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Tony'sGame Career |
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Tony'sGame Career |
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Mediagenic SSI Lucasfilm Games Sega of America Propaganda CODE SegaSoft Electronic Arts/EA.com Ubi Soft
PROPAGANDA CODE
1996
I was sick of Sega, mainly because I had presented 9 different original designs to upper management to produce and they turned them all down. Also, the Genesis was old, the Sega CD and 32X additions were failing, and Saturn was on the horizon. Things looked grim for that machine (history has proved me right on this one.)*
Rhonda's note: I was excited about the Saturn. Shows what I knew.
Los Angeles lured me into its clutches with dreams of being able to create new, exciting games at a fledgling company called Propaganda Code. The dream died after 8 months, when Phillips Home Media (the parent corporation) went belly up. Rhonda and I came back home.
Propaganda Code was in the offices of Propaganda Films in Hollywood, CA. The division had 10 people, 4 in the main building, and myself and the others I hired (3 programmers, a producer and an artist) in the editing facilities across the street. Since we never got a chance to gel as a group, there really wasn't much of a culture.
Morpheus was originally written as Full Motion Video adventure game. Since the market had gone soft on those, I worked with the designer to create a new design. We struggled with it for months. We had "creative differences" on what it should be. At the time, I thought I was 100% right and he would have to bend. These arguments continued until the company shut down.
Space Dog was a bizarre intellectual property owned by Propaganda Films. Rhonda was designing it as a side job to her writing.
The Prisoner never got off the ground. It was going to be an Online-only project using either the classic Prisoner license, or perhaps an updated one. The best part about working on it and Morpheus was that they started the seed of a new type of game noodling around in my head. One of these days I'll get a chance to produce it...
When the company folded due to Phillips Interactive canceling its "guaranteed" development contract with Propaganda, Morpheus went back to the designer to sell to a different company (he had a good contract, normally a design like that would have been swallowed by the defunct company.)
Time has allowed me to reflect on the arguments we had over that design, and I can now see from his POV it must have been infuriating to have me blow in, second guess his design, make changes and expect him to thank me. I still believe all my comments and changes were the right thing, but I can now understand that just because I thought I was right did not make it so.
SEGASOFT, INC
1996 - 1998
They say you can't go home again, and in a way, I didn't.
In the eight months since I left, Sega of America had shrunk and cast off its old Product Development arm as a new company, SegaSoft. It had new management, and a new directive: PC games and an Internet presence.
I did not intend to return to Sega, but this seemed like a new company with all my old friends working there. I wanted to do something cool with the Internet, and this seemed to be my chance. I joined to produce HEAT.NET -- SegaSoft's idea of what a game network should be. Getting back to a 5 minute commute also appealed to me, after the miseries of the LA traffic.
SegaSoft was in the same building as Sega had been (in fact, I got my old office back) but 80% of the people were new. People worked around the clock there, especially web development in the early days of HEAT.
Heat.net - Internet
Executive Producer and Designer - 1996-1997
Never mind I had no idea how to build a games network...I wanted to do it, and that was good enough for me. I had 4 months to get the system online. At that point, there was nothing but hot air and some basic technologies.
I created a master list of tasks, designed the site, prioritized the list of features and coordinated Marketing, Engineering, Product Development, Legal and Customer Service to ensure we made our date. I also coordinated the external contractor group we brought on to help with the site's content design and back end. Since I was one of the few people who knew everything about HEAT, I also went out on press tours and pushed our slogan -- "HEAT is going to save the world."
I personally produced the first Heat-ported game, DeathDrome. This gem of a game was released a year earlier, but suffered from a number of bad luck issues and almost was forgotten. Mike Latham spotted it, I negotiated a great deal with Zipper (the developer) and within two months we got it running under the new Heat architecture and even added a few features to the game! It was one of four games we were giving away to get people to play on the network.
Another of the four free games broke some new ground. Net Fighter was the first ever Real-time Fighting game over the Internet, that everyone one said was impossible. This game was the brainchild of Michael Latham and Erik Wahlberg, and developed by a company called Syrox. The game worked so well, we would do demos with people in New York and Scotland playing against each other on 56K modems!
Read about and Rate Net Fighter on MobyGames
At the 1997 E3 (the game industry's big convention every May) we premiered the network and I ran myself ragged trying to meet with EVERYONE who wanted to be a part of it. For those three days, I spent EVERY MINUTE in meetings talking to someone. My voice gave out the second day. I was hoarse at our HEAT party, where I was still talking business. It looked like HEAT WAS going to save the world!
HEAT went online in March, 1997, and I was promoted to Director of Product Development and told to hand the day to day business of operating the HEAT network over to a new staff of people hired specifically to manage it. I was now in charge of running product development: managing the ten producers I had making 15 or so games. But I still had my fingers in the HEAT pie, since the success of HEAT was directly tied to the success of the games we were developing for it.
One of these games was called Emperor of the Fading Suns, a "quicky" we picked up from another publisher to finish and make some quick revenue on. Well, the game took another six months to complete due to its complexity, went through another six months of patching and it did not set the market on fire when it released. Oh well.
One of the things I did in an attempt to help the game was write the manual and create a "tech-tree chart" ala Civ II. Despite my best intentions, no one liked the manual and the chart had some incorrect values on it when published (made further incorrect when the patches arrived). This is why I let my wife do the professional writing around here!
(Info about Flesh Feast, Lose Your Marbles, Scud: Industrial Evolution and The Space Bar under construction.)
Go to Moby Game to read about and rate Emperor of the Fading Suns, Flesh Feast, Lose Your Marbles, Scud: Industrial Evolution and The Space Bar
Untitled Adventure Game (unpublished) - PC Internet
Untitled Action Game (unpublished) - PC Internet
Producer and Designer - 1997-1998
I was also busy creating some new games for the HEAT Network. They were both designed to take an existing genre and do something new and exciting, something I think I've been pretty successful with in my career. I created them specifically for Internet play over the HEAT Network, supporting all of the bells and whistle we were developing like secure Tournament and Ladder support.
I cranked out the designs, negotiated the development contracts and managed the milestones to get to the prototypes. Prototypes are the proof-of-concepts that the game's unique designs can work over the Internet and be fun. Once complete, you review them to see if the the idea is worth funding to completion. Overall, the execs liked the gameplay of the prototypes and gave me the go ahead for production. We even showed footage of one of them at E3 as a "coming soon" title.
But when it came time for the yearly budgeting meeting a month later, there was not enough money to do all the games we wanted to. The PD budget was slashed and both of these games were canceled. Once that happened, I knew the end was near...
I hope to resurrect the core ideas of either of these games again in the future. Only time will tell if I get that chance.
Fallout
In February of 1998, SegaSoft decided it couldn't sustain both Product Development and the HEAT network, so they decided to concentrate on HEAT alone. Since I had moved into managing Product Development after the HEAT launch, I was out looking for a job, again.
The irony of this was not lost on me. Here I was the guy who made HEAT a reality, yet I was let go because the people now managing it couldn't make their numbers. This is a lesson I had not QUITE learned yet, and one that would haunt me again in a few years in my next job...
Mediagenic SSI Lucasfilm Games Sega of America Propaganda CODE SegaSoft Electronic Arts/EA.com Ubi Soft
