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Defunct studios discussion - Who remembers Black & White?
I just finished playing through the Fata Deum demo and you can really feel the B&W roots, even if it's minus your pet.
While there's lots to be excited about off the back of Fata Deum, it does kill me that this IP was left for dead considering how innovative the gameplay was at the time and how much potential it had.
Does anyone have fond memories of other hits from now defunct studios?
RIP Sierra, Westwood, and Bullfrog. The games from those three companies basically make up the majority of my childhood gaming memories.
What's up with the dearth of educational games? More refined versions of Word/Math Rescue? My kid loves Word Rescue, if not for the horrifically dated sounds.
We need more quality typing games. Textorcist is great, but hardly appropriate for elementary schools.
I just recently spoke to a middle school teacher...kids don't know how to type anymore. They don't explicitly teach it, just expecting kids to passively pick it up with chromebooks in front of their faces starting in 1st grade.
So, decided to looked it up and it seems education games just stopped being profitable. Which surprises me given how much some people spend on their kids. There's a good article on what happened to education games here (explains better than I could): https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/where-in-the-world-did-blockbuster-educational-games-go-
I'd say the biggest problem was:
A few bad quarters at a bad time (the dot-com burst) == destroy entire market. Merging into a giant conglomerate means losing the company culture that focused on people and products over profits. It doesn't matter if its a sustainable business when you need to satisfy shareholders who want ever-increasing profits.
The fact that there are educational games making a comeback (on shitty closed platforms) shows me the market isn't dead....just not blockbuster the way that Call of Duty is.
True, stockholder greed likely ended most of them and the dot-com boom gave a lot of big companies the cash to buy up assets. Then everything fell through when it burst and a lot is lost after a few sales. I think the market is out there, it'll just take a couple games to get popular and then we'll see more. It helps that advances in AI should make games easier and cheaper to make.
I know what happened to 3 of the companies. MECC, The Learning Company and Broderbund were all bought by the same company, ground down to feed the stockholders and then all sold to Mattel in '99 who quickly bungled things ending MECC almost immediately. Learning Company's corpse I think is in Ubisoft's hands and Broderbund's zombie is still floating around out there somewhere. :/
The greatest was MECC. I had so many of their edutainment games growing up in the ‘90s.
MECC! Odell Down Under was one of the first games I really got into and I still love to play it. ^_^
https://archive.org/details/ODELL_201905
Agreed. Sometimes I’ll boot up some of my old DOS games to show my kid how I used to role in Treasure Mountain! Or Midnight Rescue! (The Learning Company). I also managed to find some educational games on the Nintendo DS, there’s an Elmo game and an Umizoomi game he liked.
Some edutainment games in stumbled upon recently on Steam are “Prose & Codes” and “Epistory”. There’s also scribblenauts.
It sure does feel like they stopped making educational games, at least on PC. I'm really out of touch with that sort of thing, but I think they're mostly being developed for mobile these days though. E.g. We bought my nephew the Osmo system for the iPad and he enjoyed that a lot, although he has outgrown it now. And I do know that the Switch has quite a few educational games too, since my nephew still regularly plays some of them.
I was thinking PC, yea. I have seen some good ones on Android as well. But there used to be a robust ecosystem and now it's basically either shovelware or ancient software targetted at schools only.
So many hours of Lords of the Realm 2, Populous 2 and Syndicate as a kid.
God I wanted populus 3. I remember there being a 'coming soon' trailer at the end of the game or something, maybe my memory is leaky. That game is iconic to me and one of, if not the first, to get me into PC games. I can still hear the game sounds and music in my head at least 20 years later.
Totally. The fighting noises, the "aaaahhhh" and they fly up in the air. Lives rent free to this day. If you played on Amiga, you might enjoy this nostalgia trip.
https://www.youtube.com/live/SnaPH1oRpYA?si=sHldPtngBjs7GAGO
Oh man, Sierra. I grew up on those games.. Quest For Glory 4 is specifically a game that was very influential to me :)
RIP indeed, I loved C&C and Homeworld. Should add Maxis to that list, they're basically dead... an EA Zombie now.
Weird, looked Cataclysm up and it's been re-released with a different name (Emergence) due to Blizzard having the Cataclysm trademark, but I thought if it already exists then you cannot trademark it? Is it because Activation owns both Zombie Sierra and Blizzard now. 🤔 Seems like dumb choice if that's the case since old fans won't notice it as easy, the full title was "Homeworld: Cataclysm" and it's a different genre so it doesn't interfere with WoW in any way.
Ohhhh we've got this notion that we'd quite like to sail the ocean but we simply can't do that 'til we get more woood...
I played hours upon hours of that game and I don't think I ever finished the first one. In fact I remember spending so much time on the first island I was surprised there were more levels after that. I just dithered about, teaching my tiger magic and building my village as big as I could. I think most of the charm was in the weird emergent behaviors you could produce in your creature, like my tiger's chronic constipation after I tried to stop him from pooping on villagers. That was definitely lost in the second, where the creature was more of a minion than an ally.
It occurs to me now that if it were remade it would be very well suited to VR controls. It wanted so badly to give you that "hand of a god" feel with casting gestures, catching fireballs, and the way you interacted with your pet. If there's ever a proper spiritual successor I think it would do well in that medium, as long as it wasn't the only way to play it
It was hard to finish the first one. The last area amounted to little more than a tech demo. It was a wildly unfinished game.
Me, I miss B&W (deaaaaaaath)
Thank you for the shoutout of Fata Deum, I had no idea about it!
I've checked it out and it's really not a B&W game. Looks like it'll be an RTS with super powers.
B&W was so much more than a game about conquest. In fact, I never even finished the game as a kid because I'd spend all my time just building up my villages and training my creature. Plus you had all the fun exploration content like puzzles and discoveries. You got to feel like a god just hanging out with your peeps instead of just focusing on raising armies to wage war.
I saw that too but I'm hoping it kinda scratches the itch a little. I guess we'll see!
There is no franchise I miss more than Black and White. No game has ever captured me in the way that one did as a child.
I really think Peter Molyneux and his team were something magic during and around the period, and it is a shame that the inevitable happened once bigger companies stepped in and Peter destroyed his reputation.
Having said that, Black and White 2 definitely lost some of the magic. I think partly due to UI choices and showing creature stats as you manipulated them. This kind of I unveiled the man behind the curtain and just made you feel like you were programming your creature.
Fata Deum looks interesting. I'm reserved on being too optimistic about it, but what I've seen so far looks interesting.
The biggest problem with Peter Molyneux games was Peter Molyneux. It was always the same - let better people make an amazing product, then around e3 time start promising the moon and stars, force the team to try to shoehorn in some of the ideas, they don't really work so most are half-baked. By the time the game is released it's still decent. The problem was when his ego grew with each hit, then his promises grew bigger. Eventually his crew couldn't cover for him anymore (the fable series is a good example - compare the problems 1 had before it came out, and 3 had from the start).
Warzone 2100 made by Pumpkin Studios and punished by Eidos Interactive.
An RTS where you focused more on your artillery support, not just brute force tank action. Though tank action was very much part of it as well...
It's got an Open version now as well. Absolutely great fun.
Was this the one where they advertised that you could control individual tanks and stuff? If so, I was thinking about this game the other day and couldn't remember the name.
Design and control!
I remember Black & White quite well! Great game. I’m also a big fan of the city builder games made by Impressions Games - Caesar 3, Pharaoh, Zeus, Emperor… Tilted Mills was going to make another isometric city builder called medieval mayor set in medieval Europe, but that never worked out. Nowadays it looks like the genre sort of survives in the mobile game world, but it’s not the same.
I absolutely loved all the city builders by Impressions too. My favorite city builder was always Tropico though, which is thankfully still going strong, albeit being developed by Kalypso now.
BTW, Pharaoh actually got a remake released earlier this year: Pharaoh: A New Era. I haven't played it yet, and the reviews are mixed, but I will probably buy it eventually and give it a try.
City builders haven't completely died out on PC though, but most have lost that same sense of scale as the old games, and also taken on a lot more survival elements too. E.g. Frostpunk is pretty hardcore but was amazing, and Frostpunk 2 is due sometime next year. Against the Storm was pretty good too. The Wandering Village was still pretty barebones last time I played it, but it had potential. And Surviving the Aftermath is supposedly pretty decent, but I haven't played it yet either.
City skylines if you want a literal city builder too. And city skylines 2 will be out eventually with a grander scale
I did enjoy B&W back in the day and Peter Molyneux had other great hit games then like the Populous series and Dungeon Keeper.
I think many of the games I really miss were from much smaller studios that shut down despite having great ideas, here were some of my favorites:
MTP-Target was a little multiplayer physics game from 2002.
The game had some fun physics and king-of-the hill type mechanics but what made it so addicting was most rounds took under a minute and then it would auto-load the next map with a new challenge. It was mostly developed by a single developer who shut the project down without much notice when he moved onto new things.
Time of Defiance was a RTS/MMO hybrid from 2002.
It was interesting because your units took several hours to move between locations so you had to login several times a day to update production and redirect fleets. Apparently the studio was partially government funded and when that money ran out it closed down the servers.
Savage 2 was great RTS/FPS hybrid from 2008.
Several games have tried this hybrid combination but I think Savage2 was the best of them in its heyday when all the servers filled up. S2Games tried to revive it again on Steam with a remake using the Unreal Engine instead of their own but it flopped and the studio closed down.
I really miss B&W, they were excellent games.
This will sound a bit weird as the studio is still around, but arguably in all but the name anymore: I am really nostalgic for Warcraft RTSes, and especially the Warcraft 3 campaign. WoW isn’t doing it for me anymore and the lore is all over the place.. Some games managed to approach similar levels of fun with the campaign for me, Northgard for one, but I’d love a new Warcraft.
Similar vein as Blizzard, I miss Square not being part of a monolithic mega-organization that feels the pressure of making the most game in crowded markets or capitalizing hard on nostalgia. There's a period of time in the SNES to early PS2 era where they just kept releasing novel stuff that, even if it didn't land perfectly, felt like it was squarely (ha) a result of their own creative forces and stood aesthetically on their own.
Honestly not weird at all. Warcraft 3 especially can be mourned as it was basically destroyed from the re-release. I don't believe you can even play the old version anymore as far as I'm aware.
I don't think it could be called a "hit", but Defiant shut down in 2019 and I thought they showed real promise with their Hand of Fate series. Defiant was an indie studio based in Australia that mostly did mobile games and HoF was their first attempt at a full-fledged PC/console title.
Hand of Fate is a pretty innovative blend of a tabletop game, ARPG, and an unconventional deckbuilder where your cards aren't for powers, you instead use them to build the level you're on and define encounters. Also has one of the best narrators of all time in the character of The Dealer, an immortal being you are playing this game against for your soul, a la the chess game with Death in The Seventh Seal. The voice actor of the Dealer is fantastic as he comments on everything you're doing in the game, sometimes sympathetic, sometimes gloating and cruel, and never seems to run out of things to say.
The games are still available via Steam/GOG but they may get pulled at some point, hopefully not. I recommend them to anyone who'll listen.
Maybe I was too young or just missed it, but I remember Black and White somewhat and being totally underwhelmed. I could never get the avatar to do what I wanted, and the rest of the god simulator elements didn't really work for me. I wonder how it would play out now with a little more knowledge/internet guides.
I remember slapping the shit out of the avatar being pretty hilarious though.
Universim is KINDA like B&W, you're a god influencing a civilization, you have god powers, but also research and evolution
I remember reading a translated column series on the development of B&W from a local gaming magazine when I was a kid. Had to go check it up.
It was written by a Lionhead employee named Steve Jackson and originally published in PC Gamer. Ran for 30 numbers before getting cancelled since the game still wasn’t out.
I still remember the feeling of amazement and anticipation I got from those articles. This was the holy grail of gaming, and probably the last game I would ever play.
Anyways.. that was the first time I was victimised by Peter Molyneux’ bullshit.
(just to be clear, I felt the game was okay, it just didn’t live up to the massive hype)