DEVELOPMENT LEGEND // DAVID PERRY | BETA
Doug TenNapel. When TenNapel came to the office to demonstrate his talent and abilities, he made a sketch. Suddenly Shiny had its inspiration. Earthworm Jim was born.
THE NEXT DIMENSION After some wrangling between TenNapel and Perry over Earthworm Jim’s physical prowess – or lack of – the famous character was fleshed out, and the game that put Shiny on the map made. Rooted firmly in the 2D world, Earthworm
Jim was comfortable ground for Perry, who had begun worrying that the inevitable dawn of 3D gaming would knock Shiny sideways, and ultimately out of the business. It was then Perry sold Shiny – for the first
time – to Interplay. “That was the biggest mistake I’ve made in
my career, because I’d thought Shiny was a one-focus shop. I thought we just did hand- drawn pencil animation. Little did I know that my team would be so adaptable to switch to 3D. In the end we did MDK, which became very important in 3D video games.” Continuing to work under Interplay’s
ownership, Perry and his team did indeed prove themselves in 3D. MDK, their first title in the third dimension, introduced the now ubiquitous, genre-spanning ‘sniper mode’, and became the de facto benchmark test in magazines for analysing numerous different graphics cards. Next, MDK became a standard bundle-
game shipped with every one of Apple’s iconic new iMacs, which taught Perry an important lesson about the power of licensing. Within next to no time, 40-to-50 hardware and peripheral companies had secured MDK licensing deals.
BEYOND GAMES DESIGN In the next five years, with the Enter the Matrix video game in development and a need for a huge marketing effort to promote the title, after an intensely complex business deal Perry sold Shiny to Infogrames for a substantial $47 million. An industry in-joke continues to this day that Perry is the only man to sell the same studio twice in a row. Shortly after Infogrames changed its name
to Atari, and Perry embraced a new era of his career. He had tried to bring to life a game design of his own conception named Plague. Forced to “tear the heart out of the game” to meet with budget demands, Perry decided it was time to try something new.
You have to keep trying things that
aren’t exactly your specialty. It’s how you make yourself better at what you do.
David Perry, Gaikai “You have to keep trying things that aren’t
exactly what you feel are your specialty,” says Perry. “It’s how you make yourself better at what you do. In a way you should try everything in the industry, and especially the stuff that’s not your thing.” Learning to do what you can’t, says Perry, is
how you get better at what you can do. With Shiny sold, it was now the mid-2000s, and experimentation and a move away from designing games would begin to define Perry’s role in the industry. He would serve as
a consultant – largely at Acclaim – and became fascinated with research into the new dominion of free-to-play, long before it was as common as it is today. Ever ahead of industry trends, in this time
Perry also launched an early crowdfunding platform named GameInvestors, which served as a professional network for linking those with money to hand and specialists within development. “We made great progress there,” confirms
Perry. “But I ended up focusing on Gaikai at that time. It was a time when I was concentrating on multiple things, because I didn’t know what was going to catch on, but I still feel there’s a need for GameInvestors. I never did quite ship that project, but I’m still sure it has huge potential.” In fact, Perry is even confident
GameInvestors addressed problems crowdfunding giant Kickstarter is yet to overcome, such as a milestone system to protect investors from unscrupulous studios or individuals that see the platform as a place to take money without delivering any kind of
product.GamesInvestors had a built-in solution whereby investors would only need to part with cash as certain milestones were met. And don’t worry; Perry is already onto the CEO of Kickstarter to pass on his input. He is a man who acts on seemingly every idea he has.
HEAD IN THE CLOUD Eventually, Perry’s ongoing investigation of free-to-play lead him to cloud gaming. “Free-to-play and Gaikai go hand-in-hand,”
states Perry. “Once you go deep into how free-to-play works, it’s about creating the best user acquisition funnel that lets the most people play your game. Every single company on Earth that does free-to-play
AUGUST 2012 | 41
David Perry has worked in the in numerous sectors of the industry for 30 years, such as developing hit movie-tin Aladdin (left) and working as the sole author of Astounding Arcade Games for your Specturm (above)
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