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The Miller's Tale: 3D Realms' Scott Miller
SM: What we’re looking for is co-collaborating on IP development. When that happens, we own a portion and the studio we partner with owns a portion. It’s a shared IP. GS: It seems like a good concept, and it has worked really well, so why hasn’t it caught on? Is it too dangerous financially? SM: Oh yes, it’s dangerous. If you don’t make a hit then it can hurt because you have a lot of your own skin in the game. I often wonder why other studios don’t do this. I guess Lionhead did it, but not in the same way we did. Epic, I think, was working with an external studio until they brought them internal. I don’t really know of anyone that does what we do. id was working with Raven for a while. GS: With Hexen. 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: That was around the time of Apogee? SM: Yeah. 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: What games have you been playing and enjoying lately? SM: Man, what have I been playing lately? GS: I know the feeling. SM: (laughs) I’ve actually not finished many games. I’ve been testing the waters. I think I’m going back to Company of Heroes because it started off so terrifically nice. Let me look at my shelf here and see. GS: I’m a notorious game grazer. SM: That’s what I’ve been doing. I haven’t been playing as much as I want to. I haven’t really completed anything. Oblivion. GS: Fan of golf games? SM: I was for Mario Golf on the N64. GS: Great game. SM: Yeah, it was. GS: Has there ever been a game mechanic that you saw and wished that you’d have come up with it? SM: Well, I like how you don’t have a health meter in Call of Duty. I also like the lack of a user interface in the King Kong game. As far as a breakthrough game mechanic, like bullet time, nothing comes to mind. What about you? GS: I would probably say bullet time. Oddly enough, I was talking to John Gaeta, the special effects developer for the Matrix, not long ago. SM: Actually, bullet time was never used by them in association with the movie. |
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