RPS: So then, what’s the deal with Kings and Castles? Is it still on hold, or has a more unfortunate fate befallen it?
Chris Taylor: What happened there was, we were working on Kings and Castles. We were having a hard time finding a publisher. If you remember, I said in the first blog that we wanted to build the biggest RTS game ever. Well, that was part of my mentality. I was still sort of in the past, where bigger was better. We wanted to deliver more of everything to the customer. Bigger armies and bigger maps. That was my frame of mind throughout most of the ‘90s. It became clear to us that that was going to take us much longer to find a publishing partner for.
Now, Microsoft came along with Age of Empires Online, and we said, “Well, we have a business to take care of here, so we’re going to have to take a break from Kings and Castles.” Due in no small part to the fact that we didn’t have a publisher for it, and we didn’t have our own money to fund it. We were going to have to wait until those stars aligned. Plus, working on Age of Empires was fantastic. We were all big fans of the franchise. It seemed like, “Yeah, let’s definitely work on something cool while we sort that out in the background.” Age of Empires got bigger and bigger in terms of our commitment to it. It took up more and more of our time and focus.
Meanwhile, I started noodling around at home on a special secret project called Project Mercury. Mercury was an entirely web-based gaming platform. It was all written in Javascript on Canvas. I was just thrilled with how powerful the platform was. So I started working on a game design for Project Mercury called Wildman. I was going to actually do some RTS stuff inside of that. But then what I realized was is that the nature of web is that you have a big pipe, a streaming pipe, but you don’t have a big install footprint. You have to work with a small data set, because otherwise you have the customer waiting to fill up their memory every time they go to play.
I started looking at action-RPG. I said, “Oh, yeah, this makes way more sense. I want action-RPG and I’m going to bring some RTS elements in.” Then we said, “Well, heck. This is really exciting.” Kickstarter, last year, just kept growing in momentum, and we said, “You know what? I’ll bet you we can get out there and Kickstarter this and people would really dig what we’re doing.But we kind of intuitively knew that people would wonder about Kings and Castles. We want to be really honest and say, “Look. Kings and Castles… It’s sort of like, we don’t know how big the Kickstarter funds could go with the project. We don’t think we could raise $5 to $10 million on Kickstarter.” It was just an honest question we had to answer.
But we think we can do a game that starts smaller and grows over time as we get more and more people involved in the project. When you go Kickstarter, you have to make a commitment and deliver the game. You can’t just make stuff up. You have to commit to what you think you can. So that’s where the Kings and Castles versus Wildman debate started and ended. It comes down to what we thought we could fund. We still believe that. We still confidently believe in that decision.
But it’s very sad for me, because of course Kings and Castles… I was just so excited. We started the Kings and Castles video blog, and I was like… The greatest thing ever was to share the development, to go around and talk to the team members with a camera and all those things we couldn’t do with a regular publisher. If you talked to a regular publisher’s PR and marketing team, they would have a frickin’ heart attack if you were gonna show stuff off and you weren’t going to make it all exclusive and do all that regular stuff. You were just gonna take a camera round and show people what was going on in development.
The real truth of it is is that those video blogs were just fabulous. They were doing what I always wanted to do. So Kickstarter comes along, and one of the things with Kickstarter, especially when Tim Schafer did his Double Fine Adventure, is like, “We’re going to be showing you what’s going on!” And I’m thinking, “Yeah! That’s awesome. We’re with you.” Kings and Castles was a little early. The idea was early by a couple of years. But Wildman is going to hit that right on the head. We’re going to go out. We’re going to Kickstarter. We’ll expose the game’s development just like we did. Lots of updates. Lots of involvement with folks.
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