F3 Knoxville

Heavy Pyramid Scheme

The Project

THE SCENE: Low 70s, but feeling cooler. Still gloomy as all get out.
F3 WELCOME & DISCLAIMER
WARM-O-RAMA:

  • High knees
  • Projectivators
  • Tempo squats
  • LBACs
  • Michael Felps
  • Tempo Merkins
  • Newton’s cradle

THA-THANG:

  • Pool Wall – 10 Wallpees
  • Play ground – 10 pull ups
  • Mosey to recruiting center, Grab a block, two if available
  • 10 of each exercise, move two parking spots between each, return to start and repeat with 20, then 30 reps.
  • 1 minute plank
  • Lunging no cmu
    • Squats
    • Merkins
    • LBCs
  • 1 minute plank
  • Cusack with one cmu
    • Heavy squats
    • Curls
    • OHP
  • 1 minute plank
  • Farmer carry two cmus
    • Stacked squats
    • Elevated, deep Merkins
    • Double bent over rows
  • RTF

MARY:
One more minute of plank.
COUNT-OFF & NAME-O-RAMA

CIRCLE OF TRUST/BOM:

On Tuesday, Skewer was playing music from Mega Man, and it reminded me of a cool story that I wanted to share. The first Mega Man game was released in 1987 and was universally considered a failure. It sold poorly, it reviewed with mild enthusiasm, and if you have ever played it, you know that this was because it was just not that good. Interesting elements, but nothing came together, generally poorly executed. Consequently, Capcom had not planned to make a sequel, but the director convinced the company to allow them to make the game as long as it didn’t interfere with their other work, i.e. on their own time. So a small team of passionate creators went to work, and one year later released Mega Man 2, which remains the highest selling game in the franchise. This quote sums it up: “So we, of our own accord, got together, spent our own time, we worked really, really hard, you know, just 20-hour days to complete this, because we were making something we wanted to make. Probably in all my years of actually being in a video game company, that was the best time of my working at Capcom, because we were actually working toward a goal, we were laying it all on the line, we were doing what we wanted to do. And it really showed in the game, because it’s a game, once again, that we put all our time and effort and love, so to speak, into it, designing it.”

To me, this is a great story that expresses the power of a small group of people working with passion and commitment on a project. The idea that you need a massive organization with massive funding to accomplish great things seems to be deeply engrained in our cultural psyche, in spite of the niche creator culture that thrives online. So I think it is a good reminder of the power that a Team can possess, unified in purpose, with members freed to lead in their areas of expertise. Big organizations with design teams and bureaucracy can only produce the milk-toast junk that occupies 95% of the modern market, relying on people’s addiction to novelty just to break even.

Real success, resulting from innovation, comes out of a Team. And as Mr. Inafune points out above, it’s the best environment to work in.

MOLESKIN:
Awesome to see Snaggletooth out again, even if he had to jet early.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Family workout Sept. 3rd. Flag handoff Aug 23rd. Iron Pax Challenge in September – Get Ready.