Dinosaurs set Turok apart from other first-person shooters, according to Propaganda Games. The creatures act as a neutral third party in many battles.
In Depth
Video Games
Propaganda touts alliances with big players
Vancouver-based games studio says aligning with a large publisher is a reality of the business
Last Updated February 1, 2008
By Peter Nowak
When it comes to designing video games for home consoles today, Josh Holmes says it's either go big or go home.
With the buyout of Edmonton's BioWare by Electronic Arts, the world's biggest game publisher, in October last year, the writing is on the wall for small independent studios.
"At this point, it's not impossible to go it alone, but it depends on what you want to focus on," says Holmes, vice-president and studio manager of Vancouver-based Propaganda Games. "It's increasingly difficult for someone to do [mainstream console games] independently. That's becoming more and more the territory of big publishers."
Propaganda, which Holmes formed in 2005 with three fellow entrepreneurs who split off from EA's Canadian unit, didn't stay independent for long. The company submitted a bid to Touchstone, part of Disney's games division, to put together the next release in the Turok dinosaur-hunter franchise. Touchstone awarded Propaganda the licence, then promptly bought the studio.
That suited Holmes just fine, as it gave Propaganda the resources to design Turok, which is being touted by Microsoft and Sony as one of top releases this winter for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, and get it to a wide audience.
The large publishers also have every incentive to maintain a hands-off relationship with their acquisitions, Holmes says, because the studios have obviously developed their own recipes for success.
BioWare is an excellent example, he says, as it became hugely successful on its own with games such as Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Neverwinter Nights. Although big publishers such as EA have been accused of rushing titles out in order to meet deadlines and infringing on their designers' creativity by doing so, messing with BioWare's method would be a bad idea, Holmes says.
"If I had bought BioWare, I wouldn't be making too many changes," he says. "I'm sure that's something EA is very aware of."
There is still a market for small indie studios, Holmes says, but they are probably better off designing either downloadable titles for the main consoles, or games for portable systems and the Nintendo Wii.
Propaganda, meanwhile, has experienced little interference from Disney in the two years spent developing Turok, Holmes says.
The game did get pushed back to a February release from its original street date of September 2007, to keep it from getting lost in the shuffle of all the other major games hitting stores — including two other big first-person shooter titles, Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4.
"There were some absolutely spectacular games that came out that got lost," Holmes says. "There's only so many games that people are going to buy."
The delay allowed Propaganda to add more multiplayer maps and fine-tune the single-player mode. The result is a first-person shooter — a video game in which the player is an armed character who sees the game world from the perspective of the shooter — that differs from its peers through its advanced artificial intelligence, Holmes says.
In Turok, players are put in the shoes of the titular hero, who travels to a planet inhabited by dinosaurs in order to take down a vicious war criminal. Players must not only do battle with human enemies, but they must be wary of the planet's dinosaur inhabitants, which aren't particularly discerning in their choice of meals.
"They're a third neutral party in any conflict. That creates a triangle of conflict between you, your human enemies and the creatures and dinosaurs that are native to the planet," he says. "It's a wild-card element in any battle."
Creating the game's visuals was also a challenge because designers weren't able to use motion-capture technology, which has greatly eased animation over the past few years.
"You can't motion capture a raptor or a T. Rex," Holmes says. "It's something you have to build from the ground up."
Although the studio is banking on Turok to be a success and has its eye on a sequel, Propaganda is currently working on two other titles — one an action role-playing game, the other a secret.
Holmes doesn't want to get much bigger — with 150 staff, Propaganda is just about the right size, he says.
If it grew any larger, the studio would "lose its sense of community and the tight team-oriented feel that makes us what we are," he says.
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