The first time I met James Mielke, there was a whale involved. A space whale, more precisely, a galaxy in length from head to tail, swimming through the glittering firmament and basking in the rays from a billion distant suns. Sure, this whale had seen better days: it was covered with bright, glossy shards of cosmic infection, and as I scoured the infection away the whale began to sing to me. Each of those shards on its flesh triggered a single individual sound file – the whole thing was a sequencer of sorts. But it was also never less than a whale, a space whale, alive and playful in the deep. Once I had cleaned its back, it even rolled over so I could get to its noble belly.
This was in Tokyo, somewhere around 2010, and Mielke was a producer at Q Entertainment and working on Child of Eden, the studio’s glorious and strangely timeless Kinect game. Eight years later, I met Mielke again – in Camden this time. And this time there were dolphins involved. Two of them.
It was hot that day, but as soon as I pulled on the PSVR headset, the heat seemed to vanish. I was suddenly floating in a white-box world, the contours of the landscape around me rippling gently with the currents. I looked up, and white-box London loomed overhead, its oligarch towers tilted and crusted, in places, with scatterings of white-box coral. I moved forward tentatively and the London Eye, hopelessly collapsed, suddenly arced woozily over the lip of a deep canyon trench. There is a point in a 3D game’s development where they look classical and serene like this. I always think it must be hard to then cover all that pure, blinding geometry up with textures.
Source: Eurogamer Jupiter & Mars is a VR treat with a vital message