Is it Futile to Resist Getting Assimilated by Microsoft?
When Bruce Shelly's Ensemble Studios and Jordan River Weisman's FASA Interactive helped form the base of Microsoft's internal spirited studios, they had a secure publisher with incredibly colorful pockets. Only would joining Microsoft's Corporate come at the cost of their identity operator?
In the mid-90s, Microsoft was known to many as the equivalent of Star Trek's Borg: If they couldn't dumbfound you, they would buy up you, and add your technological significance to their own. Resistance was futile. Only for small development studios looking for the secure financial backing of a publisher, Microsoft's attempts to run its intramural game studio beyond Flying Simulator was a vast opportunity. However, that opportunity might come at a cost, as Jordan Weisman and Bruce Shelly recounted to Russ Pitts in The Wishful thinker's Issue 73:
"We went from 300 populate to 1,500 people in about 24 months. And that's a huge amount of ontogeny. Obviously, that was a totally diametric field, a wholly new field, a much more mass-market field. The original preface of the Xbox was sold to senior management that our PC brave designers could port over the videogame concepts. It was wrong. They're wholly incompatible game design philosophies; the living room versus the den. The interaction models are different. The timing cycles are different. It's a rattling different model. So IT was a real challenge. IT put a lot of separate out on the administration, as you can imagine."
For Weisman and FASA, Microsoft had snagged them on the basis of their run into PC MechWarrior games – but PC games were non console games, and the culture of Personal computer developers was not the culture that Microsoft was hoping to produce for its internal Xbox team. Shelly and Tout ensemble, but then, would be given no little a title than Glory Wars.
For the flooded story of how being assimilated into the Microsoft Collective affected these two studios, check verboten "From Borg to Stamp" in Issue 73 of The Dreamer.
https://www.escapistmagazine.com/is-it-futile-to-resist-getting-assimilated-by-microsoft/
Source: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/is-it-futile-to-resist-getting-assimilated-by-microsoft/
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