Digital Anvil

» see digitalanvil.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Digital Anvil opened on 8 april 1996 in Austin, Texas, and the founder list is the part people forget. Chris Roberts and his brother Erin, plus Tony Zurovec, Marten Davies, Craig Cox, John Miles and Eric Peterson, most of them out of Origin Systems and the Wing Commander games. And Robert Rodriguez, who had already made El Mariachi and Desperado and was there because the studio intended to be a film company as much as a game company. Microsoft and AMD put up the money. The name was supposed to say hard work and high tech at the same time.

The thing they announced was Freelancer, and the pitch was enormous. A space game with no loading screens between systems, flight on a mouse instead of a joystick, an economy that kept running whether or not you were watching, and a world you could be a trader in one week and a pirate in the next. Roberts showed it in 1999. It was the sort of demo that makes a room go quiet, and it also described a game that nobody had built yet, including the people describing it.

Marten Davies stepped down as president in february 2000. By june Microsoft was in talks to buy the studio, and Roberts said out loud what the problem was: his team needed sums of money that only a very large company could hand over. The acquisition was announced on 5 december 2000 and closed that month. Conquest: Frontier Wars and Loose Cannon were dropped and went to Ubisoft. Brute Force stopped being a PC game and became an Xbox exclusive. Roberts left the company he had founded and stayed on as a consultant on his own game.

Freelancer reached shops in march 2003, which is the year I was nineteen and most of my hours at a keyboard were being billed by the hour in an Ankara internet cafe. Those rooms ran Counter-Strike. A game like Freelancer was the wrong shape for that economy entirely: it wanted an install, a save file that would still be there tomorrow, and long evenings that nobody was charging you for. It was a game for people with a machine of their own, and in 2003 the machine of my own was not the one I spent most of my time at.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it promised ~

The Hollywood half was real, not a slogan. Digital Anvil did the visual effects work on the 1999 Wing Commander film, the one Roberts directed himself, which is a rare thing for a games studio to have on its resume and not a thing anyone remembers fondly. The founding idea was that the same building could produce a movie and a game and treat them as one product, an idea that has been tried at intervals ever since by people who did not look up what happened here.

Freelancer as announced and Freelancer as released are two different games. The seamless universe was trimmed and the persistent economy was reduced. The multiplayer stopped well short of what had been described. What survived is still unusual: mouse flight that felt right, in a galaxy large enough to get lost in. It went straight into the month's top sellers.

~ the decline ~

Between the Microsoft purchase and 2001 the studio said almost nothing in public, long enough that people began writing Freelancer off as vaporware. The word gets thrown around cheaply, but there was a real question in it, which is what happens when a studio's ambition is set by one person and that person no longer works there. Digital Anvil answered it by shipping a smaller game two years late and doing well with it, which is a better outcome than most studios in that position get.

Brute Force followed in may 2003 and set a first-month sales record on Xbox. That is two hits in one year, and it did not save anything. In november 2005 Microsoft redeployed the employees to its own studios organization, and GameSpot reported the melt-down on 1 december. The legal dissolution came through on 31 january 2006, by which time there was nobody in Austin to notice.

~ what it became ~

Alan Hartman, the studio head when it closed, was moved from Austin to Redmond and put in charge of Turn 10, where he has been running the Forza games ever since. That is the quiet ending, and it is the one Microsoft would have written.

The loud ending is Chris Roberts. In 2012 he came back with Cloud Imperium Games and started selling Star Citizen, which is the 1999 Freelancer pitch again with better hardware behind it: a seamless universe with no loading between systems, running its own economy whether or not you log in. It has taken in more than half a billion dollars from people buying ships in a game that has not shipped, and it is now older than Digital Anvil ever got to be. Freelancer meanwhile has spent two decades on private servers run by people who liked the smaller version fine.

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