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By J.D. Alley
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Gamasutra
November 24, 2006

Adapt or Die: The Biological Imperative for Aging Creatives

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Adapt or Die: The Biological Imperative for Aging Creatives

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Flashback to the summer of 2000, I am the Art Director for the LIFE Studio at Microsoft and a small independent studio from Boston has come to pitch a little game called Zoo Tycoon. There are three guys in the room, Adam Lévesque, the creative director and one of the founders of Blue Fang Games, John Wheeler, the chief engineer and the other founder of the studio and, wait for it… Hank Howie, the president of Blue Fang Games.

Six years later with over five million units sold and more than 120 million dollars in revenue generated I think it is safe to say that we made the right choice when we signed them to produce the game for us.

I flew in to Boston, we talked, and I flew back to Seattle and resigned from Microsoft. It was obvious to me that the reason the work was not going well in Redmond was because it had moved to Boston. The stakeholders at Blue Fang had sensed that same rapidly chilling wind of impending change and they had already begun the migration to warmer climes. It was easy to join up with the herd and head south, adapt or die.
It has been a little over a year since I made the decision to leave Microsoft and it feels appropriate to take some time to reflect on that decision.

The move from a major publishing house to a small independent studio has provided me with a unique perspective on our business in general and, more importantly, helped to crystallize my thinking about what it will take for any studio to thrive in a rapidly evolving market place, and how guys like me can reinvent themselves to become a catalyst for change. The thoughts that follow may well fall into the “for what its worth” category. I would like to believe that there is some nugget of hard won wisdom to be had, but you never know until you count the box office take. So, with that in mind, read on cautiously - one mans adaptation may be another’s swan song.

Let me begin by saying that I believe the single most critical adaptation we must make in our business is to raise the level of the discourse with product and process. Let me explain.

Much like the leading edge of a tsunami, real change in the interactive entertainment (read: PC and console games) business often goes unnoticed until all that energy hits the shore line and you are staring at a wall of water that threatens to overwhelm you very quickly. Studios like Blue Fang have been surfing that rapidly growing wave of change for some time now, and they are well positioned to accelerate themselves into a commanding leadership position in the world wide development community.

The old saw that “ideas are a dime a dozen” has never been more relevant. Rapid changes in technology, platform and rising production costs, coupled with a genre driven market and limited retail channel, have created the perfect storm of an exceptionally demanding and acutely constrained environment for developers of interactive entertainment. Your hot idea is meaningless if you can’t deliver it to the market place on time and on budget.

The continuing contraction of the traditional Big Box market place, a shrinking demographic of 19 to 34 year old males, and the consolidation of control for both publishing and platform have conspired to create a real “adapt or die” situation for independent studios. If you are just now noticing that approaching wave of change, it may be too late to do much to alter the inevitable outcome. That bus left yesterday and studios like Harmonix and Blue Fang were driving.

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