Comme la plupart d'entre-vous le savent, Goat Store était notre partenaire à la RGC 08. Les 50 exemplaires du jeu Feet of Fury distribués gratuitement à l'entrée de la manif vous ont été offert par son éditeur. Pour cette même occasion, son responsable, Dan Loosen fait le point avec nous sur sa vision de la Dreamcast, et l'avenir de sa société.
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Open Letter to the Dreamcast Community
The Dreamcast. It was and is an amazing system. To this day, a lot of
people still declare that it was the last true "hardcore" system. I
personally think that this has to do with the fact that the Dreamcast was
the last system to be made by an arcade manufacturer who ported many of
their arcade games to the system with spectacular results.
In fact, since the Dreamcast was initially released, the arcade scene
worldwide has given way to different ways to play games. Consoles like the
Xbox 360 allow you to play 'arcade' games in the comfort of your living
room, and consoles like the Wii allow gamers to interact with games in a
way that is new and unique. The Dreamcast really stood at an interesting
turning point in time. And what we were able to accomplish could have only
happened at the point in time that it did with the Dreamcast system like it
did.
The Dreamcast reverse engineered by a group of people very quickly while
the system was still viable. Between today's legal climate and the
complexity added to today's consoles, it would be nearly impossible for the
same thing to happen. This group of people then set to work developing
their own game demos for the system to see what it could do. Everything on
the Dreamcast was borne out of an intense curiosity about the system and
how it functioned.
The GOAT Store was lucky enough to be put into contact with these
developers in a complete chance happening. At the 2002 Midwest Gaming
Classic, a group of people came to show underground Dreamcast development.
I took my disc home from the event and put it on a shelf, never intending
to play it until I got a call from a friend who told me that the games on
the disc were amazing and easily as good as some of the released games. I
plugged the disc into my Dreamcast and I was blown away...
These game demos weren't "homebrew" game demos like I expected, these were
fully realized 2D and 3D worlds with unique gameplay ideas that were unlike
what we had seen elsewhere. We set about contacting these developers to
try to bring their dreams into the real world as games, and we had great
success.
In 2003, Feet of Fury was released by Cryptic Allusion, the group most
responsible for figuring out how to legally reverse engineer the Dreamcast.
This was followed after a huge series of legal wranglings in 2005 by
Inhabitants, Maqiupai and Cool Herders. All of these games were developed
and released with strict guidelines in place, and the quality of the games
speak to what these developers were able to accomplish with limited
resources. And this success was noticed by lots of people both fans of the
Dreamcast and beyond. Developers were contacted by big companies and
offered projects from them to consider for mainstream systems. The
International Game Developers Association asked me to write an article
detailing the games and how they were made, and invited me to do guest
speaking at some of their meetings discussing what we did, why we did it,
and what the plans were for the future.
The future side of the equation was perhaps the most interesting. In 2006,
we announced 12 titles that were in development that we hoped to release
within the year. But, since the Dreamcast development that we have done
has been done by hobbiests and independent developers, this was an
optimistic view. We do not have any way to ensure that a game is completed
or released, and external factors in many cases shifted the attention of
the developers away from what they had planned. Other times, developers
would bring us games that had fatal flaws -- the gameplay wasn't developed
well, the game didn't feel 'complete', the controls didn't work -- whatever
it was, we decided with our first release that if we didn't have 100% faith
in the games we were releasing, we wouldn't publish games just to dupe the
public into purchasing a game that wasn't exceptional. Even though this
has limited releases, we feel that the releases that we have had have all
upheld a top notch level of design and gameplay.
And all the games in the future will uphold this same level of design and
gameplay to make them truly fun. I can't sit here and promise that we'll
have twelve or ten or five or even one more game ever come out, but we do
have a number of projects that are still in development by top notch
developers right now, and we have learned that until those games are ready
to go to the presses not to talk about them. I only hope that in the
future we can tell you all about the wonderful things that developers were
able to accomplish on this unique console that will always hold a special
spot in my heart.
We thank you for supporting us, and we hope that you continue to play your
Dreamcasts well into the future. It truly was an exceptional system, and
perhaps it really was the last true 'hardcore' system, and we are honored
and humbled to have been able to add something to its legacy.
--
Dan Loosen
the GOAT Store, LLC
http://www.goatstore.com/
) et Play Asia.