Viridian Games

If, like me, Supreme Commander just made you wish you could play Total Annihilation again, your wish is granted. And it’s been updated to ensure it runs on all versions of Windows, supports higher resolutions than the original game…and is still both LAN and internet-playable.

The number of older games that are now available for digital download in one form or another is increasing. Publishers are learning that there is still value in these older games, which makes me happy, as a lot of my discs are getting really, really scratched.

Okay, I know I promised a whole bunch of stuff that would revitalize this blog and I’ve delivered exactly jack and squat. But there’s reasons! Really!

First, while I wouldn’t say we’re in crunch mode on Elemental, we are working very intently. And the interesting thing is that we’re not working intently to make some publisher happy so that they’ll keep the money drip going. We’re working intently to make our beta testers happy. The current beta (1G) actually has the potential to be – wait for it – fun. It’ll be a nice reward to everyone who stuck with us through the first few betas, which were so un-fun that we felt the need to actually put a warning on the splash screen.

Second, I lost my video card. Well, that’s not really true. I know exactly where it is…it’s in my wife’s computer, since hers flaked out thirty minutes before a raid. I could try to get it back, but I’d probably lose a hand in the process.

So I’m stuck on internal video, which is not conducive to video capture and/or…anything really. The best game I’ve been able to get running on it is Morrowind, and even that is pretty choppy. Hopefully our finances will loosen up towards the middle of the month and I’ll be able to return to the land of the 3D-accelerated.

In the meantime, I’ve found something to keep you occupied. First, GetDaved, who not only has a great YouTube handle but is also one of the best LPers out there now that DeceasedCrab is semi-retired, is currently playing through Galactic Civilizations 2. He did an excellent playthrough of Master of Orion and two (count them, two!) playthroughs of Master of Orion 2, but when he was asked to play Master of Orion 3 he refused, saying he didn’t find that game fun. So he’s playing GalCiv2 instead. Good for him!

We will resume our regularly scheduled programming soon.

I promise.

Again.

Galactic Civilizations II is currently $1.99 on Impulse. That’s a crazy price for a game that can provide so much entertainment. At this point, you’ve got absolutely no excuse.

Update: Well, it seems the sale expired right around the time I discovered it. Sorry about that. On the upside, you have an excuse again!

Guess what broke about a week ago. ‘Sright, my computer. All my attempts to resuscitate it have been met with failure. My attempts to commandeer my daughter’s computer this weekend were met with pleading and begging and tears (real, actual tears!)…so I decided not to do that.

Which left me with my laptop. Which, if you’ll recall is really just a netbook (a Gateway LT31, in fact). It’s got two gigs of RAM and a dedicated ATI Radeon X1270 graphics processor, unlike most netbooks which just use an Intel 950 Integrated Graphics Processor, which are cheap and work fine for web browsing but are nigh-unusable for games.

So I hooked my monitor, mouse, keyboard and speakers up to my laptop so I could at least compute in comfort.

Then I got out some games to see how well the rig would run them. The results:

Oblivion: Ran, but was unplayable even on the lowest graphical settings. This wasn’t a big surprise or disappointment. I knew I’d have to drop back a generation or two to get some results.

Morrowind: Ran fine; but I had to turn the graphics detail and the draw distance all the way down to get above 15 FPS outside. So it looks like Vvardenfell is constantly shrouded in fog. Interiors, on the other hand, run great – and dungeons are interiors so dungeon running is fine. Overall, playable.

World of Warcraft: Again, detail at the lowest settings. Large cities with lots of people like Dalaran are complete lag zones, but questing out in the wild greatly improves the frame rate. Overall, playable, if slightly annoying.

Deus Ex: The game defaults to 16-bit color mode, which I haven’t changed. Frame rate is good, if a little choppy in some places. Definitely playable.

Warcraft III: Perfectly playable on medium detail. I can even play on Battle.net and watch replays.

Starcraft: Perfectly playable. Again, playing on Battle.net and watching replays is no problem.

Half Life: Runs great, no changes needed.

System Shock 2: The big surprise of my experiments, this game runs perfectly without any need for tweaks (other than the minor ones necessary to get it running).

Fallout: Runs fine.

Tonight I’ll be trying Baldur’s Gate 2 and I might even be able to get away with Neverwinter Nights.

Oh, and Zeta development works fine, yadda yadda yadda.

I don’t want to turn this site into “All Stardock! All The Time!” but this was too cool not to pass on.

Brad (I’m on a first-name basis with Brad Wardell! Tee-hee!) has designed a boardgame version of Elemental: War of Magic, which five lucky beta testers are going to get to play. The entire game will be public on the forums. Here’s the starting post.

Best. Demo. Ever. And even though I can’t really afford it, I will be buying the game today.

It looks like finally (finally!) Tim Schafer and Double Fine are going to garner the success they so richly deserve.

Guess who’s an official Apple Developer now?

Go on, guess.

I’ll wait.

But that’s not all. Oh, no, that’s not all.

I’m employed, and have been for the last two weeks. I’m working for a company called Warped Productions, making (of all things) iPhone games.

It’s currently a temporary gig with no benefits, but I have every intent of proving that they cannot get along without me.

I’m sorry I didn’t tell you guys earlier, but I wanted to clear with my bosses how much I can talk about (which boils down to, yes, talk about Warped and talk about our development process but give no details of the games we’re making).

Now, this is not going to affect Inaria one bit – I made absolutely sure of that before I signed on. Inaria will still be published, and it will be published under the “Viridian Games” label. (Label! Tee hee!) But after Inaria is done I won’t be making any more of my own iPhone games while I’m working for Warped.

And here I have to give huge thanks to Ryan Clark, who convinced me to port Inaria to the iPhone and even lent me a Mac Mini so I could do so. If he hadn’t pushed me in this direction, I wouldn’t have gotten this job.

So Ryan, thank you. Bottom of my heart, man.

It’s been a while since I’ve done an in-depth story on a developer I admire. So let’s fix that!

Brad Wardell, as you probably know if you read this blog, is the president, founder and CEO of Stardock, a software development company that specializes in two different types of software: operating system customization software and games.

Brad’s entry into software development was almost accidental. His first serious business foray was into hardware – in 1990 he started building computers and selling them pretty much out of his house (a la Michael Dell). He called his company “Stardock Systems”. In 1992 OS/2 was released and Brad felt that he could gain a competitive advantage by preloading OS/2 onto the computers he sold. In doing so he became quite familiar with OS/2.

In 1993 he realized there could be a market for an OS/2 game. He had never programmed before, so he bought two books: Teach Yourself C in 21 Days and OS/2 Presentation Manager Programming, and using the information in just these two books, he wrote Galactic Civilizations.

As you can see, GalCiv was a bit primitive graphically. At the time, Brad only knew how to create windows and icons, so everything you see in GalCiv consists of one of these two features. But it was a critical success (and not just because it was practically the only OS/2 game at the time). It was well-designed and had some excellent AI. Now, I recall being at Origin at the time and watching GalCiv top lots of “Game of the Year” lists for 1994…a lot of us at the time couldn’t understand how Origin games had lost out to an OS/2 game that…well, looked like that.

But as good a game as it was, Brad made almost no money on it. He was ripped off by his publisher and couldn’t afford a lawyer to fight back. He learned a very valuable lesson the hard way – a lesson that almost sank Stardock.

But what the publishers couldn’t take away from him was the name Stardock on the box. While the success of GalCiv didn’t profit Brad, it did raise the profile of his company. Brad was able to profit by writing an expansion to his own game called Shipyards, which sold well enough to keep him going for a bit. IBM came to Brad hat in hand asking if Brad could create a special version of GalCiv for the IBM OS/2 game pack. Brad did, which he titled Star Emperor.

Brad had always been intrigued by the idea of customizing the OS/2 operating system, and in 1994 became convinced that an OS customization tool for OS/2 could be profitable. This lead to him teaming up with fellow OS/2 enthusiast Kurt Westerfield to release OS/2 Essentials, the software that would eventually become Object Desktop.

And Brad was also able to get the rights to the “Galactic Civilizations” name back and republish the game (with improvements) as Galactic Civilizations 2 for OS/2.

And at this point, he figured the game was over and he’d won. By twenty-four he was a millionaire and Stardock was not only selling tons of copies of OS/2 Essentials and GalCiv 2 but publishing other people’s OS/2 software as well.

And then he made his second mistake – he allowed his zealotry for OS/2 to nearly wreck his business.

IBM quietly dropped support for OS/2 in 1995, and Microsoft released Windows NT 4.0 (the one with the much more usable “Windows 95″-style interface) in 1996. Windows NT 4.0 quickly captured OS/2’s core market. There were lots of people (including some of my friends at Origin (Hi, J. Allen!)) who believed that even if IBM’s support of OS/2 was a bit spotty, the superiority of the platform plus user advocacy and support could make the platform a success.

Needless to say, it didn’t work. Soon Brad began to realize that something was wrong, but Stardock continued to release OS/2 software until 1998. This could easily have been the end of Stardock, but two things saved his company.

The first was an employee, Mike Duffy. Mike was the lead developer on Entrepreneur and decided he would write a low-level, cross-platform library that worked on both OS/2 and Windows. This enabled Stardock to finally start making the transition from OS/2 to Windows.

The second was customer loyalty. Stardock at this point had a whole bunch of customers who didn’t just buy their software – they were fans of the company. They wanted to see the company do well. So they actually bought subscriptions to Stardock’s online ObjectDesktop.Net service before it was actually ready. Because of this, while 1998 was the worst year in Stardock’s history they managed to pull through, and by 1999 they had begun to release Windows products.

By 2000 things were looking up again. Brad’s focus on desktop customization software was paying off, with WindowBlinds, ObjectDesktop and DesktopX all selling well. Stardock avoided the dot-com crash of 2001 by actually being profitable and having a business plan, and by 2002 Brad decided that the company was ready to get back into games again. The first had to be a version of the original Galactic Civilizations for Windows.

But development of GalCiv for Windows slowed when the launch of Windows XP approached. Because Windows XP had more customization features “out of the box”, Brad was concerned that people would feel they didn’t need Stardock’s customization software any longer. In fact, the exact opposite happened – Windows users who had never been exposed to desktop customization before saw it in Windows XP, experimented with it, and then turned to Stardock when they ran up against the limitations of what the built-in customization could do. Needless to say, this was a great relief for Stardock.

In 2003, Windows finally got a version of Galactic Civilizations. This edition included everything from the OS/2 versions of Galactic Civilizations, its expansions and its sequel (thus, GalCiv for Windows is equivalent to GalCiv 2 for OS/2). Plus it now looked like this!

At the same time, Stardock had been beefing up their digital content delivery system. Galactic Civilizations for Windows was available at retail and online on the same day. Retail boxes included a code that could be entered into Stardock Central, which registered the user’s copy and allowed them to download the latest version.

Stardock Central quickly expanded to allow digital delivery of any product Stardock published – and Stardock had gotten back into the business of publishing other software.

And in 2006, Stardock released Galactic Civilizations 2, and Brad briefly became the focus of the DRM debate when he stated that GalCiv 2 had no DRM and never would. This caused some criticism from DRM providers (indeed, a Starforce employee actually posted a link on their forums telling people where they could pirate GalCiv 2) but Brad’s decision does not seem to have affected GalCiv 2’s sales, which have been excellent.

And in 2008 Stardock updated the perfectly functional but kind of hoary old Stardock Central with a flashy new version called Impulse. Impulse is quite comparable to Valve’s Steam in that it’s a system designed to allow people to buy and digitally download software from a host of different companies, but is different in that Impulse doesn’t require an internet connection simply to play games, but only when purchasing a new game or using other online features.

Brad long ago returned to millionaire status and has stayed there since. His strategy of cultivating a loyal fanbase and shipping excellent software while staying out of debt has allowed Stardock to grow into a major online presence and allowed him to overcome his missteps.

Brad has developed a rather…unique online persona. During his stint on the Poweruser.tv podcast, he effectively acted as the “comic” to host Kristin Hatcher’s “straight man”, saying and doing outrageous things simply to get her reaction.

Brad has also been at the core of several flamewars about OS customization, routinely insisting that the customer is not always right – especially when catering to certain customers would hurt his business. At one point he exclaimed in a forum post, “I’m too old and too rich for this shit.”

His political views seem to lean toward the individualist, and he has a particular hatred of taxes, seeing them as good money given to the government who will then give it to people who haven’t earned it and probably won’t deserve it.

Overall, I think Brad is a great guy who had to overcome incredible disadvantages to succeed. If I had the chance to work for Stardock I’d probably jump at it. Despite having to move to Michigan.

During the 2004 run-up to the launch of the Playstation Portable, one of the promises made by Hirai & Co was that I would be able to carry around a playable copy of Final Fantasy VII at all times.

Now, five years later, that promise is finally kept.

So maybe now I’ll get one.

(Yes, I know, I could’ve already done it with homebrew, yadda yadda yadda.)

Lured by the promise of potential Starcraft II beta keys, I went ahead and created a new Battle.Net account.

And I discovered something interesting that I hadn’t seen people mention much. You can add Starcraft, Diablo II, and Warcraft III to your account just by typing in your (valid) CD key for each product.

At which point Blizzard will store the key and allow you to download and install the games onto any computer.

Which means that, for the first time since its release ten years ago, you can finally play Starcraft without needing a disc in the drive. Same thing for Diablo II. (To Blizzard’s credit, they did remove the CD check from Warcraft III a few updates back.) Indeed, you don’t need the discs OR the cd keys ever again, as long as you’ve got an internet connection.

This is progress of the highest order. The only thing lacking is the ability to buy the games online (Blizzard will still ship you a physical box if you order a game from them). Once that happens, Battle.Net will effectively be Blizzard’s version of Steam or Impulse.

Of course, you can’t add Diablo I or Warcraft I or II…which is kind of disappointing. Maybe that’ll get fixed later. Maybe Blizzard could offer those games as freebies to people who have purchased enough Blizzard products (which, goshwow, I think I have.)