If you’re an old school gamer, you may remember the name Rocket Science Games. 

In the early- to mid-1990s, Rocket Science was, in the eyes of the media, one of the star developers of the industry. It raised over $12 million from venture capitalists. It was on the cover of Wired magazine. And it had the film industry captivated with its “Hollywood meets Silicon Valley’ pitch.

There was a problem, though. Despite the incredible publicity and hype for the company, it hadn’t yet released a game – and when the games did come out, they weren’t that good. “Loadstar: The Legend of Tully Bodine” and “Cadillacs and Dinosaurs: The Second Cataclysm” probably don’t ring too many bells.

Rocket Science ended up getting emergency funding from SegaSoft and the games got a little better (you might recall “Obsidian” or “The Space Bar”). Ultimately, though, they still didn’t catch on with players. In 1997, four years after it burst onto the scene, Rocket Science was gone.

Steve Blank, a serial entrepreneur who now teaches at U.C. Berkeley, Stanford University and the Columbia University/Berkeley Joint Executive MBA program, was CEO of Rocket Science Games. And he has recently begun writing a blow-by-blow account of what went wrong at the company.

It turns out the problems started before the company was really up and running.

Apparently Namco Bandai's problem wasn't with the people making "Splatterhouse" at Bottlerocket. It was the management, or at least its deal with them.

According to a source close to the project, and several others familiar with the situation, Namco Bandai has quietly opened a new office in San Diego to finish production on its game "Splatterhouse" and recruited between 10 and 20 designers, artists, programmers, producers, and other staff from Bottlerocket Entertainment to work on the game.

Remember that Bottlerocket was the original developer on the game, but in February, publisher Namco Bandai took the game away from it and canceled their deal for an unspecified "performance issue," according to Makoto Iwai, COO of the company's American operation.

In the meantime, work has continued on "Splatterhouse at Namco Bandai's internal team that made "Afro Samurai." But switching developers is a difficult process since there's no internal memory of why a game is the way it is, what went wrong in the past, and so on. Getting the game out by later this year, as promised, would be difficult.

So Namco apparently has a solution: Re-hire the key folks who were making the game. Many were of couse available since Bottlerocket has been in financial straits, first because Brash went bankrupt, killing "The Flash" (and likely leaving Bottlerocket, like many other developers, in the hole for hundreds of thousands of dollars), and then because of "Splatterhouse."

As I reported yesterday, Bottlerocket has now been tapped by Genius Products to finish production of "Scratch: the Ultimate DJ." But for the past few months it has been without an assignment and even that new game likely isn't enough to keep all the folks working on "Flash" and "Splatterhouse" employed.

So when Bottlerocket couldn't afford to keep many of them, it's little wonder many on the "Splatterhouse" team took Namco Bandai's offer to finish the project they started.

Of course, we still don't know exactly why Namco canceled its contract with "Bottlerocket" and whether its plan was nefarious in any way, or it's simply executing a necessary backup plan. Either way, it's clear it wasn't entirely unhappy with the work being done at Bottlerocket since it's hiring many of their employees to finish the game. The unspecificed "performance" problem must have had to do with the developer's management, or the terms of the deal the publisher had with them.

Namco Bandai reps didn't respond to a request for comment. Bottlerocket CEO Jay Beard declined to comment.

Now that it has gotten the game's source code back from its courtroom nemesis 7 Studios, Genius Products is tapping a new developer to complete production on "Scratch: the Ultimate DJ": Bottlerocket Entertainment.

Several sources close to the project confirmed the news.

Those of you who have been paying too much attention to video game industry news will recognize several layers of irony here. For one, the reason San Diego-based Bottlerocket is available to take on this assignment is that it recently had a game it was working on, "Splatterhouse," taken away by developer Namco Bandai. So essentially, its last game was yanked by an angry (petty?) publisher and as a result, it's now taking on as an assignment a game yanked from another developer by an angry (petty?) publisher.

Furthermore, Bottlerocket and 7 have both been in a bad financial situation this year, which contributed to their problems on "Splatterhouse" and "Scratch," for the same reason: the collapse of Brash Entertainment. 7 was working on "Fun Park" and "9" for Brash, while Bottlerocket was doing "The Flash." When Brash went bankrupt, both developers were owed hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And of course, as I previously reported, "Scratch" started life as a game at... Brash. Now we're really entering Alanis Morissette territory.

So now Bottlerocket is about to start (or already started? I'm not quite sure) work to complete "Scratch," while 7 Studios is finishing up "Space Camp," its casual Wii/DS game for new parent company Activision, and likely talking about doing some kind of spin-off or sequel to "DJ Hero" while dealing with being a defendant and plaintiff in court with Genius Products, its former publisher.

And all three of the past half-year's biggest disaster stories in video games -- the bankruptcy of Brash, Namco taking "Splatterhouse" from Bottlerocket, and 7 Studios' legal tussle with Genius -- have become intertwined.

Tragedy or comedy? Hard to say. But I'll have more on the intertwined story soon.

A Genius executive didn't respond to a request for comment (no surprise since the company has only communicated through publicists through its lawsuit against 7 Studios and Activision). A Bottlerocket executive declined to comment.

In part two of my interview with Bioware CEO Ray Muzyka and VP, entertainment Greg Zeschuk, we talk about why movies are a key part of the development of the studio's fictional worlds, how they can ensure those movies are good, and how the recession and success of Nintendo is impacting their business plans.

For background on my interviewees, see the introduction to part one.

(the screenshots are from Bioware's upcoming game "Dragon Age: Origins")

Ben Fritz: In terms of the different media connected to these worlds, you obviously developed the games and you’re very involved in the novels… But I know Avi Arad has optioned “Mass Effect” as a movie. What’s your approach to working with a producer like that on one of your properties?

Ray Muzyka: We’re not going into detail on that front right now. I don’t if we’ve explicitly confirmed any of that stuff [they haven’t]. But if we were…

The one thing that’s true, regardless of how our ideas are manifested, is quality is the key. They’ve all got to be awesome and equally satisfying to different audiences in different ways. That’s something we’re unrelenting and uncompromising about. We want to work with the best people in the world on something that’s actually going to be seen as a landmark event. So people can feel it’s a good value for their money, entertaining, and emotionally engaging.

Greg Zeschuk: Another way to see it too is we work with folks who get the properties. Not just get how much the potential return is. That’s one of the important factors. People we build relationships with have to have that same feeling we have. It’s tough finding folks like that.

RM: We’ve been very lucky all the people we have worked with and are working with, past and future, are in that mold. They get it. They’re passionate. I love that. I love the passion.

GZ: I think we’ve reached a transition point media-wise where there’s an understanding that the right games can transition well to other media. There’s some, like light shooters with no story, probably not so much. It’s going to be hard to make something great in other media off a property that’s not founded in a strong world.

Our stuff would probably translate well. What’s interesting is we talk to folks from all over, Hollywood and elsewhere, it’s always amazing to find folks who have played our games. It’s like, “Wow. We love your movies and you love our games.”

RM: Translating our games to cinema is an active goal for us. It’s something we’re actively pursuing. We haven’t necessarily confirmed all the stories. But, having said that, a lot of the stories that have come out have been pretty much on spot.

BF: Still speaking theoretically, of course… If you guys are world builders, as more and more of the same tools are being used to make special effects and animation in movies, is it an active goal for you to be involved in producing those other media?

For a blog about the the business and culture of video games and their intersection with Hollywood, the guys in charge of Bioware are really well situated. They run a hugely successful RPG [role playing games] developer that was acquired by Electronic Arts in 2006, along with Pandemic, for $860 million. They've worked on one of the most successful licensed games of all time, "Knights of the Old Republic" (with an MMO sequel in the works) and created several hit original properties, one of which, "Mass Effect," is currently in development as a film. And they've got a huge original property, "Dragon Age: Origins," in production that's one of the few bets the newly slimmed EA is taking. (All the screenshots in this post are from "Dragon Age" because, hey, they're new)

In other words, they're at the forefront of the storytelling in video games, cooperation with old media, and the business of developing for the mass market. That's why I was really pleased to get to interview Ray Muzyka [left], the CEO, and Greg Zeschuk, VP of entertainment, for half an hour at the Game Developers Conference.

I think our discussion turned out to be really interesting, so I've transcribed most of it and broken it up into two posts. Today: Our discussion of storytelling in video games, in which I ask them about the relative importance of character development vs. mechanics and they shoot back that it's all about world-building.

Tomorrow: We talk about the process of making movies out of Bioware games and how modern economic realities effect their development process.

Ben Fritz: What I’ve noticed in playing your games and what’s obvious in “Dragon Age” [I saw a demo just before the interview] is their scope. When you’re trying to make a game so massive, do you cut back on the size if you feel like you don’t have the quality? Or is the quantity so important that you first need to get it to the size it needs to be? How do you balance those two things?

 Ray Muzyka: We try and define possibility space want player to engage in and what’s the scope that accommodates that.  We have to make that commercially successful at the same time, so we have to balance the commercial and artistic goals. But, we don’t want to compromise the artistic goals. We aim pretty big. Our ambitions are pretty crazy sometimes. The size of this game is kinda crazy in some ways, because there are a number of permutations and the replayability of it all.

It’s a good endeavor because in the end we trust our fans for supporting us. We’re building a platform more than anything. We’re trying to launch a landmark fantasy event. It’s dark heroic fantasy. It’s a platform for future engagement with our fans: Downloadable content; achievements surfaced on the community site; creation of user-generated content with the toolset we’re releasing. It’s a long multi-year plan.

Greg Zeschuk: There’s another dimension that’s interesting in that honestly we don’t know how big it’s going to be. Because the actual act of discovery is a big part of the development process for any first iteration of a game. Anything big especially, you have to make the tools and all the stuff that allows you to create everything. Then at the end you build it and go, “Hmmmm, how big did it end up being?”

We do set goals, but we tend to overshoot them because everyone’s really ambitious and then we trim a bit. That’s the place where we can really nail the quality. Over the years, what we’ve done is tried and establish an overall quality bar. If something dips below, we used to try and build it up. Now we tend to just excise it.

It isn’t dissimilar from a film where you’re editing. The last sequence of our development process involves editing the game content into the best mix in a sense.

BF: Where do you start, I’m curious? I spoke Monday night to some developers from Ubisoft ["Prince of Persia" producer Ben De Mattes, "Far Cry 2" creative director Clint Hocking] and they said it’s mechanics, you start with mechanics and build a character on top of that. To me that means, no surprise, the character often isn’t as compelling.

On the other hand, if you do character first before you know if he or she works as a mechanic, maybe you’re in the wrong medium. Which do you guys start with and then how do you balance when there’s a conflict between the creation of a compelling character vs. what would make the best player mechanic?

RM: First we build the world. Then we get everything situated. The character and mechanics are elements that need to be consistent with that world. I don’t think we build them separately. It’s all an integrated whole.

With all the meetings, demos, and random conversations I've been having at GDC (it's kind of cool to be in an environment where I can hardly go a minute without running into someone I know, who knows me, or who sees my name tag and wants to talk about my blog or rant about certain employment decisions made recently by certain newspapers), I didn't make it to a single speech or panel -- allegedly the point of GDC! -- outside of Iwata's keynote until yesterday afternoon. But I cleared my schedule because, really, how could you miss an opportunity to hear "Katamari Damacy" and "Noby Noby Boy" creator Keita Takahashi give a presentation titled "All About Noby Noby Boy?"

He did not disappoint. The man is just as off-kilter, wacky and hilarious as you'd expect from his work. And he was very frank from the get go in admitting that "Noby" hasn't sold too well (an impossible-to-categorize downloadable PS3 exclusive original IP? Who'd have expected that?). Watching him talk feels makes me think of Andy Warhol talking about one of his movies: The work defies almost every convention of the medium and when the creator talks, you get only more confused, not less. It seems like he understand what he's doing even less than we do.

Nonetheless, it's almost impossible to not be entranced by his ridiculously naive and pure love for his game. And to not wonder whether it's all an act -- Performance art with the video game industry (and even the fans who play his games?) as a canvas.

A few highlights:

-Takahashi's goal with "Noby" is for players to work together to get the girl to extend to the end of the solar system (if you haven't played the game that won't quite make sense; just roll with me). But with the game's limited sales, that will take 820 years at the current rate of growth.

-He's hoping to compress that a bit with an in-the-works iPhone version of "Noby Noby Boy." But he later revealed that has only been in the works for a week and he has no idea if/when it will come out. I'm going to guess that's not how Namco Bandai would have liked the game to be announced.

-One of his favorite ideas for the game he had to abandon was to give real, physical prizes to the first, 10th, or 1000th (etc.) players to achieve major goals, like extending the girl past Mars. The prizes included a "Noby Noby Boy" scarf knitted by his mother and a six foot doll made by his sister (I'm so sorry I didn't snap pictures of the photos he showed us in time). "If I can deliver an actual gift to players, this might make them think there is an actual 'girl' or 'boy" and believe, as the girl says, that if you chain the solar system everyone can be happy," he explained. Now it makes sense, right?

-He also considered making "Noby Noby Boy" dolls, like the ones pictured on left, "every day" after the game was was done to send to players. But he didn't feel there was a secure way to send them, or the scarf or doll, to players who earned them without addressing privacy concerns.

-That almost didn't stop him. "I thought it could be fun even if it went to the wrong address," he added. "Then they could sell them online and I'd buy them back and try to deliver them again to the right person."

-What is "Noby Noby Boy?" Here's how the creator describes it: "'Noby Noby Boy' is a ticket to go to a festival to change the solar system."

"That makes total sense," you're probably thinking. "But why would anyone make a game that's a ticket to a festival to change the solar system?" Takahashi has an explanation:

I felt constrained and cramped. In the last two-to-five years, the world has become cramped. It's difficult to explain. IT doesn't have to do with the recession. It feels contrained from a different perspective... Something is tying me up. It feels like I'm being constrained by systems. It might be [publisher] Bandai [Namco]. But it feels like there is something more constricting in the world.

"Noby" means to "not feel constrained, be liberated" in Japanese. Another meaning is "dilly dallying." I think that fits the game. It's a wonderful word.

Got it?

-Takahashi's concluding advice to his fellow video game makers at GDC? Forget your players, forget any rules, and just come up with something crazy you love. In other words, imagine you're John Lennon in the '70s. Or as he put it (in excerpts):

I think there's a great potential to games and that's why I'm dissatisfied with that is existing today... If we love video games, then we have to think about them much more and feel more and enjoy them more.... Perhaps we are hiding behind the rules of games and relying too much on past experience... Perhaps we have to ignore the players and companies and just create games we like...We shouldn't be afraid of being criticized or what the result will be. That method will create things that are fantastic or fanastically awful. But even if they're fantastically awful, they still have value. 

Well, maybe Takahashi is naive and insane. But in an industry that perhaps doesn't think outside of the box as much as it should and at a conference focused in large part on processes and techniques, I'm really glad we have a genuine 100% right-brained hippie (I hate the word, but it fits) in the mix.

Most video game professionals will tell you that switching a game from one developer to another mid-production is a costly and difficult move that rarely makes sense artistically or financially. You have to transfer assets and get an entire new team trained not only on the technology modified for the game, but creatively in the mindset that has gone into its world, characters, and mechanics. It's really hard to justify.

And yet... It sure seems to be happening this year. First came "Splatterhouse," which Namco Bandai took away from BottleRocket in February. The publisher is currently, according to my sources, considering what new developer it will assign the game to (I hear the internal team that made "Afro Samurai" is a candidate but not a sure thing). On Friday, Ubisoft confirmed that it took "I am Alive" away from independent developer DarkWorks and is giving the game to its internal studio in Shanghai to complete.

And of course there's Sega's two "Aliens" games, previously in development at Gearbox and Obsidian, both of which have been taken away from their respective independent developers while the publisher figures out what to do with them. According to my sources, the games were put on hold purely for budgetary reasons. Sega is suffering from the recession and its own business problems and can't justify spending the millions it would take to finish producing them, especially since they might not have even come out this fiscal year.

That leaves Sega with two games it would still like to complete, as I've previously reported. But doing so will probably require, yes, handing them over to new developers.

I'd hardly call it a major trend. But it is clear that publishers seem willing to do what the convention wisdom tells us they shouldn't, which indicates something is changing in the economics of the industry, or the incentives publishers are encountering during a recession, to make taking games away from outside developers mid-production seem more logical.

The explosion of the App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch couldn’t have come at a more opportune time for the videogame business. As major publishers downsize and and the number of original properties shrinks, developers have a growing need for new creative outputs.

Which is exactly what the App Store provides. You’d be hard pressed to find a talented programmer or designer these days who, if they’re not working 80 hours per week at a senior level, isn’t working on some kind of game for the iPhone / iPod Touch either in their spare time or full time. Why not? The tools are widely available, it’s not that hard, and there are examples of hit apps generated by a single person generating tens of thousands of dollars for their creators.

You’ve also got major publishers like EA and Sega moving aggressively into the space, as well as start-ups with significant venture funding like ngmoco. But one of the biggest signs of how much attention the space is getting could be Appy. The team behind this San Diego start-up comprise most of the guys who founded and led High Moon Studios, the developer that began life as the US branch of Japanese publisher Sammy and then put out “Darkwatch” through Capcom and “The Bourne Conspiracy” for Vivendi Games, its corporate parent for two years.

Following Activision’s merger with Vivendi Games and decision to downsize or eliminate most of the studios in the Sierra label, it might have been tough for High Moon’s senior execs to stick around (even though the studio did survive). But the chief development officer, chief financial officer, chief creative officer, design director, and executive producer (amongst others), probably could have found jobs at major publishers somewhere. Instead, they put their heads (and wallets) together and headed where the action is: the iPhone and iPod Touch. Appy was founded in the fall and is aiming to release its first games by the spring.

I talked to Paul O’Connor, Appy’s creative director and the former design director at High Moon, about why they decided to aim their sights smaller (so to speak), what the opportunities and competition are like for games on their new platform, and how things went down at High Moon when Activision took over.

Ben Fritz: Were you guys interested in the iPhone before you left High Moon, or did you look around the market at that point and realize that this was the smart place to start a business.

Paul O'Connor: We’ve been interested in it for a very long time. [CEO] Chris Ulm especially has been an evangelist for the iPhone since its inception. He bought one on day one and was convinced it’s the next gaming platform…

Also, we know from being at High Moon and having access to the brain trust at Vivendi that they were not very aggressively interested in this space. Vivendi sold its mobile unit at the end of the year, in fact.
We didn’t have a master plan about moving into this market until fairly recently, but it was always a glimmer on the horizon: “Wouldn’t it be nice if…?”

After the Vivendi acquisition we were focused entirely on shipping “Bourne.” At the tail end of shipping “Bourne,” with the merger underway, we were focused on making sure the studio would survive and have a place in the Activision empire.

Once it became clear that High Moon would survive with Activision and it wouldn’t need a thick layer of management, we asked “what next?” and iPhone was on the top of the list.

 BF: So was the decision to start Appy at that point purely what you knew you wanted to do, or a matter of you being pragmatic as you looked at the opportunities in the market, given how tough it is for an independent developer to sell AAA console games, and so on?

PoC: It was pragmatic, but it helps when pragmatism aligns with what you believe. I would go so far as to say that the iPhone market is the only place where an independent developer can make money right now.

There might be a market for Xbox Live games or ad supported web games, but in terms of a market that’s growing and in which there aren’t any established players, I think the iPhone App Store is it.

Chris is fond of pointing out that you know Microsoft is going to make the best games on the Xbox,
Nintendo on the Wii, and so on. But who’s going to make the best games for iPhone? Nobody knows right now. And many of those other players are in direct conflict. Nintendo has the DS, Sony has the PSP, Microsoft has Windows Mobile. The major players really have a disincentive to get into this space. That opens up the app store for smaller developers.

BF: But some big companies are on the app store and doing well.

PoC: We are seeing larger publishers camping out on the top of those sales lists, like EA. What I see there is an indication that those guys who have got 20 or 30 or 40 years of brand equity, the gamers know their products and are going with established brands.

BF: They can probably afford to treat the iPhone as an experiment, but for you its your whole business. Do you feel like the model is well established for you to make money?

PoC: I worked in the console business a long time and I know there are a lot of hands in the pockets between the final material and the creators of the games. It’s a legacy of the way business has done and its has driven the industry into a crazy upward spiral where it needs sure things and swings for the fences to get big hits.

Activision is in that space and god bless ‘em. They wanted High Moon to tighten down and work on their core brands year to year and that’s just not a place where we were interested in being.

Apple takes their bite, of course, and we’re happy to pay them [Apple takes 30% of all sales on iTunes and the App Store – B.F.]. But still it’s an extraordinary opportunity. What it does is reduce the amount of money you’ve got to pay someone other than yourselves. As a result it reduces budgets and allows you to experiment and try new things you can’t do in a $60 retail game.

Given the their frequent cross-over into sci-fi fandom, I'm sure many gamers will be interested in the news in today's Daily Variety that Warner Bros. is developing a new version of the '80s TV mini-series V for ABC (lizard invade in a Nazi/holcaust allegory -- it's cheesy now but was creepy then).

Perhaps even more interesting to gamers, however, is that Jason Hall is attached as an executive producer. Formerly the head of Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment (and before that, Monolith, developer of "F.E.A.R." and "the Matrix Online"), Hall is now a producer and also an online personality as host of "The Jace Hall Show" on Crackle.com.

The article by my colleague Michael Schneider doesn't say much about Hall's involvement besides that he might extend "V" into other platforms, including gaming. We can only speculate exactly what Jason will do, since he wasn't available to talk, but his company HD Films has been focused on cross-media content ("The Jace Hall Show," machinima series "Chadam" for Warner, the "Brothers in Arms" movie in development), so his involvement indicates ABC and Warner are thinking bigger than just a few nights of TV for "V."

Hard to say exactly what that means -- an ARG? a virtual world? extensions of the story via gaming or online? All of the above? The only thing clear right now is that involving someone with Hall's background means the new "V" team is probably aiming to do interactive stuff that's developed from early on a cohesive part of the property's re-launch, instead of just licensing out a crappy mobile game at the last minute.

It's also a sign that Hall, who exited his post atop Warner Bros' videogame division with the kind of "production deal" that's often's nothing more than a face-saving way for executives to be shown the door, is making a real go of it as a producer. As far as I know, he's the first former videogame executive to do that.

A few weeks ago at a party I was talking to an acquaintance who works at a big game developer that works on a very big franchise and he was telling me how it's kind of a joke within his studio that the people who do press interviews about their games are usually not the people who were most intimately involved in their development.

Of course to me as the person occasionally on the other side of the interview (though luckily not too often, since we don't do "previews"), it wasn't funny so much as sad. Though honestly, it's not that surprising. So many of those interviews are more about a series of canned PR lines than genuine back-and-forth discussion that being intimately involved in the game doesn't seem like the key qualification so much as being able to deliver those talking points.

It's one more bizarre state of affairs in the world of videogame journalism compared to other media. I can't imagine an article about a film or TV show where the interviewee is not the director or producer or head writer. But in games we often get people with amorphous titles like "product marketing manager" giving quotes that are not the way any normal human being would actually talk about something they are working on (especially when those quotes are delivered via e-mail or later approved in some way by PR people). That's not to say interviews about movies are always enlightening and games aren't, but it seems to happen more often that way than the other.

I was thinking about that after reading this little item on GamaSutra in which Gas Powered Games' founder Chris Taylor makes the crazy suggestion that "press questions out to go right to the people best qualified to answer them." What a radical notion! Of course, publishers trying to use the press to get out a certain message may not be thrilled about this, but I would like to think that as the videogame audience matures, this will increasingly become inevitable. Gamers will want to hear directly from the people who really make their games and won't accept phony PR-driven interviews. Not to mention everyone in the industry will recognize that their mature audiences can accept hearing about features that didn't make it into the game, flaws in the development process, and other things that real people talk about in real life.

This issue also ties into an excellent post a few weeks ago on SexyVideogameLand where Leigh Alexander pointed out that it's rather bizarre that Dennis Dyack is considered "controversial" since the things he says are actually hardly controversial at all. It's just the fact that he, as a developer, is able to talk to the press regularly and do so honestly that somehow makes him "controversial." Which is a very sad state of affairs.