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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 outline

  • Source article
  • Conceptualized in mid 1993 by developer Peter Barrett and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steven Gary Blank. Pitched by Barrett to an initially uninterested Blank under the high concept "Hollywood meets CD-ROM"; i.e. banking heavily on the "multimedia revolution", as many companies of the era did. Devquote.
  • After the pitch, the two gathered $4mil in capital, and one month later (July/August 93) founded RSG in Palo Alto, and established a "design facility" in Berkeley.
  • Blank admits neither of them knew much about (or even cared for) video games; it was business, not passion. So their initial strategy was to spend a lot of money up front on hiring a "celebrity" dev team (to compliment the Hollywood concept). Lucasfilm Games’ Brian Moriarty was one such developer, and additional staff was recruited from Industrial Light & Magic. Barrett's credentials also assisted in convincing staff to join.
  • With a Hollywood staff, RSG went all-in on FMV. The company began operation not developing games, but producing the development hardware needed to create FMV games on a big-budget scale. Peter Barrett was an expert in compression, and alongside developing Cinepak, assisted the company greatly in the quality of their FMV playback. The target systems were DOS computers and the Sega CD. *Cadillacs & Dinosaurs was developed alongside Loadstar, with Loadstar finishing development after C&D.
  • This was all done while FMV games were in their decline, with the company aware that this genre sold poorly. They invested so heavily so they could bank on their presentation surpassing previous attempts. As a result, RSG ended up having some of the best-looking FMV on the Sega CD.
  • Marketing was soon increased, and attracted the attention of Sega Enterprises [and a partner in Bertelsmann Music Group] for $12mil in investment (in exchange for US/EU publishing rights).
  • RSG focused almost entirely on presentation and marketing, but little on actual gameplay. Blank claims none of the executive staff were gamers, and were fooling themselves into ignoring the lack of gameplay and focusing entirely on the Hollywood presentation. At some point, the company hired their vice president of marketing from Sega of America, who (after only two weeks), began to voice strong concerns about the lacking gameplay; that the games lacked the addictive power to keep gamers wanting to play.
  • Direct quote from Bad Games: "Loadstar wasn’t developed for actual video game players as much as it was to impress the likes of shareholders and investors: Folk with no interest in actually playing games, but rather in how they can be marketed and make them money." This is pm a perfect summary of RSG as a whole.
  • The Sega CD version of Loadstar was produced without testing whatsoever. There was QA on the part of the developers, and the first version they created that had no obvious bugs was turned into the final gold master. There was zero playtesting before release. Sega Test simply required the game to run for a certain number of hours without crashing. It passed, but Sega Test reportedly hated the game.
  • Misallocation of funds resulted in games that cost nearly 10s of millions of dollars selling literally a few thousand copies.
  • “We raised $35 million and after 18 months made the cover of Wired magazine. The press called Rocket Science one of the hottest companies in Silicon Valley and predicted that our games would be great because the storyboards and trailers were spectacular. 90 days later, I found out our games are terrible, no one is buying them, our best engineers started leaving, and with 120 people and a huge burn rate, we’re running out of money and about to crash. This can’t be happening to me.” - Steve Blank
  • By the end of 1996, RSG underwent heavy restructuring and abandoned plans to become a publisher, focusing solely on development. A staff of 100 was downsized to 35, including gutting most of upper management and focusing the studio around the developers. Blank and Barrett left during this restructuring, with Barrett, while on his way out, placing some of the blame on Sega and the Sega CD, claiming "they had backed the wrong horse". A number of games were cancelled, including a sequel to Loadstar (for which the live-acting filming was reportedly complete) and a roller coaster simulator titled DarkRide.

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