Online Game Pioneers at Work PDF
Preview Online Game Pioneers at Work
O INTERVIEWS WITH SOME OF THE TOP ONLINE GAME PIONEERS OF OUR TIMEs Morgan Ramsay, the bestselling author of Gamers at Work: Stories Behind the Games People Play and Online Game Pioneers at Work, n has interviewed nearly 50 leaders in entertainment, technology and sports. He is the Founder, President & CEO at Entertainment Media l David Perry Emily Greer Council, the association for business leaders in the video game industry. i n (Gaikai) (Kongregate) Previously, Mr. Ramsay was the Managing Director at Heretic, where he provided communication expertise to various clients, from small e Doug Whatley Ian Bogost businesses to the Fortune Global 500. G (BreakAway Games) (Persuasive Games) a For nearly four decades, video games have captured the imaginations and drawn the ire of people around the world. Actors play them. Rappers promote them. Politicians want to control them. Even baseball legends m make them. Video games are a cultural crossroads where business, entertainment, and technology converge. In Online Game Online Game Pioneers at Work Morgan Ramsay interviews 15 of the most prominent founders in the game e industry whose stories are both fascinating and informative. Sales of video games, hardware, and accessories reach upwards of $20 billion every year in the United P States alone, and more than two-thirds of American households include video games in their daily lives. In a world that seems to be overflowing with fortune and success, the vicious truth of this booming industry is easily i o forgotten: failure is tradition. These candid interviews recount many of the events, the ups and downs that are Pioneers the rule in one of the world’s most brutally competitive industries. n There are a few businesses that have withstood the test of time, with most startups exit as quickly as they enter the scene. In this groundbreaking anthology, successful founders of entertainment software companies re- e flect on their challenges and how they did or did not survive. For the hundreds of thousands of game d evelopers out there, this is a must read survival guide. For those who simply enjoy games and know of some of these e at WORK founders, this will be a most interesting read. r s A T W Victor Kislyi Richard Garriott (Wargaming) (Origin Systems) O Gaute Godager Ilkka Paananen R (Funcom) (Supercell) K Jason Kapalka John Romero (PopCap Games) (id Software) Ray Muzyka Greg Zeschuk R (BioWare) (BioWare) www.apress.com a m US $24.99 Raph Koster Reynir Har arson Shelve in Business/Business Profiles s ð a (Metaplace) (CCP Games) y RELATED TITLE Riccardo Zacconi Neil Young Gamers at Work | Ramsay | 978-1-4302-3351-0 ISBN 978-1-4302-4185-0 (King) (Ngmoco:)) 52499 M O R G A N R A M S A Y 9781430241850 foreword by richard bartle For your convenience Apress has placed some of the front matter material after the index. Please use the Bookmarks and Contents at a Glance links to access them. Contents About the Author vii Foreword ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction xiii Chapter 1: David Perry 1 Chapter 2: Emily Greer 23 Chapter 3: Doug Whatley 43 Chapter 4: Ian Bogost 71 Chapter 5: Victor Kislyi 93 Chapter 6: Richard Garriott 107 Chapter 7: Gaute Godager 169 Chapter 8: Ilkka Paananen 183 Chapter 9: Jason Kapalka 211 Chapter 10: John Romero 231 Chapter 11: Ray Muzyka & Greg Zeschuk 261 Chapter 12: Raph Koster 281 Chapter 13: Reynir Harðarson 315 Chapter 14: Riccardo Zacconi 335 Chapter 15: Neil Young 349 Index 389 Introduction On October 14, 2008, richard Garriott de Cayeux became the first video game developer to travel into space, a journey made possible by a true spirit of adventure and a fortune earned as a role-playing game pioneer and entrepreneur. richard’s fascinating story, from teen game developer to astronaut, is just one of the 15 diverse, detailed, and enlightening interviews with 16 industry leaders in Online Game Pioneers at Work. like Garriott, video games have come a long way over the last 40 years. From the lab to the arcade, and from the arcade to the home, the video game market continues to expand. there are not only new platforms and genres, but new and exciting ways to discover, buy, and play video games. there are, effectively, whole new worlds to explore. the internet has made a significant contribution to the advancement of the video game as an entertainment medium and as a business, connecting a diverse number of players around the world and frequently at scales beyond anything we would have ever imagined. indeed, many of the creative and business leaders in this collection of interviews have at times commented on the pace at which the online game will displace other forms of interactive entertainment. Online games are everywhere. they’re on mobile phones, tablets, and virtual reality headsets. they’re digitally distributed, streamed in real time, and played in web browsers. they’re free-to-play, buy-to-play, and subscriber-only. they’re social, casual, and massively multiplayer; they’re sandboxes, theme parks, and virtual worlds. they’re esports, played by amateur and professional cyberathletes, covered by esPn, and watched by audiences rivaling those for other sports and competitions. more than just an entertainment product category, online games have produced wide-ranging social benefits, too. Online games connect disparate groups of people within safe, virtual spaces, enabling players to communicate, cooperate, and learn together more effectively without the physical and social boundaries that hold us back in the real world. While some developers of serious games construct virtual environments where we can practice vital workplace and emergency response skills, others create online experiences from which we come away better informed. xiv Introduction in Gamers at Work: Stories Behind the Games People Play, published in 2012, i spoke with 18 founders of successful console and PC video game companies about their stories and what we could learn from them. i wanted to learn about the challenges of entrepreneurship, and specifically, how those who had gone before managed to come out alive and on top. With Online Game Pioneers at Work, i continue that good work through interviews with 16 founders of successful online game companies, but with an eye toward the shift to the online future of video games. in this collection, you will enjoy some of the deepest treatments of the business of video games, as well as some of the most exhaustive and illuminating interviews with working founders of major entertainment companies. i hope the questions i’ve asked have revealed insights into online games that you will find informative, uplifting, and never less than entertaining. —morgan ramsay Founder, President & CeO entertainment media Council C H A P T E R 1 David Perry Cofounder, Gaikai After a two-year stint at Virgin Games designing and programming video games such as Disney’s Aladdin, Cool Spot for 7UP, and Global Gladiators for McDonald’s, David Perry founded Shiny Entertainment in 1993. Shiny Entertainment developed a number of hit games, including MDK, Sacrifice, Messiah, Enter the Matrix, and Wild 9, but the studio was best known for Earthworm Jim. Earthworm Jim quickly emerged as a global franchise replete with a TV series produced by Universal Cartoon Studios, a Marvel comic book series, and fast food promotions with the Carls Jr. and Del Taco restaurants. Over the years, Shiny Entertainment has changed hands many times, passing from Interplay to Atari to Foundation 9 and finally to Amazon. In 2009, Perry cofounded Gaikai, a technology enterprise that built the fastest proximity network in the world, enabling gamers to play major video games with only a web browser. Three years later in July, Gaikai set a Guinness World Record as “the world’s most widespread cloud gaming network,” and Sony Computer Entertainment acquired Gaikai for a staggering $380 million. Today, at Sony, Gaikai’s streaming technology powers several key features of the PlayStation 3 and the PlayStation 4. Ramsay: Before you founded Shiny, you worked at Virgin? Perry: Yeah, I grew up in the UK and ended up at Virgin Games in Irvine, California. They had asked me to come out and make a McDonald’s game for them. I ended up making that game, which was called Global Gladiators and won 2 Chapter 1 | David Perry Game of the Year awards. Virgin Games became very interested in trying to see what else we could do. I decided to stay and we ended up making another “advertising” style game called Cool Spot for 7UP. Cool Spot was based on the red dot from the 7UP logo. Sega published that game and then came back to Virgin with the rights to Aladdin. We made Disney’s Aladdin for the Sega Genesis and that, despite an insane timeline, turned out to sell well. So, this little team had generated an awful lot of money for Virgin and Sega. We thought, “Hmm, maybe it’s time to actually think about doing something different here.” At that time, I was offered a job to go work at the Sega Technical Institute. I was very tempted by that, but I ended up also getting an offer from Playmates Toys, the people who made the toys for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. They made a lot of money from the Turtles and were interested in getting into video games, so they asked if I would join to help them do that. I told them, “Well, no, why don’t I start a game company and then you fund it? If you fund it, I’ll give you the first three games.” They agreed, and we ended up with a publisher that was funded and new to video games. They didn’t have strong, preconceived expectations. Playmates really left it up to us to see what we showed up with and they put in a lot of effort to help us find licenses. If you think about it, they were all licensed, so Playmates expected that we’d just make something licensed. We were off talking to all of the studios—Uni- versal, Sony, and others—trying to find rights for a new game. We were get- ting very serious about Knight Rider. Remember David Hasselhoff’s TV show and the talking car? We were looking at different properties, but we couldn’t find the perfect fit. We finally agreed that we would make our own title. That turned out to be Earthworm Jim. Ramsay: Starting a company is arguably more challenging than taking a job. Why didn’t you just go work for them? Perry: I was interested in having a team and doing our own projects. I was less interested in just being an interactive management guy in charge of other people’s properties, making games I wasn’t so interested in. Ramsay: Did you have any experience as an entrepreneur? Perry: Yeah. When I lived in the United Kingdom, I first started at a company called Mikro-Gen. It was a real job, so you had other programmers there and managers. I learned quite a lot there but I was very tempted to see if I could go it alone. I did go it alone and started developing games myself. I put together a team and we made a game called “Beyond the Ice Palace” for five different platforms. I realized that it’s hard when you’re relying on other people. When you’re just one person, you can get stuff done but when you’ve got five people, you’re responsible for the output of all of them. It was hard, I was naive. I found that to be not so fun. I only did it one time and then I went back Online Game Pioneers at Work 3 to working for somebody else. So, I flipped back to something in between, which seemed like a safe happy zone, where you’ve got some structure around you, but on the other hand, you get to really build and do whatever you really want to do. I like that. Ramsay: Was starting Shiny Entertainment within your comfort zone? Perry: I don’t know what it is about me, but I tend not to think too much before I act. If I sat and thought about it, I might have been able to talk myself out of it. I’d have found all these reasons to not move forward. I call it “point- ing at the hurdles.” You see all these hurdles and you just sit there and point at them: this is a problem, that’s a problem, and this is a problem. If you don’t do that and just start moving forward, usually you find yourself on the other side, wondering what happened. You don’t even see the hurdles as you’re just going through this whole process. Whatever it takes, it’s just the next step, the next step, the next step, and then, finally, you’re at the end of the track. You’ve built a company and you’ve had to do whatever was necessary. If you needed to raise money, you just did. If you needed to meet certain people in Hollywood, you just did. You found a way. That’s what I like. No matter the stuff we’ve done, and the people we’ve worked with, I don’t know if you could necessarily plan it. Ramsay: Did you have a business plan? Perry: No, we did not have a real business plan but we had worked out what it would cost for the team to make a game. We were surprisingly accurate. We had this running joke about how accurate that actually turned out to be because we had made our best effort at working out all of the costs and it actually worked out. It wasn’t a business plan though, in the sense of having fully worked out our marketing strategy and everything else. There were other people taking care of those pieces for us. We didn’t have a plan that you would use to raise money or something like that. It was a little lighter. In fact, we didn’t need a formal plan. That really wasn’t necessary for the publisher we were with. Our plan was simple: this is how much it will cost to get the game done. They just wanted to have that game, so they weren’t really worrying about how much money we were making. They were more worried about what they were going to do on their end and if it made sense for them. It wasn’t as hard to raise money then as it probably is today. But if you find someone who wants the product, you’d probably still have the same situation today. You’ve just got to find someone who wants it and has their own plans for the software. There is a lot less friction then and it’s not like you’re trying to twist anyone’s arm. 4 Chapter 1 | David Perry Ramsay: Instead of a plan, you had a clear vision of where you wanted to take your company? Perry: We had a general idea about how we would do an animated game with the team we had. The team was very, very good at 2D pencil drawn animation. We had done multiple games in a row that scored very high in graphics, so we’d gotten to a point where that was expected of us. We had to deliver something that was graphically very good. Luckily, we had enough talent to deliver. Earthworm Jim received multiple Game of the Year awards. But it wasn’t like we were just focusing on making role-playing games, simula- tions, or something else. It was very clear that we were going to make some kind of action-oriented animated platform game. The team had a funky style of humor as well, which permeated the final experience. Ramsay: Was there a point where Shiny Entertainment was just you? Perry: I was “technically” the original founder but a bunch of people joined me from Virgin. There were a few new people who joined shortly thereafter. It wasn’t like I was sitting in an office with nobody and then slowly trying to recruit people one after another. There was a group of guys who wanted to work together right away. As the founder, I was responsible for the company; however, I really should have sought advice. Let’s just say there was a lot of learning by making mis- takes. The rule I follow now is just to not repeat mistakes. Ramsay: What kind of commitment did you make? Perry: Payroll was my biggest concern, so we had to deliver. If I had sat back and thought about it all upfront, I might have not moved forward. The trick is to be able to pivot when something isn’t working. You’ve got to be able to pivot and deal with it in real time. If something’s taking too long, costing too much, or you didn’t get the people you wanted, it’s up to you to find a way to solve that problem in real time. Ramsay: Did you have a family at that time? Perry: I did, but no children. It’s funny. It’s another sort of meta theme of the video-game business. The video-game business takes up just about all of your life. The wives and girlfriends were always coming to the office because, at that time, there was no real external life. It’s just work, work, work, work. There’s a movie called Indie Game: The Movie. Have you seen that yet? You should check that out. It’s a really good way to see behind the scenes of people making games. You could see how much fun it is. You can also see how much spare time they look like they have. It just becomes a way of life. Online Game Pioneers at Work 5 Ramsay: Who were some of the people who came over from Virgin? Perry: There were super talented people like Nick Bruty, Mike Dietz, Nick Jones, Steve Crow, Ed Schofield, Andy Astor, Tom Tanaka, etc. It was a small group. I think we hit around nine. Doug TenNapel was a new hire. He wasn’t from the original team, but he came up with the Earthworm Jim character, which was exactly what we needed at the time. If you look at the credits of Earthworm Jim, you’ll see all the people who helped make it. Ramsay: Had you worked with these people before? Perry: Not all of them. I worked with Nick Bruty for many years. I worked with Mike Dietz at Virgin. I worked with Nick Jones before in the UK. We had an artist called Steve Crow who was also British. The group was reasonably closely knit. We definitely weren’t like a bunch of strangers. Ramsay: Did you have to really convince anyone to join you? Perry: There was one guy who I was trying to get: Christian Larsen. I was very frustrated that I couldn’t convince him to join. He was a key person I really wanted and didn’t get. He was the fish that got away. He did the graphics for the Jungle Book video game for Disney and his graphical ability at the time was just remarkable. He had started a company with somebody else and had to see that through. I still wish he had joined us. Ramsay: When you brought on the first nine people, you hadn’t done any real planning but you knew why you wanted those people. Perry: Yeah, you just believe in the people. I think the industry is still that way. Gaikai was formed the same way. You find talent, you bet on the talent, and the talent sets out to make something good. It’s just a case of working out what that is. With really great people, you can make something fresh. The real challenge is not the idea; it’s finding the talent to make it. Once you find them, hold on tight; you’ll get some really good stuff. That’s what happens. Ramsay: Some game developers want to start a business to make games, so they operate with the expectation that their first game is just one of many to come. Others build teams for that first game and that’s all they care about until they’re forced to care about something else. The difference is subtle but it’s there. Which were you? Perry: Yeah, I agree. The company was not relevant. It was not about the company at all. The company was a function to make games. There was no one who aspired to build a business. They were all about just making games and getting the next game done and hoping people like it. We very much had a focus on the next game and “this new hook is going to be cool!”
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