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: Then you hooked up with 3DO, and that didn’t quite work out as well as it might have.

Scott Brown: 3DO is probably one of the worst decisions I ever made. Even though the people on the game team I worked with, I still couldn’t be more impressed with, they never paid us a dime.

We had offers from Mythic, when they hadn’t launched Dark Age yet, they were interested in the game. And we talked to 3DO, and we talked to Simutronics.

Simutronics were willing to bend over backwards to find a way to make this game work. And they were having so much success with their games like Cyber Strike, and they were really ahead of the curve at the time.

Mythic had already done 15 games-none of them had hundreds of thousands of users yet, but they had so much experience, and nobody knew at the time that their next game, Dark Age, was going to be a huge hit.

With 3DO I was star struck. I was like, “Wow, this is the guy that started EA! He’s going to make us awesome!” and I made the wrong choice.

Obviously, had we gone with either of those other two guys we would have been so much better off. But we survived it, and we went along.

Thankfully, the German partner we had was strong and they kept us running for a long time, and it was through them that we survived.

The MMO Gamer: And that got you through to launch? What about afterward?

Scott Brown: Well, when JumpGate launched, there was only eight of us. You don’t need a lot of money to meet an eight-person payroll. It’s not like we were living large, either.

We actually shared an office space with some other friends of mine. We shared a 1,300-no, 700 square foot office space. It was just one room, and we built our own desks. [laughs]

We went to a hardware store and bought parts and put desks together and that’s what we worked on for the first three or four years after we got out of my basement. So, that’s how we grew.

The MMO Gamer: When did you really get off and running? How long after JumpGate launched was it at the point where you had enough money coming in you could say, “Hey, maybe we can start a new project… what about that other poll result-the car game?”

Scott Brown: Part of the magic of business is just staying alive long enough until you get a break. I think it’s more that than it is some magical, genius plan that just somehow works out. So, we got real lucky again.

Two people reached out to us. The first was Jeremy Gaffney, who was one of the founders of Turbine. Wrote much of Asheron’s Call himself, and was now part of Destination Games before they were bought by NCSoft.

We would do E3, and we’d have a booth where we’d find at the last minute some person who didn’t need some corner of theirs, and they’d let us pay two grand or five hundred bucks or something to put up a little JumpGate thing.

Jeremy was one of those guys who would walk around and gather everybody in these booths and go, “Hey, you’re all making my game. Let’s go have dinner together.” He was never the big guys and the little guys-he’s an amazing person.

Then Richard Garriott came along. Richard was like, “Why don’t you come down to Austin? I saw your game and I’d love to give you some pointers on ways you could make JumpGate better.”

When he asks you, you go, and he gave us a bunch of tips. We kind of knew each other from that, so as NCSoft started gearing up in North America, and they bought Destination Games, they reached out and said, “Why don’t you pitch us? What do you guys want to do?”

We sent them three pitches. We said, “We think a superhero game would be a cool idea. We think some sort of Diablo-maybe even a sci-fi style Diablo-would be very cool. And we think a car game, like Auto Duel or Car Wars, but online, would be really, really cool.”

The MMO Gamer: Those sound kind of familiar…

Scott Brown: It was funny because they had just signed Cryptic to do City of Heroes, which we didn’t know. [laughs] And they had just signed another company that was doing a game that later became Dungeon Runners, which was basically a sci-fi Diablo.

The only game that Richard Garriott had ever done other than Ultima at that time was Auto Duel. And so, it hit a nerve, and they gave us a shot.

Thankfully, they were of the same opinion as us: they wanted to take risks, they wanted to try different kinds of games, things other people weren’t doing.

They gave us a shot and they helped us through tons of growing pains. We went from eight people to 45 in the process of building AutoAssault.

And you know, we didn’t know anything. “How do you do this, or that? What does a producer do?” We were hackers, right? I think JumpGate shipped on pure willpower.

We weren’t experts, and to get AutoAssault out we needed to get better, and they helped us get better in a lot of ways and took a big risk.

The MMO Gamer: A big risk with an unfortunate ending.

Scott Brown: I still feel terrible it didn’t pan out.

You know, I feel like we could have done a better job, or worked harder or something, but it just didn’t work.

But it gave us our shot, and we learned so much in the process of building AutoAssault about how to actually build games, how to do the engineering the right way, and just so many things: art, design, you know, everything. We just learned a ton.

So, after AutoAssault things weren’t so good, and we told people, “We probably only have maybe six months left of payroll, and we’re working on a bunch of ideas, but if that’s too scary for you, we want you to know.”

We helped a few people get jobs somewhere else because they didn’t want to be in there, and in that timeframe we were able to put together enough money to kickoff JumpGate again, to go back and try again to do it right, which is Evolution now.

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