What followed next would be the first real hit for Eidetic (as the company was then called): 1999’s Syphon Filter, a third-person spy game that involved sneaking around and taking down enemies unseen. ![]() Founded in 1993 to make games exclusively for the Apple Newton (RIP), the company has ballooned from the dozen employees who labored over Bubsy 3D to more than 100 people-and it’s still hiring.īubsy didn’t work out, but Reese says the studio learned enough to keep going. Twenty-five years lat er he sits in a brand-new five-story building in downtown Bend, overseeing the action as studio director at Bend Studio. “Hey, if you don’t make the best, you might as well make the worst, huh?” says Chris Reese with a laugh. Gaming website GameSpot called the music “annoying,” the graphics “sparse,” “ugly,” and “blah,” and concluded, “Of all the 3-D action/platform games out for the Playstation, Bubsy 3D is the least fun.” (It wasn’t hyperbole: the game’s odd control system is deeply frustrating.) The cartoon-style game sought to emulate the addictive cuteness of Sonic the Hedgehog, but the reception was almost universally negative. ![]() That’d be Bubsy 3D for the original PlayStation, a 1996 adventure starring a bobcat named Bubsy searching for rocket parts to fix his spaceship. But it could also be the title that catapults the state’s video game industry to the next level. As the most ambitious-and most expensive-game made so far in Oregon, it’s a gamble. But it’s the dangerous, unpredictable wilds of Oregon that Bend Studio (and parent company Sony) is banking on to overcome gamers’ “zombie fatigue” and vault their game to tentpole franchise status. At the E3 video game expo in Los Angeles this past June, journalists got access to a closed-door preview of the game: many marveled at the scale and the size of the zombie hordes. The world of Days Gone creates a postapocalyptic version of the high desert around Bend, cougar attacks and all. They had to kill a cougar up on the butte just last week.”Ĭonversations that whiplash between real life and the video game realm happen a lot when the landscape right outside your office door is your digital muse. “These animals are becoming more of a threat because their habitat is disappearing. “One of the enemy types in the game is just the cougar,” says Bend Studio creative director and head writer John Garvin, peering eagerly out from behind a row of monitors on his desk, each showing some god’s-eye view of his digital domain.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |