View Single Post
Old 12-17-2004, 11:56 AM   #3
serpentbox
Game Designer
 
serpentbox's Avatar
 
Join Date: Dec 2004
Location: San Francisco
Posts: 67
Send a message via Yahoo to serpentbox
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by Jackal
I don't want to step on any toes here, but you guys didn't actually start out as Pulse Entertainment, correct? The DVD mentions something about you merging with Pulse well after production had already started. So I'm a little hazy on the details of when and how (and why) Mojo "became" a Pulse game.

What brought the core team together in the first place?
Whoa. That's a toughie.

Bad Mojo began as a Drew Pictures game. Drew Pictures was a boutique developer started by Drew Huffman. I was Drew's first employee. In 1993 we released our first game, Iron Helix, and after that we were cooking with gas. We made money and got marginally famous in the small world of CD ROM developers. We began Mojo in 1994 I believe and grew the company slowly, so as to allow for simultaneous development of multiple titles. But we had a lot of grwoing pains and life was not easy for us. Poor Drew was up all night worrying about how to run the company. It took a toll on all of us. There was a tremendous amount of stress and we had real investors at that point so we had to answer to the man (our board of Directors). Mojo development was bogged down for various reasons, some of them technical, some of them psychological, and many times it looked as if we might fall apart as a company. But Drew held us together. At the time we began looking for technology partners. We needed to stop writing game code from scratch and wanted Mojo to be the last custom code game we did. We entertained many offers, including a 10 million dollar buyout deal from Take2 Interactive! (A great story in itself). Well, along came Pulse. The principals there (Bill Woodward and Young Harvill) were our old bosses when we had worked for a software start-up called Paracomp in the late '80's. They had a new game engine/real-time 3D rendering technology that looked very promising. And they needed a production arm to launch the thing. So the match made perfect sense. On paper. We meregd with Pulse pretty late in the development stages of Mojo but they were instrumental in getting it done and marketing it. By the time the game shipped we were one company....but our problems were just beginning....VC
serpentbox is offline