The Path to AAA Games

Gamasutra has up a feature discussing an E3 discussion session haunted by some illustrious names in game design. The topic of the panel was The Path to Creating AAA Games. Hosted by Carly Staehlin, the panel featured Matt Firor, Todd Howard, Tetsuya Mizuguchi, Tim Willits, and Will Wright. From the article: "'My biggest failure was Quake 3,' Willits said. 'The game offered perfect multiplayer for hardcore players. In fact, they're still playing it. But the more casual gamers, and other people who actually have money, found playing next to impossible.'"

Comments

Re:Where did this term come from?

[chazmo]

Having recently worked at SCEA, the term is commonly used at Sony to indicate how many copies they sell or intend to sell. If a game sells over a million copies, it is an "A" game. If it sells two million, it's "AA" and so on. With the sales of the latest GTA, Rockstar raised the bar, so now we have "AAAA" games (over four million sold). Granted, as of March 2005, GTA: San Andreas has sold over 12 million.

Re:Quake 3

[Profane MuthaFucka]

Yes, it's extremely good. Imagine Microsoft Flight simulator. Now, add a bunch of features that airplane geeks like.

examples:
-Interfaces to a commercial full-motion simulator, in that configuration is FAA approved for instrument training. i.e. the hours flying X-Plane count for training hours.
-Plane models are not table driven like MS flight sim, but use finite blade element analysis to compute the aerodynamics in real time. This leads to:
-A library of thousands and thousands of planes, both real and imaginary, developed by X-Plane fans using the CAD tool that comes with the program. These planes fly just like a real plane with that same shape would fly. It's been compared against real test flight data from real airplanes, and matches closely.
-Interfaces with an expensive Garmin GPS. The GPS is apparently hard to use, and a bad time to learn to use it is when you're renting a plane for $50 an hour. So, you put the GPS in training mode and hook it up to X-Plane. X-Plane simulates all the satellite signals, so the GPS will display the location of your plane in the simulation.

and on and on and on. It's a cool simulator.

www.x-plane.com