Conduit’s very own Jeff Johnson starts his summer tour with Thief Thief this week! He’ll be continuing to do some work for us on the road, between visits to sleazy motels and snacks of beef jerky.

We’re all terribly excited for Jeff as this has been a goal of his for some time. If you like instrumental, progressive rock—or if you just love going to a show and having tons of fun—I definitely recommend checking them out.

And as you watch Jeff play guitar, consider that this is only his second most impressive talent after engineering, and you’ll believe that Conduit has a bright future ahead of it.

Best of luck, Jeff! And for those of you in the Boston area, I’ll see you at O’Brien’s in Allston on Tuesday night! Check thiefthief.com for other dates across the country.

Quickie post. A particularly sweet glitch in our render tech we’ve dubbed the ‘cubism bug’ reduces our characters to postmodern mulch. Enjoy.

Dan Ogles is going to be speaking today at Interplay in San Francisco. The rest of our team couldn’t make it as we are cranking away and have a playtest session this evening. But we just found out that they will be streaming the event live on Ustream.

Dan, we want you to know we’ll be cheering/heckling you live from our offices, even if you can’t hear it.

Today an award arrived at our office for winning the top 100 startups in the Northeast. We of course welcome the encouragement despite being a little uncertain as to the criteria of “top.” Since virtually nothing is known about us except our logo, we felt the award was best served to be given to the artists. We totally hope the awards keep rolling in when the products do.

We’ve got a small but representative contingent that will be at the Game Developers Conference next week in San Francisco. Drop us a line if you’re interested in being hired, partnered with, or otherwise talking your way into a sneak peak demo of what we are up to here. Folks with high Rock Band ratings will be given priority, or course.

Email Nabeel, Damon, or Jason at our firstname@conduitlabs.com

First off, if you haven’t played Rock Band, play it, and if you don’t have it, get it. It may be the best party game ever made (rivaling Death Tank Zwei for the honor, anyway). And I’m not just saying that because we have two people here at Conduit who worked on it. If you like music (and that’s pretty much everyone, right?), then you will have fun. It’s so much fun we held off on setting it up in the office until we had finished launching a little Facebook toy we built called Make Me, knowing it would be impossible not to play once it was here.

My younger brother once told me that Sorry! is one of his favorite games, because inevitably, after a game, the players would hate each other for hours. Sometimes days. I mean, how powerful is that? A bunch of silly rules and plastic pieces moving into our lives, evoking real, outside-of-the-game emotions and putting strains on real-world relationships.

Rock Band is that kind of powerful. This story at the Escapist captures what a good game can do perfectly:

“This is not the revolution; it’s just something like it. It’s not about games. It’s about music. It’s a new way of listening, of trying to get in, like following the lyrics in the album sleeve or clumsily learning the chords on a beat-up guitar in the hopes of one day being that guy at a party who impresses the girls who might like the song as much as you do.”

If you can take the time, read through the whole story and count how many times actual gameplay is mentioned—hardly any! It’s about relationships that form through gameplay. Like just a couple weeks ago I was playing Rock Band with some friends; my friend Misty is our bass player. We get to a song with a particularly tricky bass line, and
she fails and we lose it. Stacie takes over for her, and manages to get through it.

“I don’t want to play anymore,” Misty says. “You guys seem to be doing FINE with Stacie on bass.” I sit down on the couch next to her. “Misty, listen to me. Boys Boning Boys is not Boys Boning Boys without you on bass. We need you.”

Misty looks up with these puppy dog eyes, “Really?”.

Needless to say, Misty came back and played, and we rocked. This was one of the most awesomely surreal and hilarious experiences of my life. I love it… and it’s what Rock Band is all about.

Finally, Moving Day! On August 31, 2007 we packed up our computers, took pictures of our notes on the white boards, and stacked our kitschy toys onto our desks. One by one we rolled our stuff into the service elevator and ascended. No longer would we be sharing a small windowless closet that barely fit four desks and four chairs that we have been in since April. It was the first tangible change since we got funding, finally I could back up my chair and not bump into anyone.

Upon opening the door of our new space, golden rays of sun poured through the door and into the room as if the gods themselves were welcoming us to Mt Olympus. I’m sure if we were quieter we could have heard the herald call of an angel choir, but in our giddiness, we drowned out any other sounds. The back wall is an entire window that looks westward toward Central and Harvard Sq. The other walls are modern with aluminum and glass while the loft like ceiling provides much head room for the taller members of the team. Could this space BE more perfect?

Well, it turns out that, yes — it actually could. What became apparent nearly immediately was that that we had already out grown this space and we hadn’t even been in the office for an hour. The next 3 hours could only be described as company-wide battle Tetris with 10 desks, 10 chairs and a ridiculous number of filing cabinets. For some reason the CIC folks continued to bring us a couple filing cabinets every few minutes.

To add insult to injury, the CEO of the company next to us stopped by to tell us that “You guys will be able to hear us as much as we can hear YOU!” Was this a “welcome to the 14th floor or were those fightin’ words?” Chill out guy, we’re moving in. What’s more is that Linden Labs, creators of Second Life, are two doors down and they have TONS of room, however we rarely see more than a third of their chairs filled at any one time. In fact, there have been times when we have walked by their offices in the middle of the day and don’t see ANYONE in there. Where are they and why are they hoggin’ the office space?

Well anyways, we have been in our new space for 2 weeks now and our tenth hire starts tomorrow. We are all pretty psyched. Over the next couple months we will ramp up the new hires, dive into production and look for a larger office space. Until then, the office chairs will continue to crash into each other, elbows will be rubbed, and some folks will have to suck it in to let others pass by.

Intruders.TV came by the offices here in Cambridge and sat down outside our kitchen to chat about Conduit Labs. Strangely, they don’t have embeddable video (they’ve heard of YouTube right?) but the link is below.