Remember Gathering of Developers? It was meant to be the gaming industry’s United Artists; fed up with the way large publishers treated developers, a group of independent studios formed a publishing company that would treat them better.
Except it was then acquired by Take 2 Interactive and consolidated into Rockstar Games and 2K Games. Whoops.
But the GoD founders are back with another oddly named company, Gamecock Media Group. They’ve announced a lineup of six new games from such developers as Firefly Studios and Wideload Games. You can read a bit more in this New York Times article.
I did an exclusive Q&A with Mike Levine of Crackpot Games for Adventure Gamers. He’s working on a noir detective action-adventure called Insecticide that will be published by Gamecock later this year.
Mike worked at LucasArts during the golden years, until he went to ILM in 1997 and later started a web/online company. I first met him at E3 two years ago just when he was looking to get back into video games. He’s extremely passionate about his ideas and has an interesting vision on IP development.
If you like the classic LucasArts adventures, Insecticide will be just your kind of game. Its concept art was done by the amazing Peter Chan, who also drew the concept art for Grim Fandango and the world concept art for Psychonauts. Art director Larry Ahern also co-designed The Curse of Monkey Island, and the list of industry veterans goes on.
It’s always encouraging when an original game like this finds a publisher. Hopefully Gamecock will fare better than Gathering of Developers (which may have been a bit ahead of its time?) and provide developers with many more opportunities to create new games on their own terms, without having to give up the rights to their IP.
Wow! Amazing Q&A. I’m very excited about the game, but even more excited about the developer.
He has a very refreshing view on making games that fit the story, instead of cramming a story into a specific genre. Looking forward to see this released.
BigJKO
February 12th, 2007