November 5, 1992
I couldn’t get Sophie or Anna or Frédérique to go to the Tilt d’Or awards with me, so I went alone. As if that weren’t bad enough, I won another Tilt d’Or (this time for Mac Prince) and had to get up on the podium and accept the award and say a few words into the mike. Saying it in French was the easy part; the hard part was keeping my leg from shaking – I was as nervous as I’ve ever been in my life. I thought I’d outgrown stage fright, but guess not. It’s going to be on TV, so I hope I didn’t make a total fool of myself.
Met some new people, including Frederick Raynal, author of Alone in the Dark; Eric Chahi, author of Out of This World (aka Another World); and Paul Cuisset, Eric’s successor at Delphine Software, who’s responsible for their new game Flashback. Eric’s left Delphine and is very upset about Flashback — not only because they stole his “look and feel” but because they’ve used it (he feels) to rip off Prince of Persia, which offends his sense of ethics.
Dany’s left Tilt. He’s in Thailand now trying to win over the parents of his Thai bride-to-be. When he gets back he’s going to work for — you guessed it — Delphine.
Dany’s successor is Guillaume, the guy who invited me to the awards ceremony. He’s brought on board as a fledgling staff member his boyhood pal Julien, who is a nice guy and gave me a lift home.
Julien said: “Of all the people who accepted awards tonight, you were the best, but you were the most modest.” The whole night was that way, with people coming up and saying staggeringly nice things to me. According to them, I’m one of the three best-known game authors in France, the other two being Eric Chahi and Frederick Raynal; and they were both so star-struck to meet me, I hardly knew what to say. Everyone here remembers Karateka. It’s really surprising.
Aarón and I finished cutting the film. (That is, I left Aarón at Atria, still working at 7pm, while I went to the Tilt awards.) We mix tomorrow morning at 9 am.
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