Amidst the dusty annals of video gaming, there are games only mentioned in hushed tones. There are games that are traded in back-alleys, games where the few extant copies are guarded in by hooded, pale-faced men who worship the old gods Mintah, Ammygah and Com O’door. Games where only one person has ever played it, and he whispers its plot endlessly from his isolated, padded rooms in Bedlam…
This was an 10,000 word interview on 10/8/2011 conducted for a feature written for PC Gamer; it covers the entire history of Creative Assembly. We used so little of it, I’m putting the rest up here for kicks.
With Battle.net, Diablo and WOW behind them, it’s probably fair to suggest that PC Gamers have probably spent more millions of hours on Blizzard’s games than any other company’s. With the upcoming release of StarCraft II we spent an hour chatting to three team leads of the original game, now all working inside Blizzard on StarCraft II. They are Frank Pierce, the executive vice-president in charge of product development (he oversees all the new games), Bob Finch, the lead software engineer on (he makes the engines and decides on game features), and Sam Didier, Senior Art Director (he makes the world look o-so-pretty). In line with their history of fantasy roleplay, if anyone fancies LARPing this, Frank Pierce’s voice suggests a paternally-growling Tauren, Bob Finch is an tinkering Gnome alchemist, and Sam Didier is some sort of excitable Goblin with ten tonnes of hi-ex strapped to his endlessly-whirring noggin.
This is an interview with the anonymous modder Vorians, who’s worked on the Unique Landscapes and Better Cities mods for The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion. I was interviewing him to talk about Skyrim for this piece on What Modder’s Want for Gamespy, but he didn’t reply in time, so I’ve posted it here.
It’s 1941 and Nazi Germany has just invaded the USSR, its erstwhile ally. SS counter-intelligence soon detects a range of radio signals from communist and socialist sympathisers, embedded at all levels of European society. Since the SS call transmitters ‘piano’ and supervisors ‘conductors’, they name this nascent resistance network the Rote Kapelle – the Red Orchestra. Despite early successes, it’s soon crushed.
