Project Mercury/Copernicus Interview
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ZAM: Obviously the big news that you released just prior to the Game Developers Conference was the fact that you have a single player RPG in the works with the Big Huge Games and that that game will be set in the world you've created for Copernicus. Were you planning to release the RPG first ever since you acquired Big Huge Games; or was this something that just made sense from a technological and product development standpoint?
Schilling: From the outset of the company's founding, this .cosystem of product' around the intellectual property was always a vision. Obviously the MMO was the baby; that was the big thing we were pouring our hearts and souls into. But we always had a vision of being platform neutral. whether you were holding your iPhone or your Nintendo. you'd be interacting with our IP. A single player RPG was a natural fit for that ecosystem, and something we'd always envisioned being there.
When we laid our roadmap out, initially in that first five year plan we had an MMO coming out and then the next step would be the RPG that would be a part of that world. We'd always talked about how that would happen. Fast forward to this time last year, and Jen walks in to let me know that Big Huge Games is for sale, and after a couple conversations with them realized that there was an opportunity there because of how advanced they were with their proprietary technology. With those technologies, we could turn our post-MMO roleplaying game into a pre-MMO RPG.
There was a lot to figure out with the deal, obviously, but we basically sent a packet of assets to their studio on a Tuesday, and by Thursday they were sitting in our offices with a working demo of their RPG with our assets in the game. We realized right away that their tech pipeline and assets were mature enough that this could be a seamless move for our company. The most important thing was that Copernicus wouldn't feel a major impact on its development.
Danuser: From a creative standpoint, we'd spent all these years working with Bob (R.A. Salvatore) crafting these thousands of years of history. We're really invested in this world, and we're extremely excited about all the potential stories that could be told along the way. On top of that, we're not even going to be able to tell all of the stories that exist simply because the MMO focuses on a specific span of that timeline.
Having these guys come in and pick out points of the timeline that they'd like to work with was terrific, because we could work with them and tease out the best stories that could be told and really fit into our RPG.
Salvatore: When I came in and started working with the 38 Studios team, it wasn't to simply create a game. Our goal was to create an intellectual property based on a world. A big world. A world where you could do anything you wanted to do. Because of that, when we brought in the guys at Big Huge Games, it was very easy for them to understand their parameters. It's almost like telling a King Arthur story; you know the tale and the type of tale it is, but there are dozens of different stories that you can create from the characters and settings that are there.
It's the same type of thing with what we've done working with Big Huge Games.
