In fact, their half room was actually buried in a corner of the larger company's studio. While they'd left Looking Glass, they were still on good terms with their previous employers. This left Irrational at a loss, until Paul Neurath, head of Looking Glass, called them with an opportunity. Their first project, a single-player version of early isometric shooter Fireteam had been canceled, when its publisher decided to concentrate solely on multiplayer. We went off on our own and very quickly found it was challenging.” Almost fatally so. “I thought – probably naively at the time – Hey! I can do that,” Levine says, “I had no idea what that would actually mean, as I was a cocky guy who thought it'd be easy. There really was a dialogue about advancing the media, but not a lot about making successful products.”Ĭoming from a film-industry background, Levine felt they needed to find a balance between art and commerce. I left because despite how talented the people were there, in some ways it more like a university than a games company. I'd met a lot of people who I really respected and admired – people whose legacy is more known to the intelligentsia of the gaming field, and is still being felt. “Looking Glass was obviously a really impactful experience on me,” Levine says, “It was my first job in the games industry. In fact, when looking at their situation in their early years, you begin to wonder why Irrational's co-founders of Ken Levine, Rob Fermier and Jonathan Chey splintered from Boston's illustrious and much-missed Looking Glass software in the first place. When you look at where and how Irrational worked on their first game, it's easy to think of the claustrophobic horror of RPG/Shooter System Shock 2 as a pure product of its environment. They're all crammed into a single room – in fact, half of one, since it's one room bisected with screens. Viewed by any objective criteria, the small inexperienced team doesn't have the skills to achieve their aims. At every turn there's a crippling lack of resources. Everyone's panickedly fighting against a seemingly impossible, oppressive deadline.
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