Fair warning: This video game post may appeal more to game fans than it does to business people in games or in venture investors. It is like a bridge between this blog and my old one at the San Jose Mercury News. You’re catching it mid-story. It involves a controversy that started when I reviewed “Mass Effect” at the Merc. But this discussion is relevant here in a different way. Please indulge me in sharing it with you. I look forward to your feedback. I hope it is relevant for game fans and game industry watchers.
I caught up with Ray Muzyka (left) and Greg Zeschuk, the top executives and founders of BioWare, the well-known role-playing game developer in Edmonton, Canada. Electronic Arts bought their company along with Pandemic Studios for $800 million. That purchase price was double the investment put into BioWare/Pandemic by Elevation Partners just a couple of years earlier. I can’t think of any game developer who scored better.
Muzyka and Zeschuk, two Canadian doctors who chucked their careers in medicine in favor of taking up games, are mild-mannered craftsmen. They care deeply about their games and have pioneered titles that have deep storylines and nuanced characters.
I thought they might be out for my head. In December, I messed up a review of their big holiday game, which I called “Mass Defect.” It took a team of more than 100 people working for more than three years to make the game, which depicted realistic human and alien facial animations. As the characters staged conversations with each other, you as the player could chose what your character said. Then the action played out like a standard role-playing game. I played the sci-fi adventure game for eight hours but I played it without taking advantage of some cool features, like freezing the game and giving directions to my companions. I didn’t even realize they were there. Other critics chimed in and said it was BioWare’s fault for not making it obvious to players like me. Readers in the know thought I was a bozo. They were right. During subsequent weeks, I played through to the finish and rewrote my game review (here and here) , apologizing in the process. In spite of my words the game had sold more than 1.6 million copies as of January and is expected to cross 2 million in sales, generating an estimated $120 million at retail. When I caught up with the BioWare duo, they were quite gracious. This interview completes the mea culpa that began back in December.
Takahashi: Thank you for talking with me.
Muzyka: I mentioned this to you already. The second blog post was gratifying.
Zeschuk: Everyone was very impressed with that. Sometimes those things happen. We’ve always had respect for you and that reinforced it.
Takahashi: It didn’t transpire as I hoped. It was a good learning experience for me. Particularly on the idea of whether you have to finish a game before you review it.
Muzyka: It’s pretty tough to finish games. Especially massively multiplayer online games.
Takahashi: That’s why I never reviewed MMOs.
Zeschuk: Our games take a long time. Read the rest of this entry »
