Latest Posts

Link

Link

Satoru Iwata has revealed in his GDC keynote address today that Nintendo has shipped its 50 Millionth Wii. This comes on the heels of Nintendo shipping its 100 Millionth DS a couple weeks ago. So just to recap…Economy down…Nintendo up..way up!
Read More

Satoru Iwata just finished his GDC keynote address and announced quite a few things such as: Play from SD card for Wii, WarioWare: Snapped for DSi, Virtual Console Arcade, Final Fantasy games on the Virtual Console, and The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks for the DS!
Read More

GDC 2009: Satoru Iwata Keynote Liveblog

Nintendo’s President, Satoru Iwata, will shortly be taking the stage at GDC for his keynote. Stay tuned to this post as it will be …
Read More

Jeff Mills
Director of Production
Red Fly Studio

Stars Align (again)

At GDC in March 2007, Red Fly Studio had only been in business for about three months. Studio founders Dan Borth and Kris Taylor knew that we had to start immediately preparing for the future beyond our first title (Mushroom Men). We set out for the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco where we met with the top brass of half a dozen of the biggest game publishers in the industry.

The one publisher who seemed surprisingly uninterested in our demo was Vivendi Universal Games. They sat impatiently through our presentation, and as soon as the standard demo spiel was done, they drew us away from the screen and quickly got to the point. They had a job, and they wanted Red Fly Studio specifically to do it.

Before I left Terminal Reality to help Dan and Kris start Red Fly Studio, I had been part of production on Ghostbusters, the project TRI had been developing in utter secrecy for the previous year. Because of my foreknowledge of the project, the publisher could cut right to the chase: The publisher wanted TRI to focus their entire attention on the Xbox 360 and PS3 version of Ghostbusters without concerning themselves with producing a separate Wii version as well. We were already licensing Terminal Reality’s Infernal Engine to produce Mushroom Men, and our close ties to TRI (Dan and Kris worked there along with me back in 1999) made us ideally suited to produce Ghostbusters for Wii. And it was Ghostbusters, after all: a dream job. Right?

“No way!” came the unanimous response from Red Fly Studio.

If the release date for Ghostbusters had been after Mushroom Men’s release date, then maybe we could have done it. But the publisher required that we ship this new title at the same time as our current project. Pushing a single title to completion is challenging enough, but shipping two titles simultaneously is a monumental undertaking. The veterans at RFS had seen a dozen studios explode by growing too quickly, taking on jobs that they couldn’t handle. We knew better. We sadly but politely declined and bade them farewell, wishing that the timing had been better.

Read More

The Wii Shop Channel is undergoing maintenance.  We know the North American and Japanese Wii Shop channels are down.  It’s also worth noting that this is the 1 …
Read More