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 …
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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.

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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 …
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It looks like Nintendo is having another round of DSi ‘sampling’ events this coming Sunday, March 29.  I just got an email about it, so if you …
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In terms of highlights coming out of this show, I’d say Nintendo’s Iwata keynote is the one that you’ll really want to watch (Jeremy will be live blogging it tomorrow …
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Things are slowly kicking off at this year Game Developers Conference. Tomorrow is when the big fun starts, with Mr. Iwata keynote at 12 pm ET. I …
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