Click here to Download Press Reset PDF Book by Jason Schreier English having PDF Size 1.8 MB and No of Pages 261.
The son of astronaut Owen Garriott, Richard had grown up obsessed with computers and space travel, and in 1981 he’d released a game that combined them both: Ultima, a video game interpretation of tabletop RPG rules that sent the player adventuring through a fantasy world full of castles and dungeons.
Press Reset PDF Book by Jason Schreier
| Name of Book | Press Reset |
| Author | Jason Schreier |
| PDF Size | 1.8 MB |
| No of Pages | 261 |
| Language | English |
| Buy Book From Amazon | |
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Playing as a human, elf, dwarf, or bobbit (a not-so-subtle attempt to dodge Lord of the Rings copyrights), you’d go around solving quests, fighting monsters, and eventually boarding a spaceship to battle enemies among the stars. Ultima, which Garriott had created with a friend over the course of a year, was successful enough to let Garriott launch Origin and turn game development into his career.
Whereas Spector was introverted and demure, Garriott was flamboyant and outspoken, with a love for hosting lavish, themed parties and exploring dangerous places.2 Back when Spector had lived in Austin, the two men had become unlikely friends, running in similar circles and sharing sensibilities about game design.
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Now, feeling unhappy in Lake Geneva, Spector leaped at the opportunity to join his pal at Origin. “I really wanted to work with Rich,” Spector said. “I think that was part of why I got the job as well. We were really simpatico in just about every way.” By 1989, when Spector walked into the doors at Origin, the company was up to its sixth Ultima game and expanding rapidly, with offices in both Texas and New Hampshire.
The video game industry was booming, particularly on personal computers, and Origin had become a burgeoning power player. In the years that followed, Spector learned how to be a video game producer—how to lead teams, manage projects, and perform the nearimpossible act of steering a bunch of stubborn people toward a single creative vision.
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He worked with Garriott on Ultima VI, helping craft an elaborate story about a horde of gargoyles who at first seemed malicious but turned out to have more complicated motivations—an innovative twist on video game storytelling for the 1980s. He helped produce Wing Commander, a space combat simulator in which you’d pilot a starship and gun down aliens.
With the rising young star Chris Roberts, whose intractable nature taught Spector a lot about how to compromise.3 “We’d get into ten arguments a day, and if I won three of them, that was a good day,” Spector said. It didn’t take long for Spector, one of the oldest people at Origin, to move up to a senior leadership role at the company.
“My business model was: I would start up four projects, two internal and two external, and I’d kill two projects every year that weren’t going well,” Spector said. “I would tell people that’s what I was going to do. ‘Be one of the projects that’s going really well.’” One Origin partner whose projects usually went well was Looking Glass, a studio in Cambridge, Massachusetts, run by a programmer named Paul Neurath. Press Reset PDF Book
Spector and Neurath became close creative partners, collaborating on two seminal games: Ultima Underworld, which came out in 1992; and System Shock, released in 1995. The two games had very different settings —Ultima Underworld took place in a fantasy dungeon, while System Shock unfolded on a space station—but they shared common design elements.
Notably, they were both fueled by Spector’s and Neurath’s desires to recreate the feeling of Dungeons & Dragons. “We loved stories from linear fiction, film, books,” said Neurath, “but games are interactive. They give you a chance to interpret that story and layer on your own sense of character.”
With Ultima Underworld and System Shock, Neurath and Spector helped pioneer a genre that today we call the “immersive sim,” a type of game whose influence you can see in everything from Fallout to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The idea was to give players the tools to overcome puzzles and obstacles in a variety of ways. Press Reset PDF Book
Say you had to get past a door guarded by two soldiers. An action game might force you to blow the soldiers to pieces in order to proceed. In an immersive sim, though, you’d have all sorts of options. You could kill the soldiers, sure, but maybe you’d instead decide to sneak past them using a set of vents connected to a nearby alley.
Or maybe you’d set off fireworks to distract the guards while you ran through the door, laughing as they missed you entirely. Suddenly, Spector was back on the road again, pitching System Shock 3 to publishers as if he were back in the 1990s. But he was older now, and tired of flying around to different cities to beg for money.
Publishers never said yes or no—they’d always offer noncommittal responses like “We’ll be in touch”—and by the end of 2019, Otherside had failed to find funding and had to lay off most of the Austin office. Chase Jones, who had reunited with his old boss to be the design director on System Shock 3, was again forced to make a tough decision. Press Reset PDF Book
After leaving Junction Point in 2012, a few months before the studio closed, Jones had moved to Redmond, Washington, for a job on Microsoft’s publishing team, and then took a brief hiatus from the gaming industry to work at a software company in Australia. In 2018, he’d rejoined Spector at Otherside, where he was thrilled to work on a new System Shock, until the money troubles started.
The company asked Jones to cut his hours in half, but there wasn’t much for him to do without a full design team in place, and he couldn’t afford the pay cut. He had a baby on the way. So Jones quit Other side to join a new game studio that some of his old friends had started. Meanwhile, Spector found a new savior.
In May 2020, the Chinese conglomerate Tencent, which owned and invested in many video game companies, announced that it was taking over System Shock 3. Spector would again be beholden to a giant corporation. As of this writing, it remains to be seen what will happen with the game.Press Reset PDF Book
There’s reason to be optimistic; few companies are more financially stable than Tencent. Then again, the same thing was true of Disney. Flood, would be about surviving and exploring the wilderness, like Dowling and Sinclair had initially imagined. You’d play as a wanderer named Scout, rafting down a river that would look different every new game.
You’d have to scavenge for supplies, stave off dangerous wild animals, and search for survivors in run-down gas stations and abandoned hardware stores across the game’s postapocalyptic, flooded version of America. It was a cartoony, lo-fi game with isometric graphics—a far cry from the massive airships of Columbia, but lovely nonetheless.
On October 7, 2014, once they’d mapped out their plans for the game, Dowling and crew launched a Kickstarter for The Flame in the Flood, asking for $150,000 and immediately driving buzz from video game news outlets. Laid-off Irrational developers strike it out on their own! By the end of their Kickstarter campaign, they had reached almost twice their goal. Press Reset PDF Book Download
Bringing in over a quarter of a million dollars from more than seven thousand empathetic and curious backers. It was a success by any measure, but they all knew the money wouldn’t go very far. Divided by six, their earnings of $251,647 came out to just around $42,000 per person—less than half what each of them might make at an AAA studio—and that was before Kickstarter fees.
Backer rewards, and other expenses.4 The Molasses Flood struck a deal with Microsoft for additional funding in exchange for temporary console exclusivity on the Xbox, but money was still a big stress point, which meant that they didn’t have much time. In that sense, being independent was a lot like entering production at Irrational.
“It’s less different than people might think,” said Dowling. “You always have a fixed amount of money that you can work with, you always have a clock that’s ticking, and time is always running out. The numbers are just much smaller.” For the next year they plugged away at The Flame in the Flood, working out of a small office they’d rented just outside Boston. Press Reset PDF Book Download
The hours were long and the pay was low. To save money and keep their team as small as possible, everyone at The Molasses Flood handled multiple jobs. Dowling was both a designer and the president of the company, and he also did their PR and marketing. Frey animated the game’s characters and somehow also found the time to crunch the numbers and pay everyone’s taxes.
Buoyed by the support of a small but hard-core community and the buzz they’d gotten around the launch of the Kickstarter, the team put The Flame in the Flood into Steam Early Access in late 2015, allowing players to buy and play before it officially launched. The developers continued to fix bugs and update the game, heading into 2016 with high hopes.
The official release would be February. “We had this just never-ending confidence that this was going to be just fine,” said Gwen Frey. “We never thought we’d be Notch”—the billionaire creator of Minecraft—“but we did think we’d break even.” What blew Thom Ang away were the perks. Ang had been a professional video game artist for over a decade.
First at Disney working on licensed games like The Lion King and Toy Story for the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis, and then at Sony, EA, and THQ. Those had all been good jobs, but none of them were as luxurious as 38 Studios. 38 Studios was the type of company a teenager might dream up when fantasizing about what it’d be like to make games for a living. Press Reset PDF Book Download
Located in a historic former mill in Maynard, Massachusetts, with red-bricked walls, a looming clock tower, and picturesque views of the nearby Assabet River, the company appeared to be flush with cash. Its executives acted like they ran a Silicon Valley tech unicorn that had just received a billion-dollar valuation.
Employees received top-notch health benefits and gym memberships. They got personalized high-end gaming laptops worth thousands of dollars. There were free meals, lavish travel expenses, and Timbuk2 bags customized with an illustration of the world map for their inprogress video game, which was code-named Copernicus.
The man responsible for all of these perks was Curt Schilling, the sandyhaired former professional athlete who founded and ran 38 Studios. Schilling had spent two decades pitching in Major League Baseball, helping win championships for the Arizona Diamondbacks and, most notably, the Boston Red Sox, a team he had led to its first title since 1918. Press Reset PDF Book Free
Now retired in Massachusetts, he was a video game CEO unlike any other in the industry. “Curt really took care of people,” said Ang. “He recognized that in his field, he’s treated as a star. He’s a top-level athlete. He was given Cadillac packages for everything. He said, ‘That’s how I want my team to feel. I’m going to attract the best, and I’m going to treat them as if they’re the best.’
And he did.” In 2008, when Thom Ang first got a call from a 38 Studios recruiter, he was skeptical. He’d grown up in Southern California and couldn’t see himself moving to the East Coast, where the winters were cold and miserable. But he already knew a bunch of 38 Studios employees from his EA days, so he figured he’d let the company fly him out to Massachusetts just to say hi to them.
“I went in knowing I’m not going to take the job,” Ang said. When he got there, he was awed by the office, the promises, and the swag. Then his former colleagues showed him the art they’d been making for their game. “I said, ‘Oh my god, this is gorgeous,’” Ang recalled. “‘This is a fantastic-looking game. I want in on this.’” Press Reset PDF Book Free
When Ang accepted the offer, 38 Studios gave him a hefty relocation package, even flying him back out to Boston so he could look for a new place to live. He fell in love with a beautiful three-bedroom ranch on a lake in Acton, Massachusetts. “I’ve always wanted this,” Ang said. “In L.A. you can’t get a house on a lake.”
And in June 2008, Thom Ang officially started work as 38 Studios’ art director; he was responsible for managing a team of artists and establishing a visual tone for Copernicus. There wasn’t a lot done on the game, even though the studio had been operating for two years, but Ang didn’t think that was a problem. Throughout his years in the video game industry, he’d seen how slowly things could move at the beginning of a project.