the hood, anywhere that goes is something that we could potentially do.
Are you approached by publishers or are you doing the approaching? It’s actually both. There are games that came from a publisher saying, ‘We want to have a product like this in the market.’ And then there are certainly things where people are constantly like, ‘You guys should do this game and you guys should do that game. Have you guys considered doing this collection? Or that?’ And it’s like, yes, if there are rights holders out there with things that we think would make a wonderful rerelease, we are actively pitching. We’re not just sitting around waiting for stuff to come
like we’re firing on all cylinders within Digital Eclipse. We’re very excited about what we’re making and we’re so gratified that it’s connecting with people and we just want to keep it going.
Digital Eclipse is also behind a collection of modern retro- styled games and last year’s Wizardry remake. What’s the strategy there? We’re a studio built around classic, iconic games, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s literally just taking Apple II games and emulating them. We do a lot of things, and you’ll see a lot of things this year, but everything always comes back to an understanding of and respect for what made those games good in the first place. So whether it’s like a new game that’s sort of patterned after what worked on a 16-bit system, or something like Wizardry, which looks new, but fundamentally is just the Apple II version running under
to us. When it works out is when the thing that we are pitching was something that they on the other side were like, ‘Oh, yeah, we were looking for somebody to do that.’
How did the collaboration with Jeff Minter come about? Is it because Jeff ’s worked with Atari a long time and DE is an Atari-owned studio? No, not really. Mike and Jeff have known each other for a really long time. When Mike was a teenager looking to get into the game industry, he went to E3 and met Jeff Minter, I think, at the Atari Jaguar stand. Mike wanted to make Jaguar games and just started talking to Jeff and Jeff was, you know, extremely friendly. And so Jeff was a big help to Mike in his early career and they’ve known each other ever since the Jaguar days. The Jeff Minter Story basically became possible
because we had raised the funds. Prior to Karateka everything was like, ‘Do you have money? Can you give us money to make a game for you?’ It was work for hire type situations. But Karateka and Llamasoft, it’s ‘We have money, we will licence your product from you, and then we will make the thing that we want to make.’ We could do what we wanted because we are in creative control, because we have done the licensing.
44 | MCV/DEVELOP August/September 2024
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