CREATOR OF UNIVERSE HAS SECOND THOUGHTS
Dateline --Atlanta - May 28 1998
Sometimes you succeed more by doing less.
BIG FUN, the Atlanta-based game developer, has come to this realization after working eighteen months to build the "Reign of Ronin", an enormous recreation of feudal Japan on the Internet.
"The possibilities of the Web are so attractive," explains Dov Jacobson, Big Fun's president, "that you can forget to ask whether a feature will really make the game work better."
In the case of Big Fun, the tempting features were "persistence" (the ability for an online game to last indefinitely) and "megaplay" (the ability for thousands of people to share a gameworld). Like many pioneers in Internet gaming, Big Fun set out to create a single game universe where hordes of players struggle for dominance for night after night after night.
"We realized that we were building a game for a tiny cadre of addicts," Jacobson continues. "If we want to attract a mainstream audience, we need to package fun the way it has been served up since the days of Aristophanes: an hour or two of entertainment that has a clear winner at the end, and starts up tomorrow with a clean slate."
"Look at a baseball game, or a TV show, a Quake match, a movie, or an opera," Jacobson explains. "An hour or two and its over. There is a sense of conclusion at the end. Usually characters and situations carry over from episode to episode, but little of the story does."
Recognizing this, the Big Fun team restructured Reign of Ronin. Instead of a single enormous game, Ronin supports a large lobby and hundreds of games, each with up to six players. And Reign of Ronin can be won in a half an evening. (The original game was balanced so it could never be permanently won.)
The problems experienced with Ultima Online, the persistent-world game by Origin, helped shape thinking at Big Fun. Reign of Ronin is a strategy game, not a role playing game, and the Ronin designers felt they were buying a lot of Origin's issues, without the game requiring it.
"Origin's motto is 'We create worlds.'", Jacobson laughs, "Maybe later... Right now we are creating a game."
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BIG FUN is a privately owned game publisher in Atlanta founded in March, 1996 by executives and staff of the late Turner Interactive. Their 1997 titles include the 3D cartoon race game PIZZA PILOTS (published by Simon & Schuster, and starring Cheech Marin and Cyndi Lauper) as well as RONIN.
THE FULL TEXT OF THIS DOCUMENT IS AVAILABLE AT www.BigFun.Net/PR/PR4.htm
For Further Information Contact: Sharon Ahmed
- Big Fun Development Co.
- 5115 New Peachtree Rd
- Atlanta GA 30341 USA
- Tel: (1) 770 454 6770
- FAX: (1) 770 454 7373
- e-mail: sharon@bigfun.net
- http://www.bigfun.net