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Satellite Reign - Interview @ Rock, Paper, Shotgun

by Couchpotato, 2013-07-03 02:34:32

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has an interview with Satellite Reign's Progect Lead Mike Diskett. I also have a dev chat video with the developers.

RPS: Last year when the Kickstarter stuff was starting to really heat up, I said to Gillen that we should go and find Mike Diskett and tell him to do a Syndicate-like Kickstarter. With so many American classics getting spiritual successors, it seems like a time to bring back some of those visions from the Amiga days that really made us who we are. But it turns out we didn’t have to go on that peculiar quest, because you were already on that same path?

Diskett: When Kickstarter really started being successful, I suppose about eighteen months ago, I began thinking about whether there would be any interest in a game that followed Syndicate and Syndicate Wars, and I wasn’t totally sure that there would be enough interest out there. Especially given that the original Syndicate games didn’t sell well. Despite that, I suppose, everyone I meet has played them. At least in the games industry. They’re well-known games, even if they were not commercially great. I’ve moved around between a lot of different companies, across England, Scotland, Australia; Rockstar, THQ, Pandemic – most places I went I expected people to ask about working on GTA at Rockstar North, but actually they asked about Syndicate Wars. It was that project that interested people, not GTA!

RPS: But isn’t that people of a certain age? Gillen and myself are getting on a bit now, and that’s why we are old men playing at running the world constantly banging on Amiga stuff, and isn’t that true of a maturing game development community?

Diskett: It’s odd because the people I work with are often quite young, and I’ve met fans of Syndicate who were barely born when the original game came out. These are people who have played the game and won’t even know what an Amiga was. They’ve played it on the PC when they were young, maybe they didn’t have a good PC, but had one that could play some old Bullfrog classics, something like that. The point is: there are all these 20-somethings that remember it, because of being able to play older games on the PC. So I knew there was some audience there. But there was another thing that really brought home what a fanbase there was for this sort of game, which was… well, I really like Starcraft II. I used to play constantly and I used to watch the Day9 ‘casts. He does all these videos, and he did a “lifetime in Stacraft” video, which I watched, and one of the things he said was about how he used to play Syndicate Wars with his brother. So there was this moment where I thought: One of my heroes played and loved this old game I worked on! So that was a revelation.

Here is the video.

Dean, Mitch, Chris and Mike chat about Good vs Evil, Character classes and City simulations

 

Information about

Satellite Reign

SP/MP: Single-player
Setting: Sci-Fi
Genre: Strategy-RPG
Platform: PC
Release: Released


Details