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Sunday Comics: Dead Island The developers of the original Neverwinter Nights, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and Blood Wake has closed its doors, ending twenty years of Stormfront Studios. We’d heard from a number of ex-employees over the past 24 hours who tipped us off to the closing, telling us that Stormfront prez Don Daglow announced during the studio’s weekly meeting that it would be shutting its doors forever, offering no severance and no further health benefits. The studio was said to have a staff of about 30 full-time employees at its closure.
This morning at the GC Developers Conference, a panel of game developers—Don Daglow from Stormfront Studios, Mike Capps from Epic Games, Julian Eggebrecht from Factor 5, and George Backer from Lionhead Studios—spoke on the subject of “top selling games” and the methods and philosophies involved in designing them. When asked how influential the enthusiast press and the forum dwelling hardcore were on the final outcome of their games, the developers were surprisingly frank about the impact both groups truly had.
Capps was first to respond, saying “We absolutely love the press. Everything they say we immediately put into our game.” Joking, of course, but it’s actually not that far from the truth.
As learned gamers, we usually scoff at movie licensed games, calling them the not-so-cheap way out for developers looking to cash in. But during a roundtable at GCDC today in Leipzig, Germany (Europe), Stormfront Studios’ Don Daglow presented two tumultuous experiences with licensing movies: Lord of the Rings and TRON. Obviously LOTR was in many ways a dream proposition…[but]when we started the project, everyone was saying, Peter Jackson??
But then… [Producers]brought up to EA 16 minutes of the movie…After they saw that…everything had changed.
Lord of the Rings wasn’t a multi-billion franchise yet; it wasn’t a sure thing for publishers to bet on. But the problems with the licence ended there. As for TRON…
