Article: Controlling Their Own Destiny (game developers)

[Dover]

Controlling Their Own Destiny
So many questions for the gaming industry, so many Austin game developers to answer them


As you read this, millions of copies of the newly released Microsoft game Halo 2 are flying off store shelves at an unprecedented rate. As this is being written, it's a scant 24 hours since the game, a strategically complex you-against-the-aliens scenario that operates as a "first-person shooter" (meaning the action takes place from the player's point of view), has hit store shelves, but it has already racked up sales, including more than a million online presales, that are almost surely going to make it the most popular video game ever. Here in Austin, the Alamo Drafthouse's Village and Lake Creek locations have organized big-screen tournaments (for more on that, see p.82). It's a watershed moment in gaming, one of those cultural crash barriers that marks the denouement of one aspect of popular culture and initiates another: Games are becoming – have become – the new recreational pastime to an unprecedented degree, eclipsing watching movies and doing, like, other things both financially and creatively.

And as Austin's game-development community grows right along with the industry itself, it, too, is experiencing growing pains, from the recent sale of Inevitable Games to industry giant Midway to the death throes of Acclaim Studios this past August. As it were, much of the blame for that shuttering fell to the company's initial push toward creating games for the Sega console platform, which steadily dropped by the wayside after the release of Sony's ultimately more popular Playstation in the mid-Nineties. It was a case of backing the wrong horse, and one that cost some 120 Austin employees their jobs. That said, there's plenty of action going on right now in the River City, ranging from the arrival of the American division of South Korean-based NCsoft, headed by Austin gaming pillars Richard and Robert Garriott, late of Origin Systems, to the Congress Avenue-based Aspyr Media Inc., which takes PC and console video games and reconfigures them for the cult of Mac. Aspyr is also branching out into other entertainment mediums, which, in what every single person interviewed for this article called "a time of transition in the gaming industry," might be the smartest and surest way to stay one step ahead of an increasingly fickle consumer base...cont'd

http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2004-11-19/screens_feature.html