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What happened with X-Com (interview)

Araanor

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http://dynamic3.gamespy.com/~thelastout ... php?art=57
http://dynamic3.gamespy.com/~thelastout ... php?art=58
http://dynamic3.gamespy.com/~thelastout ... php?art=59

Three-part interview, the first is mostly about Dave Ellis himself, the second about Interceptor and the third about Genesis. Altough I don't like all the design decisions they made about the game it looked promising.

There are some juicy bits at the end:
Cyke: How did it all come to an end? Was it very sudden or a sinking realization over weeks before a confirmation?

Dave: When Hasbro Interactive bought MicroProse, our studio head in Chapel Hill (Mike Denman) told all of us that we should read a book called Toy Wars by G. Wayne Miller. The book is a fascinating history of Hasbro, and concentrates on its rivalry with Mattel. When Mike read the book, he was impressed with the business skills of Hasbro and came away thinking that we were in good hands.

When I read the book, I knew we were doomed.

Among other things, the book talks about how Hasbro had tried to enter the software/video game business twice prior to the formation of Hasbro Interactive. In each case, tens of millions of dollars were poured into the effort and, when the software division didn’t turn a profit in a year or two, it was shut down.

Hasbro Interactive had had great success with the translation of Hasbro board and family games to electronic form, but these games had development cycles of 3-6 months. MicroProse games had average development cycles of 18-24 months. I knew from the start that Hasbro wasn’t prepared for these long cycles, and I knew that they’d get impatient when the profits didn’t start flowing.

In other words, I saw it coming from a long way off. I said so at the time, but not a lot of people bought it at the time.

Fast-forward to December 7, 1999. I was in my office working on the Genesis design document when Wayne Harvey, Eric Peterson, and Marc Racine walked into my office and shut the door behind them. They said, “Dave, you were right! The IS guys from Hunt Valley are here, and so is Tony Parks (vice-president of Hasbro Interactive). They’re shutting us down!”

And that, as they say, was that. We hung around to shut down (and play Quake) for another month or so and, on January 17, 2000, the doors to the Chapel Hill office were locked forever.




Cyke: In your own words, what killed Genesis, and what of the game had been done?

Dave: Genesis (and the other project Chapel Hill was working on) was killed when Hasbro Interactive shut down the studio. It’s as simple as that. They shut down the studio, and the projects went with it.

At that time, about 75-80% of the design document was complete and we had a semi-playable demo. A Geoscape that could be zoomed and spun and a game clock were basically all that were done of the strategy portion. As for combat, we had one test level that we were constantly adding to for research and testing purposes. We had an X-COM squad that you could move around anywhere, a lot of buildings, a couple of stationary aliens, and a lot of lighting effects. The AI programmer, Chris Nash, was just starting to work on the pathfinding system for the troops at the time.

We were ahead of schedule, and everything was looking really good. We were originally scheduled for a spring, 2001 release.



Cyke: Initially, Hasbro Interactive claimed they would continue with the game's development, but they didn't. Did you ever hear of any hope for it to be continued, even under another team?
Dave: I believe that was a smokescreen to try and save face a bit on the part of Hasbro Interactive. Either that or the person who issued the press release wasn’t aware of the entire situation.
The reason that Hasbro Interactive shut down our studio was to save money and to write off some of their losses to “restructuring and reorganization”. As I understand it, in order to write off those losses, they had to cancel the projects the studio was working on and never use the code, art, and so on that was produced for those projects. What that means is that Genesis was dead and had to remain so, legally, in order for the company to write off their losses.
I’m pretty sure that this carries over to Infogrames now that they own Hasbro’s properties.

Don't you just love those suits?
 

Saint_Proverbius

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Well, Hasbro is rather foolish. They should have made X-Com:Genesis turn based and completed it for one simple reason, which should be obvious to anyone at Hasbro. Make a smashingly great video game with X-Com - which has a successful name, then work on table top rules for it. Since table top requires turn based play, it would have mirrored the way the game played. You'd end up drawing in table top wargamers to the video game, and video gamers to the table top wargame.

The ruleset for the table top would have had very little developmement overhead, since that would have already been completed by the video game. Just streamline the rules a bit for table top play, write a basic set of rules with the statistics of everything. From there, you have merchandising galore with bonus rule sets, more books covering weapons and aliens, minitures, and so on. Use those add on rules to fuel the development of an expansion to Genesis or even a sequel.

Hasbro, better than most companies, had the assets to do all that. They could not only expand their video game license that way, but also expand in to table top strategy and role playing as well. They already have board games in a lock for them, they have toy manufacturing facilities for the minitures and official merchandise along that same line, so most of what they'd need to do this is already in place.
 

Psilon

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Well, it seems to have worked for Sid Meier. I heard that the Civ board game, while obviously not a direct conversion, did OK for a $50 extravaganza.

I hear they're doing the same thing with Scrabble and Monopoly next.
 

Elwro

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Divinity: Original Sin Wasteland 2
Psilon said:
Well, it seems to have worked for Sid Meier. I heard that the Civ board game, while obviously not a direct conversion, did OK for a $50 extravaganza.
.
Wasn't the board game before the computer one?
 

Sabotai

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Jan 22, 2003
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There was one. But now there is a new boardgame based on Civ the computer game.
 

GreenNight

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Elwro said:
Psilon said:
Well, it seems to have worked for Sid Meier. I heard that the Civ board game, while obviously not a direct conversion, did OK for a $50 extravaganza.
.
Wasn't the board game before the computer one?
The computer game was based on a board game. And then they made a board game based on the computer game. I've played both board games, I have the one based on the computer game and a friend of mine has the one that was the base for the computer game.

Of them I feel the best is the first, the last is too random. In the first there was an incentive to trade, with some dangers, while in the last one can be lucky and start gaining tons of gold and then it's almost impossible to lose. In the first at least there are calamities that usually affect the most the big players, IIRC. Edit: here when I'm refering to the first and the last I mean in chronological order.

Have fun.
 

Moondog

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Jun 14, 2003
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The original X-Com is one of my all-time favourites games. God knows how many hours I spent playing that back in '94-'95. The sequels were good-ish (I even like Interceptor!), but the original is the best. It's a shame that the suits always end up killing off good franchises. Look at Ultima. They were great up to part 7, but 8 & 9?

Where did it all go wrong.... :(
 

Psilon

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No, Sid Meier's Civilization bears practically no resemblance to Avalon Hill's Civilization. Trust me, I've played the AH game several times and spent a year mastering the Microprose one. Other than the generalities (ooh, command an empire as it enters the Iron Age) there's nothing in common. Sid's Civ is a wargame with dozens of different units, city micromanagement, and a horde of advances. Trading with others (as opposed to the double arrows) is an extremely minor part of the game; in fact, I won three spaceship victories in a row without touching Caravan units. Avalon Hill's Civilization, by contrast, is largely a trading and economic game because their words aren't backed by nuclear weapons.

On the other hand, AH was there first. So (as I understand it) Microprose paid Avalon Hill some cash in exchange for not getting sued over "Sid Meier's Civilization." Then came Civilization II, which apparently pissed off the AH lawyers. They, by contrast, had licensed the name again, this time to Activision. So, by this point, we had three different Civilization computer games, one of which was a DOS port of the board game. Avalon Hill had their "Advanced Civilization," Microprose had Civilization II, and Activision had Civilization: Call to Power. While the two latter games had some rule similarities, they were vastly different. (For one thing, most people couldn't play CivCTP for very long without getting dreadfully bored.)

Now, here's where life gets even hairier. In order to placate the Avalon Hill people, Microprose renames their second expansion pack to "Civ II: Fantastic Worlds." After all, most people call it Civ anyway, right? Well, as it turns out Microprose then wins some kind of legal victory. This gives us "Civilization II Multiplayer Gold Edition" and, later, "Civllization II: The Test of Time." Shortly thereafter, Firaxis releases its own game, Civ III. Activision drops the Civilization title from its sequel, entitling it "Call to Power II." Oh, and then Eagle Games gets the license to make an elaborate board game based off Sid Meier's Civilization.

Sufficiently complicated explanation for everyone?
 

Araanor

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I'm playing ironman X-Com on Veteran right now, lovely game.

I'm not so sure about Aftermath, here's how they define Simultaneous turn-based combat:
Tactical missions use our unique combat system, which features all of the best elements of both turn based and real time combat systems. You should preferably give orders while the game is paused, to avoid the frantic rush of a real time system. While paused, you can give your troops very detailed orders, taking as much time as you like. Once you are finished, you simply tell the game to start. Once the game is underway, you can pause the game at any point to update or change your orders, and the game will automatically pause when important events occur, so that you may modify your plans accordingly. Be sure to note that all of the combat happens at once, combining the finely grained tactics of a turn based game with the realism of a real time system.

Anyone know if Bethesda are up to anything with Dreamland Chronicles?

Saint_Proverbius said:
Make a smashingly great video game with X-Com - which has a successful name, then work on table top rules for it.

Ye gods, that would have been a good idea. We can't have that.
 

Saint_Proverbius

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Their simultaneous turn based system is a marketting catch phrase to get UFO/X-Com fans to buy the game when the combat is nothing more than real time with pause. Pretty damned pathetic.
 

Rosh

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Oct 22, 2002
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Yeah, marketing bullshit.

As for MicroProse, it's yet another example in how game development companies are bought out by the clueless and then their vision goes to hell or is just completely killed off. It stems mostly from how they go from treating game writing as an art form to a cheap knock-off product to cash in on impulse buyers.
 

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