Ex Microsoft publishing exec Ed Fries talks to Gamasutra
Ed Fries has recently been involved in a “looking back” interview with Gamasutra. The ex Microsoft Game Studios executive was responsible for starting the Microsoft Games division and controlled it right up until the launch of the Xbox 360. Ed Fries is significant as he lead the acquisition of Ensemble Studios after the Age of Empires series proved to be a big profitable hit for the new division.
By then, we were up to maybe 5 or 600 people… and some weeks we would be the leading PC publisher in the country. We weren’t as big as Electronic Arts in general at the time, but we were getting there.”
It has become clear that it was only after the acquisition of Ensemble Studios that Microsoft was able to reap the rewards of the games division. The success of Ensemble games lead to Microsoft increasing investment in the games division enabling them to start looking at home consoles and acquiring more studios such as Bungie, Lionhead and Rare.
That, says Fries, is when “these crazy guys walked into my office and told me they had this idea to get Microsoft into the console business. They were from the DirectX team, and they wanted to make this thing called the ‘Direct X-Box.”
Direct X-Box, of course, was truncated to ‘Xbox,’ — and “marketing hated the name,” says Fries. “They went off and created this whole, long list of better names for the machine.”
In focus testing, the marketing team left the name ‘Xbox’ on that long list simply as a control, to demonstrate to everyone why it was a horrible name for a console. “Of course, ‘Xbox’ outscored, in focus testing, everything they came up with. They had to admit it was going to be the Xbox.”
The Xbox was greenlit by Microsoft upper brass, giving Fries and his team less than two years to pull together the first-party launch lineup. “We were lucky to team up with people like Bizarre Creations to create Project Gotham Racing… and Bungie, we did the acquisition at that time.”
In 2004 Ed Fries left Microsoft Game Studios at the 360’s launch having developed the division from scratch for some 18 years. With the departure of Ed Fries the division was shaked up with alot of new management being brought in for the division. Bruce Shelley of Ensemble Studios frequently suggested that relationships with these new execs was not as good as those under the old leadership.
The Gamasutra interview provides good insight to what Microsoft and Ed Fries wanted Microsoft Game Studios to be, before and after Ensemble Studios and other studios were acquired.
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=24831
Matt Pritchard in classic Gamasutra Age of Empires interview archive
Gamasutra has lifted the lid on a classic interview with Ex Ensemble graphics engine programmer Matt Pritchard. Matt joined Ensemble in the early days of Age of Empires development, so early that the game was called “Dawn of Man” before being renamed “Age of Empires” later on. The archived interview is an excellent read for Ensemble and Age of Empires fans. Reading the article you should recognise many names including Tim “timotron” Deen who has worked at Ensemble since Age 1 right up until Halo Wars and the studio disbandment. Tim Deen is now working at Robot Entertainment. Matt Pritchard went on after Age of Mythology to work on BlackSite: Area 51.
The interview talks about some of the choices made at Ensemble about the games design, multiplayer and testing along with details about how the game was programmed. Matt’s primary role was developing the “Genie” graphics engine which powered Age of Empires 1 and 2. Matt’s efforts with the engine managed to increase the initial framerate of 7-14FPS right up to 55FPS. The remainder of the interview discusses things that went well such as the games database driven design, staying in close contact with the publisher (Microsoft) and how Ensemble’s management truly respected its employees. Many of the good points that Matt talked about in the article remained true right up until the end of the studio including the database driven design and employee morale, maybe not so much the publisher relations aspect, though.
Of course a large scale game development like Age of Empires comes with its bugs and these are also talked about in the article. A late beta test, lack of multi player testing on residential modems and not planning for a patch rank highly. In the original release of the game some players found online play unsustainable due to lag time and drop outs over slow 56k modem speeds. Due to the whizzy and fast equipment at Ensemble Studios the testing which took place internally did not necessarily reflect the speeds players would get on the outside. Luckily the good communication with management at Ensemble and Microsoft allowed for the creation of the 1.0a patch which duly rectified most of the multiplayer issues.
Alongside a retro article comes a retro picture of Ensemble Studios staff in 1997. See if you can spot some familiar faces in the picture below:
Looks like Christmas!
I encourage all fans to have a read of the Gamasutra article below, delving into some history of the studios early days. Ensemble Studios is sorely missed. 🙁
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=24767
Bungie CEO: “Ensemble didn’t build a game with a community that carried it”
Some interesting remarks from Harold Ryan the CEO of Bungie who in an interview with Brier Dudley at the Seattle times said:
Q: It’s interesting how you’re mentioning Bungie like that. Are you now trying to raise the profile of the studio? Is this a step toward additional games beyond Halo and saying hey, we’re not just ‘Halo, we’re Bungie’?
A: Yeah, definitely. When you go back to the divestiture from Microsoft, that was when we started paying more attention to the Bungie brand. It means something – there’s now an existing game, Halo Wars, that wasn’t built by Bungie. There’s a big difference in the success – in sales, in the review numbers of the title. The Ensemble guys (who made Halo Wars) are great guys, they did a great job with what they did, but I don’t think they made a Bungie game. They didn’t build a game with a community that carried it.
It seems somewhat a harsh comment seeing as the Halo Wars community website has been online long before the titles launch and was lead by a fantastic community team at Ensemble Studios. One might like to point out that the community was damaged due to the Microsoft decision to close the studio. Obviously, any community will suffer when a company is closed. Today the community is lead by a sole community manager, Duncan “Aloysius” Stanley and Robot Entertainment has recently held a developers play night with the fans and a feedback thread asking for fan feedback on Title Update 3 fixes.
Seattle Times article:
Gamesindustry.biz interviews Peter Molyneux and Phil Spencer – says Ensemble and other studios “wernt the core focus of MGS”
The good folks at Gamesindustry.biz have a new interview between newly created “Creative Director Europe” Peter Molyneux and Phil Spencer. Indeed if you didnt know, studio head at Lionhead Peter Moloyneux has recently been promoted to look after all of the Microsoft studios in Europe along with Lionhead.
One question in the interview was as follows and refers to the reasons behind removing some studios (Ensemble, Flight Sim and cuts at Rare) to focus on Live, Natal and other “core focuses”.
Q: The past six to 12 months saw studios close and staff laid off across Microsoft. Is Peter’s new position an effort to refocus Microsoft Game Studios after such a significant shake-up internally?
Phil Spencer: That’s exactly right. I moved into the role of head of worldwide studios when I came back from London and one of the first things I did was try to think of all the strategic initiatives that all the different studios thought they were on and I drew this chart and had ten or eleven different things on there. And I recognised from that, as an organisation we need to focus. We have great talent in the organisation but we need to make sure that talent is really focused on fewer things that we can do extremely well.
The downsizing that we went through was more about removing things that weren’t a core focus of the organisation and creating scale and space for us as leaders to think deeply in the areas that are going to be critical in terms of our long-term success. Live is a crucial area for us, for example. And since that time we’ve hired a significant number of people back into the organisation and I expect we will refill all of those positions and even more. The acquisition of Big Park was perfect, we’ve been working with them for over a year on Joy Ride and what we found was a studio of people that were really committed to online, free-to-play, micro-transactions and building new IP. It made sense for us to work together more closely and that’s why we went through the acquisition. It’s about getting focus behind the initiatives that really matter.
So there you have it.. it basically confirms from other MGS leaders what Shane Kim was talking about a few weeks ago when he said that the talent at Ensemble didnt fit into the areas they wanted to explore.
You can read the full interview here:
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/microsofts-peter-molyneux-and-phil-spencer
And more on the original Shame Kim interview about the ES closure over here:
http://remember-ensemblestudios.com/?p=640
Graeme Devine working at Apple’s iPhone group on mystery project
Graeme Devine who was Ensemble’s Lead Designer and Lead Writer for Halo Wars has now confirmed that he is working for Apple in the companies iPhone group. It seems yet another ex-Microsoft employee is working for products on Apple’s iPhone along with the Bettner brothers (NewToy) and FuzzyCube software.
What is Graeme working on at Apple? Well we wont have much longer to wait to find out as he is currently preparing for the WWDC on Monday. Perhaps he will be leading a new in house Apple games unit? Who knows, but hes certainly someone to be looking out for at the WWDC.
More news tomorrow when we should find out what hes up to! Good luck at the WWDC Graeme!
Link: http://kotaku.com/5281682/halo-wars-7th-guest-dev-lands-job-at-apple
DevelopMag writes about Shane Kim’s statement “Ensemble wasn’t the right studio for Natal”
To continue from my last blog post where I picked up on Shane Kim’s explanation about the cutting loose of Ensemble Studios a magazine has stepped forward to formally express the same viewpoint. I would direct Ensemble fans to the link below for a write up by a professional magazine.
http://www.developmag.com/news/32096/Report-Axed-Ensemble-not-the-right-studio-for-Natal
Update: Here’s IGN following suit :
http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/47943/Ensemble-Studios-Denied-Natal
It is possible more information develops on this over the next few days and I shall keep readers informed. I will be adding these news articles into the press archives.
As mentioned before, I think Microsoft made a big mistake in not having faith in the Ensemble guys, those prototypes we saw could of been made into great Natal games.
Shane Kim: “Talent at Ensemble wasnt right for Natal”
With the E3 expo coming to a close today and after some very interesting announcements at Microsoft one of these was the revolutionary controller free full body motion capture device called “Natal“. Shane Kim an executive at Microsoft Game Studios discussed in an interview with Venture Beat that they have put significant investment behind the project. I imagine the cost of implementing hardware and software into Project Natal must be very expensive. But what other costs would there be for having this motion free technology. It seems as though to make way for Natal Microsoft’s internal studios Flight Sim and Ensemble Studios were the casualties.
The Venture Beat interview finally demonstrates the financial reasons why Microsoft decided to close its incredibly successful internal studio Ensemble Studios. Quoting from the interview Shane Kim responds:
VB: You cut some studios like Flight Simulator and Ensemble Studios.
SK: We also acquired Big Park Studios. I don’t know how constant the ebb and flow will be. It’s not unidirectional. We made some hard decisions in the past. We made good decisions. We are still committed to first party. The Big Park acquisition should demonstrate that to folks. We were positioning for things like Natal and I don’t think the talent at Ensemble or Flight Simulator were necessarily the right studios for that.
So there you have it – Project Natal is one of the reasons Microsoft thought was better to invest more in than its long standing internal studios. Will it be the right choice? I am confident that the talent at Ensemble Studios could have made things work with Natal. The studio has some industry visionary legends including Bruce Shelley, Graeme Devine, Sandy Petersen not to mention the rest of the team. Some of the prototypes could have been modelled to work fantastically with Natal including the prototype “Agent”.
It is sad to be blogging about the closing of Ensemble Studios again but it is interesting to find out about the thought process behind the decision. Moving forward though we must support all these talented individuals who have formed new studios. No matter what, we will still see great games from these talented people.
You can read the full interview here:
Five long years. Chris Rippy ex producer at Ensemble Studios discusses the last few months working on Halo Wars
Chris Rippy discusses in the latest developers blog on the HaloWars.com website what the last few months at Ensemble Studios felt like as the Halo Wars game started to go through its final stages of quality testing. The post provides a valued look into the life of the studio during this time and what the developers felt knowing this would be the last game.
The blog post as obtained from HaloWars.com follows:
“Five Long Years”
Today, I’ll do my best to remember the final steps of getting Halo Wars out the door.
The final months of a project are all about taking the previous years of work, mashing it all together into something cohesive, testing the game, and fixing bugs. It’s also a time of very difficult decisions. In the name of getting the game out the door, we’re forced to eliminate several features, many of which already had months of work put into them. This can be costly (literally), but it helps provide focus to the most important aspects of the game, and gives us a better chance at hitting our target release date.
Now would probably be a good time to detail out all the features we cut, but maybe that’s best left to everyone’s guesses. Or maybe those features will show up again somewhere else…
Back to it. As we approach the last 6 weeks or so of the project, we begin thinking about something called “Release Candidates”. These are complete builds of the game that we believe are good enough to make it to the retail shelf. On December 1, 2008, we created “RC1”(Release Candidate 1). Cool, we’re done! Not so much. “RC1” never makes it all the way through the testing process, and in fact, our designers run a contest for everyone of our games trying to guess the actual number of Release Candidates we will create. Guesses for Halo Wars ranged from “RC2” (yeah!) to “RC426” (no!). For a build to be considered “the” build, several parties must sign off on it from Ensemble Studios, Microsoft Game Studios Test, the Localization team, and a Production team at Microsoft. In the end, RC11 was “blessed” by this crew. Halo Wars build number 1169.
We’re almost home at this point, but we still have a crucial step in front of us, called Certification. For Halo Wars to be “certified” a team at Microsoft takes the game and runs it through a battery of very specific tests to make sure it lives up to the quality and experience expectations of the Xbox360. Tests range from making sure Achievements work, to seeing how the game responds to people yanking out their memory cards while the game is running (never a good thing to try 🙂 ).
Going through Certification is a very strange experience. It can be a multi-week process, and you can go days without hearing from the Certification team on how things are going. Ensemble had just gone through months of crunch, and we suddenly found ourselves in a waiting game with very little to do but hope the game makes it through successfully. Work hours returned to normal and people passed the day working on the demo or playing board games. Weird.
Finally, on January 8th, 2009, Halo Wars passed Certification and was declared “gold”. From there, the game was sent off to manufacturing plants all over the world, packaged up, and put on a shelf at a store near you. Good times.
Chris Rippy
Producer
Developers Playtesting the DLC (click to enlarge)
“FuzzyCube” – Another ex Ensemble development house – Releases a game!
Yup! That’s right folks yet another development house has risen from the ashes of Ensemble Studios. This is the second development house which is confirmed to be working on iPhone games (the first being NewToy). The company has just released thier first game titled “iQuaterback” and is available to download via the App Store right now! If you have an ipod it may well be worth checking out!
It would seem alot of Ex Ensemble employees enjoy iPhone development – lets hope Apple culture inside Ensemble didnt affect their Microsoft shut down!
The FuzzyCube website can be found here: http://www.fuzzycubesoftware.com/ and they are starting to create forums here: http://www.fuzzycubesoftware.com/iquarterback/forums/
It looks like the developer is already showing Ensemble like success as already 1 million footballs have been thrown. More details on this title as more statistics arrive.
Good luck FuzzyCube!
Gamespy talks to Dusty Monk on starting up Windstorm Studios
An excellent article put together by Gamespy today as they talk to Ex-Senior Ensemble Studios programmer Dusty Monk. Dusty who worked at Ensemble Studios for 15 whole years discusses how valuable his Ensemble friends Graeme Devine and Tony Goodman have been helping him set up the new studio. Dusty has some freelance and ex- Ensemble people working part time on his presumed futuristic MMO.
He also talks about his thoughts on the closure of Ensemble and what its been like to set up a new studio in these economic times.
I wish him all the best and we will be following him closely here at Remember-EnsembleStudios.com
Full article: http://uk.pc.gamespy.com/articles/969/969790p1.html
Dont forget to check out the Windstorm website! www.windstormstudios.com
