Author: Greg Roensch

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EA Story: Phase 2

After opening the EA Story exhibit in May (and launching a massive internal website), I spent a few weeks recharging in the desert before digging into part two of the project — bringing order to chaos in a room stuffed with an estimated 20,000 video tapes (and assorted other media).

In this room, you can find VHS and BetaCam tapes, CDs, film, and a variety of other obscure and obsolete media formats, all from forty years of making and publishing video games at Electronic Arts. The bulk of the collection features content from the late 1980s through the mid 2000s.

What’s on all of these tapes? Gameplay footage. Company meetings and presentations. Special marketing events. Wing Commander. Shockwave. Medal of Honor. Need for Speed. Dead Space. Madden, FIFA, and the rest of the EA SPORTS lineup. And tons of other game franchises and brands. Yes, even Shaq Fu!

My mission: organize and catalogue the madness and then figure out what needs to be digitized and further preserved.

If you don’t hear from me, you’ll know where to send the search hounds.

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Ten Years and Counting

Six String Communications. Ten years in business and counting. Thanks to everyone who’s played a part in keeping this little editorial engine chugging up the hill. I appreciate it. And for anyone looking for a seasoned writer, editor, ghostwriter, scriptwriter, proofreader, all-purpose-editorial-collaborator, please keep me in mind. Here’s to the next ten. Woohoo!

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New Alien Story

This just in … my new short, short story “Giant Rock,” inspired by my recent trip to The Integratron, has been accepted for publication in Bright Flash Literary Review. Thank you to them. And, yes, aliens are involved, as are baby quails, a giftshop saleswoman named Venus (who looks like Marilyn Monroe in “Some Like It Hot”), and a talking bobcat.

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“Dear Lev” in the UK

I’m thrilled to announce that “Dear Leviathan” has been named a finalist in the poetry film category at the 2022 Absurd Art House film festival. The short film will be shown on July 9th at The Criterion Blue Town Cinema and Music Hall in Sheerness, Kent – that’s in the United Kingdom.

A note about Absurd Art House: “We are open to all international films that don’t fit in, don’t want to fit in, or just can’t be categorised to fit in to the norms expected of so many conservative festivals (you know who you are).” 

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Let’s Get Weird

Super-huge thanks to the Holly Weird Film Festival for choosing my short experimental poetry film “Dear Leviathan” as an official selection. Festival will be held July 10, 2022 in North Hollywood. See the official announcement here.

The festival “celebrates independent films of all genres that feature a distinct vision, a unique voice, or an avant-garde challenge to what is expected or accepted. HWFF provides a venue for narrative, documentary, experimental and avant-garde film and video. Holly Weird is dedicated to celebrating all types of creativity from the worldwide independent film community.”

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EA Story Project

May 27, 2022 marked the 40th anniversary of Electronic Arts.

When I worked at EA (1997 – 2012), one of my favorite parts of our Creative Services department (besides the amazing people I worked with) was the Packaging Wall, where we placed (with Velcro) all the covers of the games we worked on. 

People who came by would stop at the wall and say something like, “I remember that game” … or “I didn’t know EA published that game” … or “I loved playing that game.” 

Fast forward about eight years since I left EA to start my own business, I was very thrilled to receive an invitation to lead the EA Story project. Anyone who knows me knows I’m a writer. But on this project, I was fortunate to serve as director, researcher, curator, podcast interviewer, asset wrangler, cat herder, treasure hunter, and, yes, writer. 

As it turns out, we made a Packaging Wall – an interactive-dancing-lightshow-extravaganza of a Packaging Wall, with a matching internal website on steroids.

I view my work on this project as a tribute to all the people throughout the last 40 years who loved working at EA like I did. And I hope EA employees today (and in the future) enjoy, learn from, and are inspired by the experience as they continue to shape and reshape the company.

We rolled out the EA Story project this week. And we’ll continue to update it as Electronic Arts releases new games and achieves new milestones. Many people contributed mightily to this project, and I thank them all from the bottom of my heart.

Happy Anniversary, Electronic Arts. 

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Trigger Finger (Part 2)

I recorded this song (with a lot of help) a few years ago. And here we are again.

America the beautiful   
America the disgrace
America the shithole
Get your gun out of my face

Wake up, politicians
From your silky satin sheets
Stop bending over for your lobby
While more people cry and bleed

From the schoolyard to the graveyard
In the blink of an insane eye
Our kids become our heroes
When they die, baby, die

Blood stains on the playground
Fuck your thoughts and prayers
Do something, anything really
Prove that you care

America the beautiful
America the disgrace
America the shithole
Get your gun out of my face

America
America
America
Get your gun out of my face          

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Apocalyptic Thanks

Many thanks to the End of Days Film Festival for selecting both “Chernobyl” and “Don’t Forget to Pack Your Hand Grenade” for their 2022 festival.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

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On the Radio

Thanks to The Lost Church radio for playing a couple of my songs yesterday.

It was pretty amazing to hear my tunes among all the great songs being played.

I look forward to the day The Lost Church opens their new space in North Beach. Who knows. Maybe I’ll play a gig there???

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Bella Italia

I’m excited to announce that “Then Came the Firestorm” was named a Semi-Finalist this week in the Videopoetry category at the 10th Bologna in Lettere festival.

Here’s some info from the official website about Bologna in Lettere – A Multidisciplinary Festival of Contemporary Literature.

The festival was born from a previous project called “Necessary Literature,” which aimed to eliminate territorial barriers by creating multimedia events. More than 1,500 authors from various backgrounds (poets, writers, critics, philosophers, video artists, musicians, performers, and others) have participated in the previous nine editions of Bologna in Lettere.