Industry Insider - December 2008

Don’t Get Consolized (tm)

by Eric Marlow

“I get to play games for a living”. I have chuckled many times in using this line, but in all seriousness it’s true. Of course it doesn’t mean I play games for fun all day, but it does mean I get to play games for research purposes that I wouldn’t normally otherwise play.

I am a gamer at heart. I got into this industry because I loved games and liked to share my experiences with others. I loved it so much that I start to write articles about it, and that eventually led me to friends who I started a business with together in the games industry. But even though it is a business for me, I still play games for fun.

Given how many games I need to get through for business purposes, I am somewhat picky as to where I spend my personal time. Over the years there are many games that have caught my attention. Here’s a very small starter list of what I have played, and kept playing:

All games I play for fun stem from my love of the Falcon series of flight sims. Basically starting with the seminal Falcon 3.0, and going through to Falcon 4.0, I wasted thousands of hours in these games. Toward the end of the Falcon 4.0 development process I became involved with Microprose (the game’s developer) in the fixing the many bugs that existed in this complex piece of software, so F4 holds a special place in my heart.

Because I enjoy sims so much, my list would not be complete without paying homage to the Jane’s Combat Simulation games. Of this list there were many, but Longbow I and II, F-15, and 688i all stayed on my drives the longest. I even created word for this – the Jane’s sims had a very long “HardDisk Lifetm” with me.

The Age of Empires series of games developed by Bruce Shelley and the guys at Ensemble Studios, and those based on the AOE engine (such as Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds) got me into the real time strategy genre. From there I expanded into more recent hits such as Chris Taylor and Gas Powered Games’ Supreme Commander, or even the less complicated Command and Conquer series.

I have always been a fan of the first-person shooter genre, but like my interest in realistic flight sims, I also enjoyed the more realistic shooters such as Red Storm’s Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon. For action I loved games such as Star Wars: Jedi Knight and Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast.

And it’s true – I never really owned a game console until I started to work in the industry. I considered myself an elitist PC gamer. Never would I stoop down to playing consoles. I detested the fact that many of my favorite games were becoming more “arcady” and less hard core. I even invented another word for this – when a good PC game was ported to an Xbox or Playstation (or worse was cancelled in favor of a console version), this is what I called “being Consolized tm”. Damn you Ubisoft for screwing up Ghost Recon! The PC platform rulez!

Eric Marlow is General Manager and Head of Studio for Kuju Manila, Inc. Please feel free to drop an email with any questions you may have. Space permitting we’ll answer your questions in upcoming editions. You can reach him at theinsider@octobereighty.com. Game On!