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Tony'sProduced Games |
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Mediagenic SSI Lucasfilm Games Sega of America Propaganda CODE SegaSoft Electronic Arts/EA.com Ubi Soft
ELECTRONIC ARTS
1998 - 1999
My experience on the HEAT Network brought me to Electronic Arts. I took a job there as a Producer for the brand-new Online Division. EA had hit it big with Ultima Online and were ready to expand into more online games. And I was ready to do them!
I wanted badly to get back to making games. It had been over three years since I produced my last game. More importantly, I had wanted to work at EA for as long as I could remember. At last, I would make games for EA. Or so I thought...
The Electronic Arts office in Redwood Shores, CA, is even closer to my house then SegaSoft was (by a 1/4 mile!). EA is a massive company. There are about 800 employees in the EARS buildings alone, and EA has eight other offices around the world!
Need For Speed III Network Play System (unpublished)- Java Internet
Producer and Designer - 1998-1999
No games for me after all, at least not for another year. Turns out the job they were offering me was not in Studio, but in Online Engineering, which meant I was not making games, I was to be working on support systems for the games. OK, it gets my foot in the door, I thought.
I was hired to produce and design an advanced, server-based matchmaker system for EA's next generation multiplayer games. The game we were going to implement first was Need for Speed III.
Man, was this a hard project to get any traction on. I don't want to go into all of the reasons, but let's just say its impossible to do your job when no one gives you the responsibility or authority to do it. Though pure determination I got the team to a functioning Alpha build on time, but ultimately the project would be canceled (for numerous reasons to lengthy to list.)
Actually that's not quite true. The underlying network server code (separate from the Java matchmaker code) survived and was developed and released to support some EA Canada games, including three Hunting games and Motor City Online.
Online Matchmaker System - Java Internet
Producer and Designer - 1998-1999
While I worked on the NPS stuff above, I also I took on the additional tasks of producing and designing the Java matchmaking sites for EA's key PC multiplayer games: Alpha Centaruri, The Jane's combat simulation series (six different games), Triple Play, Populous: The Beginning and NASCAR.
This was perhaps the most unfulfilling job I've ever had in my entire career, simply because it was a total dead-end. Since this matchmaker system was not part officially part of the game, the Studios wanted nothing to do with it. And since it was a free service, it had no revenue so no one wanted to enhance it to make it better. So I would deal with it every day, and get no satisfaction for keeping it going except my own personal pride.
While I was working in Online Engineering, I was trying to get transferred to either the Studio (where retail games are made) or the new Online Network divisions (where subscription-based online games would be made). I was unsuccessful in getting a Studio job, and idea of an EA Online Network was constantly being re-thought.
After a year of gritting my teeth, I could see my job in the Online Engineering department was on the verge of collapsing. I had to make a push to get out of this department NOW. I set a meeting with the President of the company, and told him my talents were being wasted - I needed to be producing games, and pulled out 4 game designs I could produce, given the chance. Through the strength of my presentation and a dash of being in the right place at the right time, he transferred me to EA.com.
EA.com
1999 - 2001
EA.com began life as EASports.net, then later evolved into the concept of EA.com. EA.com came about during the dot.com boom, when every dot.com company would IPO and its stock would rise. This was the reason EA created EA.com, and it explains a lot about its ultimate fate.
The strategy of the network was to become the EBay and Amazon of the gaming world. The idea was to create 4 "channels" of games: leverage EA Sport's strength to have a Sports Channel, create a bunch of popular games like Hearts and Bingo and make a Popular Channel, experiment with some hip and trendy game ideas like "the dating game" for the Lounge Channel, and make some serious hard core games and charge people $9.99 a month to play them on on the Games Channel (originally called Worlds.)
In the frenzy to hire executive staff to make decisions that would seal our fate for the next two years, my experience at HEAT.net was overlooked. It's too bad, since EA.com made the SAME mistakes we did at HEAT.net, but multiplied fourfold. Bottom line... we did too much too fast, and assumed people would pay for whatever we put up.
At its height, we had about 500-600 people working at EA.com, which was HQed in the Redwood Shores offices. Origin Studios (in Texas) and Kesmai Studios (in Virginina) were separated from EA and made EA.com studios.
Trading Card Baseball (aka Dream Deck Baseball) - PC Internet (unpublished)
Producer and Designer - 1999-2000
Man, this is a long, sad story. I have to wait a while to tell this one.
But it would have been a great game...
I started this game when I was in EASports.net. I had seen the tabletop game Chronology years ago, and I always thought it was a great idea for a online trivia game. The game mechanic is so simple: You answer questions like: Did the Gold Rush come before or after the invention of Coca Cola? That's pretty easy, before. But now, did the invention of potato chips come before the gold rush, between the gold rush and Coca Cola, or after Coca Cola? As you guess correctly, your answers build a "timeline" and as it grows, it's harder to make guesses.
I proposed two games, a sports version and an entertainment version. I made the pitch to my boss, who agreed to ask EA.com management if they liked the idea, who liked it. We negotiated the online rights, and off we went. I hired my good friend Victor Penman at Evermore Entertainment to do what was to be a quick six month online game.
Adrianne Canfil, one of my associate producers, did the day-to-day production of the game and did a great job adding in elements of style and fun. She convinced me to add music to the game, as well as voice directed the actor who read the lines like "Welcome to Chronology!" and "Your Turn!"
For numerous reasons (all out of Evermore's control), the Chronology Sports took well over a year to complete. To make matters worse, as soon as it was Open Beta, EA.com made the decision to switch its trivia games to Pogo.com, where Chronology's technology was incompatible.
Thus, this gem of a game never got a chance to shine.
Silent Death Online - PC Internet
Channel Senior Producer - 1999-2001
Click picture to see Video (5 MB)
This game had been online for a year and a half on GameStorm and then AOL. It had a loyal but small following. I had played this game back on GameStorm, and thought it was really cool (click the video on the left to see why.) I fought to keep it alive when EA.com tried to kill it 3 different times. I saw a chance to grow the audience on EA.com
David Gray, the other of my associate producers, also saw a lot of potential with the game, and its developers Mythic Entertainment. He worked hard with them to upgrade the game, make is safe from hackers, and keep the community happy.
But it was like swimming upstream. A number of issues prevented Silent Death from growing, despite incredible work by David Gray (aka "Roslof"), who's deeds I unfortunately cannot detail at this time.
Air Warrior III: Millennium Version - PC Internet
Channel Senior Producer - 2000-2001
Click picture to see Video (4 MB)
AW3 was another game that had a long online life before coming to EA.com. It was the ORIGINAL online flight simulator (created in 1987!) and was Kesmai Studios' passion. A number of factors (both before and after Kesmai's acquisition) hampered AW3's development, which hurt customer growth. Of special note was the HUGE miscalculation EA.com made. TWO days before going live, EA.com management laid off a number of Kesmai employees, including all but one of the AW Support staff! This shook the AW community to the core, and a third of the player base quit in disgust, with many more being very hostile towards EA.com in general.
So we had a tough road ahead of us. Despite the setbacks, we had a few successes:
1) We had a great turnout for the "Pearl Harbor: What If" event, based on the concept of what if America had scrambled fighters to intercept the Japanese just before the surprise attack. Kesmai had run the event many times before, always to a "full house" of 300 people in the air at once.
I pushed to get this event up around the release of the movie Pearl Harbor (which at that time had tremendous buzz behind it.) My strategy was to gain visibility via some free PR due to this "hook" and it worked... we received coverage on national news sources such as GameSpot, Yahoo and CNN.com!
Steve "Mage" Lackey quickly planned and organized the event, which ran flawlessly. I logged on and played on the American's side (flying a Wildcat that launched off the USS Enterprise!) and Adrianne and Allen Reese (our online community manager) played on the Japanese side. It was a rush to be flying over Battleship Row, fighters everywhere! By the end of the event, the US crushed the Japanese attack (although the Americans were outnumbered 2 to 1!) It was one of the coolest online events I'd ever been part of, and the reason why the online experience is really unique!
2) Kesmai worked hard to upgrade the game as best as possible, especially under the resource constraints. This included fixing a number of performance and crash bugs, as well as general game tweaks. They also instituted some online tutorial arenas, where new players could log on and train against "limited AI" planes. While not "successful" in increasing it's subscribers, I think it was a tremendous step forward in easing the tremendous learning curve, something other online games should learn from.
3) The entire staff (including Arnold Hendricks, the game's Sr. Producer and myself) worked together on the design for Air Warrior 4, which was REALLY cool.
But alas, it was not to be. While EA and EA.com top brass found the design interesting and the prototype very nice, they did not believe a online WWII flight sim could bring in the hundreds of thousands of players to justify it.
Multiplayer BattleTech: 3025 - PC Internet
Channel Senior Producer and Designer - 1999-2001
Click picture to see Video (9 MB)
This is another hard one to talk about at this time, so maybe there will be more on this in the future. But for now, Here's the good stuff: We had over 20,000 people playing the free beta, and we NEVER officially announced it! And they loved it (check out the video to the left.)
The entire game was only 15 megabytes! Only the online savvy of Kesmai could figure out how to make a game that looks this good that small!
Finally, the MPBT core online community was incredible. I had a great time at Gencon, where we hosted a BattleTech Community night, where 200 die-hard fans had dinner together and got to talk with me, Kesmai, Jordan Weisman (BattleTech's creator) and others associated with the BattleTech games.
Shutdown
On October 23rd, I was laid off from EA.com with 250 others. Was I surprised? Sure! I had 3 of the top 5 subscription games on the site, and was brining in roughly 50% of the revenue each month! I assumed that would be perceived as valuable, and they would want to keep me and my associate producers for something else. But I was incorrecto.
So once again I hit the pavement, looking for work. Unfortunately, with the recent dot.com crashes and 9/11 just behind us, the economy and basic employment was way down.
Worse, as one rises in experience and position, it becomes even harder to find a job at a comparable level. In fact, it would be over 6 months until I found my next job...
Mediagenic SSI Lucasfilm Games Sega of America Propaganda CODE SegaSoft Electronic Arts/EA.com Ubi Soft
