3 Sep, 2011
Lunch in Thai restaurants in the middle of Seattle is a pretty typical scene. When a renowned filmmaker and the CEO of a small game company is involved, it’s not too typical anymore, but we are talking about Seattle.
On one of these not-so-typical days in 2006, Seattle saw two men sit down and meet over lunch. Michel Gagne, a renowned filmmaker whose creds include An American Tail, All Dogs Go to Heaven, and Rock-A-Doodle, sat down with CEO of Fuelcell Games Joe Olson. Both were tired of grinding away in their respective industries — Gagne had quit Hollywood and started drawing comics, while Olson was tired of doing effects in the gaming industry.
With a pinch of disgruntledness, the pair concocted a plan to start doing games their way, their terms. Their very first labor of love? A star in Xbox Live’s Summer of Arcade, Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet.
In an interview with Gamasutra, both Gagne and Olson tell a little twisted story fraught with doubts, persistence, and eventual success. “I had never worked in games before,” said Gagne. “I didn’t know anything about the industry. I hadn’t played games in over 15 years. I thought I should do some research. Joe said, ‘No, this is perfect. The industry needs fresh visions.’”
With an emphasis on beautiful graphics, dramatic camera angles, and action so fast paced even Van Damm would stop and admire it, Gagne explained that games of the newer generations just wasn’t his thing. “The new stuff is so fast,” he said. “The camera swings all over the place. I get dizzy. The only games I was interested in playing were old 8-bit side-scrollers. I said, ‘But people don’t play these anymore, do they?’”
Old school gaming may be dying, but it isn’t completely dead. Thank goodness for a cycle of bringing back the old, like terrible fashion that should never be revived. The only difference is that old school games are never bad — after all, they are the foundations on which the newest are built upon.
So how does a renowned film animator and a special effects artist in the gaming industry get along? By finding common ground, and in this case it was all over animation. “We were studying some of Michel’s film work,” said Olson, “stuff he did for The Iron Giant and the 2D Clone Wars cartoon. He gave a workshop, and we hit it off. The next day, we started talking about doing a collaboration together. I wanted to use the power of modern consoles to drive feature-quality animation.”
“A lot of animators [in the movie industry] look at games as, well, if you can’t hack it in the film industry, then you go into games,” added Gagne. “I wanted to show them that games can be as beautifully animated as a movie. That was my goal.”
The pursuit of individuality eventually led to the fruition of Shadow Planet. Gagne was unhappy with merely being a cog in a larger machine. Olson was in the same boat, and neither wanted to be there. They wanted the freedom to do as they pleased, and they weren’t going to get it when working with a larger studio. “I’ve worked on 25 feature films, but they never really felt like they were my own,” said Gagne. “I was just one of many soldiers building that film…You get a steady paycheck [working for the studios]. For me, it was something I had to do. I would come come and work on my own stuff. I had to make a choice.”
“I had a similar experience at Midway,” added Olson. “[The gaming industry] is becoming a lot more specialized. You’re this cog in this machine. You do this one part, and you shouldn’t venture outside of that. That is one of the reasons me and my partners left Midway. We wanted to make a bigger impact.”
The next logical step in this progression is to quit your day job. Both Gagne and Olson did, so they would have the time to work on their project. Living in a basement wasn’t ideal though, so they both began to take contract work, allowing time to create Shadow Planet to their liking. “…we started taking on contract work to keep the team together: Call of Duty, Transformers,” said Olson. “We would take on a contract for 5 or 6 months. At the end of the contract, we might have a week or two to work on Shadow Planet again. Then, another contract. In the meantime, Fuelcell got ot of my basement. And Michel was working on Ratatouille.”
With everything looking like it was about to take off, the final step in making Shadow Planet become real was to bring it to a publisher. That was no easy task, as both Gagne and Olson went up and down the west coast, attempting to court publishers. In the end, Microsoft seemed the ideal choice, but it was no easy battle. “We had talked to Microsoft for awhile, but it didn’t work out,” said Gagne. “When we released our second trailer in 2009, they called us back.
“…it was a whole new regime. It had a good feeling. After eight months of negotiations, we finally decided to go with Microsoft. They were pretty tough to negotiate with.”
Convincing publishers to take the risk was the hardest part of the process, said Olson. While they both received generally good reactions, negotiations themselves still brought publisher doubts to the table. Eventually, through persistence and compromise, both Gagne and Olson were able to make Shadow Planet happen.
And as it turns out, a lot of people liked the result.
Read the whole interview with Michel Gagne, Joe Olson, and Gamasutra here.
Via Gamasutra.
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