What Would Matt Do

I’m also jealous Tom Chick scored this interview with him. Maybe I should try to go the short route like Tom to stardom so I too can interview awesome people. And by short route I mean working in the industry for more years than I know.

Seriously it’s a very good interview.

Chick: Are you officially no longer a real-time strategy company?

Reynolds: Well, we’re no longer an exclusively real-time strategy-focused company. The announced project, the biggest thing we’re currently working on, is a role-playing game. And we have another product that’s kind of unannounced, but every now and then I see something on the Web about it. Clearly somebody knows a lot more than we’ve officially announced.

Chick: So people who loved Rise of Legends don’t necessarily have to think that Big Huge Games will never do another RTS?

Reynolds: They certainly don’t have to think that.

That kind of things makes me happy, but really, the whole interview is really good. Tom and Brian touch on Rise of Legends (honestly not my favorite, but it was all right), Rise of Nations (loved it), and even some Alpha Centauri (I still have it installed). While I don’t agree with the Rise of Legends full on spooge fest (I think it was an RTS that ended up feeling generic even though it was trying for so much more in so many ways), the whole article touched on things I didn’t know, how well each one sold relatively and a hint at future plans.

I think Tom is right about educating and expanding gamers minds with the likes of SMAC though. That game is awesome in so many ways and it really did include sci fi (and real theories about math and science) in a very approachable manner that many games miss.

More from the interview:

Chick: I sort of a see a parallel with what you did in Alpha Centauri.

Reynolds: Thank you for reminding me of that. Yes, in some sense, we went against the lesson of [our own] history: that you can sell a lot more Civ IIs than you can Alpha Centauris. One reason we did it again anyway is because we did make a good amount of money on Alpha Centauri. We just didn’t make truckloads of money like we did with Civ II. So we did it.

But it was a lot harder to explain even the most basic science fiction concepts to people than it was history. Everybody knows what a bow and arrow do. Everybody somewhere back in their genetic programming understands the possible benefits of discovering the wheel. The concept of mathematics doesn’t sound very frightening, but then when you get into nonlinear mathematics and special quantum laser gun theory, then — no matter how socially relevant the biting commentary provided by your game is — there’s still this accessibility issue. You have a lot more work to do to get people into the story.

So you could say that we should have known.

See, I’m of two minds about this. Yeah, it’s harder to sell a non-standard game to the public. But I don’t think it was the factions or the setting that killed RoL, but the way the game didn’t quite meet the goals it was striving for, imho.

What Would Matt Do: Me, I really like to work with Brian Reynolds. See what their design processes are like, see how they come up with some of the awesome simplicity they often do and see how the magic happens.