Graham

@Rageous The genre's steadily been contracting. Remember back in the day there were those two plus Ridge Racer, Burnout, Need For Speed and plenty of others? Of those, only Need For Speed really remains, and it's the Burnout team who are making it now.

@ecbremner That's pretty much what he said, with one qualifier. It was, "...talented RACING game designers...". If I knew how to make racing games part of the gamer consciousness again like it was in the PSX era, I'd be hiring people and renting fast cars like crazy.

@Dick Socrates Activision's a public company, so they do have to be pretty merciless in financial terms. Hollywood does indeed make 'indie' films but they do it for about 15% or less of the cost of their main titles. They know less people will see it but those people will value it as much as a summer blockbuster, so they charge the same price. A big game costs around $25 million to make. It's not possible to make an acceptable PS3 or Xbox360 retail game for $4 million and sell it for $60. The retail channel won't take it, for starters - Wal*Mart have a limited amount of shelf space and they are demanding of their suppliers. If the publisher charged less, the channel will only be a little more favourable (because they pay less in turn to the publisher) and now you need more buyers, which means you need more marketing.

This what XBLA and PSN are for. Lower cost, lower priced games with a very agreeable retail channel and one that has built in marketing no less! If Activision can't or won't make titles for those markets in order to find some new franchises or ideas, that's their loss.

The trouble with that Vegas game is it was Zucker's favourite game. Everybody in Chicago knew it was a total fucking disaster, but there was nothing to be done. Back when it was a 2 page blue sky document it had stuff like "play all casino table games against the AI including all the poker variants". I looked at it and was like, "this is 500 man years of development, those idiots in seattle have no fucking clue". But Zucker thought it was the greatest idea ever so the thing just lumbered on and on sucking up resources.

Game company CEOs have to come from the rank and file, because if they don't they all fall to a fatal disease. They start out saying "I don't do creative, I trust your judgement" but they can't be around all this cool stuff going on all the time and they have to start making value judgements and insinuating themselves into the process and of course they're finance guys or lawyers or marketers (which, don't get me wrong, are all really useful things) and they don't have game sense and they make horrible decisions. I saw it happen to Neil and I saw it happen to David. And look where Midway is now. Matt's a fucking diamond, I worked under him and he saved a project from disaster, but that company's ship has sailed.

Wow, I had no idea Pat Goschy was suing over the Wiimote!

I worked at Midway for 7 1/2 years and I knew Pat. He was a good guy and a smart engineer too. He invented a motion-sensitive boxing controller for the Dreamcast for Ready 2 Rumble Round 2. It was pretty cool, you could punch the air with it and juke left and right with it to move. It was indeed a simple precursor to the Wiimote, but it never went beyond the one-off prototype he made in the lab in Chicago. Neil Nicastro didn't think it was cool (because Neil was a clueless prick in this as in many other things) and it was too expensive to pack in especially for a one-off game on a dying console. Nintendo certainly never heard of it and the Wiimote was a more sophisticated piece of technology, quite possibly based around different internal workings.