My Game Development Career

by wickedcestus

Over the weekend, I picked up a small iPhone game that I've been hearing a decent amount of buzz about, Game Dev Story. It's essentially "Video Game Tycoon", a continuation of the "Roller Coaster Tycoon", "Elevator Tycoon", and "Zoo Tycoon" fad of games. You start off as an Indie developer making games for the PC, but as you expand you can hire more staff, get console licences, and develop games that could make it to the Hall of Fame! I could write a review, but it's only about $4 and all the review would say is, "Hey, I really like this game because I like video games and I like it when video games are about video games and also this game is pretty cool you can make Pirate Racing games called 'Poop Deck Racing' and that's pretty funny." Actually, it probably would have been a bit more well-written than that. Anyways, instead of doing that, I'm going to write a narrative (read: story) about my stupendous development career. The game technically ends after 20 years - It doesn't save any high scores past this point - but I continued to truck onto Year 25, with best-seller after best-seller. My business had it's ups and downs, and it's lefts and rights, but mostly, NNEs and SSWs.

This is what it looks like when you're a lot better than me.
I instinctively named my company "Bitches?" just because I thought it would be funny. And it was. Later on, people would start writing us letters saying, "I love Bitches?" or, "This is just what I would expect from Bitches?" which is incredible and made me love myself. Sadly, for the first 15 of my games, I didn't realize I could name them, so don't expect the funny to appear before near the middle of my story. And what a story it is. It all started about 25 years ago, in a small office with 4 chairs.....

We started off by making games for the PC, because we didn't have to pay any money for a licence. We immediately started making Adventure games, but we made some racing games too. We were a small company back then, only six people, including me and my secretary. (We later grew to 10 people! That's a lot of people). We ignored the NES due to lack of money, but when the Game Boy came along we knew we needed to get in on this shit. We started making almost exclusively Sim games for the Game Boy. We made pirate sims, robot sims, marathon sims, ninja sims, any sim you can think of. We seem to always focus mostly on Robot games though; that was really our wheelhouse. We were Lvl 5 at making Robot games even before we stopped developing for the Game Boy, about six years into my story.

Then, the SNES came along. We were impressed, we felt that we could continue making sweet Sims and robot games for that too! Our first game for the SNES was a robot-themed shooter, which was awesome. It wasn't long after that the PlayStation came out, and this is the part where our company goes up, and then comes crashing back down. We became way too focused on the Playstation. I mean, why not? It was awesome. We went from consistently selling between 100 000 and 300 000 units to selling 600 000 units with our first game. Game #15 was our first million seller, providing us with the extreme confidence in the system.

We then realized that naming our games might be a good idea. We decided to make a historical shooter name "Darkest of Day" (because you can only put in 14 characters, we had to leave out the "s"). This didn't quite hit a million, but it was still a good leap from our old stuff. We continued with "Robocalypse", another shooter which also didn't quite reach a million. But then, we broke through. "Arrrrrrrrrrrr!" sold 2 million copies, allowing us to move to a new office, and gain a lot of confidence. Unfortunately, this marked the peak of our sales for a while to come. We expected every game to sell that amount or more from this point on, but that was a terrible mistake.

You see, because we expected every game to sell, we started pumping all our money into every game we made. We would end up with debts after every game, and we would just make enough back to create one more game. The games still consistently sold one million, but we didn't see any growth from this. From "Ninjaru" - which I am aware doesn't mean anything, unless it actually does, where in that case I am aware of how insanely clever I am - to "SimAnimals" - which I had no idea would tank so bad - we followed this idea, wasting all our money and barely keeping afloat. Yeah, all our games would be the number one selling game in the first week, but they didn't have the "mass market appeal" we were looking for.

We made a last ditch effort with "Arrrrrrrrrgh!", a spiritual successor to "Arrrrrrrrrrr!" since we can't make direct sequels to game unless they make it to the Hall of Fame. It sold 1.5 million copies, JUST LIKE OUR LAST SIX GAMES. Even "POOPDECKRACE" couldn't break through this magical barrier. Our next game, "*sigh*" really showed the exasperation we felt. So, we went back to Square One. We decided to make some relatively cheap educational games for the Playstation to get some capitol. We also did a lot more contract work with external sources. We lost a lot of fans because we didn't put out as many games, but I felt it was our best solution.

"Toads and Friends" and "Pirate Pals" made us enough money to start making games we cared about again. But then, we realized that we were still making games for the original Playstation! The Playstation 2 had just came out, but we didn't have enough money to get the licence for that yet. So, we decided to create a couple more really good PS1 games, before trying to get a new licence. We settled on the DS, because of it's market share, but then compromised for the PSP because it cost a lot less.

Our last two PS1 games were "RoboRPG" which is pretty self-explanatory, and "Arr ye Matey!", yet another spiritual successor to "Arrrrrrrrr!". They both almost made it to two million, but cost a lot less than our other games. We made a PC game called "Filler" to make the last few thousands we needed for a PSP licence, and then moved on to being a portable developer. We hired some new talent, my favourite of which was Charles motherfucking Royal, who was a master of making things awesome. Our games would have been like 50% worse if not for him. This was extremely helpful because some of our employees were chumps who couldn't keep up with the amazing games we were about to be pumping out. We then began our series of PSP games.

Our first was "ArrrrrrrrrPG!", a fourth spiritual successor to our best-selling game, which actually managed to sell 50 000 more copies than the original. We followed that with the derivative "Ninja Side Story", which then usurped "ArrrrrrrrrPG!" from the top-selling slot. But, then we topped ourselves one more time, with "Gooooooooolf!", a golf sim that sold 3 million units. At that point, this meant that half of PSP owners at this point owned our game. How could we top that?

We didn't. We released "Robot Wars?", a game suffering (or maybe benefiting) from a typo in the title. Even though it got a lot of buzz on the internets, it only sold about 1.5 million copies. This is when we decided to make the switch over to PS2 development. It's quite strange that my company became such a Sony-centric developer, considering how I am not much of a Sony fan at all. I guess it just made sense, the PS2 had a lot more units out there than the 360, which cost more to develop for.

(I'm going to go on a brief tangent now to talk about this game's strange history. Obviously, all the consoles aren't actually named after the copyrighted console names themselves, they are slight variations. They manage to go through the last twenty years of consoles pretty faithfully, except for a few exceptions. I guess they just didn't want there to be so many console releases that you can't keep track of them. There's no Game Boy Colour, Game Boy Advance or N64 in this game, meaning the GameCube actually comes out a lot earlier in order to compensate. The 360 and Wii both come out at around the same time as the PS2, which is a weird thing. This doesn't really detract from the game that much, but I was just disappointed because I really wanted to make Ocarina of Time. I do like the few joke consoles they throw in there, which usually have ridiculous licence costs. The weirdest thing is, when Sega should be putting out the Dreamcast, they instead come out with a giant brick that looks nothing like anything. They manage to spoof all the other consoles pretty well, I don't really know why they decided to be weird about that one. Anyways, this is a really stupid point to make, but I felt the approprate history really added to the game, and when they left shit out I was all like, "OH SHIT BRO.")
Whaaaaaaat.
Then shit started to get real. We started off with "Ninjas! Yeah!" which sold 2.5 million units. It's sales weren't amazing, but it was our first ever game that made it to the Hall of Fame, which meant we could make a direct sequel to it if we wanted to. We did immediately, and "Ninjas! Yeah! 2" sold about 4.5 million units, but didn't review well enough to make it into the Hall of Fame again. So, we started work on another pirate game, because pirate games always seemed to sell the best for us. "Arrmy Pirates!" came out with fantastic review scores: three 9s and a 10. It sold 7.8 million in total, which made us rich as heck. So, we continued by making another Robot game, because they were are favourite to make.

"Robits!" our first game to break the 10 million unit barrier, and marking our third game in the Hall of Fame. We continued making sequels to these games (and another HoF game, "Animal House") until we became so incredibly rich that we could afford to develop for the Wii. We made "Arrmy Pirates 3", which sold 20 million fucking units. That's like 20 million people, and they all have our game. It was nuts. We decided that after that magnificence, we couldn't keep going on. We couldn't possibly top that, it was too good. Also, it was three AM and I hadn't slept yet.

In conclusion, Game Dev Story is awesome. It has the same addictive quality of all those other Sim games, but hits a lot closer to home considering most of us know more about games than theme parks or elevators. It's one of those games that holds on to you and never lets go, at least for the weekend. Plus, it's only four bucks, and that's a pretty sick deal.