Company
THQ and Warner Bros. Interactive have recently announced that the movie-licensed game version The Polar Express (starring Tom Hanks) is now shipping to North American retailers. The Polar Express was developed by Blue Tongue from Melbourne, and is available for the PC, GameCube, PlayStation 2, and Game Boy Advance.
You can see some media footage of Polar Express at the following link...
Actually, the GBA game was made here at Tantalus, not at Blue Tongue :)
A good clarification given how bad some of the reviews have been.
http://www.gamefaqs.com/console/ps2/review/920105.html
My god how did that happen
There's only a couple of possibilities. A bad development team (obviously not), a bad publisher or bad management. The ultimate question has to be asked, how did THQ let this happen ? The next question, how does Australian game development recover from this and move on ?
There are some good reviews.
Where ?
I would say its the publisher fault. They should have managed the game better, ultimately they have the final say in what the game should be.
How can you blame the publisher. They have to rely on the developer to get it right.
You can't blame the team. There's a great bunch of developers who worked on this game.
No one ever wants to take responsibility for a failure. Everyone always takes responsibility for a success.
Exactly :)
I wish I could say more, but I have to say given my experiences so far I don't feel safe doing so. I still need to work in this industry after all.
Here's a scenario. Publisher acquires the rights to a movie with some BIG names behind it. Various people working at Publisher don't want anything in the game that they think will offend those big names. Developer has to make a game with some ridiculous gameplay constraints.
Interesting theory. This game however would offend the BIG names and anybody else who plays it. I wouldn't want my name attatched to it if I was Tom Hanks. ,
Also, it's a pretty big obstacle to overcome when somewhere, someone along the production hierarchy wants to justify their own existence by making changes to design and content just because they can. What makes it even worse is if these people have no clue about games. Trust me, it does happen. Then you have the scenario where the developer budgets their time on a game only to have the content completely altered by the publisher with no change in dev time - in the middle of the project. Now I'm not trying to say who was to blame on this one, but just that people shouldn't make comments like "How can you blame the publisher. They have to rely on the developer to get it right." without knowing the facts.
You're talking about the team that created Jurassic Park Operation Genesis. Are you suggesting they don't know how to steer the publisher towards a good product ? It's more likely the project was steered off track by the developer not the publisher. Yes publishers have the final say, but they don't have enough control over the day to day management of a project. That's the responsibility of management on the ground. Right ?
I'm just saying that before people comment on who was responsible for a crap product you really need to know all the facts. Also, it's sometimes not quite as simple as steering the publisher towards a good product. This may well have been a complete stuff up by Blue Tongue, I don't exactly know (and don't really care to tell the truth), but having been in the industry for many years I know there's many factors out of the developers control that can, and often will, have an effect on the end product.
One more thing - good management does not necessarily equal good product. Have you ever worked on a licensed project where a producer at the publisher has his own set vision of the game, loves to make changes for change sake, and has no clue about gameplay mechanics? Not exactly a recipe for a hit game.
I agree, this definately does happen. But the result isn't usually quite this bad. How about some comments from the team. We know you're reading. What about THQ. Maybe they have some comments, or is the game so bad that nobody wants to associate themselves with it in any shape or form.
The Publisher or BIG names were no more a pain in the ass than any other project we worked on as far as I could tell. Mind you, it wasn't the sort of environment where you have a casual chat with management about stuff. There was no flow of information. Nothing. Sorta like living in a bubble.
Mabye it was just a bad licence for a start. I have not seen the movie, but these guys turned Starship Troopers into a cool RTS and Jurrasic Park into a Sim!
Often I guess its a combination of to many people with different ideas not communicating.
Starship Troopers was seen as a bad license at the time. They turned it into a great game however. Communication amongst team members is extremely important in game development. It looks as if that must have been the problem here.
Bah humbug. Starship Troopers was an awesome license. It just sounds like their project management didn't come through on this one. Probably because the team wasn't all that interested in the license to begin with, or just poor management, or worse.
How about some decent titles being developed out of Australia instead of these second rate, bottom of the barrel, nobody else wants to do them licenses that they are dishing out to the local mob.
The movie didn't do well. The book is 'nt that well known.
The book is a clasic. The game was based on the book.
Starship Troopers and Jurassic Park were hideously late and consumed the resources of the entire studio. Critical acclaim after the fact isn't going to pay the bills when you're a struggling independent developer. Polar Express, on the other hand, was completed on time and on budget by a small team. From the publisher's (THQ) point of view, Blue Tongue delivered and the project was a success. I have little doubt that this was a major factor in THQ's decision to purchase Blue Tongue.
"Ok, but why is the game so crap?", you ask. Plenty of reasons, all of which were beyond the control of the dev team.
(1) Dumb licence. Polar Express might be a classic children's book but it makes a terrible game licence. Most of the original action takes place on a train. In other words, you're walking up and down a narrow aisle between rows of seats. Not a very interesting scenario to base a game design on.
(2) Shortened development cycle. In a matter of about 10 months, the team managed to go from nothing to releasing the game simultaneously on PS2, GC and PC in all territories. There was simply no time to go back and refine gameplay or polish graphics and sound, and it shows.
(3) Under-resourced team. At the time most of Blue Tongue's talent was focused on an ambitious next-gen title which unfortunately was never published. For much of its life Polar Express was the unloved "second" project operating with a skeleton team. That changed towards the end but it was too little, too late.
So who's to blame? It would be easy to say it was all the fault of Blue Tongue's management. Certainly they made some bad decisions in hindsight, and at the end of the day they have to accept ultimate responsibility for the company's performance. But I think their options were severely limited at the time. Nobody set out to make a bad game and all the guys I knew from the Polar Express team were talented and passionate. But it seems that talent and passion are not enough to make a great game in the desperate hand-to-mouth world of the Australian independent games developer.
Now that Blue Tongue is part of THQ I wonder if the environment has improved. I guess they would have more time and resources to make the games they want and only release it when it's ready. Hopefully they also get their pick of the best THQ licences now. They're a great bunch of guys and I'm looking forward to seeing what they can come up with next.
1. Starship Troopers and Jurassic Park are both excellent games. They were completed on schedule and reviewed very well. There's a great post-mortem on Gamasutra http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20030317/chan_01.shtml. Starship Troopers was also delivered on a very tight schedule.
2. Why should The Polar Express be limited to going up and down a train? That's just silly. Obviously it's a serious lack of imagination. The designer should be held accountable for that mistake.
3. The Polar Express is built on faulty technology. There's no excuse for that no matter what the timeframe.
4. I wouldn't be surprised if Blue Tongue management was off doing their own personal projects now they no longer own the company. They don't really care what happens to the company or the staff now it's not their going concern anymore.
5. The company's golden years are clearly over.
Whoa there big boy, you can turn down your flamerator now! I'm not trying to defend the poor quality of Polar Express, just explain it.
1. Starship Troopers and Jurassic Park were indeed good games but they DID slip on their schedules. STTA was originally planned to ship July 2000 but was pushed back to October. JPOG missed its original Christmas 2002 deadline and finally shipped in March 2003. Everyone who worked at Blue Tongue at the time knows the JPOG post-mortem on Gamasutra is a total work of fiction. We just treated it as free advertising.
As for Polar Express, it might have been a critical flop but it was completed on time and on budget by a small sub-team of Blue Tongue. As I said previously most of the company's efforts were focused on another project at the time. Should disappointed gamers care about this? Of course not. Blue Tongue put out a crap game and there's no excuse for that. But it does help to explain why THQ were still impressed with the team's performance on Polar Express despite the poor quality gameplay.
2. In fact the Polar Express game is NOT limited to going up and down a train carriage. There are many levels that take place outside. eg. downhill skiing, train surfing, tube ride, eyetoy games, etc. But at the end of the day the bulk of the action must still take place inside the train because that's what the original picture book is about - riding a magical train to the North Pole. It's a dumb licence for a movie and an even dumber one for a game.
Still want to blame the designer for not being innovative enough? Fact is the Polar Express team didn't really have a full-time designer so who you gonna call? Despite this most of the reviews I've read say there are some good ideas in there but the execution is clunky and underdone. That's what you get from a poorly resourced team on a crazy schedule. Again I'm not trying to excuse it, just expain it.
3. The Polar Express was developed using RenderWare. How is it faulty technology? Rockstar didn't think so when they licenced RenderWare for GTA3 and EA didn't think so when they bought Criterion recently. I can say without qualification there is no way Polar Express would have got finished if we hadn't used RenderWare. It was the right decision without a doubt.
4. I couldn't say what the Blue Tongue management are doing now. Apparently most of them from the old days are already gone. But who cares about that anyway? I'm more interested in the dev team. AFAIK most of the original guys who worked on Troopers and JP are still there making games. The guys I still keep in contact with are all pretty positive about the THQ aquisition. It seems like a better work environment than a year or two ago.
5. Are Blue Tongue's "golden years" really over after one dud product? Time will tell. But I'm not so arrogant as to think the team that made STTA and JPOG have suddenly lost their skills since I left. I hope you're not either, Mr "Another Ex Blue Tongue". :)
I don't know when you left but you should know that:
A lot of the developers who worked on JP are gone now. There are still a few of us around. 1/2 the PS2 dev team has left, 1/2 of the application programmers and 1/2 of the artists have moved on already. Some serious talent has moved on. There are a lot of new guys here since we were purchased by THQ so we shall see.
I guess it depends on what you mean by on schedule and how you want to spin that. The Polar Express was disastrously behind schedule. I guess it would depend on when we started working on the project "officially". The game development process was a real mess. As to the claim that the project was "on budget", given how the project was managed the budget was very poorly used. Consider, the entire company was run off the Polar Express budget but only a smallish team of individuals was initially allocated to its actual development. There were no other projects or sources of income for the company during that time. There should have been more people allocated to the project in its early stages. The initial team was tiny.
Poorly designed
Poorly constructed
Poorly delivered.
Poorly managed.
Dude, the game was on the shelves November 3rd a week before the movie was released! That is what it means to be "on schedule". Why don't you do a google or even check the news date at the top of this page. Sheesh.
Yeah, but it shouldn't have been on the shelf (given the end result). Obviously a lot more time was still required to fix some of the problems, the fact is there wasn't enough time by the sounds of it. The point he's trying to make is that if the game had been developed properly then you would have something worth while by "November 3rd" or whatever date was finally agreed as the delivery date. It sounds as if the development was buggered.