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Introduction What Went Right What Went Wrong A Unique Company Résumé

A Unique Company Résumé

Asheron's Call was a tremendous learning opportunity for Turbine and Microsoft. Despite all the problems and setbacks, Asheron's Call is a success story. The game has been well received by PC game enthusiasts as well as the majority of the game industry press. The fan support for Asheron's Call is overwhelming, and players routinely spend more than six hours a day logged into the game world.

In addition, Turbine is now in a very desirable position, being one of only a handful of developers (and the only independent studio) that has successfully created a massively-multiplayer title. Industry analysts predict that online games will be the fastest growing segment of entertainment software. With its reusable architecture, robust toolset, and (now) experienced developers, Turbine intends to remain at the forefront of massively-multiplayer gaming.

Toby Ragaini leads Turbine Entertainment Software's design team and was the lead designer of Asheron's Call. He is currently working on Turbine's next-generation massively-multiplayer game.

Asheron's Call Turbine Entertainment Software Westwood, Mass. (781) 407-4000 http://www.turbinegames.com Release date: November 1999 Intended platform: Windows 95/98 Project budget: Multimillion-dollar development budget Project length: 40 months plus 8 months of beta Project size: approximately 2 million lines of code. Team size: 30+ full-time developers, including 6 artists, 4 game designers, 15 software engineers, and 5 QA testers . Critical development hardware: Intel Pentium PCs Critical development software: Microsoft Visual C++ 5.0, Visual SourceSafe 5.0, Lightwave 5.5, Photoshop 4.0, RAID.

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