Gathering of Developers

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

~ the eulogy ~

Gathering of Developers opened in Dallas on 13 January 1998 with a premise that reads as naive now and was close to heretical then, which was a publisher owned and run by the studios it published. Mike Wilson and Harry Miller put it together with three others, and the founding partners were development houses: 3D Realms, Epic MegaGames, Ritual Entertainment, Terminal Reality and PopTop Software. The studios kept their own properties. The publisher took a cut and handled distribution.

The pitch worked because 1998 was the year it could work. Dallas had id Software and 3D Realms within a few miles of each other and Ion Storm was about to open downtown, PC gaming was still a shelf business with real margins on it, and developers had read enough standard publishing contracts to know what one cost them. g.o.d, as everyone abbreviated it, was the counter-offer.

The catalog came out strange and good. Railroad Tycoon II in 1998, then a run through 2000 that took in Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K.², Rune, KISS: Psycho Circus and the Blair Witch games, and then the year that actually counted. Max Payne, Serious Sam: The First Encounter and Oni all shipped under the label in 2001.

None of it made money fast enough. Take-Two Interactive bought the company on 1 May 2000, barely two years in, and the founders were gone not long after. The name was shortened to Gathering by February 2003, and on 9 September 2004 Take-Two folded the label into Global Star Software, its budget-shelf imprint. Six years and eight months, start to finish.

~ the dossier ~

~ the promised lot ~

The thing g.o.d is most remembered for is not a game. E3 was in Atlanta in 1998, and rather than pay for floor space inside the convention center, the company rented a parking lot across the street, put a stage on it, and handed out barbecue and beer to anyone who walked over. They called it the Promised Lot. Something close to ten thousand people came, which is a number no booth of that budget was going to produce.

The stunt is the company's entire personality in one gesture: spend on the party, spend on the developers, treat the industry's official venue as a thing to stand outside of. It also spent money the company was not yet earning. Take-Two's offer arrived less than two years later.

~ the catalog ~

Seen from Turkey in 2001, the g.o.d list has an accidental property, which is that hardly any of it needed a connection. Max Payne was single player and Railroad Tycoon II was six hours alone with a map, while Serious Sam's co-op ran over a LAN, which is exactly what an internet cafe is. I was on a modem at home and in cafes at the weekend, and the games that got to me were the ones where the network was optional. That describes this publisher's whole catalog, without the publisher ever having planned it that way.

Max Payne is the title that outlived the label. Remedy built it in Finland, g.o.d published it in July 2001, and the bullet-time mechanic and the comic-panel cutscenes got copied steadily for the next five years. Serious Sam is the other survivor, a Croteam game out of Zagreb that ran on weak hardware and threw a hundred screaming enemies at you at once, which is a design decision and a hardware decision at the same time.

~ what the founders did next ~

Mike Wilson and Harry Miller tried the same thing twice more. Gamecock Media Group in 2007 was the second attempt and was sold to SouthPeak inside two years. Devolver Digital in 2009 was the third, and that one held: the same model, developer-first and loud about it, pointed at independent games instead of retail PC boxes, arriving at the moment Steam made distribution cost almost nothing.

godgames.com does not resolve. The lot across from the Georgia World Congress Center is presumably still a lot. The idea outlasted the company by a decade and came back under a different name with the same people running it, which is more than most dead publishers manage.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »