Difference between revisions of "CartridgeCulture/To do"

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*Add LaserActive to NEC Retro.
 
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*Mail to [https://www.gamingalexandria.com Gaming Alexandria]: Sega VR book, Nicole Miller items, GameWorks Vegas papers.
 
*Mail to [https://www.gamingalexandria.com Gaming Alexandria]: Sega VR book, Nicole Miller items, GameWorks Vegas papers.
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==[[Rocket Science Games]]==
 
==[[Rocket Science Games]]==

Revision as of 21:50, 12 February 2023

Back to: CartridgeCulture.

To do

  • Clean up Contributions articles.
  • Add LaserActive to NEC Retro.
  • Mail to Gaming Alexandria: Sega VR book, Nicole Miller items, GameWorks Vegas papers.

Rocket Science Games

Funding

  • 4mil: Initial funding gather (around January 1993)[1]
  • 10mil: Tokyo investment company (around July 1994)[2]
  • 12mil: Sega of America, Bertelsmann Music Group (May 1994)[3]
  • 5mil: Times Mirror (July 1994)[4]

Company

  • RSG began with Barrett managing video game and development tools and Blank handling marketing and financing.[5]
  • The "Hollywood meets Silicon Valley" angle was easily digestible by the media, and this marketing angle ended up netting RSG stories in Fortune, Forbes, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, among others.[5] According to Blank, "the theme of our press blitz was all about how we were going to show the old tired game companies the right way to make video games. Our press infuriated the established companies who had spent years building games that sold well, but had zero press recognition."[5]
  • When RSG was founded, Blank went out and spent a month or two talking to 14-22 year old gamers (their target audience). He then realized he lacked an emotional connection his customers or product, and that this should have set off warning bells. This section of his article is titled "What do you mean you don’t want to hear about features?".[6]
  • Blank was a Silicon Valley person and unaccustomed to the entertainment industry.[6]
  • Celebrity developers included filmmakers Mike Backes and Ron Cobb, and game developers like Will Wright.[7]
  • RSG expected each of its titles to cost $600,000 to $1.2 million to produce.[7]
  • RSG planned to release a third game alongside Loadstar and C&D.[7]
  • Despite the general hubris on RSG's part, Blank realized pretty early on that the company would need some high-level advice in the fields of technology, game development, and video game distribution if it hoped to be successful. To this end, he created an advisory board of specialists
  • RSG's actual business was to be split between games and software development tools. Per Blank, "A key premise of our new company was that our video compression and authoring technology would revolutionize how games were made and played. We believed that by putting full motion video (i.e. movies) into video games we could tell stories, build characters, have narratives and bring all the 100 years of craft and cinematic experience of Hollywood to the sterile “shoot and die” twitch games that were currently in vogue. (This wasn’t just some random Silicon Valley fantasy. My partner had convinced several major Hollywood names that this was the inevitable consequence of the merger of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. And at the time it was a plausible scenario.) But in reality our passionate belief that video would transform gaming was just our hypothesis. There was zero proof in the marketplace that was the case. And we weren’t going to be bothered to go out and prove ourselves wrong with facts. (Why should we – our VC’s had already told us what geniuses we were by fighting to even get into the deal to fund us."[6]
  • To expand on tool development, Blank states RSG was planning on producing an easy to use CD-ROM authoring system that would revolutionize how games were made, particularly through efficient video compression technology as a means of allowing all games to have that "Hollywood cinematic" feel. To this end, Peter Barrett had convinced several of the key members of the Apple Quicktime team to join. However, these plans never came to fruition, as by Blank's account, the company was so passionate about the development of the tools that it had never really asked itself why customers would want to buy their product in the first place.[6]
  • One of the company's tools, its "V3O technology", was eventually sold to Attitude Software and retitled "3D Anarchy", where it was sold again to Adobe and renamed "Adobe Atmospheres". The initial sale was sometime in 1996-1997.[8]
  • RSG titles appeared at some E3 and received major awards.[9]
  • At some point, RSG demo'd some of its games at a promotional event at the Playboy Mansion.[9]
  • After the release failures, when Blank was seeking the next round of funding from his venture capitalists, they denied him. It was a trip to SF with two investors. I believe this may be the same investor who was quoted as "We sold to Sega for nothing". They liked how the business was being run, but stated "we realized that we’ve backed a business we don’t know much about, the company is a money sink and both our firms have no stomach for this industry.”[10]
  • At some point, RSG entered into an agreement with American print publisher McGraw Hill to publish strategy guides for their games.[11]
  • RSG had plans to distribute their games in Japan, or at least were selling the potential distribution rights. Despite a mid 1994 trip to Japan to meet with potential investors in person, however, the company was not able to work out any deals.[12]
  • Venture capital funding amount of $35mil total.[13] Fundraising was reportedly easy[5], with numerous venture capitalists competing to fund RSG.[1]
  • Executives became aware of (or could no longer ignore) the company's inevitable bankruptcy in January 1995, roughly a month after the releases of C&D/Loadstar.[13]
  • His investors, despite losing out on their returns, had promised Blank another $12 million in capital to start his next company. (WebTV?)[13]
  • By 1994, Blank had already launched and built six successful businesses, so his investors knew they'd most likely score another win.[13]
  • The Space Bar was originally scheduled to be published by Rocket Science Games. However, following the complete failure of the company's business and subsequent near-acquisition by SegaSoft in late 1996, publishing duties were transferred to SegaSoft.
  • Rocket Jockey is the only RSG game people seem to enjoy. Apparently there's been a few attempts at remakes, and its got a modding scene.[14]
  • The ex-SoA VP that RSG hired (Richard Burns[15]) was also in charge of gathering early feedback from customers, and that said VP was extremely insistent in trying to make executive staff aware of these issues (which was ignored).[5] Blank admits that ignoring poor customer feedback was one of his biggest mistakes in managing the company.[5]
  • Blank said he was upfront about his finances, and that every major decision was brought to the board ahead of time. This speaks to how many people in the company truly believed in what they were doing[5], and that claims of extremely few ppl in the company being gamers are true.[13]
  • "I had a public, humiliating failure, and still the people who lost the money had enough confidence [in me] because it was an honest failure" -Steven Blank. Blank later returned $1bil to his investors through his next startups.[13]
  • Blank states he learned three things from the failure of RSG: "get outside your office and test your product's viability with real customers", "ensure the executive staff and founders are aware of your product's viability", and most importantly, "no formal launch until you have early sales validating the product and sales process".[5]
  • On the topic of lessons learned, Blank: "I learned how to dial back the hubris, get other smart people to work with me – rather than just for me, listen better, and act and do what was right – regardless of what others thought I should do." and "For my next startup I parked the behaviors that drove Rocket Science off the cliff. We established a team of founders who worked collaboratively. When my co-founders and I got the company scalable and repeatable, we hired an operating executive as the CEO and returned a billion dollars to each of our two lead investors."[16]
  • Blank believes that if RSG had listened to early feedback and dialed back hype, they could have delivered truly great future games. Per Blank, "The huge mismatch between expectations and reality of our first games diminished the brand and demoralized the company – we never recovered."[5]
  • RSG would be Blank's first and last time acting as his startup's CEO.[17]
  • "I would get to use my marketing skills at generating an industry-wide reality distortion field to make this company look like the second coming. I was going to find out why this wasn’t a good idea." This perfectly sums up both RSG as a whole, and one of its biggest legacies: hype. Between boring games and low sales, the "RSG hype" was one of the single-largest in the industry, and needs its own section.
  • Cassidy phrases this better than I will, but RSG (both the company and its games) was developed with making investors happy. This quote: "The CDROM content business in the early 1990’s was one of the many of the long line of venture capital fads. If you were a “with it” VC you needed to have a “Content” or “Multimedia” company in your portfolio to impress your limited partners – educational software companies, game companies, or anything that could be described as content and/or Multimedia."[1]
  • "I heard about a new company called Rocket Science Games that was just starting up, and Brian Moriarty was one of the first people they hired. I called them to see if I could join. They looked great on paper. They had some really strong people, engineers- some of the people who had invented some of the best codecs for compression. They had some amazing ILM Industrial Light & Magic] matte painters, modelers. It was an all-star team. But what we ended up producing was really heavily art-driven instead of game-driven, and there really wasn't anyone in the company who were gamers other than Brian and myself. Whenever there were trade-offs, they went toward better-looking art. I was working in a genre that really wasn't my type. It was an action shoot 'em up game. We had to use pre-rendered video instead of graphics rendered on the fly like in Rescue. The idea was that you could take this new CD-ROM, put a bunch of video on there, and have it stream off. You'd get to a junction and you could move left or right, and it'd show a transition scene based on the choice. They got that all to work, but it was taking too long to do all the scenes, computer graphics and the pre-rendering. I ended up taking what was originally a ten- or twelve-level game--with each level offering different gameplay and converting it to ten or twelve levels of the same game, with only slight tweaks. It was a huge compromise. I liked the story we came up with, but the game [Cadillacs & Dinosaurs] was not one of my favorites." -Brian Moriarty, Honoring the Code: Conversations with Great Game Designers
  • Blank says, "to this day I still can’t play a video game."[16]

Redirects to delete

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 https://steveblank.com/2009/07/02/rocket-science-2-drinking-the-kool-aid/ (Wayback Machine: 2022-10-05 01:41)
  2. ↑ https://steveblank.com/2010/02/01/incentives-and-legends/ (Wayback Machine: 2023-02-07 17:49)
  3. ↑ https://www.wired.com/1994/11/rocket-science/ (Wayback Machine: 2023-01-17 02:45)
  4. ↑ https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-07-26-fi-19960-story.html
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 https://venturebeat.com/entrepreneur/youre-not-as-good-as-the-press-thinks/
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 https://steveblank.com/2009/07/09/rocket-science-2-hollywood-meets-silicon-valley/ (Wayback Machine: 2022-12-07 00:55)
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 https://www.inc.com/magazine/19940401/2864.html (Wayback Machine: 2022-05-27 06:10)
  8. ↑ https://phoenixtoews.net/phoenixcv (Wayback Machine: 2020-11-21 14:44)
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-orr-112b3a36/details/experience/
  10. ↑ https://steveblank.com/2011/02/03/vc’s-are-not-your-friends/ (Wayback Machine: 2022-12-25 12:05)
  11. ↑ https://www.abandonware-france.org/compagnies/mcgraw-hill-620/ (Wayback Machine: 2021-09-26 01:29)
  12. ↑ https://steveblank.com/2009/12/03/someone-stole-my-startup-idea-–-part-1-are-those-my-initials/ (Wayback Machine: 2022-12-16 22:24)
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4 13.5 https://www.inc.com/zoe-henry/how-steve-blank-lost-35-million-and-bounced-back.html
  14. ↑ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/07/masterpiece-rocket-jockey-for-the-pc-1/
  15. ↑ https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1002607/0000950123-96-005789.txt (Wayback Machine: 2018-08-26 15:03)
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 https://steveblank.com/2013/02/26/failure-and-redemption/ (Wayback Machine: 2022-11-24 02:16)
  17. ↑ https://steveblank.com/2009/02/23/out-of-the-ashes-something-isn’t-quite-right/ (Wayback Machine: 2022-12-16 22:24)
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