游戏先驱者的心路历程：成功与挑战

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"《Online Game Pioneers at Work》是一本深入探讨电子游戏业界先驱者成功历程的访谈集，作者通过15位娱乐软件公司的创始人分享他们的挑战、坚持与创新，揭示了在这个竞争激烈的市场中成功背后的故事。这本书不仅适合游戏开发者，也对游戏爱好者具有极大的吸引力。在书中，读者将了解到这些业界巨头如何应对各种困难，如何保持对质量的执着追求，以及他们如何在技术和商业模型上进行创新。例如，Richard Garriott（Origin Systems创始人，制作了革命性的《Ultima Online》），John Romero（id Software的Doom、Wolfenstein和Quake的创造者），以及Victor Kislyi（Wargaming的《World of Tanks》创下了同时在线人数最多的世界纪录）。他们的故事揭示了如何在充满风险和先进技术的行业中求生存，并在不断变化的市场中抓住机遇。书中的访谈涵盖了创业、设计、招聘、融资、商业模式、公司出售、业务生命周期等多个方面，创业者们坦诚地分享了他们的挫折、错误和激情。本书强调了对质量的承诺是所有成功企业家的关键，同时也指出妥协原则往往会导致失败。书中还提到，对变化的敏锐洞察以及快速响应推出高质量产品是取得胜利的策略，而真正理解消费者也是成功的关键。此外，书中还教导读者从错误中学习并作出调整，以及如何优雅地进入和退出市场。无论是对游戏开发有深厚兴趣的人，还是寻求创业灵感的企业家，都能从这些在线游戏先驱的经验中获益。《Online Game Pioneers at Work》是Apress At Work系列的一部分，与其他关注不同行业专业人士的书籍如《Gamers at Work》、《CIOs at Work》等一起，提供了丰富的行业洞见和人生经验。" 这本书适合对游戏行业有着浓厚兴趣的读者，特别是游戏开发者和初创企业创始人，他们可以从这些先驱的故事中汲取教训，理解成功背后的策略和付出，从而在自己的职业生涯中找到启示和动力。

Online Gamers at Work

Ramsay: Tell me about the lead up to the sale.

Perry: After The Matrix came out, the movie was a monster hit so the direc-

tors reached out to us again. They asked, “Would you like to talk about The

Matrix Reloaded?” Now, at that point, it was the hottest license in the game

business so I was very excited about it. They had visited and seen our shop

and what we did. We had a good relationship.

Other game companies were trying very hard to get the rights from Warner

Bros. Because we were working with the directors, we had a very strong chance

of actually getting the rights and we ended up getting them. But Interplay, finan-

cially, wasn’t really ready to make big epic games with movie footage, television

advertising, and everything else. The best move that Interplay could make was,

after the deal was done, to sell the company. That’s what we agreed to do.

Well, the question then was “would someone want to buy us?” It turned out

to be very easy to get a buyer. With such a hot property, we were perfectly

positioned—we were at the right place at the right time. Atari was very bull-

ish and I was very impressed at how they had a very clear plan. They wanted

to get a big property and get behind it. That’s what they did. So, they gave us

whatever we needed to make sure that the game got done.

To be honest, we had taken on a little too much with the property. We had to

make a PlayStation 2 engine, a Game Cube engine, and a PC engine to make

the game even possible. To make engines and games at the same time is actu-

ally kind of hard, so the team had really bitten off an awful lot. And then, of

course, we were trying to innovate and do new things that had never been

seen before. That created a lot of production work, like how to get movie

footage made and how to tell the story. This was the first video game where

the directors had really written parallel story lines between the movie and the

game, and then they shot the movie footage for both. It was a very new idea

at the time. To actually deliver that, and to know that you had a date that the

movie was going to launch and there was no option to slip, it was something

that, as you know, a lot of game companies struggle with. It’s hard to do. It was

an intense time—a very intense time.

Ramsay: What was selling the company like for you as the founder?

Perry: Well, it was great. It was financially very nice for me. I was in very, very

good financial shape. And I was inspired because The Matrix was important

and we had to build a team.

And we even had crazy stuff happen in the last three months of the project.

Our landlord leased out the building out from under us with no apologies. He

basically said, “I see your team’s growing so much. I assumed that you weren’t

going to extend your lease, so I’ve leased it to somebody else.” What? It was

a nightmare. We went through a lot of crazy stuff.

Chapter 1 | David Perry

Gamers would never know that this kind of nonsense happens in the background.

At Atari, I was very interested in a new idea for a game. It was called Plague and

I started designing this game. I was very inspired and excited to do it because

it had new ideas that you hadn’t seen before. The budget was 19 million dol-

lars and Atari said, “We can’t afford 19 million. Can you do it for less?” I got

the budget down to 17 million, but going down two million dollars was really

hurting the experience in my mind.

That made me realize that I’m not so sure if I want to stay and do this now.

I wasn’t sure if the game would turn out the way I expected. I wanted to do

something really shockingly good. At that time, I was talking to the Earthworm

Jim team about reforming and the team agreed. I started that whole process

and then Atari said, “Look, we can’t afford to start anything new so we can’t

do that.” That just made my mind up. I was done, so I was like, “Okay, I’m done

now. I’ll see you later. Bye, bye.”

Ramsay: How did you feel about first losing control of your company and

then having to leave it behind?

Perry: Well, I expected that I was going to help them sell the company. I knew that

if they were in financial trouble, they’d have an asset called Shiny Entertainment,

which can generate money. Shiny shouldn’t have been costing them money.

Shiny should have been making them money. I believed very strongly that I could

sell the company again, so I proposed that to them. But Atari wasn’t interested;

they believed that they could do that themselves. I was more than happy to let

them, but I thought I would help facilitate a sale externally and that’s what I did.

I went out and started to talk to investors and people who would buy the

company. I ended up pairing them up with the people who actually bought it. It

took a different course than I expected. I had some investors reach out who

were interested in not buying Shiny but buying Atari. And so we actually went

back to Atari with a proposal to buy the whole company and Atari wouldn’t

even consider it. It wasn’t an option. That scuttled the whole thing.

As far as Shiny goes, I did make the first introduction to get someone to buy

it, but it took about 10 months before Atari actually agreed to sell it to them.

There was a long lull and in that lull, I just got on with my life.

Ramsay: You just got on with your life. What do you mean?

Perry: I can’t quite remember the timeline but I got involved in a bunch of

different projects that I found interesting. I was consulting on The Simpsons.

I was working with Acclaim as a consultant on free-to-play. I was funding my

own projects like Game Investors and Game Industry Map. And I was going to

the conferences, hosting lunches, and just having a good time.

It started to get very interesting at Acclaim because we were learning about

China and Korea. I was flying down there with the CEO, and in the end,

Acclaim offered me a job as Chief Creative Officer. I ended up taking that job

Online Gamers at Work

and eased back on all of this other stuff. I focused more on free-to-play and

bringing Asian games to the West.

Facebook was taking off at the time so we were doing a whole bunch of

research on Facebook, trying to understand virility and game sharing. We

were also discovering issues with digital distribution, the cost of acquiring

players, and how important that would be to the future of the business. And

so we were investing in new technologies to try to make games easier to play

without having to download them.

We were working on interesting server-displacement technology that would

allow you to play games on a server but see the output in Flash. If you wanted

to edit a level, you would edit the level with web tools, which would actually

modify it on our servers and then the game experience, like sprite coordi-

nates and things like that, would be sent to Flash. At the end of the day, while

we had games running from the cloud, they still looked like Flash games; they

didn’t look magical.

There were a lot of other companies that realized the cost of players was too

high, so they started making Flash games, too, like Zynga and many others.

There was a lot of movement toward trying to make games more accessible. I

was very interested in how to make games incredibly accessible and the num-

ber one way to do that was to play the whole damn thing from the cloud.

I went to DICE in 2009 and I gave a speech about this and a whole bunch of

other stuff. Some engineers from the Netherlands contacted me and said that

they had been working on this technology; they already had it working. They

sent me a link and I was able to play World of Warcraft and games like Spore all

the way from the Netherlands in my web browser. I went, “Oh my God. This

is the Holy Grail! This is what we’ve been searching for.” So, I left Acclaim.

I joined them and became a cofounder of Gaikai.

At GDC 2009, we demonstrated the technology to press and investors, and,

at the same show, OnLive was launched. From that day forward, it was clear

that we weren’t alone in this space. It was us, OnLive, G-Cluster, PlayCast, and

whoever else came along. “Cloud gaming” was something that really got going.

We put a lot of energy into evangelizing it and trying to get people excited

about it. A year later at E3 in 2010, you really saw the momentum and we

really started to demonstrate the potential. We signed with Electronic Arts.

We were able to put very big games onto the web so that people could start

to play from the cloud properly.

I was just at the Cloud Gaming Conference and today there are lots of com-

panies. There’s actually a conference for cloud gaming and there are compa-

nies talking about all of the different things you can use this kind of technology

for. It’s not something that I think is going to go away. I think it’s going to be a

piece of the future of the business.

Chapter 1 | David Perry

Our story seems to end with Sony buying us, but what they actually did is

start our next chapter. What do you do when you have a company like Sony

behind you? What do you do with that?

It’s a very fun brainstorming exercise to think of the potential things you can

do when you’re dealing with a company that makes phones, televisions, and

consoles. They’ve got so much content and thousands of games. And the

games are standardized to a controller. When you put a PC game on a TV, the

game still needs a keyboard and a mouse. That’s a problem. But now we had a

library of console games that used a joypad controller. What can you do with

all that? We were enjoying thinking of the possibilities.

Ramsay: How’d you get involved with Gaikai as a cofounder?

Perry: I can’t remember exactly how that discussion went, but basically, “Why

don’t we start a new company together?” It’s very hard to raise money when

you’re a company from the Netherlands. It’s much easier when you’re an

American company. I was kind of the gateway to getting an American company

started with “boots on the ground,” as they say, and I was able to go meet with

the various companies here very easily.

Ramsay: Who were the other cofounders? How far along was the company

by the time you were involved?

Perry: There were two others: Rui Pereira and Andrew Gault. They had a

tech demo. They could demonstrate that the technology was working, but

there wasn’t a global network of servers. It wasn’t commercially ready. The

technology was hard for me to experience it properly because, if you can

imagine, every time I pressed a key, that key press was going all the way to the

Netherlands, rendering, and then coming all the way back. There was such an

enormous delay. As I was playing a game, I just had to imagine what it would

be like if the servers were in Los Angeles, for example.

Ramsay: When you joined Gaikai, what was the first thing that you did?

Perry: The first thing was to try to get datacenter space. We reached out to

all of the top-tier datacenter networks, and we convinced a company called

Savvis to work with us and give us access to their data centers.

When you’re a startup, you don’t want to spend a lot of money, so Savvis was

very happy to work with us on the pricing, etc. We were able to get our servers

into five or six datacenters really quickly. This was great because when we’re

talking to a company in New York, for example, I could send them a link and

they could have a good experience in New York.

Ramsay: You went after the datacenters before you started talking to people

about money?

Online Gamers at Work

Perry: We were talking to people about money as well but we started by trying

to raise money in Europe. Raising money in Europe turned out to be very diffi-

cult. We kept refining our pitch until we finally nailed it. Offers started coming

in from American investors. We just found that, in general, American investors

seemed more aggressive and willing to invest.

Ramsay: Why is raising money in Europe difficult?

Perry: It was probably our pitch. You know, “Hmm, I should have said this”

or “I forgot to mention that” or you listen to the questions you get back and

you’re like “I thought that was clear?” Now you’ve got to fix your pitch. After

awhile, you can tell that your questions are answered and they understand

what you’re saying. At some point, you start to feel like somebody might actu-

ally say yes. It’s actually good to get out there and practice. We got our first

investment in December 2009.

Ramsay: I read that you joined Gaikai in 2008.

Perry: Technically, in 2008, I was just thinking about the concept while the

engineers were working on it in the Netherlands. I officially joined after my

DICE speech which was January 2009.

Ramsay: And by the end of the year, Gaikai was funded. You know, you’re a

game developer and you joined a technology company.

Perry: I know, it’s funny, isn’t it? It’s funny but that’s really what this is all about.

The game industry is becoming more technical. In the old days, you made

games, you stuck them in a cartridge, and you just sold the cartridge and you’d

have no idea whether people liked it or whether they were getting frustrated.

We just didn’t know.

But the more that servers became involved, the more we were able to collect

data and say, “Wow, people are getting stuck on level 7 in room 4.” We can

now fix that and issue an update. This is where the world’s going! It’s becoming

more and more connected. Developers are directly connecting with gamers.

We’ll end up making better games because of it.

It’s inevitable. We’ll have more and more discussions about datacenters, the

cloud, metrics, and studying the data and trying to learn about what motivates

gamers, what they like, and what they don’t like. And we’ll be able to use that

information to try to make the best software possible. It’s a different world.

The world is evolving so quickly. It’s amazing.

Ramsay: Making the switch from working from one perspective to working

from another can be difficult. How easily did you transition from working in

development and publishing to working at Gaikai?

Perry: It’s different for me because I’m into learning about things. That’s

what I do. I’m not that interested in just being into one thing. I used to be

an engineer but I also used to do design. I used to do audio. I used to do art.

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