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Denver, 5:30 PM
Wed Dec 16
61 posts in the last 24 hours
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08/29/09
GEE I WONDER WHY HE GOT LAID OFF GUYZ.
08/29/09
No go back and look. He says it is less ski-jumping away from explosions and more about classy espionage spies.
08/28/09
08/28/09
08/28/09
Hey people want to know who dumbed down spore and got rid of all the cool stuff Will was talking about in earlier videos shown off?
It was Chris Hecker.
[forum.spore.com]
"Chris Hecker was having strong misgivings about how appealing all this hard science would be to the wider world. "I was the founding member of the 'cute' team," he says with pride. "Ocean [Quigley, Spore's art director] and Will were really the founding members of the 'science' team. Ocean would make the cell game look exactly like a petri dish with all these to-scale animals and Will would say, 'That's the greatest thing I've ever seen!' and some of us were thinking, 'I'm not sure about that.'"
08/28/09
08/28/09
Good thing about all this, is that hopefullly....just hopefully, these people that get laid off and do like Chris and start their own game devs, smaller so they don't have to deal with jokers like EA and Activision. Benefits: Keep a small staff, keep a focused game, watch the overhead...oh yeah, and just make great, passionate games.
08/28/09
08/28/09
Seriously, look at The Sims 1. Then look at MySims Kart Racing. The series has gone horribly wrong, and it's EA's fault.
08/28/09
I recall browsing jobs on Gamasutra a few months ago and there was a position for a Lead Designer for a "fast paced multiplayer shooter with massive customization" at the Emeryville Maxis studio.
The job is no longer posted so either they filled it and are working on Battlefield Spore or the project got canned.
08/28/09
Spore has matured in the past year and is no longer in need of a full team.
Will Wright moved to SFC, and the upper management of Maxis shifted around a bit.
If they lost 24 people, I'd guess it was just a restructuring.
08/28/09
Personally I thought the game was okay but the DRM prevented me from buying a retail copy. Even f the game is awesome (IE Mass Effect) I find DRM to be enough of a reason to pass on the game.
I wonder if others felt the same way as me.
08/28/09
08/29/09
The rest of Maxis moved to Emeryville to work on Spore. The point is that the operations of the Sims has no bearing on Maxis, and vise versa.
There was also some other kind of weird subtext that "Maxis" was sort of a carryover of corporate culture that still existed at the Maxis studio, and Sims unit, but that "Maxis" itself didn't exist any more as a distinct entity, since it was considered part of the Redwood Shores campus.
08/28/09
08/28/09
08/28/09
Incredibly broad, makes me wonder what he actually did
08/28/09
08/28/09
08/28/09
08/28/09
08/28/09
thesircuddles uses PSI Shield Ω to protect everyone!
08/28/09
Sim City 5
*squeee*
08/28/09
08/29/09