Ensemble's games (AOE, AOK, AOM + expansions) recently broke 15 million in sales (there was a press release about it at the time).  The actual number is of course higher by now, I think even up another million or two.  Wow.  I still just can't get my head around those numbers.

Today we had a very cool internal presentation about it and then all went to the local Dave & Buster's to celebrate.  A good time was had by all, including my 3 yr old who proves to be a master at the coin pushing games there.

I didn't join Ensemble until about the AOM era (though I was around for the tail end of AOK) but it's just staggering to me the great audience that our games have found over the years.  I'm very proud of all the games I make, but that doesn't translate to equality in sales ... AOM sold more in the first month or two than all my other previously shipped games combined.  I'm not sure how I feel about that but I certainly learned the hard way early on that game quality, and game sales are not tightly coupled factors (quality is generally required for sales, but are by no means a guarantee of it). 

The Age series hit that perfect sweet spot of quality along with the right market factors it needed.  It's a great feeling when it happens.  The coolest thing about those kind of sales numbers is just that it means many millions of players have been entertained by what we make, and that means a lot to me.

We have such little turnover at Ensemble that almost everyone that worked on the original AOE is still with the company.  It's a really amazing feeling to see that kind of continuity among my peers.  I count my blessings that when I made the jump to Ensemble I was joining up with such a solid crew. 

Ok, ok, enough with the misty-eyed blathering...

Heh, I noticed that Dave Long's "Longshot" column this week mentions AOM.  In fact, I'm the programmer in question when he mentions "Manly Random" games... a phrase tossed about in many a game of AOM & AOK around the Ensemble Studios playtest area.  It refers to the practice of setting everything as random as possible, but specifically your map and civ choice when playing a multiplayer game.

I really love the fact that players who play a lot of Warcraft 3 on battle.net with the "random" civ get a separate set of avatars.  Actually in general it's kind of nice that when you choose Random in that game (and in Starcraft) your civ is hidden from your opponents until they encounter you, something that can potentially make it a tactical advantage as well as just a fun setting.  We discussed doing something similar in AOM but ultimately it was just one of those things that slipped through the cracks at the end of the project.

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GamerDad is a great site, BTW, for those of you who are gamers and have kids.  My two boys are 3 yrs old and 3 months old, and the elder has become an absolute fiend at Super Mario Sunshine...

Geeky parenting tip #222: The Gameboy is a great way to enjoy actually eating out again once you have kids.

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."

William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), "Romeo and Juliet", Act 2 scene 2

It might smell as sweet, but I'm not sure I'd want to give a bouquet of "Spiky Thornflowers" to my wife no matter what they smelled like.  I'd also be pretty confused if there were 7 different versions of roses, all of which looked and smelled different (come to think of it, there probably are -- one of many reasons I'm intimidated out of the florist shop so quickly).

There is a lot to a name -- especially in the games industry. 

I'll set aside for a moment all the usual issues with names ranging from the unwieldy ("Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow") to the absurd ("Disgaea: Hour of Darkness").  Those are great games, mind you, just with clunky names.  Today, the focus of my ire is the practice of publishers releasing completely different games on different platforms and giving them the same name!

The excellent Spiderman 2 game is a great recent example.  Activision has been advertising the PC version identially to the console version, same packaging, everything.  But the actual content of the PC game vs the console game is considerably different.  IMO, this deceptive marketing practice is only going to cause trouble for everyone.   Doubly so because the console game is so darned good and if they'd just ported it to the PC they'd have a lot of happy PC customers instead of a bunch of misled & ripped off PC customers.

On the flip side of the coin, the upcoming EA Lord of the Rings: The Third Age came looks pretty awesome.  Oh, you thought I meant the console version, with Final Fantasy style?  No, I meant the identically named GBA version, which looks to be a fun game in the style of Fire Emblem.

If the distinction between the two hadn't been called to my attention (via a thread on the ever-interesting Quarter To Three) I would have certainly given the GBA version a complete pass.  This really baffles me -- if a publisher is going to spend all the money to develop a totally separate game, why hide it under an identical title and lose sales from people who might be interested in both of the games?  It's not like "The Third Age" carries such massive positioning or buzz that it alone would drive people to the GBA game -- there are tens if not hundreds of LOTR-themed titles that would've drawn attention to this interesting-looking handheld tactics RPG title.

Hey, I've worked on my share of horribly titled games ("Terra Nova", anyone?) but I really don't understand why publishers would want to muddy the waters with actively misleading names.   It's a sign of how immature our industry is still that not only do publishers do this kind of stuff, but that no one in the "press" calls them on it. 

(If anyone reading this has a good link to somewhere besides random forums & blogs that anyone does draw attention to these practices, please post a link in the comments).

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Speaking of horrible names in the usual sense... I finally finished La Pucelle: Tactics last night.  A bit slow at times, and I didn't do all the ridiculously difficult optional dungeons, but overall a quite enjoyable tactics-RPG.  In many ways I liked it better than the sequel, Disgaea: Hour of Darkness -- which is a great game in it's own right but a few of the mechanics in La Pucelle just grabbed me more.  A compare-and-contrast between the two would be an interesting blog topic in the future (at least interesting to pointed-headed gaming geeks like myself). 

If you liked either La Pucelle or Disgaea, keep an eye open for Phantom Brave coming at the end of August -- it looks absolutely incredible.  Hopefully I can finish Tales of Symphonia (next in my RPG queue) before then!

The first expansion set for my favorite online collectible card game, Star Chamber, just went on sale today.  Anyone who has even a passing interest in games like Magic: The Gathering or Master of Orion owes it to themselves to download this game and try it out. 

I won't try and explain the game here (there's plenty of info on the Star Chamber website) but there are more interesting gameplay decisions and cool mechanics in this game than just about anything else on the market.  It's totally an indy game, so don't expect pre-rendered cutscenes but the graphics & production quality are more than enough to let you enjoy the experience.  You may have to poke around a bit for a game if you play at some seriously off-peak time, but that's never really been a problem in my experience.

Anyways, the download is tiny and you can play Sample decks for absolutely free.  Or for $20 you can buy a preconstructed deck and play some fairly serious games.  For $20 you will easily get your money's worth. 

I'm really curious to see how Star Chamber does over the next few years.  Because it's not from a big budget publisher it relies almost entirely on word of mouth, and is an unusual sort of business model to boot.  If they are successful (as they certainly deserve to be purely on the merits of the game) that really will demonstrate to me that online distribution and self-funding is beginning to come of age.  Existing publishers like Matrix Games, Shrapnel Games, and Battlefront have already established the feasibility of this model for some particular niches like wargaming, but I would love to see the market evolve to a point where it is practical for higher budget games across a wider range of genres.  Publishers and distributors wield an incredible amount of power in the industry right now and it can be more than a little bit stifling.

Obviously, I am biased on the publisher / developer relationship (being a developer and all) but anything that puts more power in the hands of the developers is a good thing in my book.  I find it incredibly unfair that even for fantastic hit games, the publisher usually reaps 3x to 5x the profits that a developer does.  Life is not fair, of course, and business doubly so -- there are good practical reasons why this is so (mainly that the publishers have all the money).  I'm not trying to slam on all publishers, as they are an essential part of the industry.  But I do think the balance of power is skewed.

It is still in the domain of hardcore strategy titles, but I thought it was quite interesting that Paradox Plaza (makers of Europa Universalis 1/2, Victoria, Crusader Kings, etc.) is moving towards self-publishing via online fulfillment.  Perhaps the first sign of more changes to come? 

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Speaking of Paradox, I've been spending a lot of time playing EU2 lately.  What an incredibly deep game.  I'm a sucker for historical games and EU2 is the ultimate "what if" game.  Not only that, it is so much more polished and playable than some of their more recent work, like Victoria & Hearts of Iron.

While I haven't seen the movie yet, I've been playing the heck out of the Xbox version of Spiderman 2.  I'm very glad to see that my high hopes for it from E3 were well founded.  While it does have a bit of the open-ended city feel of GTA, the game it most reminds me of is Tony Hawk Pro Skater.  There are a lot of moves to learn in combat, and the swinging has a great "manual" feel to it.  Easy to learn, difficult to master and all that.  Spidey has such a wide variety of moves to use while moving through the city -- it is quite an empowering feeling.  While it does have a little bit of an issue with repetition in the random city missions, it is a small blemish on an excellent game. 

I was glad to see Bruce Campbell returning as the tutorial / hint voice for the game.  He is absolutely perfect.  A lot of times the hint text is different from what is spoken... I wonder whether that is due to ad libbing or just wanting clearer written text.  Also, KMFDM does the music for the game, which was quite a surprise.  It fits the game much more than I would have thought.

My favorite random feature in Spiderman 2: you can unlock "tricks" that are just cool stunts or moves you can do in midair.  They give you Hero Points, but really, they're just fun to do for their own sake.

Unfortunately my Spiderman playing time has been interrupted a lot by disc read errors on my Xbox.  I have a pre-release Xbox, a translucent green one "signed" by Mr. Gates himself, thanking me for my contribution to the Xbox.  Admittedly, my only contribution was happening to work in Microsoft Gaming Studios when the company launched the Xbox, but hey, I still like my cool green Xbox.  Unfortunately these (along with some of the other launch boxes) have notoriously bad DVD drives -- several of my coworkers have already had to replace theirs.  Given that it's almost as expensive to have an Xbox repaired as to go buy a new one, I guess I'll be heading to Fry's for a new Xbox this weekend...

There's an interesting post on Jamie Fristom's (developer at Treyarch) blog about MTV's "Making Of.." on the game, and how their coverage was heavily skewed towards the art side (including the pre-rendering house for the game).  Programmers, like authors, just aren't very telegenic, and unlike authors it is hard to attribute specific contribution or even understand what the heck it is we do.  I guess it's human nature to want to view the product of large teams to just one person.  Certainly the media does it relentlessly with the few luminaries our industry does have (Sid Meier, Warren Spector, Peter Molyneux, Will Wright, etc.).  To those guys' credit they keep constantly reminding the industry press that they can't take individual credit for the many awesome games they've worked on -- not that the message ever seems to get through to the press.

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Turns out my Mom is listed in IMDB as well!  Hey, the whole family is famous!  :)

I've made a few changes to the left column of the page... recent comment links are there (though there's not a lot of comment traffic here yet) as well as some links to other blogs / websites from interesting folks who are friends of mine, in the industry, or both.  Check 'em out, lots of good stuff there.