Re: "Rick Smith's greatest mistakes",

[raito@raito.com]

The only (uncredited) credit I have is doing the update of Tracon II while
I was at Wesson International. Though early on my clone of Missile Command
on the Atari ST got some popularity, which wasn't bad for 2 days work.

I was in Austin from 96-98 and knew a bunch of game people. Including guys
who'd done playtesting for SJG in the early days.

Rick wrote:
> About 10 other titles at EA, where either I had a minor role or the game
> was unpublished.  The worse thing about working for EA is how many good
> games they kill.  (Save marketing cost.). Bunch of stories there, ask me
> about Will Write and ’the Sims’ some time.  LOL

EA does make some strange decisions. After buying Origin Systems (the
Ultima people), in the mid-late 90's they hired a bunch of artists around
Thanksgiving. Moved them all to Austin. Then laid them off by Christmas.
I'd have been pretty pissed off to pull up stakes and move for a month's
work.

> I’ve worked in the computer game industry so we don’t really do errata.
> If there was a bug, we would do patches of course.  A clever thing in
> Total Annihilation was the patches were mostly new units.  I was not in
> charge of balancing units in that game, Jake was.  Jake loved air units
> and he didn’t notice that air was too strong.  (Worse, I designed a ship
> for AA, but the first draft of it shot these honking big missiles that
> were used for blowing up the ground forces.  I argued we needed to dump
> that ship.  it was doing the job of the cruiser.  But the model and
> animations looked so cool, that people were reluctant to throw it away.
> With time pressure, the error was never fixed.  Anyway, Chris Taylor had
> designed TA, so you could add a *.UFO file (a text file that described how
> to move, animate and control a unit, plus the data for the art).  The game
> was designed that you could drop a *.UFO file in the correct folder and
> you had a new unit.  So the first 4 new units we added were all anti - air
> units.  I was really impressed how some good engineering could add to the
> game after it was done.

Air units are so overbalanced in TA that once gunships are available, the
only things I build besides infrastructure are missile towers and
gunships. I need no other units. And the same mistake exists in Supreme
Commander, though I usually play on larger maps, so I might also build
some nukes.

Neil Gilmore
raito@raito.com