The Miller's Tale

There's a seriously good interview with Apogee/3D Realms founder and president Scott Miller over at Gamasutra.com. Entitled "The Miller's Tale", this wide reaching interview is definitely worth a read if you are a fan of our company (or even if you're not).

Scott talks about a lot, but some of the bullet points in the interview are publishing and developer issues, working with external teams, 3DR's future console gaming thoughts, digital game distribution, intellectual property issues, and of course, a small bit about Duke. Here's some selected stuff from the full interview:

"GS: What's your approach to a PR situation as the publisher or developer? For example: Prey's release announcement came quite suddenly after quite a bit of silence. Will you take this approach with further releases or was that a decision for just that one product?

SM: Yeah, I think that something like that is how we're going to go in the future, because it seemed like in the early 90s games didn't take that long to make. It seemed cool then to announce a game when you started, because you knew you'd be done in a year or two. Now it's hard to find a hit game that's made in less than two and a half to three years.

GS: You guys are the most prominent at working with different people.

SM: We pioneered it, going back to 1990. id Software was the first studio we partnered with. They weren't even id then, they didn't have a name until I approached them. I asked them if they wanted to try shareware since they were doing so well with the Softdisk thing at the time. That's when they put together the company.

GS: The large majority of games coming out nowadays are console releases. Are you guys planning on focusing more on consoles now or sticking to the PC? I know that you have a history of FPS games which are more PC-centric.

SM: That's true, but going forward, any studio needs to look long and hard at focusing on consoles first. That's where the bigger money's at. Even though our background is in PCs, there isn't any more difficulty now making a console game. It used to be a problem because of the computing power differences between PCs and consoles. Nowadays, it's not that big of a gulf. It really comes down to whether the game idea is good, has good gameplay, technology and story hooks. If it does, then it's going to work on any platform. You just need to keep your controls simple and make sure it's going to work on a console, then it's not a big problem switching over. We're definitely going to be more focused on consoles than PC development in the future.

GS: Speaking of digital distribution, how would you feel about older 3D Realms products, like Duke Nukem 3D, appearing on Xbox Live Arcade.

SM: Yeah, we'd love to see that happen. Microsoft has a pretty tight lid about what they're putting on the system now. They're trying to not hit the same genres over and over again, and since Doom just came out on Live, they probably won't want Duke 3D on Live anytime soon. I've had some casual talks about this, but you never know. We'd like to see that happen, it's just a matter of making it happen."

There's a lot more to read, you'll definitely want to check this all out by reading the full interview today.

Posted by Joe Siegler on November 30, 2006 at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Discuss this story on our forums
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