It’s late 1999, money is running out fast and we’re scrambling to find a development deal or sell the studio.  We entertained a few offers one of which was from old Acclaim.  During our many discussions with their leadership, we talked about the kind of games we could do for them.  I pushed hard on doing online games (including variants on our current games such as Silent Death Online) and even MMOs.  Unfortunately, their CEO didn’t think much of SDO and even went as far as to say “Why would we want to do that, we were making those type of games 10 years ago?”  I pointed out that as far I knew Acclaim wasn’t making online games that long ago (I don’t think he enjoyed that retort) and also explained how low our budget was for it and all but one of our other games (our highest budget prior to DAoC was 450K for Aliens Online (with an essentially an expansion) with the rest being well below 100K). They listened politely to what I said and replied “But We have a better idea!” Expecting a merely bad idea to come out of their mouths, I told myself no matter what they say, don’t be an ass**** when I respond.  “Let’s do an online game” they said “based on Mary Kate and Ashley. Now, that would be great!” They told us how hot they were commercially and that we could make a ton of money if we could do an online game/MMO based on them.  At that moment all sorts of thoughts went through my head.  Is this a sign of the coming apocalypse in 2000 perhaps? How bad would it really be to go back and work in fast food?  What constitutes justifiable homicide?  Which countries don’t have extradition treaties for capital crimes with the US?  However, we needed a deal desperately so I politely pointed out what that would be a bad idea and why MMOs like EQ would be a much better idea.  They didn’t agree but we continued to talk about other, smaller budget games going forward.  Like the vast majority of publishers, they didn’t believe that there was much future in those MMO things.  After many months of negotiations I desperately wanted to walk away from the deal.  Truth is I didn’t trust them at all and the deal terms weren’t all that exciting.  IMHO, I’d rather go belly up than take a bad deal especially since we would have to stay and work for them.  So, we walked away and a couple of months later we did the deal with Abandon for DAoC, things could not have worked out better for us and the world was saved from perhaps one of the worst ideas for an MMO EVER.

Mark

About these ads