Zerathustra wrote on 07/20/12 at 03:06:25:
I'm curious,... What's necessarily significant of Kirk Baum exactly? Care to tell Kil? Or anyone?
You mean why is he so cool?
Absolutely. One thing that I think TM 2012 has really emphasized for me is that no one person can really be responsible for the greatness of what a game is. They are HUGE projects, and we tend to focus far too much on just the big names involved.
Maybe TM 2012 is your fave game of the series. If that is true, it wasn't just Dave or Scott that were involved, it was a huge team. In fact, the group that actually creates the guts of what we all love, makes that vision happen, is never the Scotts or Daves of the group. They dream it, others interpret it and make it. Dave would certainly agree to this statement, so I'm not saying anything new to him but it may be new to some of us.
So it is with the old Twisted Metals. It's no surprise to me anymore that TM 2012 was not my fave, and in fact, it's no surprise to me that a lot of the things the fans loved about the past games Dave and Scott seemed to be unaware those traits even existed. Many, many people who made TM, TM2, and TMB successful were not a part of the ESP effort.
Kirk Baum is one of those peeps. He was involved in TM1, TM2, several Singletrac games, and TMB/TMBO. He was also a lead network guru on Warhawk.
One thing that was awesome about Kirk was he showed a deep deference and respect for the fan base. He would not only come to TMA and post amongst us and get us hyped about the game on a pretty regular basis, but he would actually PLAY with TMA, online for MONTHS or perhaps even YEARS. That type of dedication was just awesome to be a part of. When TMHO came out and many of us had trouble connecting, he appeared on TMA and helped walk us through it.
Finally, he is literally the savior of TMBO. One of Sony's biggest epic fails for their first online releases on the PS2 is that they were afraid to give any type of chat functionality at all to any of the games that weren't rated M (probably because they were worried it would mean the game was miss-rated when peeps cussed up a storm - in fact if you read their boxes now they say online interactions may change the game rating).
So, when TMBO came out they ordered Incognito to gut the chat code, and for the first three months the player base believed there was no chat. Had this continued, the game would have died a much earlier death. However, as legend has it, Kirk (as far as I know he has never admitted to this, but we all believe it was him) ignored that order and left a code in the North American release that would activate the chat. Legend has it he also got in trouble for it (it's not in the European release that came after).
So, he's a hero. 'Nuff said.