I finally went and tried out Defcon. It was originally released about four years ago. I had seen screenshots of the game before, but never tried out the demo and was curious about how the game played strategically. It was interesting how it’s setup – how your units have different modes, and it takes time to switch between modes. For example, your missile silos can switch between attack mode (where they can launch nukes) and defense mode (where they can shoot down nukes). The switch happens slowly, and the time-delay means making yourself vulnerable and planning ahead. I managed to get 6/7th of the way through the demo before I misunderstood what I was supposed to do, launched all my nukes, but didn’t destroy one of the enemy missile silos that I’m supposed to destroy. This resulted in the tutorial not letting me progress any further, so I had to bail-out of the game. It was disappointing that they didn’t plan for the contingency that players might not do everything right, and get caught in a situation where they can’t progress any further.
Video of Defcon gameplay:
One of the surprising things I noticed on their blog is that they almost shut-down in March. Their latest game wasn’t selling as well as they’d hoped and they were out of money. From their blog, Aug 20, 2010:
Internally we knew within about an hour of Darwinia+’s launch that it hadn’t done well enough. It took us about two weeks to really accept that and the awful realisation that we didn’t have enough to continue with the office or the staff. We had a bunch of creditors knocking at the door, but worse than all of that we were absolutely shattered. Darwinia+ had been really drawn out and I’d spent a lot of time selling the future to the team and when the rug was pulled away from my feet I really didn’t want to continue. Critically, neither did Chris. He’d had to spend a lot of time on Darwinia and decided that we had failed to live up to our original mission of making “Original Video Games”. Striking out on his own made most sense given IV’s failure: “We tried it your way, Mark – didn’t work”. So we started shutting things down. We reached out to our creditors and (amazingly) they accepted our payment plans. We closed the office and sold the tables and chairs. We let Gary, Leander and Martin go (another three that can be officially added to Nicholas Lovell’s redundancy tracker). They were amazingly stoical about it and I’m glad to say that they are all doing well. Then we closed the door on Introversion, rewrote our CVs from scratch, and started applying for jobs.
I guess this was rock bottom. We’d been through crises before, but we’d always wanted to solve the problem and find a solution, this time it was a bit like there was nothing left to save.
A couple of weeks rolled by and I found myself unable to accept the end. Chris too wasn’t actually ready to jack it in…
They managed to limp through it, even though they had to let people go from the company. I was pretty surprised to hear about their money problems since they’ve made a number of games I’ve heard of – Darwinia and Defcon being the most notable. Admittedly, I haven’t been very aware of stuff they’ve done in the past few years. Like I’ve said before, it’s feast or famine in the indie game business.