Veteran game developers Mike Nelson (Falcon 3.0) and Larry Holland (X-Wing) began development house Timelapse Mobile in early 2005 and are now close to releasing their first title, Bodacious 80's Challenge. In this interview, Games On Deck talks to Mike Nelson about their switch to mobile, problems with offshoring, and their new title.
Games On Deck: What's the philosophy behind Timelapse Mobile?
Mike Nelson: Even when you're recruiting employees, it's believed that videogames is where it's at, but we believe, and we think that a lot of other people do too, that it's really games which you can play for five or ten minutes and you don't have to devote your life to them.
GOD: It's interesting because both you and Larry (Holland) who started the company made your name in the traditional video games business. What led to such a drastic switch?
MN: It's sort of interesting, but it's much more of a mass market opportunity. I'd been looking at the mobile space since several years ago, and every time I talked to anyone in that area, people would always say, "The mass market is several years away." So I kind of talked myself out of it, but then I took a hard look at it myself, and when I really looked at the hard numbers, well. When I was in the video games business you always judged things by installed user base - when I was president of Microprose, we primarily made PC games but we did port to Mac. I killed that, because the installed base of Mac machines out there was just far too small. And videogames, well, you're talking in terms of the PS2 having 35 million machines out there installed at its peak.
Mobile phones, however, there are a billion and a half, to two billion out there, and even when you only think about the ones out there which are really capable of doing games, it's still 600-700 million. It boggles your mind when you look at it that way. And if you really want to take advantage of that, you're going to have to offer a mass market product.
So really it was the enormity of the potential market we could reach. And then, it takes us back to when Larry and I really started, particularly Larry, he was a programmer working on Commodore 64 stuff! And if you look at the level of most handset today, it's really similar. It takes us back to basic gameplay. You've got to have an addictive product that people can understand and get into quickly, and that's where gaming started off.
Games On Deck: There is a massive user base out there, but they're all using different types of phones, different carriers. How can you reach them all with that level of complexity?
MN: Well, to me, a lot of times the bigger companies, and there's nobody that's really that big, if they want to do an international launch they've got to do, like, 1500 handsets. And that's a challenge, more of a challenge than I thought going in.
But that's not the leverage. The leverage is the ability and understanding of how to make a really good game. That's what really engages people, and if you can figure that out, I guarantee that getting it onto all handsets is a cakewalk.
We're doing our first game, and we're learning as we go. We're just working on the US market currently, until we get over some of these hurdles, and we've picked up almost every carrier for our first game in the US, and we're into the porting process and it's a heck of a lot more complex even than the early days of PC gaming, when you had to deal with Radio Shack built PCs and all kinds of different configurations. But once you have the right tools, it's not as complex as people might want you to believe.
We've made some mistakes. We used an offshore company based in India that just didn't work out for us, and now we're using someone US based and we're developing our own tools.
GOD: What happened with the Indian company?
MN: Well, when we jumped in, I decided it was important for us to understand the offshoring system. One, there was the perception that we'd at least get it done cheaper, and two, that the ability to source high quality talent anywhere in the world and manage that is an asset.
But the reality, it's not just "offshore talent" it's the "right offshore talent." If you can get the right group that has experience with US carriers and the ability to test US carriers beyond an emulator, then it can work. I had gotten some recommendations, and I don't want to name names but it was a company that had done work with EA in Europe and so on and had a pretty good reputation, and we liked working with them and we had the process of working with them down, but the reality was they didn't understand the US carriers such as Sprint, and they couldn't test. We had to do all the testing ourselves. I literally had to hook up 40 phones myself and use two full time testers here just cranking through and that was a complication we really hadn't planned on.
We learned from that process, and we started looking at US based porting houses, and we came across one where the price actually turned out to be about the same. Now, that's either I didn't negotiate hard enough with the previous company, or prices are beginning to normalise. I've heard that they can get titles ported for something like $200 per handset, but I've learned my lesson. I'd rather get someone I can depend on.
Having said that, I haven't given up on it! I just made a mistake by not having enough diligence when selecting a company.
