Making MMOs on a Shoestring: The NetDevil Story with Scott Brown

By Steven Crews | April 6, 2009 | | Filed under: Events, Features, Interviews | Tags: Jumpgate Evolution, NetDevil, Scott Brown

The MMO Gamer: What was that like? Just starting out from scratch?

People have the perception that an MMO is a monumental undertaking that requires a team in the hundreds and fifty million dollars to even attempt.

But, I assume that when you were just starting out, you didn’t exactly have fifty million dollars and a team in the hundreds.

Scott Brown: No, we didn’t. [laughs] So, yeah, it was just you figure out what you can do, right?

I think a lot of times at shows like these there’s a lot of fear mongering. Like, “If you don’t have ten million dollars to throw away, don’t even try to start one of these things.”

That’s crap. If you want to make a game, go make it. And so, we just started doing it.

I started writing it every night and every weekend, learning it. I didn’t know how to make games. At the time, this was 1997, I couldn’t go to the web, and there wasn’t like some big gaming reference that you could look at.

The first version of JumpGate I wrote was in WinG-some Windows program that Intel was doing-and then I looked at version one of Renderware, and it was 3,500 bucks. That was most of what I had at the time.

I took a night job for three months building a game for somebody else. Made ten grand. That paid for two GDCs, two E3s, and Renderware. That’s how we started.

I bought some servers, piecemeal. And when I first got them, I wasn’t living in Louisville where we are now, and we didn’t have high speed Internet yet. We only had modem. And so Ryan, one of the other owners of the company lived in Boulder, and Boulder could get IDS… ISBN…

The MMO Gamer: ISDN, those were the days.

Scott Brown: But he was still a college guy, so I helped pay for his high speed line.

We had these two servers made out of bits and pieces, and duct tape holding drives together, sitting on a board over a sink in his laundry room because it was the only spot in his house we could find room for the machines.

You just have to find a way to get your stuff done.

The MMO Gamer: How did you go from boards over a sink in the laundry room to-I’m assuming you have slightly more up-to-date data centers these days?

Scott Brown: Yeah, there’s no sinks in our server rooms anymore, for sure. [laughs]

The MMO Gamer: I imagine that would be slightly hazardous.

Scott Brown: It was slow! Slow is the answer. We started this almost 11 years ago, I think it’s 12 years this summer.

The MMO Gamer: But what was the point at which you realized, you know, no more board over a sink? This is a serious business here.

Scott Brown: There really wasn’t that point. We just did everything when we could afford it. That’s what I mean by shoestring.

We always wanted everything, right? I wanted fancy business cards like everybody else had. I wanted all these other things, but couldn’t afford them.

So for a long time I bought the pads and I printed and punched out my own business cards and brought them with me.

I just would go around to game developers, and go to shows. I’m not the most charismatic person. I don’t run in a room and walk around and say “hi” to everybody. I just listened.

At the time, I remember 3dfx was coming around, and I would attend their training, just soaking in everything I could.

Our break was basically with one of my friends who’d worked with a German company, Deutsche Telecom. They happened to be coming to Colorado to meet with a company called VR-One that was in Boulder, as well, and he managed to hook a meeting up with us.

We didn’t have an office or anything. We were just working out of my basement, basically.

We booked a room at a local hotel, all brought our own personal computers over, networked them, and put a demo of the game on.

That was enough to get us a little bit of money. From there one of the other guys could afford to quit, and so now there was two of us full time and one guy kind of at nights. Then we got another partner, and that got us a little bit more money, and we got one more person in.

That’s how we got there.

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