don't know, maybe I'm just projecting, but that would be the kind of work I'd seek out if I openly or secretly hoped to find a way into the games industry in the late '80s or early '90s, in a time and from a place where that must have seemed almost impossible.

Another quote from a family friend in the New York Times article about the massacre broke my heart: "She worked so hard and had so little." Maybe in a better world, she would have become one of the great early game designers. Maybe I'm just dreaming things up. I just wished that there was something of her life rather than her death remaining in the aether that is the internet.

I've tried to recreate what the magazine replicated of her description as closely as possible, except I couldn't bear to let the tipsy rancher handle a gun after what happened to her, so I made him wield a boomerang instead.

It's been almost five years now since I've first found out about Mi Kyung Kim, her game concept, and her tragic fate. Five years I just couldn't forget, five years this story has weighed on my psyche. Maybe it's presumptuous of me to think I could tell the world something about her, to make a game based on her idea. I'm sorry if I hurt or offend anyone seeing this, I just couldn't hold this story in anymore.

Well, this is what I'll always remember about Mi Kyung Kim, even though I never met her, and that's why this game is dedicated to her.