Curt Schilling’s video game finally gets on base
Curt Schilling, the former pitcher and two-time World Series champ is more nervous about his new video game than he ever was about baseball.
He told a New York crowd at an event put on by Electronic Arts on Tuesday that he slept like a baby before World Series games in 2007 — but didn’t catch a wink on Monday night ahead of the release of his company’s first video game.
Schilling’s personal fortune is on the line with “Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning,” a fantasy-action game that hit stores Tuesday. Schilling told Reuters last July he had invested between $30 million to $35 million of his own money into the 400-person company he founded that made the game.
“‘This is opening day of career 2.0,” he told the crowd . And it’s an opening day that’s seven years in the making–Schilling founded the company called 38 Studios (after his jersey number) in 2006.
Schilling has been a video fanboy for years. Peter Moore, EA’s chief operating officer said he first spoke with him in 2005. Schilling called Moore, who then worked at Microsoft, to see if he could get his hands on an advance copy of the Xbox 360.
Moore, who said he turned down phone calls from Tom Cruise and Mel Gibson that same day, took Schilling’s because he was a big Red Sox fan.
“We spoke one hour about massive multiplayer games. I tried to talk him out of it,” Moore said, of Schilling’s idea to bankroll a video game.
Zynga’s new game is less FarmVille, more Indiana Jones
Zynga is famous for making games about farm chores but now that it is on the brink of its IPO, it is trying something different. In the most complex game Zynga has released so far on Facebook, players in Adventure World need to unlock clues and puzzles to find the last city of gold, El Dorado. Reuters spoke with Nabeel Hyatt, the general manager of Zynga Boston about why this is a new direction for Zynga, which is not known for World of Warcraft-type quests. Zynga bought his company, Conduit Labs, last summer and now he leads the team that made the game hitting Facebook in a few weeks.
REUTERS: What makes Adventure World different from other Zynga games?
HYATT: We consider this to be a new genre of social game that hasn’t existed before. The overall adventure genre goes back 20 years and hasn’t really had a place in social games. You can’t build the same kind of social game that you would have built for a hardcore gamer. If you think about FarmVille and CityVille, we call them ‘invest and express games’ where you grow a city over time and you use that to express yourself. This is very different. It’s a new bold move for Zynga to make that is about exploring, discovering and uncovering secrets and solving puzzles and moving across lots of different maps and worlds. This game is a really broad expansive experience with more than 30 different environments when it launches and over 20,000 objects.
REUTERS: Why is this a new direction for Zynga? Is this going to be Zynga’s version of World of Warcraft?
HYATT: It’s the first Zynga game that focuses on your avatar and your character’s growth over time. Also, each of these maps you play on is almost like its own game and has its own type of gameplay. That’s a new thing for Zynga, which hones in tightly on one specific type of game play and then tries to polish it like crazy to get a really nice experience, like in FrontierVille or CityVille. A lot of us on this team worked in massive multiplayer online games like Lord of The Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons online. These are large expansive games that people run for years–World of Warcraft is over 10 years old–so we are thinking of a game that we would love to build and make now but also that we’d love to build and make two years from now or five years from now and players could log in any given month and find a new adventure. This game was built with longevity in mind.
REUTERS: What is the game inspired by?
HYATT: We are definitely inspired by massive multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings online. It’s a large expansive world that changes over time, so it has that in common with those games, but it’s not really that hardcore or meant to be a role playing game. From a game play standpoint, it’s probably closest to a game like Legends of Zelda, which was a strong inspiration for us. Genre-wise, it harkens back to pulp movies from the 1930s and 1940s, up through “Indiana Jones” to “Jewel of the Nile” and “National Treasure.”
Online games nowadays are way more interactive and entertaining than what we had a decade ago. I can still remember playing chess online with my friends and that was about it. Nowadays, there are so many games that I will never get bored, good stuff!
