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He thought about doing a big console game, but he felt that wasn’t so interesting. At that time, he was considering his options. He was scoping out game development trends at the Dice Summit conference in Las Vegas in 2011, where I ran into him. “There’s a shift in the market and the technology,” he said. You can test ideas, and you bring games to market that don’t need 10 million fans in order to be a success. Within an hour of taking its web site live, Cloud Imperium, with no publicity, had 1,000 people signed up for its beta test. “Now you can interact with the community directly and get feedback loops,” he said.Īnd he thinks there’s pent-up demand for cool games. That’s really exciting to me,” referring to trends such as distributing games digitally directly to consumers. And the other aspect is the move to online and digital business models. The technology to a point where the stuff we could do was great. Wing commander privateer interesting systems Pc#But now he feels that PC gaming technology has finally advanced far ahead of the game consoles and can now produce high-quality imagery that can look very cool. Roberts said that he left games in part because he was frustrated with the technology and felt that film could do a better job of realizing the visions in his head. Altogether, he produced 10 movies and worked with a big German film fund that poured $750 million into both films and real estate. Roberts never directed another film, but he went on to produce films including The Punisher, The Jacket and Lord of War (the latter starring Nicholas Cage). ![]() Wing commander privateer interesting systems movie#He created the Wing Commander film, a $30 million movie that generated a third of that at the box office. In that sense, he was also a pioneer of transmedia, or taking an entertainment property from one medium to another. He took time out of his gaming career to fulfill his dream of making a movie. I wasn’t keen on getting sucked into management. You work hard and then start the cycle again. I left four years into Freelancer, and it was two more before it game out.” Lost in space and re-entry But I was frustrated by development technology. I saw a game experience in my head that I wanted to play. “At the end of Digital Anvil, I was burned out,” he said. It was a precursor to modern massively multiplayer online games. Wing commander privateer interesting systems full#In Roberts’ original vision, each one of those worlds was a living, breathing thing, full of people and adventures. In the game, the player went from planet to planet, running missions and building a cool spacecraft. That game took 4.5 years to make (and six to get to market), and by the end of it, Roberts had left the firm to make movies and Microsoft acquired his compan Freelancer was not a huge commercial success, but it was memorable. Roberts left Origin in 1996 and started his own company, Digital Anvil. Roberts said that no one has really picked up the mantle in sci-fi combat sims since his last company created the ill-fated Freelancer, published by Microsoft in 1999. Naturally, I kept playing and switched to the other hand when the need arose). I used to play the game so much that my hand got sore from holding the joystick. It was an addictive game where you flew space combat fighters as if they were World War II fighters, an imaginative twist on the space combat in the Star Wars films. (Wing Commander, by the way, was the reason I spent $2,000 on a brand-new 486 PC. For a time, it was a huge business for Electronic Arts, but the copycat sequels bored gamers and drove the franchise into the ground. He became a star in 1990 with the release of Wing Commander, a space combat game that produced nine sequels and spinoffs. ![]() He started in games at Origin Systems, the Austin game studio that Electronic Arts later bought. ![]() Roberts (pictured above) is unveiling the game at the GDC Online conference today in Austin, Texas. ![]() That’s a bet that only someone with decades of game-making experience can make with any degree of confidence. Roberts bets that the future is all about outstanding movie-like game experiences, not casual social networking games. Now that I’ve seen a demo of Star Citizen, it reminds me how much I miss those epic space battles where you save the human race from the evil aliens. Roberts teased the game on his web site, Roberts Space Industries, after hackers discovered the site by accident. This is a spiritual successor to games like Wing Commander and Privateer,” which is another Roberts creation. “The space sims just aren’t happening anymore. “I want to bring space games back,” said Roberts, the chief creative officer at Cloud Imperium Games, in an interview with GamesBeat. ![]()
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