Steampunking Our Future: An Embedded ... - cdn.oreilly.com

22 | STEAMPUNKING OUR FUTURE: AN EMBEDDED HISTORIAN’S NOTEBOOK
“I was the same age,” he smiled. " I would have seen it a year later because New
Zealand was a year behind in the movies at that point.”
“So I always had that love for that science fiction from that era,” he continued.
“And particularly for some reason the ray gun. I love weapons in general and
something about the ray gun is really appealing. I think it’s the overtly designed
nature of them. So I drew a bunch of them, probably back in the 90s. I did them
as little sketches and I even talked about them to a friend of mine who had a clothing
label putting them on a sweatshirt or something like that. Then I just sort of shelved
the thing. I just left it for a bunch of years.”
“So what happened?” I asked.
“I managed to get a job at Weta and that was a massive changing point in my
life,” he replied. “I had been unemployed for all of my adult life and all of a sudden
had an income and this amazing job. And even though I suddenly had the best
job in the world, I just got itchy feet and needed to create my own original stuff.
So he made ray guns. Okay, not real ray guns.
Greg reminisced, “I painted these ray guns for my wall. I did nine of them, in 3
x 3 grids and I popped them up on the wall. Richard Taylor, who owned ideas for
merchandize at Weta, was asking: ‘Has anyone got any original ideas they want to
try out?' So I said, ‘We should make these ray guns. They look cool, they would be
fun.’
It kept building from there.
Greg: “We should do them in tin boxes.”
Richard: “What about in an old jewelry case?”
Greg: “Yeah, yeah. They should be velvet lined and they could have all those
little accouterments. We could have a manual with it.”
It was a pivotal moment of creative synchronicity. Greg pitched his ideas, and
Richard filled in the blanks. “He was immediately, ‘Oh this is one of those things
that makes sense. You make a gun, you put it in a jewelry case.’ He could instantly
see the product.”
“Well, you knocked it out of the park.” I said, thinking of Cory Doctorow’s office
and the proud place one of Greg’s ray guns occupied in it. “They have become
tremendously aspirational items. Having one of those is a mark of a serious invested
geek.”
“Yeah, to buy a crazy expensive gun,” he chuckled. “It’s not like we even make
a lot of money out of the guns. The guns are expensive to produce, even though we
are making them as cheap as possible. What we have done is really art. There is no
way we can make this a commercial product—it has to be a piece of art, because