Curt Schilling: We want to be the world # 1 game Publisher

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As a legendary Major League Baseball pitcher, Curt Schilling was, for a time, the best in his field. But that time has passed, and Schilling has now traded the mound for a mouse in his new career as the founder of game developer 38 Studios. With a fighting drive to be number one, can Schilling transform 38 Studios into the best game-maker on the planet?

"(Blizzard is) the best in the world at what they do right now, but nobody stays number one forever," Schilling said during an interview recently at New York Comic Con. "And I want to be the number one leading game publisher in the world. Whether that happens two years or 10 years from now, that's the goal."

Although 38 Studios' first game will be a multi-platform single-player RPG called Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, the company is also working on a massively multiplayer online game currently codenamed "Copernicus." Armed with famed fantasy novelist R.A. Salvatore, Spawn creator Todd McFarlane and developers who've worked on EverQuest, World of Warcraft, Dark Age of Camelot and Ultima Online, Schilling thinks 38 Studios has got what it takes to be on top.

We asked Schilling more about his history in gaming, why some MMO developers are "full of crap," and how Blizzard can't stay number one forever.

Read on for the full interview.

UGO: Why put out an MMO?

Curt Schilling: Um, I'm stupid? (laughs) I don't know. It's what I love. It's the reason I got into the industry. I think it's the genre in the industry that I -- air quotes -- know best, and it's probably the sweet spot of the talent we put into the studios. (The developers) have been on every major MMO from Ultima Online. They've made mistakes, and they’ve done great things so I think it's probably our strength.

UGO: And you personally have played every major MMO since Ultima Online?

Schilling: Oh I have, yeah. I go way back. I started on Ultima Online but my first hardcore game passion was EverQuest. I lost many years of my life in Norath. EverQuest and EverQuest II were the kind of games that sold me on what I thought I wanted to do after I was done playing (baseball).

UGO: Did you get to do any gaming while you were playing baseball?

Schilling: Oh no, I did. You see, I was a conundrum in high school. I was a varsity athlete, but I hung out with the geeks. I've always been a fantasy guy, I've always loved it. I've read Lord of the Rings maybe 10 times minimum. I've been a passionate reader my whole life so I love good writers. Then, when I came across the R.A. Salvatore books, which I found kind of later in life, I had a team.

UGO: Do you feel because you're a longtime MMO player that you're actually qualified to make this thing work?

Schilling: I only say yes because I'm not actually making it. I know a good game when I play one. That doesn't make me a lot different than other people, but the key is we're not making my game. I've played those games. I played games made by companies that made somebody else's game, instead of a game everybody wanted to play. While we're not making my game, we're not making a game for everybody either because when you make a game for everybody, you end up making it for no one. I know what we love, I know what we want, and the game that I'm playing is growing into being what we set out to make.

In my mind, you could argue, we're taking the two biggest possible risks you could take. We're launching an MMO, and in our mind a triple-A MMO, and we're doing an original (intellectual property). It's a huge risk, so how do I mitigate that? People who have created their own original IP, they've done that for over 30 years in their own industries. No one's going to want to suddenly read quest text dialogue because R.A. Salvatore wrote it, so we've got to come up with an innovative new way to tell a story. More importantly to me, we’ve got to tell you a story that you care about. We got to give you a world that you care about. R.A. talks about making something so evil you have to kill it, and something you care about so much you have to save it. I haven't played that game yet. I haven't been in that world yet. I haven't cared that much about a game world yet.

UGO: How does the success of World of Warcraft and the failure of so many other MMOs play into your creative and business decisions?

Schilling: You'd be an idiot not to look at the people that do it the best in the world. In the baseball world, everybody looked at how the Yankees did it, but they did it because they had more money than everyone else. Blizzard didn't have more money than everyone else -- well, they do now, but they didn't when they started. But a lot of times, it's not rocket science. It's very simple stuff. It can be a very deep and complex process. Accessible and fun; if WoW is anything, it's those two things.

When WoW launched you could play on a 10-year-old Mac, and I could play on a brand new NASA-speed PC, and we could have the same game experience. If you think about all the games surrounding it, no other game can give you that. In EverQuest, you'd have to turn the settings way down. So to me, the bigger piece was, even though we have a game with a lot of people in the world, a lot of people still want to play alone. WoW allowed me to go in and play 20 minutes by myself and have fun. In EverQuest, my first 45 minutes was spent getting my stuff together and looking for a group. When that was the only thing out there, that was okay -- you had to accept it. You don't have to do that anymore.

And so we have the lead (user interface) designer from WoW, and we have a lot of people from that team. We got a lot of people from the EverQuest and EverQuest II teams, some from Dark Age of Camelot, and every one one of them understands they did some things that weren't right, and they're not going to make those same mistakes again. But you can't make a product running away from mistakes, like "OK, we're not going to do this." Eventually you have to do something. There's a lot of compromise. At the end of the day, creating the best guest experience in the industry is the goal. Whether that's account creation, some viral comic we put on the iPhone, all of it has to be the absolutely best guest experience we can create, or we're not doing the IP justice.

UGO: WoW has a six-year headstart and three expansions, to boot. What would success be for you in the age of WoW?

Schilling: Make no mistake, everyone in the studio still plays WoW. We love the game, but the challenge is going to be asking you to walk away from a game that you have had years invested in. So ultimately we have to believe we've done that when we ship this game. If we haven't, we can't ship it. We're going to be asking millions of people -- we want them to say, "OK, that was fun. I'm ready to walk away from that and do this because this is going to be more fun." (Blizzard is) the best at what they do right now, but nobody stays number one forever, and I want to be the number one leading game publisher in the world. Whether that happens two years or 10 years from now, that's the goal. I honestly think I got everyone to believe I'm not just saying that. Everything we do -- from our employee benefits package to our milestone process -- we do with an eye towards making it perfect and being the best in the world. The mindset is starting to permeate everybody in the company.

UGO: But to get back to my original question, in terms of measuring success, for example, Warhammer Online had 300,000 subscribers and people were calling it a failure...

Schilling: That's a real dangerous game to play because who's saying it first off? No one will have higher expectations of the company and the people than I will. There's a pretty good chance we'll never meet my expectations. We'll still be the best in the world, and we'll fall short of them. All of the things that people worry about for success will take care of themselves if you make a great product. I laugh when I read the quote un-quote experts' opinions on certain things. I'm amazed at how many people are experts, and I look at their resume and they've never done anything! So to qualify as an expert in the industry is not really hard to do. But there are people that are truly experts at what they do; fortunately some of them are working for me now. The metric system for how we measure our success will be an internal one, and no one will set a higher bar for us than us.

UGO: There are a lot of MMO developers I've talked to that passionately loved their game and thought they were making the best decisions for it, but then it didn't pan out...

Schilling: Yeah, but see, that's the thing -- a lot of them are full of crap. You can't tell me that anyone at NCSoft thought Tabula Rasa was going to be awesome. They admitted after they launched the game that they had to go back and reapply the players they lost in beta because it wasn't fun. You can't tell me there weren't people in the company saying this isn't going to work. At a lot of companies, sales people aren't allowed to speak. That's one of the biggest differences here. Nobody is going to be able to say, "I told you so." Everybody understands that everyone is responsible and possessive about what we're doing. We're not having meetings where people are walking out saying, "I don't agree with that." They're standing up and saying it. I can't be in a company where someone goes, "Well, I could've told you that two years ago." Well, why didn't you? We don't have those people.

UGO: As far as the business model, what have you learned from other MMOs? Are you worried about the economy?

Schilling: You always worry about the economy, just because it is what it is and it's not getting any better anytime soon. We won't launch free-to-play. That makes no sense. You're looking at a game that's going to be worth more than $100 million when we're done making it. We have a lot of ways we can go, which is kind of cool. We don't have to make a cool final decision today. We have a path we're going down and that we'll be on when we're done. We're just not sure what we're going to make the path up of yet.

I would tell you how you monetize an MMO is a very intricate part of game design. If you look at Lord of the Rings Online and all the games that went free-to-play, they weren't built to be free-to-play micro-transaction games. They did a great job transitioning, but there's a lot of work and a lot of money spent to reconfigure things. That's a decision you make upfront. Given the feedback that we've gotten and in a lot of focus testing that we've done, people will pay a subscription, if they believe that they're getting their money's worth.

UGO: Blizzard tries to avoid giving any kind of release date so that they don't disappoint fans with delays. Are you going to try to not give any release dates?

Schilling: People get mad at you until your game launches. Everybody was mad at Blizzard for years, but no one bitched after (the games came out). Now it's become a badge of honor for them. When they delay, it's awesome and when everyone else does it, it sucks. But they built that reputation. They've achieved to get that. We'll do what we need to do for two reasons. The game will be as finished as we can make it, and it'll be the right time and place to launch it in the market.

Super Mario Bros ' 25: Miyamoto reveals all

Is the NES silver anniversary this month, Yes, but it also happens to be the 25th birthday of Super Mario Bros, the game is arguably more than any other NES title to ensure that new system of Nintendo will runaway success.

Shigeru Miyamoto, designer of SMB and a few dozen other Nintendo titles you may be familiar with, Sat with Famitsu magazine issue this week to share some stories behind the development of the NES flagship title. some of the highlights:

-Did the concept for SMB where originate, anyway? "It wasn't an idea that you just came at night," said Miyamoto. "It was the culmination of a variety of factors. Firstly, we had a lot of technical know-how created by Excitebike games as well Kung Fu. Secondly, the System Disk [an attachment only Japan] coming soon, so I would like to make a game that will put an exclamation mark in the final era of cartridge games. Thirdly, I would like to build on our tradition of what we called ' sports games ' moment--games where controlled a formula and many had to jump to overcome obstacles.We felt strongly about how we were the first that came with the item, and it was our aim to keep pushing. "

-Moderate enough, but why is Mario fight what is essentially a Legion of demonic turtles for this game? The answer lies in the original Mario Bros, 1983 arcade game. "Me and [Gunpei] Yokoi arrive at a concept gameplay for Mario Bros who took advantage of different floor levels the playfield," Miyamoto recalls. "The idea was that will kill us in direct contact with an enemy, but underneath it afflicts them could knock out.That wound is too boring to be settled on the final system where your first knock them off their feet, jump and then back up to deliver the final blow so Mario Bros. made it out, and when we looked at it, we realized it had no sense that you could get killed in a Mario Bros. When you jumped back a turtle. If you do this, the turtle will get worse than this, wouldn't it? So we decided that if we had the opportunity to make another Mario game, will certainly have so that they could jump to turtles all you want. "

-SMB controls--A to jump, (b) shoot fireballs and perform instinctual--seem like second nature for gamers today. However, the settlement after this control scheme, was less than simple for developers. ' In much of the growth, were a shoot bullets, (b) indent, and on the control yoke to jump, "said Miyamoto." Bullets liquidation becoming fireballs afterwards--initially thought about having a shoot-'em-up stage where Mario jumps in a cloud and shoots to our enemies, but rejected because we wanted to focus jumping action. Bonus stages rely on sky are the remnants of this idea, we could say.Finally, we realized that it is able to shoot all the fireballs you want while running gave too Mario advantage both in contrast had thus only one fireball shoot, when you start running. Freed up "A" button, and we made the jump button. I would really like to have A power button, and press to jump, but surely it worked better for Mario eventually. "

-Why your power up from attention-grabbing (and possibly eat) magic mushrooms? "One of the fun things about looking at the world games action games and set out a strategy to deal with," Miyamoto explained."The first prototype game we would be very good, because they couldn't see very far in front of you. People who wanted to have more of the visible world on screen, but don't want to make Mario each less than what it was.So, we decided to build the world of scale of a smaller Mario and then increase the multiplier in its final version.That is when we are struck by the idea to start small and letting the Mario get more later.From the entire game in a Magic Kingdom, I made the required element energy-up a mushroom because you can see people in Folk tales wandering in Woods and eats mushrooms all the time.That, in turn, led to us through the world in the game ' Kingdom mushrooms ', and the rest of the installation of the basic plot determined from there. "

-Infinity 1UP trick, one that involves kicking a tortoise shell repeatedly against a block, included in the game by intentionally; in fact, Yes. "We did the game code, so that a trick like this would be possible, "Miyamoto revealed."We tested out extensively to understand how can pull off the trick should also be determined by how it is now, but people who turned out to be much better in pulling the trick for ages at the end than we thought. "What happens with the prestigious international apart? "This is a mistake, Yes, but it's not like the game, so it's really kind of a feature, too! "

The UnderGarden hands-on preview

Mix Flower, LittleBigPlanet and some of the Pixel junk your games and get UnderGarden, Atari new XBLA, PSN, PC games from author vitamin G Studios.

The UnderGarden is a part of physics puzzler, part Exploration game with a healthy dose of psychedelic colors and whimsical music.The folks at Atari name a palate cleanser, something to fill the gap between loud toys with weapons. is a puzzle game that objectivity is friendly and familiar, which you can select to play with your friends or when you want a quiet night gaming.

Our levels played, players responsible for navigating in a world of underwater almost resembles alien, filled with strange flora and fauna; you'll be able to dress up your creature-friendly appearance in a variety's outfits and swim around the world, epikoniasmoy worldwide collect seeds and solving puzzles. players may also bring along a friend to help with the game 15 levels.

The UnderGarden seem to ride the recent trend of small platformers and experimental downloadable titles and less add something was missing: a game that can be downloaded for children in the family.

Search for the UnderGarden in November on XBLA and PC and in early 2011 PSN.

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