Q&A With Microsoft's Jon Grande
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Q: Your background hints to a real flavor for Role Playing Games. Which game would you rate as the Best RPG of all time? And which non-partner titles do you look forward to in the future?
A: In the (modern) era of RPGs - I would probably have to list Baldur's Gate 1& 2 and Diablo 1 & 2 as tied for the best RPGs of all time, at least in my personal record book. Baldur's Gate and Shadows of Amn top the list for me because of the scope of the story they told and their use of the party to add diversity to the experience the sheer weight of what the BioWare team delivered (remembering that this was only their ~4th product) is just amazing to me. At the same time, there's no way that I could avoid including Diablo 1 and 2. While I wasn't as enthralled with Diablo's story or the moment to moment gameplay there's no denying the phenomenon that they created with Battle.net. The degree to which they nailed the balance between the classes, the loot system, and the integration with Battle.net was absolutely brilliant.
But my all time sentimental favorites would have to be:
Single player RPG - Sid Meier's Pirates! was the first PC game that I got hooked on. When I think back to the first 3 PC games that I really remember, the time from 1987 to 1990 is a blur where I was completely addicted to Pirates!, Madden NFL'97 and Stunt Driver (from Spectrum Holobyte). And what I liked about all three was similar the ability to grow your character the way you wanted in Pirates, the ability to design your own plays in Madden and the ability to design your own tracks with Stunt Driver (that and hooking up my sound card to my stereo to hear the real rumble of a '66 Shelby Cobra). Ultimately it was the customizability of all three games that hooked me into gaming early on. This was at the same time that I was just getting over my early college addiction to D&D and was just beginning to explore the world of BattleTech (little did I know I'd have the honor of working with Jordan Weisman & co about 10 years later).
Multiplayer/MUDs - The Kingdom of Drakkar was the first MUD/MMO that I would say I really developed a (problem) with. I got to know the folks at MPG Net through some mutual friends, and later got to work with them to build Windows clients for a number of their games. My wife recounts the story of a long distance bill that I rolled up on one business trip to Japan dialing back to the US (before VPNs made connectivity so simple) that took me a couple of months to pay off (and had a hard time explaining to my boss).
Thinking about future titles that I'm looking forward to, it's hard to exclude partner titles because in addition to Sigil, we're working with several of my favorite developers (including BioWare, Gas Powered Games, Big Huge Games, LionHead, etc.) but my short list would have to include WoW, Guild Wars, and EQ2 all of which I mentioned before, as well as Half-Life2, Doom3, Ghost Recon 2.
