Long before I ever heard the term “Jump the Shark”, I began to see some warning signs of Interplay’s continued success. I sensed a change in the management. There was a shift from a passion for game making, to a desire to make Hollywood-style cinema. We changed from the old adage of “Shoot for the moon. Here’s a nickel.” to “How can we make this experience more like watching a movie.” It began with Stonekeep (which started as a throwback to the old Bard’s Tale, but became a nightmare of “cinematic experience”), and exploded with the Sim-CD series (Interplay’s remakes of SimCity, SimAnt, and SimEarth in CD-ROM format with lots of movies) and the horror show that was “Cyberhood” (an interactive movie that became a black hole of funds.)
I remember one producer summit when we first saw the film footage shot for Sim City CD. The idea was that you could click on buildings and see a movie of the people inside living their lives. They were 30 second clips of people watching TV, or sleeping in bed, or doing aerobics, or eating cereal. And there were dozens of these clips; the most boring and mundane things you can imagine. Immediately after seeing this footage, we learned that it cost over a million dollars to film… and there was more filming to do. Considering that most of the games in production had a sub 100K budget, I (and many of the producers there) about had aneurisms. All it took was for this one game to be a train wreck, and the whole company suffers, or even dies.
During this time, I inherited SimEarth CD-ROM. I was my favorite of the sim games, and I immediately wanted to add features that would enhance the gameplay. For instance, I always wondered what my creatures looked like when they evolved into sapient beings. What would a sapient arthropod look like? What kind of cities would an iron age civilization of sapient amphibians build? I wanted to create small movies that were rewards for evolving your planet. There was a new artist at Interplay who was quite good at 3DStudio, and he did an amazing 3D movie test. (This was before Toy Story, so a movie with high-quality animated 3D characters was bleeding edge.) As the artist built and rendered these movies in his spare time, the programmer, coded furiously to convert the old Sim Earth into a modern vibrant VGA game. When the incredible movies went into the beautiful game, it began to really shine.
Then, the pain. I was told that I was going over budget. Confusing, because I had spent less-than $100k. But my predecessor spent over $200K on other cinematic footage.
Footage that we had no gameplay use for.
No problem, I’ll make it work.
Then, after showing the incredible movies to Steven Spielberg, the artist was pulled from my project to work on “better things”. (Spielberg was in the process of founding Dreamworks, and soon after hired that artist to work on Shrek.) Then another artist was also pulled off. Finally, after months of insane hours to meet the schedule the project was canceled. (Since SimCity was having such budget overruns, our product lineup needed trimming.) After all the time and effort we had spent getting the game ready to ship, this was kick-to-the-bits number two.
In another company wide meeting, we learned that Universal Pictures had purchased a portion of the company. The company was treated to a day at Universal Studios, and we were promised several amazing upcoming movie licenses. My fear of the company ditching games and becoming a movie house was getting stronger.
The first movie license arrived in-house, Flipper, a remake of the 70s TV show. (I recall the designer of that project saying that we should buy the rights to ECO the Dolphin and simply rename it.) The second movie license was Casper the Friendly Ghost. When the first design was shot down by Harvey Comics because “Casper should be able to walk through walls” – we realized that trying to create a game with no way to contain the player’s movement was, in fact, rather impossible.
The third movie license? Oh, it was the granddaddy of them all: Waterworld. After flying the designers out to Hawaii to see one of the multi-million dollar atoll sets (which would later sink), all they were provided with was the original script to create a game (which surprisingly wasn’t bad – the game I mean). However, most of their ideas got thrown out as the movie filming was changing the script on a day to day basis. The game did ship, but it became a Real-Time Strategy game, based in the world, but having nothing to do with the actual movie.
...
