Stormfront Studios Interview
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GC: Can you give us, from start to finish, the story on how this happened?
DD: I'll give you the abbreviated version. For any team, when you finish one project and you're working forward onto the next one, that's always a point of greater vulnerability. We had been working on two original IPs for an extended period of time, and had made a significant investment in those. What's cool is that both of those IPs got very strong reactions from publishers, but we did not have them signed. With all of the merger and acquisition activity that's going on right now, we had one project that we were working on that was canceled as a result of the various (big deals) that are going on right now.
You have a series of situations like that, and you find yourself with products in advanced stages of discussion with publishers, but you don't actually have a deal. Routinely, for us, over 20 years, in those situations and that does happen periodically to developers we had been able to get bridge loans, and it's not an issue; you keep working. That had been a fairly routine process for us. What happened this time was we added the extra element of not only having lost a project to the acquisitions with the publishers, not only having things come at a time when we were between projects, not only having invested in two original IPs that we were close to signing but hadn't signed, and then you add the final phase of the perfect storm: What's happened to the economy and the stock market.
We were in a situation where it was not at all unreasonable to believe that either the signings would happen in time and everything would be just fine, or else we'd have the bridge financing and that should be all right. And then you follow up that strand and come to the point where you see, we're going to need to invoke the financing, and it's not there. I don't think it's appropriate to go into all the details, but if you allow for the fact that it looked like we would have the deals signed and it wouldn't matter, but you pick up a little bit of delay on your deals, and that delay is just long enough that you need your bridge financing, and then it turns out that, to your surprise, the bridge financing is not there. you go very quickly from (Hey, it looks like things are going to be fine.) The number of days it takes to go from there to not being able to pay people is not very many, in that situation.
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GC: On the dice metaphor is that something you had considered for Stormfront? Stormfront largely made its name on Neverwinter Nights, lauded as one of the first graphical MMORPGs. Given the hot property that MMORPGS have become today, have you given any thought to another such title?
DD: We have thought about it. There's certainly a lot of money out there to go in that way. One thing about operating for 20 years is that you tend to migrate what you do based upon the passions of the team. Early in our history, because I had been involved in online. I produced the first graphical game for America Online when the company had about 40 employees, and was working directly with Steve Case on the project. When I founded Stormfront, that led to other games, which in turn led to Neverwinter.
When AOL went through their huge growth cycle, where all the stories in the press in the early '˜90s were about, (Will AOL fail because they can't install modems fast enough to keep up with demand for their product?) At that point, at first AOL terminated all game developers, except Stormfront. We were the only ones working on games for them for a while. After that, they then suspended all game development altogether, because they had all hands on deck doing nothing but support the growth, and trying to respond to the customer growth. Steve Case called me and said, we should be sequelling Neverwinter Nights right now, and I just called to tell you we can't, because we just got every hand pinned down, dealing with these growth issues, and rather than have us just mysteriously not do things we ought to be doing, I just figured I'd call you up and just tell you why, and acknowledge the fact that we're leaving money on the table we're missing an opportunity by not doing more sequels and building on the system. That was the relationship we always had with AOL, was that kind of honesty.
Subsequent to that, we were already working on a lot of different kinds of games, including some of the early EA Sports titles, so we ended up migrating away from online games, and into doing other things. As the team migrated in that direction, we recognized it was something we could go back to, we had team members with a lot of expertise in the area of online and multiplayer. It simply turned out that other opportunities pulled us in that direction.
