![]() Changing the names of all of the real-world leaders involved in order to keep the lawyers at bay, it hinged around a race for the Russian presidency involving a moderate, Yeltsin-like incumbent and two right-wing opposition candidates. He prepared a 25,000-word walkthrough of a plot whose broad strokes would survive into the finished game. In the meanwhile, Activision wanted something fresh, something with the sort of ripped-from-the-headlines relevance that Ken Williams liked to talk about.īates settled on a story line involving Boris Yeltsin’s Russia, that unstable fledgling democracy whose inheritance from the Soviet Union encompassed serious organized-crime and corruption problems along with the ongoing potential to initiate thermonuclear Armageddon any time it chose to do so. But the reality was that there was little appetite for re-fighting the Cold War in the popular culture of the mid-1990s that would have to wait until a little later, until the passage of time had given those bygone days of backyard fallout shelters and duck-and-cover drills a glow of nostalgia to match that of radioactivity. One alternative - the most logical one in a way, given the time spans of its two star advisors’ intelligence careers - was to look to the past, to make the game a work of historical fiction. Activision faced the same problem with Spycraft. Authors like those Bates had grown up reading were trying out international terrorist gangs, mafiosi, and drug runners as replacements for that handy all-purpose baddie the Soviet Union. It was thus with no small excitement that he agreed to spend 600 hours creating a script and design document for an espionage game, which Legend’s programmers and artists might also end up playing a role in bringing to fruition if all went well.Īt this time, writers of espionage fiction and techno-thrillers were still trying to figure out what the recent ending of the Cold War meant for their trade. Ever since, his literary consumption had included plenty of Frederick Forsyth, Robert Ludlum, and John Le Carré. ![]() Bates had read his first spy novel before starting high school. But another, better one was that he was a child of the Washington Beltway with a father who had been employed by the National Security Agency. One reason for this was that Legend lived perpetually hand to mouth in a sea of bigger fish, and couldn’t afford to look askance at paying work of almost any description. Realizing that he still needed help with the interactive part of interactive movies, Gershenfeld in turn took the unusual step of reaching out to Bob Bates, co-founder of the Virginia-based rival studio and publisher Legend Entertainment, to see if he would be interested in designing Spycraft for Activision. Bobby Kotick hired Alan Gershenfeld, a former film critic and logistical enabler for Hollywood, to spearhead his efforts in that direction. Luckily, Activision’s base in Los Angeles left it well situated, geographically speaking, to become a hotbed of interactive movie-making. (On balance, this may not have been such a bad thing that game is so unfair and obtuse as to come off almost as a satire of player-hostile adventure-game design.) ![]() ![]() To make matters worse, much of the crew that had made Return to Zork, including that project’s mastermind William Volk, had just left. The company was chronically understaffed in relation to its management’s ambitions. ![]() With the name-brand, front-of-the-box talent for Spycraft: The Great Game - and, if all went swimmingly, its sequels - thus secured, it was time to think about who should do the real work of making it.Įven as late as 1994, Activision’s resurrection from its near-death experience of 1991 was still very much a work in progress. On January 6, 1994, Activision announced in a press release that it was “teaming up with William Colby, the former head of the Central Intelligence Agency, to develop and publish espionage-thriller videogames.” Soon after, Colby brought his good friend Oleg Kalugin into the mix as well. Warning: this article spoils the ending of Spycraft: The Great Game! ![]()
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