Brad
Wardell is an interesting man. One part Windows developer, one
part game developer and one part hardcore gamer adds up to
someone who is devoted to making games that he wants to play. As
the president and CEO of Stardock, head of the TotalGaming.net
subscription service, and the developer behind Galactic
Civilizations and Galactic Civilizations 2, Mr. Wardell
has a very busy schedule. Luckily, he took an hour of his time
to sit down and talk with Gamasutra. We discussed many different
subjects, but one theme constantly came up: we need a creative
revolution.
Gamasutra: So, how's it going?
Brad Wardell: Pretty good. We're just hiring up for our next game
project.
GS: Oh yeah? I was going to ask you about that. What have
you got coming up?
BW: Well we've got Galactic Civilizations 2: Dark Avatar,
which is in development. It comes out in February. We're publishing
a game called Sins of a Solar Empire, next August, which
is kind of like Homeworld but larger scale, with multiple
star systems.
GS: That sounds pretty good.
BW: Then, we're starting up a fantasy strategy game right now,
but that won't be out for a couple of years.
GS: That's one of the things I wanted to ask you about.
I wanted to ask about the Master of Magic license. You
guys looked into that didn't you?
BW: Yeah, we did. We pursued it. Actually, Atari came to us a
while ago. I thought they had a pretty good idea. That is, over
the years, Atari has collected a lot of good IP (Intellectual Property)
like X-Com, Star Control, Master of Orion, Master of Magic and
a lot of others that a lot of people didn't realize that they held.
So they came to us and said "We're not really interested in publishing
these things ourselves, but what we'd like to do is license out
the trademarks to third parties like you guys and we'll make a
royalty off of them." So, we sat down and decided that Master
of Magic would be our first, since it's close to something
we'd done and Master of Orion 3 had already come out.
We were able to agree on the money, so we thought everything was
set, then their legal guys got involved, and that's where it stalled.
They wanted the right to approve any marketing we did with a mutli-day
stipulation. Say, for instance, me talking to you right now would
be considered marketing and I would have to have approval first.
That sort of thing. Then there was the weird thing, like if the
game was manufactured overseas, someone from the company would
have to be onsite to make sure there was no child labor.
GS: That's pretty odd. Do you mean from you guys or from
Atari?
BW: Oh, from Stardock. So if we were doing a Korean or Russian
version, someone from here would have to be there. There were all
sorts of things in there that made it difficult to do. Then Atari
ran into financial difficulties and we just decided to do our own
fantasy strategy game. At that point, no one was really doing a Master
of Magic. I think that there's a strong market for a fantasy
strategy game that has some of the elements of Master of Magic like
random maps and building your own cities. It's not really a competitor
to an Age of Wonders or Heroes of Might and Magic,
they're completely different game mechanics.
GS: Right, Master of Magic was random maps. Will
there be multiplayer?
BW: Yeah, multiplayer will be in there.
GS: Ok, I just remember that in Master of Magic you
had to do all sorts of crazy things to get multiplayer going,
and then it was only hot seat.
BW: (Laughs) No, no, what we have now is Society which
is our massive multiplayer game. That's going to be many years
from now, five or six, but the building blocks from that are going
into our other games. We've been using the multiplayer libraries
in Galactic Civilizations and integrating them into the
fantasy strategy game and other games.
GS: Makes sense to use as much as you can.
BW: Exactly.
GS: I guess that the Master of Magic game is
out of the question now with Atari's problems.
BW: I'm not even sure what's happening there. We went to them
and offered to buy the rights for six figures and they turned us
down. They wanted all or nothing. This game is over ten years old.
I mean, it's just the name. I could come out with Lords of
Magic; we wouldn't do that because it's cheesy.
GS: Yeah, that's pretty close.
BW: Yeah, but we're talking about a ten year old game. There isn't
a trademark for it; it expired, not that we'd name that. I was
very surprised at how high they valued it. It definitely has value,
but I was surprised that they were that aggressive about it.