Day 2 of 1up's Prey Coverage

Today is Day 2 of 1up.com's Week of Prey Coverage and they've published their latest piece. Today's piece is entitled "Say it Ain't So". This is an interview with 3D Realms' George Broussard talking about Prey.

The interview is wide ranging running from the early days of the project in 1995, through the change in development teams, up until now, how the tech has evolved, and lots of Prey specific questions. The interview also talks about a few things that aren't Prey specific such as what happened to the shareware game concept of distribution. Of course, since it's an interview with George, there's a few tidbits in there about Duke Nukem Forever, as well. Here's a few samples from the interview:

1UP: So I can start off: Just kind of take us back to 95 and just kind of tell us what was it like at Apogee/3D Realms back then. What was going on?

GB: Well, in 95 we were still working on Duke Nukem 3D, and so it was pretty hectic, just trying to get that game finished and basically trying to move from being a shareware developer doing smaller games to doing more large-scale games to try to get into the retail space. And then obviously, Duke went out and did really, really well in 96, and we were all really happy with the results from that. We started looking at wanting to expand a little bit and start another team, and that's kind of how we started building the Prey team.

1UP: So when you see what Human Head's doing with it now, does it really capture what you guys envisioned back then [in 1995]? What it's like comparing today's portals to 10 years ago's portals?

GB: It's pretty close; it's fundamentally the same stuff. We're all surprised that no one else really took that direction, because they're not really technically that hard to do. I know they got a lot of press from being like a whiz-bang cool thing back then, but technically, they just weren't too difficult to do, and there are some neat gameplay things you can do with it. But really, Human Head is pretty much just carrying on the torch and doing almost exactly what we were doing back then, and then expanding it into other areas with wall-walking and spirit walk and those kind of new things.

1UP: What kind of - so tell me about, like, what kind of feelings were you guys having when it actually started to come together, you're like: "Wow, we're going to bring Prey back"?

GB: It was a pretty fun time. We also were really close with the id guys through our past relationships, and that let us get the Doom 3 engine really, really early. I think we got it just a couple or three weeks after Raven did.

This interview also has an audio file of George, so you can listen to the interview and hear George speak it in addition to reading it on the page. All of this goodness is available on the 1up site here.

Posted by Joe Siegler on January 31, 2006 at 12:54 PM | Permalink
News Categories: Prey