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Schilling, Salvatore, McFarlane Form Game Studio
simoniker writes "Baseball legend and avid MMO fan Curt Schilling is forming a new Boston-based video game company, Green Monster Games, with Spawn creator Todd McFarlane and noted sci-fi/fantasy author R.A. Salvatore. They're going to create what is described as 'industry-changing games'. Schilling, who is the pitcher for the World Series-winning Boston Red Sox, is already known for his online game interest (he is a long-time EverQuest/EverQuest II player), so is evidently extending this to form a video game developer."
I would not be surprised if we start seeing more ventures like this either. While it may just be in an investment roll, the more money and people making games can only help to further the industry.
Invexi - a Phoenix, AZ based web design and web development company.
Maybe Todd could call up Seth... Inject a little humor into it as well.
Does this sound like a bad to anyone else? These guys are all out of their element. To their credit, Schilling and Salvatore both have some business experience in the pen and paper realm, but that's not neccessarily going to translate into software success. If I had to bet money here, I'd wager that this company is a place for Schilling to dump money that would otherwise be spent paying taxes.
Smell's like Daikatana.
Ding. Ding. Ding. We have a winner.
I predict that Armadillo Aerospace will land on the moon before these guys put out a good game.
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If two medical doctors can get together and form a successful company like Bioware then a baseball player, comic book legend and fantasy author should be able to do something other than sound like a bad geek-joke punchline. Best of luck to them as long as they can push out something good.
And here I was thinking that two terrible writers and a baseball player I've never heard of (which says nothing of his fame, I just only recognize the first two people) have suddenly decided that they have what it takes to compete in absurdly-competitive video game industry because they're famous. I thoroughly enjoyed Todd McFarlane's artwork when I was 13, but it wasn't revolutionary and he was an incredibly poor writer. Salvatore has six or seven thousand pulp fantasy books, like his endless Drow books, but the quality of that work is certainly not "phenomonal." By the standards of video game writing he might be a comparative genius, but that says more about the secondary role storytelling serves in the majority of video games. Creating video games requires teams of talented people, not a handful of famous people. It consists of arduous amounts of work, and frankly no amount of fame can short-circuit that. Especially in the case of the baseball player, it seems a lot like a group of teenage males getting together and talking about how great it would be to create video games. Or probably more likely, a group of rich males getting together to create what they expect to be a profitable business venture relying largely on their fame to enter into the MMORPG market. Any group of actors looking to make an investment into the gaming industry would offer much of what this trio does (fame, money) and still face the same challenges (having to create entire teams of talent). They probably should have just bought an existing studio that already has experience producing games together.