J. Allen Brack on The Darkening (August 23, 2006)

Bandit LOAF

Bandit LOAF

Long Live the Confederation!
You probably remember the TCS Brack from Wing Commander Prophecy... well, the man behind the reference is here! As part of our birthday (and Privateer 2) celebration, Wing Commander veteran J. Allen Brack was kind enough to write us a very nice e-mail -- you can find it below! In addition to his role in main Wing Commander titles, he was part of the American portion of the Darkening team. Thanks to LeHah for arranging this!
Greetings...

Congratulations on eight years as one of the best fan sites out there! I'm a Wing Commander super-fan and had the fortune to work on a lot of the games over the years, so it's a real pleasure to see your continued success.

Happy 10-year anniversary to Privateer 2! Privateer 2 was a difficult project for me on several levels. I had just finished Wing Commander 4 and was working on The Kilrathi Saga. At that time Privateer 2 was called "The Darkening" and was an EA game. About halfway through TKS, The Darkening was branded an Origin game, which meant Origin people taking a look at it. Over the next month, the game went from "The Darkening", to "Privateer: The Darkening", to "Privateer 2". Origin was told that the reason this decision was made is someone said "Flying and trading in space sounds like Privateer".

This was a painful decision for many people at Origin. Using that logic, all space movies must also be Star Wars. The original Privateer remains my favorite game of all time. For me, the major problem was the name, and I think most of the team shared this sentiment. Making games is a large, difficult, creatively painful process. The development team had spent a great deal of time creating an entire universe. It had it's own style, it's own technology, and a unique humor. It was designed to stand on it's own. But it was not Wing Commander. To marry the two together felt like sacrilege. It felt like we were sullying the Privateer name.

There was a lot of contention between Erin and Paul on the UK side, and the team over at Origin. I'm sure I didn't make their lives any easier. They wanted to finish, and we wanted it renamed. In the end, everyone came together to get the game out. Paul in particular was great in working with us on getting a patch done after ship that included additional features! Every project is a learning experience. Erin gave a really good commentary on the lessons of the project. For me, I learned lessons I carry with me to this day.

WCNews is a great fan site. Watching the community over the years always makes me smile. Thanks for staying strong over the years and keeping the spirit of Wing Commander alive. We literally couldn't do it without you!

J. Allen Brack
"Blair"
Click to expand...

--
Original update published on August 23, 2006
 
Last edited by a moderator:
:confused: What's this patch with additional features he's talking about?
If it's not yet in the CIC files section, could you ask if he still has a copy of it?
J. Allen Brack said:
... Paul in particular was great in working with us on getting a patch done after ship that included additional features! Every project is a learning experience...
Click to expand...

P.S. : His comments certainly shed some light (for me at least) on why Priv 2 is so different from Priv 1. It wasn't canon at all but EA tried to make it canon :rolleyes: (and failed)
 
P.S. : His comments certainly shed some light (for me at least) on why Priv 2 is so different from Priv 1. It wasn't canon at all but EA tried to make it canon (and failed)
Click to expand...

... did you read the article by Erin Roberts?

(and please, people, stop saying canon - it doesn't mean what you've decided it means. Especially here.)
 
Confed said:
It wasn't canon at all but EA tried to make it canon :rolleyes: (and failed)
Click to expand...

Uh, what? Come again? I mean, saying it "EA tried to make it canon" is really silly. EA made it canon, even by your personal misunderstanding/definition of canon. EA said it's Privateer, so it's Privateer. Where's your confusion come from?
 
Take this for what it's worth (absolutely nothing) but I have to agree with the OP; at least as far as the WC production team at Origin, what was released as Privateer 2 was never factored in as what we thought of as the "real" Wing Commander games. It was dumped into our laps and we were told to shoehorn it into the WC universe, but really none of us (that I know of) ever saw that as anything other than a marketing decision of convenience. I do know that we felt like we'd made a lot of effort to create internal consistency in our WC games and for someone to take a completely unrelated game and slap a "Wing Commander" label on it seemed kind of insulting (note that I don't mean any disrespect to the game itself, just how it was insinuated in the WC universe).

As far as I know none of the production people ever looked at P2 for info or inspiration for subsequent WC games; we accepted that it had been made part of the universe by marketing, but it was pretty much left at that.
 
Ahhh all this time away and the arguments haven't changed one iota. It wasn't something the original creative minds behind Wing Commander thought up, or pushed for inclusion, but if Paramounts next Star Trek series followed the exploits of gay borg then it'd still be Star Trek (we'd just all create a mental block about its existance).

I think... I'm glad it took the name Privateer as its a wonderful game which more people deserved to enjoy and having the name attatched accomplished this. As for whether it fit into the universe... despite Erin's best efforts I don't think it added anything to the title to have those very small nods at the WC universe, it was a very unique and wonderful title in its own right.
 
Pedro said:
despite Erin's best efforts I don't think it added anything to the title
Click to expand...

I don't understand how an entirely new game doesn't add anything. Can you explain this to me somehow?

(Thanks to Kris for the correction)
 
Not the game :rolleyes: the tie-ins to the Wing Commander universe. All they seemed to accomplish was this decade long debate :) I'm not a massive fan of the Final Fantasy titles but from the ones I've played there is no cannon as such, each game is almost a parallel dimension, with a few characters sharing the same name. The reason for maintaing the FF name is so that purchasers know what they are getting and it keeps sales up.
 
Take this for what it's worth (absolutely nothing) but I have to agree with the OP; at least as far as the WC production team at Origin, what was released as Privateer 2 was never factored in as what we thought of as the "real" Wing Commander games. It was dumped into our laps and we were told to shoehorn it into the WC universe, but really none of us (that I know of) ever saw that as anything other than a marketing decision of convenience. I do know that we felt like we'd made a lot of effort to create internal consistency in our WC games and for someone to take a completely unrelated game and slap a "Wing Commander" label on it seemed kind of insulting (note that I don't mean any disrespect to the game itself, just how it was insinuated in the WC universe).
Click to expand...

I think the issue with Confed's post is the suggestion that this is some final end to a very long standing debate - this clearly isn't a cut and dry pronouncement on our part... because we ran the story from the point of view of the EA UK guys just last week.

Also, let me stress that I really, really don't want to take this debate too seriously. We set out last month to celebrate ten years of Privateer 2, not to rehash an old argument - I just thought it would be unfair not to include other points of view from people who worked on the game.

I think what we should get across -- and then leave behind -- is that it's more complicated than anyone ever properly frames it. We hear over and over (and this is what I felt Confed was implying) that a nameless marketer added the 'Privateer 2' at the very last minute. The common belief is that someone unrelated to the project changed a completely unrelated game called 'The Darkening' into 'Privateer 2: The Darkening' at the last minute.

That simply isn't true. The game started off its life as 'Privateer 2: Darkside' in early 1995. It lost its spot as a Privateer sequel for the same reason it got it back years later -- Chris Roberts decided to (and then not to) do a Privateer 2 in the US. The game spent quite a bit of time presented as a 'spinoff', too -- it was 'Privateer: The Darkening' both before and after it was just 'The Darkening'. The '2' was a last minute 'marketing' decision (presumably -- but we never get e-mails from the marketers...) -- but in the end the story isn't simple.

We should strive to understand the whole complicated history, rather than argue about what it may or may not mean to some larger personal concept of what Wing Commander is. The former was the goal of these posts, the latter is impossible.

(My own less important opinion is... how could it be anything else? It's a game developed by the same guy as the original Privateer, with the same gameplay, sold by the same company under the same label... I feel bad for what the US team had to go through, I feel bad for everyone involved and for us that we never got any of the Austin-developed Privateer sequels and I feel bad about the various balancing issues that still hurt P2 today (and I agree that the QA guys were absolutely right) -- but I love the fact that it's a pretty cool game stuck in a weird little corner of my favorite universe, even if that's going to be forever insignificant to all future stories.)
 
Origin was told that the reason this decision was made is someone said "Flying and trading in space sounds like Privateer".
Click to expand...

Very interesting insight on the decision-making process of big game corporations. Anyway, great e-mail, thanks for that, Lehah. It all worked for the best in the end, as Priv2, which is a good game on its own, now has attention it deserves.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top