Interview Brian Fargo interviewed by Rocket Beans TV and GameStar at Gamescom 2016

[Roguey]

Bitch please. You're listing bunch of exceptions as if that somehow makes a point. Those are just that - exceptions. Mass market at large is driven by graphics more than anything else.

It's their our fault for being so successful? Because guess what, that's how companies end up growing large.

Why the fuck do you think mid-sized developers died out, and only resurfaced 15 years later when digital distribution is a thing?

An unexceptional exception: Spiderweb Software. Jeff Vogel made run-of-the-mill RPGs with Deviantart-tier portraits and the most basic sound and graphics, and he stayed in business without the benefit of Steam for nearly 17 years. When Avadon did blow up on Steam, he didn't even massively expand his company (sure, he dumbed things down, but as seen on his blog, that's his preference as opposed to a cash grab) Selling a few thousand titles each was just enough to keep him in business; a slightly larger company would have been able to do the same with tens of thousands (as noted, Black Isle was profitable until the end). Fargo didn't want to be that company, so his failures are his to own.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Right. Interplay, top 3 PC publisher at the time, with millions of revenue, should just suddenly start operating like Vogel. Fire everybody, lock Avellone, Cain and Boyarsky in the basement, pay them minimum wage and make them work on shovelware RPGs.

That, in your opinion, would be a good management?

You're an idiot, I'm done.

 

[Grauken]

I somehow doubt if you lock Avellone, Cain and Boyarsky in the basement, you get shovelware

 

[SionIV]

lock Avellone, Cain and Boyarsky in the basement

Yes please, how do we get this to happen?

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

I somehow doubt if you lock Avellone, Cain and Boyarsky in the basement, you get shovelware

You wouldn't even get shovelware, because they'd scram at first opportunity, and go to work a job that pays according to their talents. Upstarts and wannabies like Vogel can work in a basement, but if you think any of high-profile celebrity BlackIslers would stick around with some garage operation....lol.

 

[SionIV]

I somehow doubt if you lock Avellone, Cain and Boyarsky in the basement, you get shovelware

You wouldn't even get shovelware, because they'd scram at first opportunity, and go to work a job that pays according to their talents. Upstarts and wannabies like Vogel can work in a basement, but if you think any of high-profile celebrity BlackIslers would stick around with some garage operation....lol.

If that is what is needed for us to get a real Fallout/Arcanum game, then they'll have to take one for the team and suffer through a few years living on Pizza in a basement.

 

[Infinitron]

In some talks that he's given since the Kickstarter era began, Fargo has said that he had plans to downsize Interplay and focus on Black Isle. He's also said he had plans to sell the company to a Chinese corporation. I'm unsure how those two plans fit together, but in both cases he says the majority shareholders (ie Herve) scuttled his initiative.

 

[Roguey]

You wouldn't even get shovelware, because they'd scram at first opportunity, and go to work a job that pays according to their talents. Upstarts and wannabies like Vogel can work in a basement, but if you think any of high-profile celebrity BlackIslers would stick around with some garage operation....lol.

What do you think Troika was? What do you think Avellone's doing right now?

 

[Athelas]

You wouldn't even get shovelware, because they'd scram at first opportunity, and go to work a job that pays according to their talents. Upstarts and wannabies like Vogel can work in a basement, but if you think any of high-profile celebrity BlackIslers would stick around with some garage operation....lol.

What do you think Troika was? What do you think Avellone's doing right now?

Making AAA first-person games with expensive production values and cutscenes like Bloodlines and Prey?

 

[Roguey]

Arcanum was made by a core team of 12 people which is nuts given the scope of what they were trying to accomplish.

 

[Fowyr]

Upstarts and wannabies like Vogel can work in a basement, but if you think any of high-profile celebrity BlackIslers would stick around with some garage operation....lol.

Vogel, despite all his dumbfuckery and shortcomings, still produced RPGs that are better than almost everything from 2001 to 2016. All your high-paid AAA developers on the other hand sucked ass.

 

[Fairfax]

In some talks that he's given since the Kickstarter era began, Fargo has said that he had plans to downsize Interplay and focus on Black Isle. He's also said he had plans to sell the company to a Chinese corporation. I'm unsure how those two plans fit together, but in both cases he says the majority shareholders (ie Herve) scuttled his initiative.

That's what the french did. They sold Shiny to Atari, and then closed Digital Mayhem and BlueSky. Black Isle became responsible for the company's main projects: BG3, FO3 and BG:DA2, but it didn't work out.
Selling Interplay to chinese investors sounds very much like an emergency plan, considering Interplay owed Fargo millions. With Titus, some of those debts had to be written as a loss IIRC.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

What do you think Troika was?

Another company that went bankrupt by trying to stay PC exclusive. So basically, your great battleplan of saving Interplay from bankrupcy, is to start another company that would bankrupt instead. It's a puzzle how you're not ruling the world yet with such business acumen.

 

[Roguey]

Another company that went bankrupt by trying to stay PC exclusive.

All of Troika's games made a profit. Tim Cain folded the company because after Bloodlines publishers were only interested in giving them shovelware non-RPG projects, on account of their RPGs not giving them a massive return on investment.

 

[Fairfax]

The saddest thing about Troika is that all 3 games would've been a lot more successful nowadays.

 

[tuluse]

An unexceptional exception: Spiderweb Software. Jeff Vogel made run-of-the-mill RPGs with Deviantart-tier portraits and the most basic sound and graphics, and he stayed in business without the benefit of Steam for nearly 17 years. When Avadon did blow up on Steam, he didn't even massively expand his company (sure, he dumbed things down, but as seen on his blog, that's his preference as opposed to a cash grab) Selling a few thousand titles each was just enough to keep him in business; a slightly larger company would have been able to do the same with tens of thousands (as noted, Black Isle was profitable until the end). Fargo didn't want to be that company, so his failures are his to own.

It's my understanding that in the 90s a company that was just Black Isle wouldn't have really worked because they couldn't force retailers to put their games on shelves and would have relied on publishers who would have not wanted to publish the games they made. Interplay had to be big enough (and have enough hits) that Fargo could force retailers to put the games he wanted on shelves.

In some talks that he's given since the Kickstarter era began, Fargo has said that he had plans to downsize Interplay and focus on Black Isle. He's also said he had plans to sell the company to a Chinese corporation. I'm unsure how those two plans fit together, but in both cases he says the majority shareholders (ie Herve) scuttled his initiative.

I thought the downsizing thing was something he wished he had done in retrospect and the selling off was a "save whatever value our ip has" move and Herve though he could do more himself.

 

[tuluse]

Another company that went bankrupt by trying to stay PC exclusive.

All of Troika's games made a profit. Tim Cain folded the company because after Bloodlines publishers were only interested in giving them shovelware non-RPG projects, on account of their RPGs not giving them a massive return on investment.

Folded with enough money on hand to pay everyone a year's severance.


(maybe they should have spent some of that on funding their own patch of Bloodlines)

 

[Roguey]

It's my understanding that in the 90s a company that was just Black Isle wouldn't have really worked because they couldn't force retailers to put their games on shelves and would have relied on publishers who would have not wanted to publish the games they made. Interplay had to be big enough (and have enough hits) that Fargo could force retailers to put the games he wanted on shelves.

In the mid-to-late 90s, Interplay was more of a money loser than a hit maker.

http://articles.latimes.com/1998/mar/24/business/fi-32032

Interplay Announces IPO, Seeks to Raise $72 Million
Finance: The Irvine digital entertainment firm, beset by development delays, has not made an annual profit recently.
March 24, 1998|P.J. HUFFSTUTTER | TIMES STAFF WRITER

Hoping to take advantage of investors' interest in digital entertainment, game developer Interplay Entertainment Corp. said Monday it plans to raise about $72 million by selling stock in an initial public offering.

The company--best known for its outrageous marketing campaigns--has struggled to make a profit over the last several years, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Interplay, which makes the Virtual Reality sports and Descent series of games, has not turned an annual profit since 1995. It lost $27.2 million in fiscal 1997 on sales of $83.3 million. The company lost $10.7 million through the first three quarters of fiscal 1998, although it recorded a third-quarter profit of $7.4 million.

Proceeds will be used to repay $33.6 million in debts, a $1-million bonus to 35-year-old founder Brian Fargo and $1.5 million to distributor Universal Interactive Studios.

Interplay didn't say how many shares it planned to sell or at what price. Universal is the company's biggest shareholder at 44%. Fargo, who made $237,500 in salary last year, owns 40%.

After two years of industry-wide troubles--including soaring production costs and missed deadlines--analysts say investors may be leery of buying into Interplay's image.

"With Interplay, you can count on fast hits and future hype. But it'll be very difficult to gauge the real value of this company because it's such a grab-bag collection of assets," said Dan Lavin, a multimedia analyst with the research group Dataquest. "There's Interplay the independent publisher; Interplay the developer; and Interplay, the owner of Shiny Entertainment and the brightest piece of their company."

Shiny, based in Laguna Beach, is a game developer best known for creating Murder-Death-Kill and the Earthworm Jim series.

Interplay officials declined to comment Monday. The company develops, publishes and distributes interactive titles made for both the PC and other video game platforms.

Founded by Fargo in 1983, Interplay and its staff of nearly 500 have long worked under the corporate philosophy of creating products "by gamers, for gamers."

The company's marketing gimmicks have reflected the game industry's irreverence. For the 1996 release of "Virtual Reality Baseball," Interplay announced that it intended to buy the Los Angeles Dodgers--as long as 10 million fans bought copies of the game. And last year, the company held a blood drive for its driving game "Carmageddon," which carried the slogan "so many pedestrians, so little time."

But like its rivals in the computer game industry, Interplay has struggled financially. The company's troubles come from delays in developing its games and getting them to market on time, according to the filing. For example, "Stonekeep," a glossy adventure game, took five years to make and missed two release dates.

Hoping to offset the financial drain, the company began acting as a distributor for other entertainment developers, such as the Discovery Channel and Universal.

Yet the effort did not stem the losses, because the titles did not sell as well as expected, according to the filing.

Piper Jaffray Inc., Bear Stearns and UBS Securities are underwriting the offering.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Interplay Entertainment at a Glance

* Headquarters: Irvine

* Founded: 1983

* Founder and CEO: Brian Fargo

* Product: Entertainment software

* Employees: 500

* 1997 sales: $83.3 million

* Popular game titles: "Descent," "Mario Teaches Typing," "Battle Chess," "Star Trek 25th Anniversary," "Stonekeep," "Star Fleet Academy"

 

[Infinitron]

Roguey That's not actually an argument against what tuluse said. Clearly Interplay's titles did have enough clout to gain the company retail shelf space.

Remember that western RPGs kind of died in the mid-90s and to a large extent it was Interplay who brought them back. What tuluse is saying is: If Interplay was only a developer, not a publisher, would that have happened?

 

[Roguey]

Roguey That's not actually an argument against what tuluse said. Clearly Interplay's titles did have enough clout to gain the company retail shelf space.

Remember that western RPGs kind of died in the mid-90s and to a large extent it was Interplay who brought them back. The argument is: If Interplay was only a developer, not a publisher, would that have happened?

Baldur's Gate was a D&D game with high quality art, I imagine anyone would have wanted to stock it.

 

[Infinitron]

Oh? We know from interviews that even Feargus and co thought Baldur's Gate would be commercially mediocre. I can imagine what other publishers must have thought.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

All of Troika's games made a profit.

Yeah, I'm sure never patching anything saved them a lot of money.

 

[Roguey]

Yeah, I'm sure never patching anything saved them a lot of money.

Arcanum received three patches within two months, Temple of Elemental Evil received two patches within eight months, and Bloodlines received one patch within one month.

How the more successful competition holds up: Not counting the expansion, Bioware released one patch (and one stopgap beta patch) for Baldur's Gate within two months. For Morrowind, Bethesda released two patches within three months.

Ergo, Troika's patch support wasn't any worse than anyone else's single player RPGs, theirs were just far more ambitious in scope given the time and team they were working with.

 

[tuluse]

Roguey That's not actually an argument against what tuluse said. Clearly Interplay's titles did have enough clout to gain the company retail shelf space.

Remember that western RPGs kind of died in the mid-90s and to a large extent it was Interplay who brought them back. The argument is: If Interplay was only a developer, not a publisher, would that have happened?

Baldur's Gate was a D&D game with high quality art, I imagine anyone would have wanted to stock it.

It also wasn't a Black Isle game

 

[Fenix]

I'll wait for the Ultimate Deluxe Director's Cut version with all the DLC integrated into it plus other gameplay enhancements to be released.

Remind me what were the troubles with DC for HR?

wannabies like Vogel