Earlier this week we got the good news that SOE’s MMO The Agency wasn’t canceled, but where’s the game been? In hiding, apparently. According to the game’s lead designer Hal Milton, after the CES demo was released earlier this year the developers went into full-on content creation mode. We went kind of intentionally dark after CES, we’ve been pretty quiet this year so we could go heads-down on the content. In the world of MMOs and triple-A game development we are actually a pretty reasonably-sized team. We’re slightly under a hundred people. I know sports titles and other games that have much larger teams than that for ‘offline’ games. We’re all just concentrating on getting our tools online and building as much content as possible – making sure that content is actually fun.
In mid-1980s Nicaragua, a woman stood beside a burnt out bus in a tiny, remote town. Game designer Jim Gasperini was in the region to visit his brother, a journalist covering Contra issues during the Reagan administration.
The bus, the woman told Gasperini, had been provided by the Nicaraguan government, and she had relied on it as her only means of visiting her sister. The Contras – anti-government guerillas funded by the U.S. – had destroyed the bus. The woman, passionate about American democracy, told Gasperini that if he could just tell everyone back in the States about what had happened to her bus, Americans would vote to help, the Contras would cease their attacks, and she could travel to her sister’s again.
Touched by her plight and by her faith, Gasperini wondered what he could do to disseminate information about the Contra situation. In the end, he decided to do what he did best: Make a game.
