If you’ve heard of Kickstarter.com, the crowd funding website for creative projects spanning from indie films to video games to physical objects you can buy, it’s probably because of one of its two most popular projects to-date. new adventure game from Double Fine, the studio created by one of the most important game designers in the world, Tim Schafer, has brought in $3.3 million.
In fact, Kickstarter has become the de facto place for game designers to help raise funds to create their games—often times, adventure games. Popular right now are games designed by creators who once worked at Sierra On-Line, the company behind such massive 1980s and 1990s hits such as King’s Quest, Space Quest and more. (Full confession, I’m an admitted Sierra fanboy.)
Al Lowe, creator of their adult franchise new game; and Jane Jensen, creator of the Pinkerton Road.
I recently spoke with Jensen to cover a wide range of topics, from working at Sierra in its heyday, to the trend of game designers using Kickstarter to kick off their video game franchises, to the state of adventure games in an industry still dominated by first person shooter and third person action games. We also talked about her new project, Lola and Lucy’s Big Adventure.
First, we talked about her memories of working at Sierra and coming up with the Gabriel Knight franchise.
Gabriel Knight
Moebius
Let’s start off with a few questions about your days at Sierra. As a Sierra fanboy… I can’t resist. Talk to me about what it was like working on your first title versus running a studio now.
Probably my first real design job was EcoQuest…
I played EcoQuest! I remember that game!
The concept was by Bill Davis, who was the creative director at Sierra at the time … I was just really hungry those days and I was just absolutely in love with Sierra and the idea of being a designer. I was very ambitious and wanted to do the best job I possibly could. That was a major difference—that feeling between wanting to prove myself versus now when I’ve just being doing it for so long, it’s much more about the craft.
Tell me about how you first came up with the Gabriel Knight franchise. Did you know it would be a franchise at first? How did you pitch it to your bosses?
I had worked with Roberta [Williams, co-founder of Sierrra On-Line] on Hellblazer. And I really wanted to do a paranormal mystery series. So Gabriel Knight developed around that idea.
It was actually a really hard sell, because at the time, Sierra only did really family stuff like King’s Quest and Quest for Glory and of course Larry, which was sort of the pornographic, dirty uncle of the Sierra world. But they really had not done anything dark and serious and gothic and Ken [Williams, CEO of Sierra On-Line] wasn’t thrilled about it. He actually told me, I’m going to let you do this, but I wish you would come up with something lighter or funny.
So that caused a crisis of confidence, but we did it and the audience loved it.
I remember buying it in Eggheads, which at the time was based in Staples. And I still remember the odd box it came in. I wish I still had that box.
The other question I wanted to ask about Gabriel Knight is what was behind the decision to switch gameplay styles with each new sequel? The sequel was a full motion video (FMV) game and the third game was entirely in 3D.
It wasn’t deliberate so much… it was just that the industry was changing and at that time, the Sierra adventure games were big business. They were some of the top of the line games. So when Sierra was going to invest a million dollars in creating a new game, they wanted it to have whatever the latest and greatest technology was. Because they weren’t going to invest that money in something that was already considered passé.
So when we did GK2, Roberta had already been working on Phantasmagoria, which was full motion video and they had created that whole blue screen studio in Oakhurst for that. So they thought that was going to be the way the whole industry was going. So naturally Gabriel Knight had a million dollar budget and they were going to do it in full motion video.
Similarly, by the time GK3 rolled around, full motion was dead and everything was going to real-time 3D. It was more a matter of what management perceived the next wave of technology was going to be—we had to use that.
Next, I talked with Jensen about Kickstarter. A number of her former colleagues are using the platform to restart their franchises and/or career. They’ve focused on one game usually, while Jensen is using it to help launch her studio working on a number of different games.
There’s a number of former Sierra creators on Kickstarter with new projects—Al Lowe, The Guys from Andromeda, etc. Do you stay in touch with them at all? Are you following their projects?
We’ve been supporting each other. I’ve pledged to their projects and they’ve pledged to mine, and we mention each other in our videos and our updates. We try to spread the word. But really, I had not been in touch with them since I left Sierra. This has been the most I’ve had contact with them in 15 years.
When did you first decide to start your Kickstarter? What made you want to do it?
I had been a co-founder of a casual game company called Oberon Media and that ended—I was about there about seven years—April 2011.
And so after that, I did some consulting work for some big companies but really started thinking about doing my own studio. We started work on the Lola and Lucy project – which is just getting ready to ship – as sort of a small project that we could fund ourselves and that would be a fundraiser for the new studio.
So that started last October and since then, we’ve been putting together the plans for the studio. And about Christmas time, we really started talking seriously about it being a big adventure game, and we were going to use Kickstarter.
We already kind of had that in mind before Doublefine went out. And of course once they went out, two things happened. One, we realized there were going to be a lot of projects going out. So if we were going to do it, we felt like we had to do it quickly. And then two, it just changed our perception about the possible scale of the campaign.
What do you mean by that?
We thought there was more potential there than we had realized. We had thought we would be able to raise some of the money for the project on Kickstarter and then we planned to provide some and then Lola and Lucy would provide some and then we were looking for some VCs—but we sort of decided to go for a bigger chunk of it with Kickstarter than we had initially planned.
Can you tell me at all about how work is going on Moebius or Mystery Game X.. or are you playing that close to the vest?
I can’t announce Mystery Game X, a game a publisher is funding, and so they have their own timing on when they want to announce that. That will probably be around August. We are currently working on it pretty aggressively.
And then Moebius… there’s not a whole lot to say about it from what we already unveiled during the Kickstarter campaign but formal design on Moebius just started yesterday [June 4] and we’ll probably start production the beginning of August. So it’s still really early on but I’m really excited about it. The script is going to be great.
Jensen and I then spent a lot of time talking about the first project to come out of Pinkerton Road—Lola and Lucy’s Big Adventure. It’s an interactive eBook for the iPad. We talked about what the game is and their future plans for it. Originally, as Jensen mentioned, it was going to be a fundraiser for Pinkerton itself, but then it became simply the first game they would release.
Tell me about Lola and Lucy’s Big Adventure.
Originally it was an idea for a children’s book that I’d had several years ago. It’s based on our two English bulldogs. The story is that they are perfectly happy living with their family in Vermont until one day at a dog park, they meet an Australian shepherd who’s a champion sheep herder—an awarding winning dog. And he tells them that every dog is supposed to have a job.
So they get this concern that they should get a job instead of just living with their family. One day, they happen to see on the computer that bulldogs were originally bred to hold bulls by their nose. So they run away from home to find a bull. They shuttle across the whole country looking for a bull. First they go to Wall Street and see the Wall Street bull.
It’s sort of a series of misadventures as they try to find a bull. At the very end of it, they finally find a bull and they come to this conclusion about what their true purpose in life is. It’s this funny slash tearjerker little story.
It’s aimed at kids 4-10, but there are actually two levels of story in it. You can play it in Picture Book Mode or Chapter Book Mode. So there’s a longer story so kids can grow into it. And there’s 29 pages—it’s an eBook, so 29 fully-illustrated pages that are just gorgeous. They were done by a Russian dev team that we work with and each page, you can pull up a story panel or you can poke around. All kinds of things to animate. There’s sounds. There’s fifteen different mini-games in it. There’s a herding game and a paint game.
Compared to the other kids eBooks that I’ve seen, it’s the next step in the amount of content and the sophistication of the content.
My 3 1/2 year old niece loves playing on the iPad. It was amazing to see, even at 2 1/2, how easily she could navigate the interface entirely by herself. She knows how to scroll through apps, power it on and off, etc. But what do you think about kids that young already getting into gaming? Do you think it’s a positive thing?
I do. I think it’s like learning a foreign language. Their brains are so open at that age to learning things and to forming connections. I studied a little about neurobiology when I was working on Gray Matter and there’s this age where you’re still forming synapses—connections in the brain. That’s why it’s so beneficial to learn a foreign language at that age and I think it’s the same thing with technology. The younger they can start, and becoming comfortable with that, and having it be second nature, is going to be beneficial for where our society is going.
What’s it like developing for the iPad versus for PC games?
I love my iPad. I love the touch interface. It’s a little challenging on the technology side because there are some hard limits on performance—so you couldn’t do scrolling fog and things we take for granted on the PC side. I love my iPad and we’re planning to do Moebius and Mystery Game X on iPad also. Not as a secondary port, but as a primary platform to develop on.
So… will those be primarily PC games?
They’ll primarily be iPad and their will be a PC version—but we’ll be developing from the get-go on iPad.
How will you buy Lola and Lucy?
It will be free to download and you can play the first six pages for free, and then you can unlock the rest of it with an in-game purchase. Anybody can take a look at it and get it from the App Store.
For Lola and Lucy, do you view this game as a one-off or are you looking to launch a franchise? Or, do you see it as a typical iOS game, where you don’t necessarily do a sequel but where you would add to it as it goes along?
I think it’s a standalone—not that we wouldn’t update it. We probably would update it … a little further down the road. The next one would probably be a whole separate product … on the other hand, it turned out really well and we have some interest from publishers. And some interest possibly in contracting us to do a couple of sequels to it or even possibly to do a second kids franchise. I think that’d be great for the studio.
We’d probably have to hire a producer to do that because I can’t do it. Bottom line is, we would be happy to continue with those sorts of products as well as the adventure games we’re doing if the opportunity is there.
Finally, I had to pick Jensen’s brain on the state of adventure games in the industry. I grew up on playing – and replaying – so many of the Sierra classics, but there just aren’t a ton of professional made games in that genre anymore. Fan-made games have luckily lead to the growth of new studios, however, and Jensen and I talked about that.
I grew up on so many Sierra games. Police Quest, Space Quest… but then they all sort of went away. But thanks to Kickstarter and developers like Telltale Games, it seems like they’re coming back. Do you agree? If so, why do you think they’re coming back now?
The question is why they went away in the first place. And the answer to that is similar to Hollywood in that the really big game companies like EA and Activision … they really get to the point where games were so expensive to make—tens of millions of dollars—that they’re not going to take a risk on whatever isn’t what they would consider is a guaranteed sell. And for many, many years, that’s basically been games for young males. Action games.
So it’s been almost impossible to get anything else produced. In the United States at least. In Europe, adventure games have been popular for awhile and that’s why the last adventure game I did, I did with a German publisher. You just couldn’t find an American publisher to fund it.
But that doesn’t mean there weren’t designers that wanted to write them or gamers that wanted to play them. But the publishers were the gatekeepers and they were the ones saying no no no.
That’s why Kickstarter is amazing. It basically just opens up a new gate that lets the players and the designers collaborate together to get something made.
I think Telltale too has been showing it can be done and there is an audience for it. I think iPad as well … there’s a whole bunch of factors coming into it. The rise of the casual game and hidden object games have become a big business … more and more of the big publishers are starting to look at that and say this is interesting.
The market for those games is 80% female over 35 and that’s a market share they’ve never had—and it’s big. And adventure games fit very well into the market share.
So it’s an interesting confluence of events and it can only be good if the industry wakes up from catering to 18-22 male audience perpetually and decides to make games for other people.
Talk to me about gaming in general. Are there any developers or studios out there, that you as an industry person, that you’re really excited about?
I like Telltale a lot. And I’ve been following them for a couple years. I’m less excited about some of their franchises like Jurassic Park and Walking Dead—but that’s just me.
There’s not too many that I can currently point to—but I feel like there’s a lot starting.
It was E3 this week. [This interview took place during E3.] Are you following it? Do you plan to go next year?
We’ll definitely be there next year. Right now, we don’t have a lot new to show. Definitely paying attention.
[NOTE: A few days after our interview, I decided to put a beta version of Lola and Lucy in front of their ideal target audience—my nearly 4 year old niece.
Right away, my niece was drawn in because her beagle is also named Lucy. She shouted at her dog multiple times to remind her of that fact.
What I could tell she enjoyed, however, was the fact that nearly almost object on the screen was interactive. She loved being able to touch the dogs, for instance, and hear a funny sound that a dog would make. Our a bird. Or a car. She would spend minutes on each page just trying everything out. I saw her eyes light up multiple times when she got to a new page and saw what she could touch.
She also loved getting a certificate at the end of the mini-games. Only one or two “puzzles” were challenging, such as when she had to dial a fake phone number off a Lost poster for the dogs. (Parents will definitely need to help. Or uncles.)
Overall, the game was a hit with my niece and she immediately wanted to go back into it a second time.
No exact launch date on Lola and Lucy, but Pinkerton Road tells me to expect it to launch this summer in the App Store. If you’ve got kids in the 4-10 age range, you’ll definitely want to look into picking it up.
But for us big kids? I’m just happy to have people like Jensen back out there making adventure games…]