Wing Commander Developers in Tiberium Drama! (November 1, 2008)

[Bandit LOAF]

Nothing turns 'gaming journalism' into a tabloid circus like a major product cancellation... and the recent demise of Tiberium is no exception. Gamasutra recently ran an article on the axing which turned into a forum for (theoretical) EA insiders to reveal dirty behind-the-screens details.

Anonymous Developer #1:

A Designer who had originally built only 1 mission on Halo was promoted by then manager John Batter, who had a hard on for Hollywoodesque big talent. John poured milliions into James Bond over Medal of Honor. This mean that less experienced personal got bigger salaries than the MOH teams. The designer "Dan Orzlak" experience on 1 mission in Halo was quickly used to calm DANJAQ's butterflies. He was promoted to Design Director. Although very personable, he only understood Halo's systems superficially. Why? Beause he was never a system's designer. Boom, fast forward to the next project.

The Producer pretty boy from marketing (insert his name) and Dan came up with a game called "vertical" that never saw the light of day. Neil young then moved them to Tiberium. While Neil squashed the old guard and created his own kingdom, FEAR fell upon all those working on Tiberuim. In other words no one wanted to make a design decision.

5 years later, Dan and team had changed the weapons 5 times. Hired a myriad of clown hack jr designers, all who wanted to be the "AI designer!" Dan was let go, and in came Tim Coolidge, who left after 2 weeks.

Anonymous Developer #2:

While many of the above statements are true, one statement needs corrected. An opinion shared across the team except by a select few, is that the "jr." designers, some with 10 years or more experience in the industry, were far more knowledgeable and proven than their lead Orzulak, or his student of the fine art of smoke screening, Andre Garcia. This was not only supported but reaffirmed by other level designers brought on loan from the Medal of Honor team, also with far more experience than their leads. Since you talk of MobyGames'ing a resume, you'll find Andre Garcia, a QA tester for nearly a decade, quickly went from nothing, to a design lead position, thanks to his friend Dan Orzulak.

However, despite the narrow focus of the above poster, the demise of this project, and others, was in the hands of a higher pay grade than is likely visible to the above poster. Previous games such as MoH:A survived even less competent design leaders, such as the aformentioned Jon Paquette, a creative director with even less design experience than Orzulak. No, this would not ordinarily be enough to sink a ship at the well funded studio...

The real story of Tiberium's fate was a project being led by these incompetent leaders, as is par for the course at EALA, but was recognized as an opportunity for a new team of management to make a powerplay for their own development team. At first they made the right moves to win over the crowd, eliminating Orzulak, "pretty boy EP," and their "no action is the best action" technical director, along with demoting the similar philosophy senior development director in one fell swoop. The team rejoiced, and invested their full faith into the newcomers...

Anonymous Developer #3:

The real problem started with them placing Chris Plummer in charge. The dude had no idea how to make a video game and had mostly marketing experience - no actual game dev experience other then a few nightmare projects at EALA. He didn't listen to any of the more experienced staff and changed his mind every few months, causing the team to churn and burn things over and over. The project ended up costing as much as a Hollywood movie and wasting years of people's time. You simply cannot succeed when the guy at the head of the project has no idea what he's making, and no idea how to really do it. I'm amazed they let him churn and burn for 4 years on it. Sad... there were some great ideas in the game and some great people on the team.

Why does this matter to us? Well, at least three of the "inexperienced" people being blamed for the failure here are Origin veterans with credits that stretch back to the original Privateer! Neil Young was President of Origin for Wing Commander Prophecy and Secret Ops; he also produced the Wing Commander movie and was directly responsible for establishing this website. Chris Plummer got his start playtesting Wing Commander III and then moved to marketing for Wing Commander Prophecy and Secret Ops. Newsgroup veterans may remember his posts to alt.games.wing-commander during that time. He's also the famed "Tangy" who appears in several WCSO screenshots. More importantly, Dan Orzulak was a member of nearly every Wing Commander development team at Origin from the original Privateer forward -- even running the QA team on Heart of the Tiger! With that history in mind, can these claims really be taken at face value?


--
Original update published on November 1, 2008

 

[nebular]

I can believe it.

The simple matter is, being part of Wing Commander past doesn't automatically make you the best person to make the future games. What matters is WHICH part these people were from. two of the people you mentioned had only a smattering of actual development experience, the rest was either upper management or in marketing. As for Dan, I don't know all the details of his career, I don't see how being part of every development team for a WC game since privateer puts him in the top spot by default.

Yes these guys absolutely needed to be part of the team for the game, you need franchise veterans to keep the feel of the game consistent, but it sounds to me like the higher ups took that a bit too far.

 

[MaHeSw]

One thing I have learned from my working experience is that people are very quickly looking for scapegoats if something goes wrong. This seems to be the case here. But I don't think we should waste our time on this. If you read further down in that forum you quickly realise it starts to get really rediculous, with people accusing the EA managagement of being drug addicts and so on...
The following comment is coming from that forum and I think it sums up pretty great how much facevalue we should take on this (which is, not much).

Frank Arndt 2 Oct 2008 at 6:55 am PST
Wow, this is all so encouraging for me. Me being one of those fresh out of lame-name-college guys that are willing to kill for a position at pretty much any company just to get some more work experience.
Anyways, being the low level grunt I am I cant help but think that any company who spends this much time and money on a project only to call it quits is full of retards. If you dont have a solid core team with a solid design idea to begin with, why bother?
And then coming here to wash some dirty laundry and throw around accusations in a circle is real professional. I can understand frustrations building up at the office, trust me I have worked in quite some interesting environments before coming to this industry, but seeing anything at this level is ridiculous.
You people who are throwing around accusations should be ashamed of yourselves, because each and every individual who puts such an amount of effort into these accusations also seems to be highly motivated at creating the best possible game they can. Where was that drive when you were working on the game? Or were you too busy talking about who did what wrong and searching for scapegoats?
Problem just seems people have gotten a little lost in this huge clusterfuck and lost focus altogether. Maybe management is bad on a mid level. Maybe on a higher level too. But if thats the case, its up to the grunts to stick together as a team and put in work. The grunts are the first and last line of defense. Without them nothing gets done. We might take out the execs garbage, but we have power too, the power to make a good game and put our heads together and defend good ideas as well as criticize bad ones.
But if the grunts are messing up and fighting over who gets to be AI designer, along with managers who dont do a proper job, then my friends you are doomed. No matter how talented you are as an individual and no matter how impressive your resume might look, if you dont have the right spirit and motivation, it will be very hard to put together the effort required to make a good game.
If games are your passion and your company is fucked up, ask yourself the simple question why is that so? Why do I want to make a good game? Why loose time over dishing out accusations,when you can ask yourself what can I do to improve the situation? If your answer is that you dont think you can change anything, you are wrong and should go home. And not come back. Focusing on who caused the problem instead of dealing with the situation at hand is a waste of time.
And if you have tried all you can as a real team and finally come to the conclusion that you are indeed powerless and cannot change it for the better, call it quits and go surf! And find a new company.
Oh and fire the frikkin junkies please!

 

[Quarto]

I do think some of these posts could be true indeed. It is certainly more than plausible that someone who did a good job ten years ago would be completely incompetent now.

However, whatever the case may be, there is one very, very good reason not to touch this subject even to speculate about the real story - all of these accusations are anonymous. Anonymous information should always be ignored, because you have no way of telling what the motivations behind it are. This is especially true when someone is complaining anonymously. And yes, these people for the most part can't post openly, because of their NDAs, but that just proves the point - if they're willing to anonymously violate their NDAs, then they cannot be trusted at all.

It's a pity and a mistake that the CIC decided to post about this. Anonymous accusers should be ignored, not given publicity.

 

[Bandit LOAF]

It's a pity and a mistake that the CIC decided to post about this. Anonymous accusers should be ignored, not given publicity.

This was widely-reported-on two weeks ago (when I wrote the update...). It only seemed fair to offer an alternate take on the story.

 

[Bandit LOAF]

Allright, a slight defense:

Let me be absolutely clear: I am not a journalist; I have nothing but contempt for anyone who insists that they are a 'game journalist' and who runs a website under that pretense. I have a brother who is a reporter and I respect him greatly for it. He makes honest money following the police to crime scenes and accident sites and interviewing victims of things who presumably don't want a man with a note pad talking to them. The ability to cut and paste press release, attend fancy PR parties and to reword other peoples 'news' is in no way, shape or form journalism. At best it's marketing. Anyone who gets fancy about journalistic ethics at their video game fan site is... it's just the thing I like the least in the universe - a pretense to feel big about yourself, something you haven't earned.

That in the open, my criteria for a CIC update are: one, have something each day and two, try and have something that interests *me*. Lord knows I don't always meet that second criteria - I know a lot of people are interested in the latest space sim from a small European developer... but I'm not. I could very easily say that this is such a case... but I'll be honest: it isn't. This story rings my bell for several reasons, none of which are because it's 'salacious'. In order:

- It updates us on the careers of several Origin employees who, apparently, made names for themselves far away from the groups that stayed together in Austin. What's more, it's an aspecct of their careers that we probably won't hear about, since the game's manual will never make it into MobyGames.

- It is about a cancelled game, which is a subject that personally fascinates me. I have spent a great deal of effort tracking down the history of 'our' cancelled games, and C&C is a series that I've always enjoyed in passing. I would very much love to find this sort of update - even if it's rumor and speculation - about something like Technosaur or A-10.

- It is history that otherwise will not be recorded. In ten or fifteen years Kotaku and GamesDaily and whoever else is 'reporting' on this in exchange for McDnalds banner advertisements will have lost their passion for paying the hosting bill; they will go the way of Happy Puppy and CrackedNuts and we will not. Not only is the source material preserved now, but our commentary becomes the one that lasts. Fair? No... but that's how history works.

- It is a defense of men whose work I respect... and one who is the reason we are here today. Neil Young did us an amazing favor all those years ago and he deserves every slight kind word I can give him, however insignificant. I don't think it's out of place to serve as a character witness, especially in an arena where absolutely no one else ever will. It's also a stand against something I hate - the internet's beloved 'authority is automatically evil' (and to the above, I will note that my argument isn't that these people *must* be especially suited to this project... but rather that they are not inexperienced. Helping develop Privateer in 1993 means you aren't new to the industry).

 

[Quarto]

I just don't like to see anonymous jerks like this getting free publicity. As someone who works in the games industry, and who has actually managed projects from start to completion, I resent the way they make their accusations in secrecy, depriving the people they're accusing of any way to defend themselves - or even to learn from their mistakes, if they indeed did their jobs wrong.

But yes, thinking about it, you are right - there are many good reasons to post this story here, and certainly it must be worth something that you're giving support to people who have been attacked this way.