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Former Interplay Dev Talks "Disastrous" Old Star Trek Games
In a podcast recorded at PAX, a former Interplay developer named Thom Robertson talks about the problems he encountered while working on the company's Star Trek titles. In particular, he was the lead designer of the canceled Star Trek: The Secret of Vulcan Fury, and mentioned how incredibly ambitious initial plans for the game were. "Just one of the many reasons why that project was doomed to failure was because the team and the management had really no concept of exactly how expensive a proposition they were imagining when they set out to do it. I saw the plans. They were looking at four to six hours of created video, and they were planning on doing it at maybe a 1/20th of the budget of a Toy Story movie. Something did not connect." He also discussed how Interplay was "too close to Hollywood," and the problems they ran into while filming for Starfleet Academy The full podcast (MP3) is available from 1Up; Robertson's interview begins 42 minutes in.
Hmmm. I'd call myself fairly up to date with technology -- I even have a linux box that will play full screen flash video -- but I'm yet to actually understand what is meant by 'podcast'..... I'm going to assume this is a good thing. For some reason, the very sound of the word is enough to make me decide it is something I don't care about -- a little like twitter.
Having worked an engineering job for an entertainment company, I can attest that life in the more fluffy parts of such companies are a completely different world with entirely different priorities. There's a continual "glam-factor" you have to deal with that's entirely counterproductive to producing a technically challenging piece of technology. At Disney their HR and Marketting departments were like professional cheerleaders. They always had some party going on--something they were planning. After a while it was a serious distraction, regardless of whether you were invited, and everything was catered. After a while I began to wonder how companies like this could stay in business... turns out only a few could. Oh and who could forget that any nontechnical jobs are stuffed with people who just want to be close to entertainment in the off hopes that while the secretary is performing some lounge-singing jazz number off the balcony (because the acoustics are so great) right next to where your cubicle is... (while you're trying to code a state machine in Verilog) that some movie exec will hear her, and she'll be made a star--hollywood movie fantasy! Ugh... No thanks.
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