ZeniMax Online Studios Interview
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Q: When did you first become interested in games? What attracted you to the online category, and how did you get into development?
A: My first gaming experiences were playing the original Dungeons and Dragons in the late 1970s, and then, when it was released, AD&D. This was long before I had a personal computer, although when I did finally get one (a TRS-80 Color Computer, in 1980?) there weren't many games available for it - so I started writing my own. There were plenty of good games around, of course; friends of mine had Apples, and we would all gather round one of them on Saturday afternoons and play Wizardry together.
I was introduced to online games in 1984, when I visited a friend who lived in Bethesda MD, and who was playing a dial-in multi-user game called Scepter of Goth. This allowed about 10 to 15 players (the maximum number of concurrent players was limited by the number of modems the server had connected to it) to interact in an online fantasy text world. I spent a lot of time over the next two years playing it, which was made much easier when I started college at George Washington University (in DC) in the fall of '85.
Scepter of Goth was my entry into the computer gaming industry. In 1987-88, some friends and I decided to license it and deploy a server in Atlanta. This failed miserably due to a lot of reasons, so we decided to then write our own game to compete with it. By the time our, Tempest, was complete in 1992 or so, Scepter was long gone, but I still remember it fondly. Tempest, which was renamed Darkness Falls due to obvious problems with the arcade game of the same name, ran for a few years and made enough money to keep the server and the phone lines paid for, but not much more. After some personnel changes, we merged with another company, formed Mythic Entertainment, and then we were off and running. Because all of our experience was creating online games, we never really contemplated making anything else.
