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:
Don't you just love those suits?
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!â€
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 reorganizationâ€. 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?