Patience is a virtue

After reading this Slashdot post from Matt “The Optimizer” Pritchard regarding Ensemble Studios which I will reproduce below.

“Though I appreciate the sentiment, you got some key facts wrong. As someone who was there (interviewed before a publisher was found, hired just after, and wrote a very good chunck of the code in Age of Empires) I can attempt to clear it up, set the record straight, and shed some light on the process.

– Standard Disclaimer — The contents of this post are the personal views and recoletions of the author and not representing Ensemble Studios and/or Microsoft.

Tony Goodman is a business man and a first-rate gamer who dreamed of creating PC games and the company that would realize them. However, economic reality being what it is, he started out by creating a company that created Database tools (Paradox) and provided consuting services to local businesses. That company was Ensemble Corporation.

The company grew and prosepered. Along the way Tony and others learned a lot through the school of experience and mistakes about how to run a company successly. Eventually the company was succfull enough that Tony had enough resources to boot-strap start something that would become a game company.

At this time, Tony had NO connections to Microsoft or any other game publishers. Repeat, no contacts at Microsoft (Hell, they were using Borland products at the consulting firm).

He did however have a friend from 15 years ago (His college gaming club), Bruce Shelly, who had gone on to a successful career in the Game Industry (Co-designing Civilization with Sid Meier among other things). He called up Bruce, and over a period of time convicned him to join the effort he was starting.

With a couple fellow game-company believers they hired a couple people (game programmer and artist) to work full time on a game prototype. This first prototype was more Civ like and called “Dawn of Man”. It was written in Delphi 1.0 and fit on One single floppy disk.

As the game was being developed by the programmers and artists, Tony and his tiny Management team were working on the Business side of things.

Now I can’t stress enough how having great skills at running a small business is as important as having great skills at making a game. BOTH sides have to be there for things to turn out mega-successful.

Anyway, then the Dawn of Man prototype was to a point it could be shown, Tony Goodman went (along with a couple others) to GDC (The Computer Game Developers Conference) to shop around for publishers. With much salesmanship expended, eventually three publishers showed some interest: Seventh Level, Hasbro, and Microsoft.

At that time (late ’95 to early ’96) Microsoft was a nobody in the PC games arena. (They were just about to come out with Deadly Tide and Microsoft Soccer — which would go on to sell something like 3000 units)

A company discussion and vote was held to determine which publisher to go with. It was close… we almost went with Seventh Level (Remember them) , but we chose Microsoft instead. Why? Because 1) they offered a good contract that was competitive with the others, 2) they offered better hope for international distribution (though we didn’t realized then how important that would be) and 3) they had their act together business-wise better than other publishers. It often is a dog-eat-dog world when dealing with game publishers, but MS’s size gave their games group an advantage.. they didn’t have to screw us around on the little points and they were hungry (the MS PC games groups) to make themselves into a publisher to contend with.

Anyway, from there a lot of hard work occured and passion resulted in some truly great games. Insdutry Contacts may get you the initial meetings, but you need the whole enchelada in place to make great games.

-Matt “The Optimizer” Pritchard”

As I am going to leave by current company by the end of March. A good idea would be to take up any consulting or development jobs that I can handle even though it may not be game related, but game related jobs will take priority. Then with all these jobs, I can build up a nice little warchest to fund my own game development project which will be heavily focused on mobile development since my interest lies in the mobile game industry. After all, if it works for Ensemble Studio. Then it should work for me. Plus, Ensemble Studios created the award winning “Age of Empires” series. As a friend tells me, “Patience” is a virtue. So I will just bide my time like Jiang Zi Ya.