What was Richard Garriott's involvement with COH?
By
Brillig,
Posted on: 2012-09-03 11:17 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
That's... very interesting. I totally missed that the first time around, now I'm intrigued...
Quote:
He probably helped as a go between for NCsoft and Cryptic Studios (to be honest, the Exec Producer is an ambiguous title).|
Originally Posted by that_darn_lurker
I know he is listed as an Executive Producer for this game at launch, but what exactly did he contribute to the project? Are there any amusing stories or quirky anecdotes out there? Was there anything controversial about his involvement or particularly helpful? Was he involved with design decisions, or did you just help with the day to day operations and project management?
Any tidbit of information (or long winded story) would be most appreciated. Thanks! |
NCsoft list the development studio employees, and then their *own* relevent employees in the credits (which is why they tend to list whole departments together (ie QA/Billing/QA even if the actual individual barely touched the game).
Looking through the credits, you see some interesting names:
April Burba listed as Tech Support (yep, she was an NCsoft Employee and *not* Cryptic Studio's)
He worked at the publisher's (NCSoft's) corporate office. He visited the studio once and said "Goooood dayyyy!"
And that's the full extent of his involvement with CoH. For the first few years, Cryptic was in full control of content and policy and NCSoft just marketed it, published it, and did Community Support (the forums and GMs). Garriott was nominally in charge of all that. He was busy full time getting Tabula Rasa off the ground, rasa'd, and off the ground again. Then he went to space, which occupied him a bit. Then he fell to earth finding Tabula Rasa terminated by NCSoft and blaming him. Then he fully separated from NCSoft and sued them.
NCSoft became a bit hands-onsy when Cryptic (Jack) pared down the CoH staff to the Freem Fifteen (plus 5 support) and demanded that they put out at least three issues a year. Then when Cryptic (Jack) was pimping the studio around to make a CoH-killer with some other publisher, NCSoft bought out the IP and became very hands-on (that's when 'Production' started calling the shots and the Devs were subordinate and just in charge of art and content). Garriott was long gone when that happened.
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This thread seems as good a spot as any to re-post my City of Heroes interpretation of Tabula Rasa's General British.
I know he is listed as an Executive Producer for this game at launch, but what exactly did he contribute to the project? Are there any amusing stories or quirky anecdotes out there? Was there anything controversial about his involvement or particularly helpful? Was he involved with design decisions, or did you just help with the day to day operations and project management?
Any tidbit of information (or long winded story) would be most appreciated.
Thanks!