Interview With Bing Gordon (EA) 87
djedery writes "I interviewed Bing Gordon (Chief Creative Officer of EA) via email. We discussed game design in academia, outsourcing, game scheduling / budgeting, games for India / China, getting along with marketing, and risks." Decent interview; could be longer but the line about reverse engineering the Genesis is an interesting one, especially considering that some of the current legislative attempts would make that illegal.
Games have become horrible (Score:3, Insightful)
yawn@games & lol@interweb
Re:Games have become horrible (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Games have become horrible (Score:1)
Yeah, they can write really terrible games that you'd need a bloody film tie in to sell - hence the number of small companies bought up by large companies...
Re:Games have become horrible (Score:1, Insightful)
Consider Free-Radical's Second Sight (a paranormal 3rd person action adventure); if the game wa
Re:Games have become horrible (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Games have become horrible (Score:1)
Re:Games have become horrible (Score:5, Insightful)
Your opinion is just so generally wrong =)
Perhaps there are only FPS games WHERE YOU LOOK.
This lot are even free :
http://www.megagames.com/news/html/freegames/free
Re:Games have become horrible (Score:2)
It simply cannot compare to... Hexen...HD. Seriously, that game rocked.
My bet is that an old school 2D game will arise out of the ashes of the industry and bring the genre back where it so richly deserves to be.....on a TV screen. RPG's too. There's good eaten in an RPG. Just look at Oblivion, and that's an american RPG!
Re:Games have become horrible (Score:1)
I have played Oblivion, but I'm not sure if you are lauding it or lampooning it. I wasn't impressed with it tbh.
Re:Games have become horrible (Score:2, Insightful)
One of the most original console games recently was Katamari Damancy, and it still didn't sell as well as Final Fantasy 12, "It Plays the Game For You". That's just sad - more people are willing to buy Version 12 of the same game, but not something tr
Re:Games have become horrible (Score:1)
My point is not that Zelda/Oblivion are awesome and everything else sucks, hear me out. My point is there are 8 years between these two filled with nothing but mediocre, play through once and pawn them
Re:Games have become horrible (Score:1)
Re:Games have become horrible (Score:2)
Re:Games have become horrible (Score:2)
I agree. Also Please invest in my startup: EggsByMail.com
Oh wait, it is not 1998 anymore. From where I am sitting games nowadays are sports games, MMOs (or other similar, open-ended games like GTA, Tony Hawk), and 1st person shooters is probably last on the lather rinse repeat cycle nowadays (but not absent from the list).
I agree th
Re:Games have become horrible (Score:2)
It's a fairly low-cost platform to develop for; much lower than one of the SUPER 3D OMG consoles. As result you do see more wacky games and risks taken, especially if you don't mind importing some of the wackier DS games from Japan.
(DS carts aren't region-locked; you can pop any DS game into any DS regardless of country of origin...)
Re:Games have become horrible (Score:1)
Moon-buggy is an awesome game by the way.
Re:Games have become horrible (Score:2)
I sometimes wish I had a time machine. I'd love to pop back about 15 years and take a look at both Hollywood and the video game market and see if t
Re:Games have become horrible (Score:1)
Would Adventure of Link have been remembered as the worst non-CDi Zelda if it had implemented a better save and restart
Re:Games have become horrible (Score:2)
As far as movies go, we can use IMDB to look back. At the 1982 Oscars (celebrating the movies of 1981) we see: best movie - Chariots of Fire [imdb.com]. When's the las
Re:Games have become horrible (Score:1)
Re:Games have become horrible (Score:1)
MUD forevaaahhh
Re:Games have become horrible (Score:2)
Well, no. There are games that are horrible, but there is a easy solution: Don't play or buy the horrible ones. Psychonauts, Fahrenheit, Dreamfall, Advent Rising, Geometry Wars, Katamari Damacy, Shadow of the Collosus, NewSuperMarioBros, etc., there are plenty of very good or even great games around that aren't yet another first person shooter or FIFA, there is even a new Sensibble Soccer around if you want a different kind of soccer. The core problem is mo
Whoa, famous guy. (Score:1, Offtopic)
/. effect = fame (Score:5, Funny)
10,000? So one link on
Overall a great interview. I like where it talks about the need for business acumen in software development. It seems that there are certainly developers who are missing this.
Re:/. effect = fame (Score:2)
"If you do something creative enough that 10,000 people download it, and you want to be worked to DEATH, have we got a job for you!"
Re:Bing Rocks (Score:1, Funny)
That comment was built with English words, but I'll be damned if I can parse it into an English sentence that makes any kind of sense.
Re:Bing Rocks (Score:3, Funny)
But then I'm guessing you haven't experienced his management style directly.
Re:Bing Rocks (Score:2)
Interesting comment about reverse engineering. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Interesting comment about reverse engineering. (Score:1)
My gut reaction was, since EA had one of the first copy-protection schemes to require specialised software to break it -- remember "Art's Backup" in Di-Sector, fellow Commies? -- and since such software had to be coded by reverse-engineering the protection, they pretty well have to be aware of reverse engineering nowadays!
Re:Interesting comment about reverse engineering. (Score:1)
If the DMCA had been arround in the early 1980's...would IBM still hold a monopoly on the PC BIOS? Think of all we would have missed out on. Apple probably would have folded up for lack of users if the Mac clones industry didn't happen...although they'd like you to forget that
People bought clones instead of Apple hardware, not in addition to it. Clones didn't help Apple.
Re:Interesting comment about reverse engineering. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Interesting comment about reverse engineering. (Score:2)
Re:Interesting comment about reverse engineering. (Score:2)
Re:Interesting comment about reverse engineering. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Interesting comment about reverse engineering. (Score:2, Interesting)
my question (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:my question (Score:1, Funny)
Do you know how hard I worked to come up with the idea of switching from Arabic to Roman numerals for the continuation of our flagship franchise?
Hrmph, I thought not.
You're looking in the wrong place (Score:3, Funny)
Re:my question (Score:2)
I wonder if his older brother is called "Flash"...
Re: (Score:1)
Funny guy (Score:4, Insightful)
And ofcourse all your customers are happy with half completed games.
We reverse-engineered the electronics in a "clean room" environment, because Sega wouldn't give us licensee terms that we could live with.
And yet they set up terms others can't live with. Haven't they learned anything?!.
I think our industry's greatest challenge is to transition from technology-based to creativity-based experiences. In other words, we should all become like Miyamoto! Easier said than done.
Uhm.. EA doesn't really have a track record for both technology-based or creativity-based experiences. I think they'll have a long road ahead of them.
Oh and ofcourse publishers should grant the creators of creativity-based experiences some slack, otherwise it won't work ofcourse. how does this go along with "it compiles, ship it" mentality from the first citation?
Re:Funny guy (Score:1)
Re:Funny guy (Score:1)
Re:Funny guy (Score:1)
also, since when has there ever been a tag in html?
At least since 1998, when HTML 4.0 was released? It's still in XHTML 1.0.
Re:Funny guy (Score:1)
Re:Funny guy (Score:1)
However, the <q> tag simply renders quotation marks before and after the enclosed text (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/text.html # h-9.2.2), and is therefore more or less useless, unless you're using it for proper quotation of another language (still not sure if it's really even useful then, as some browsers probably won't handle that properly). If someone else can point out its usefulness, by all means, do so. I'd like to know.
Not useless if you intend to include the quotation inside an el
Re:Funny guy (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Genesis (Score:2, Informative)
EA's biggest risk was preparing to launch a lineup of games for the Sega Genesis without a license. We reverse-engineered the electronics in a "clean room" environment, because Sega wouldn't give us licensee terms that we could live with. If this had not worked, and the games hadn't sold, (Sega agreed to license terms the evening before our public introduction of games), EA would probably have gone the way of early computer game leaders like Broderbund and Sierra. It was truly a "bet the company" decisio
Re:Genesis (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Genesis (Score:2)
Re:Genesis (Score:2)
The funny thing is, EA ate and shat out one of those two companies and they now own a stake in the other one (Broderbund was bought by Ubisoft, which EA now owns 19.99% a stake in). EA going the way of sierra is like saying "EA died and bought themselves out".
This is barely an improvement (Score:5, Funny)
What a challenge! (Score:3, Insightful)
Translating: Our industry's biggest business challenge is to figure out how to rise our prices, so getting exclusive use of trademarks like NBA, FIFA, NFL, NHL makes us the only one, and we can put the price we want. We will buy more and more small and good game studios to! Well, if you want a game, you will need to buy from us, this is our industry's biggest business challenge.
How can we rape customers... more? (Score:3, Insightful)
Die in a fire you ass! Fine, as soon as gaming PCs/consoles are as cheap as the equipment needed to read a book you use that as a valid comparison. And as far as "excess hours", cut-n-paste level grinding and mindless drudgery does NOT count per-hour the same as watching a movie. Fucktard. I think we found one of the reasons EA sucks so hard.
Re:How can we rape customers... more? (Score:3, Insightful)
Your average game seems to take about 15-30 hours to complete. Let's call it 30, to be charitable. They cost about fifty bucks MSRP. That's $1.60 an hour.
I can read your average novel in about six hours - and I mean read it, not skim, and a book I've never read before, to boot. A paperback is eight bucks today. That's $1.33 an hour. I admit though, I'm
Re:How can we rape customers... more? (Score:2)
For a novel, you just need the book itself. And a light - I hear the sun works nicely.
Re:How can we rape customers... more? (Score:2)
This is a salient point when it comes to console games, since [today] game consoles [out of the box] only play games. Well, a couple of them are DVD players, too. Whoop de doo. Oh, and I guess Xbox360 has MCE now? Which only
I could never take seriously a man named Bing.. (Score:1)
Re:I could never take seriously a man named Bing.. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:I could never take seriously a man named Bing.. (Score:1)
Bling Gordon (Score:1)
Bingo! (Score:1)
Bada Bing (Score:1)
Obvious (Score:1)
Thus providing a boatload of overpriced, hype marketed, half-done crap to your consumers, forcing large patch downloads, huge amounts of frustration and company image degradation. This really lets customers know how much you value them.
It is because of numbskull thinking such as this that I admire Blizzard above all other game developers. Their philosophy: "We'll ship it when it's done."
Damn straight.
T
Re:Obvious (Score:2)
Not a fan of him (Score:1)
I felt he was a total jackass, and I know several people who work (worked) for EA (go EA Tiburon) and there's a lot of bad things to say about EA. This guy's demeanor and appearance backed it up. He somewhat reminded me of the stereotype o
EA Sweatshop! (Score:1)
Funny how he forgot to mention exploitation of labor as one of their "tricks." Not too terribly long ago, you could almost compare them to any sweatshop in China and find parallels. How'd that class-action a couple years back work out for ya, EA?
I admit, I don't know if the situation's improved for EA programmers since the lawsuit was settled. This is pure speculation on my part, but given their corpor
Re:EA Sweatshop! (Score:1)
My
low ratio?! (Score:1)