Old Man Murray
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| Available in | English |
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| Owner | UGO Networks |
| Created by | Chet Faliszek and Erik Wolpaw |
| Website | http://www.oldmanmurray.com/ |
| Current status | No longer updated |
Old Man Murray (aka OMM) is a UGO Networkscomputer game commentary and reviews site, known for its highly irreverent and satiric tone. It was written and edited by Chet Faliszek and Erik Wolpaw. Old Man Murray was critical of games that received strong reviews elsewhere, most notably the King's Quest series. Common targets of OMM news updates included John Romero and American McGee. Old Man Murray was a significant early influence in both the world of game development and Internet comedy, and is often considered to have "helped birth online games journalism".
A major theme in Old Man Murray criticism was the accusation that many new games failed to add any original ideas to the medium. Gabe Newell, CEO of Valve Corporation, cited the opinion of Old Man Murray as a factor when designing the popular and iconoclastic Half-Life. Old Man Murray often took aim at the conventions embedded within game genres.
Two of the site's attacks on stale game conventions have received particular attention from game developers and journalists. One was the April 2000 "Crate Review System" essay, which half-seriously introduced the "Start to Crate" metric as an "objective" measure of the overall quality of a videogame. The Start to Crate was the number of seconds from the start of a game until the player first encountered a crate or barrel. By 2000, crates and barrels were a commonplace of video game map design; according to the essay, the first crate "represents the point where the developers ran out of ideas". This essay has had a significant impact in future game design, in part for pointing out "a good gauge to determine just how creative your game is", and driving designers to a point where games are "at the stage where warehouse based level design is not de rigueur". Gabe Newell mentions that there was such a worry about the crate cliché that eventually the team gave up and made a crate one of the first things the player sees and manipulates, figuring that this "was the Old Man Murray equivalent of throwing yourself to the mercy of the court".LightBox Interactive's Matthew Breit considered the "Start to Crate Time" system the "first actual critical look at a level design trend", making him self-conscious of the off-handed use of crates in his level designs to fill an otherwise empty room. Ernest Adams of Gamasutra cites Old Man Murray as being the original source of the sixth condition of "twinkie denial" named in the article: "I can't claim crates without pallets as an original Twinkie Denial Condition because the Old Man Murray guys thought of it first...". A decade after the original "Start to Crate" article, it can still be found as a tongue-in-cheek metric for game quality.
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