Nervous Testpilot Meets "Vogel" - The LucasArts Speedrunning Man

"SVGA Bigfoot Watch" looked likely to take Game of the Year.

What drives an otherwise perfectly normal man to an insane frenzy of LucasArts speedrunning? “Vogel” has now secured his place in internet lore with his strange behaviour (people at university even recognise him from the videos), he has left certain sectors of the world asking simply, “Why?”

It was my pleasure to put this penetrating and vitally important question to him, as well as a whole cluster of completely asinine ones.

"OK, scented candles and emulators are SO out."

"I don't want to make the people think I'm a freak,” says Vogel, about his evident immersion in game culture, “but when you're listening to music from fifteen-year-old games and painting pictures of Guybrush, Day of the Tentacle and so on, you pretty much have to love that shit, don't you?

“I started playing Maniac Mansion with some friends back in 1990 at the age of ten and I can remember that we had serious problems solving the game, it nearly took us five months to finish. Until 2000 I kept on playing every adventure game I could get, but since then there’s been a big gap. I guess Monkey Island 4 somehow stopped me playing these games. The earlier games provided the player with a ‘real’ story and character interaction; the music was great too, and all the games have great tunes that created a cool atmosphere.”

Despite becoming jaded with the state of the games industry, Vogel found another way of satisfying his lust for more of the pointing and the clicking through messing around with a camera:

“It happened totally by chance. I found that function on my camera to create interval recordings, like 1/2 second recording every minute. I filmed it combined with a clock and had a time attack. Voila.”

With his gaming partner Jörn (him of the “I’m With A Nerd” sign) he’s created about six other videos in the same mould. But what of the future? At the moment, he’s into TrackMania Sunrise and Farenheit, but his video output might take a new direction: “I want to create a video of how to paint favourite computer game scenes or characters in acrylic on a canvas. This is the next thing to do. But, hey, maybe I should do a KingsQuest and SpaceQuest time attack!”

Despite his new-found fame he still continues to protest normality: “I'm a pretty normal guy. No superduper hardcore gamer.”

Vogel would like to thank everybody “who got to this point of the interview” and invites the reader to offer him feedback and suggestions - vogel@mx23.de