After almost a month, Matt Barton has finally published the fourth and final episode of his interview with Phantasie creator Winston Douglas Wood. As we know, after Phantasie IV Winston designed another game for Japanese publisher StarCraft Inc, a sci-fi space RPG with mechs called Starfire. It turns out that over the course of its development he gradually lost touch with StarCraft, who shut down a few years later, and in fact he only realized last year(!) that the game had ever been released. Winston also designed a SimCity-inspired medieval castle builder for another Japanese company, which they were unable to create because it was too complex. When he tried shopping it to a different publisher, they eventually stopped communicating with him and then released a suspiciously similar game a few months later.


Winston's game development career ended long ago and today he develops pipe network analysis software. Back in 2013 he began working on a Phantasie V but soon realized that it was too much work. If he were to revisit Phantasie today, he would probably remake the original game with the mechanics of Phantasie III & IV and release it on Android platforms. Thus ends another Matt Chat interview. Coming up next week, an interview with Obsidian's Brian Heins.