Newcomer REfanchris recently brought up the subject of games creation, curious about how to process of conceiving and developing truly a game comes together.

A number of anecdotes on this subject were recently posted on GameSpot, from some of the most respected names in the industry, discussing just how how difficult even simply pitching a concept for a game idea can be.

Even these industry legends had hurdles they couldn't always climb over; a good lesson for new developers who might be distraught by the current state of the industry.

These anecdotes are posted below, for your interest and viewing pleasure. Enjoy.

Lorne Lanning, president of Oddworld Inhabitants
I pitched to a big publisher a game about dogs called Pound Dog. There were about 15 people in the room, and they all loved the pitch. It was gonna be great, but then one guy, who of course doesn't play games, is about to retire, says, "But who wants to be a dog?" Everyone looks at him 'cause he's the boss, then they come looking back at me, shaking their heads and saying, "Yeah, but who wants to be a dog?" Six or seven months later, Nintendogs came out to huge sales. If the capacity of your vision for what titles could be and what makes them resonate with an audience is "who wants to be a dog," then OK, go make your next shooter with 2 percent new mechanics and better graphics.

Will Wright, designer of SimCity, Spore
There are things I pitched that I, in going over the development process, decided to drop for one reason or another. I've always been fascinated with airships, and I wanted to do a game about the Hindenburg. And it was originally conceived as a cross between Myst and a flight simulator, if you can imagine that. You basically wake up on the Hindenburg. You're all alone. It's flying toward Lakehurst, New Jersey. You can walk anywhere on the ship. You can turn lights on and off. You can steer. You can adjust the engines. But every time you come into Lakehurst, it blows up. And you have to figure out why, and it becomes like this weird mystery flight simulator thing. I'd still love to do that.

Oddly enough, every time I talk to people about this game, the one thing they all got hung up on was, wasn't that a Nazi airship? Which was interesting because Nazi air force commander Hermann] Goering hated it. In fact, the guy who built it really had to sign this deal with the devil to get the Nazis actually to finance it because the Nazis wanted to use it as a propaganda tool. And they painted a swastika on the tail, and they'd fly all these propaganda missions. And so it got inexorably linked to the Nazis, unfortunately for the inventor. But it was a beautiful craft. And I just thought it was a wonderful kind of cool idea for a game.

Dylan Cuthbert, Q Games founder, PixelJunk Racers and StarFox developer
Many years ago we fleshed out a game on the PC with similar elements to Spore. We had fractally generating worlds and buildings/towns and creatures that evolved. Also, we made it LAN playable with up to 16 players and experimented with distributable networking so the game could possibly run with 100s or 1,000s of people. The world also had a fully developed and simulated ecosystem with humidity, winds, temperature fluctuations, and so on affecting plant life and types of terrain (you could actually watch hurricanes form from the overview map).

All in all, it was actually quite cool, even if I do say so myself, and we showed it to a hell of a lot of publishers, and they also thought it was cool, but none of them would risk money on something of that experimental scope. After about a year of talking to Microsoft, they funded us to prototype it as a game, rather than an experiment, but it got dropped when they started re-focusing stuff in their Japan studio.

I should have taken it to Will Wright.

Tags : Anecdotes : Dylan Cuthbert : Lorne Lanning : microsoft : nintendo ds : Oddworld Inhabitants : pc : PixelJunk Racers : Pound Dog : Q Games : Sim City : Spore : Starfox : Will Wright

Comments

By: Corrine On: 12:25 Dec 21st, 2007 Offline	Those forgotten games sound really cool. And it makes me pretty upset that such awesome ideas get dropped and things such as Cabelas and Fifa and Madden get published for years. It's what sells I guess.

By: Evren On: 06:04 Dec 21st, 2007 Offline	I wish Oddworld inhabitants got to do every game they wanted. They're just uber at games. New Oddworld plz.

By: boa On: 02:56 Dec 22nd, 2007 Offline	Some nice ideas there, but two of them, ar about ideas that happened anyway.