SAN FRANCISCO — Big-name videogame designers are thinking small.
Creators of legendary games of the ’80s and ’90s like Sinistar and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade are increasingly working on social games like those found on Facebook, largely because the development of popular time-wasters like FarmVille closely mirrors the creative process that drove the early days of gaming: small teams, short production schedules and more creative autonomy for designers.
“It feels to me like 1981 or 1982,” said designer Brenda Brathwaite at a Game Developers Conference panel here Tuesday afternoon. Brathwaite worked on the classic Wizardry role-playing games and is now creative director at San Francisco social media company Slide. “I remember, early in my career we would make a game in six months. I love the idea of just putting a game together with a small group of people. I can’t imagine anything I’d rather do.”
As videogame hardware has gotten more powerful and gamers’ expectations of quality have grown, game budgets have ballooned in recent years. One estimate pegged Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’s budget at between $40 million and $50 million. Meanwhile, social game companies are reaching millions of users with games designed by small teams, sometimes in a matter of weeks.
For gamers, having designers with so much experience working on social games is bound to bring higher levels of quality. David Crane, the creator of classic Activision games like Pitfall!, is doing iPhone apps. Ultima creator Richard Garriott is turning his attention to Facebook with a high-end game platform called Portalarium.
“It’s becoming acceptable to make smaller games again,” said game designer Eskil Steenberg, one of the developers at the conference who is talking about the move away from big-budget games. “We used to be at a point where everything went triple-A, but now indie scenes and all these kind of games are taking off, and it lets you work alone.”
Steenberg is at GDC showing off a work in progress called Love, a one-man project on which he is artist, programmer and designer all in one. He says he savors working on the smallest of small teams.
“There’s no office politics,” he said. “You don’t have to communicate with anybody about anything.”
A bit extreme, perhaps, not to mention impossible for anyone who doesn’t have Steenberg’s many talents. But the designers at GDC who are gravitating toward small teams share many of his feelings.
Steve Meretzky, who created cult classic text adventures like Zork Zero: The Revenge of Megaboz and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, took a job with social game publisher Playdom in 2008 after becoming frustrated with how even smaller, casual games were becoming bloated. He spent two years working on the game World of Zoo, and in that time it was only two-thirds finished. “Working really, really long years to get a single product done … (was) a pace of game development that was a lot less satisfying,” he said.
Noah Falstein, who began his career working on the Atari 2600 and created the classic arcade shooter Sinistar, said that he had a “feeling of being increasingly detached” as game design got more complicated. “GDC was getting really depressing for me because everybody was talking about these $20 [million to] $30 million games,” he said.
Falstein was depressed not only because bigger teams made game design a more fractured creative process, but also because the big budgets brought significant risk aversion.
“Nobody wants to (take risks) on the gameplay side,” he said. “You end up with World War II first-person shooters and science fiction first-person shooters. With this new explosion, there’s a much smaller monetary risk…. It suddenly frees you up to be much more creative.”
Since social game design brings with it new challenges — connecting players to their friends is as important as the game itself — it’s not as if these industry veterans are resting on their laurels. And that’s why experience is so important in this emerging medium, argued Falstein: When you’ve been creating games since Atari’s heyday, you’re used to having to learn and adapt to rapidly changing technology just to keep your head above water.
“It does take a certain level of experience,” he said.
Photo: Left to right: Noah Falstein, Brian Reynolds, Brenda Brathwaite and Steve Meretzky speak Tuesday afternoon at Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
Jon Snyder/Wired.com
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Deviating from the way we would expect Sega to mark the 32X’s 15th anniversary — by trying really hard to forget about the 32X, just like every year — the company has announced a CD full of music from 32X games. The Super 32X 15th Anniversary Album includes what looks to be all the tracks from Space Harrier, Stellar Assault, Virtua Racing Deluxe, Parasquad, Metal Head, and Virtua Fighter, all as they sounded on the 32X.
Sega celebrates 32X with soundtrack CD originally appeared on Joystiq on Sat, 20 Mar 2010 01:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
