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After my first Time Capsule article
which took at look at an old ad for
Legends of Future Past found in a 1994 issue of Computer Gaming
World, I mused about hunting down some of the principle people
involved for a follow-up interview. A text-based MMO before the term
even existed -- that could make for an interesting retrospective
piece. Then I got busy with other things.
Last week I noticed a new follower on
Twitter, Jon Radoff, the very person I was going to track down.
After a few emails, here we are.
Thanks for your time, Jon! |
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Jon Radoff Interview
Conducted by Aaron Simmer
 A
quick rundown of your origins in the videogame industry. Educational
background, how did you get your start, what have you worked on, where
are you now?
I met my wife in an online game called Gemstone back in 1991, and it was
there that we hatched the plan to start Legends of Future Past. I
dropped out of college, and she moved across the country. Since then, I
started a content management software company called Eprise back in
1997; a social network for gamers in 2006 [GamerDNA]; and now I’ve
started a new social game company called
Disruptor Beam.
Tells us a little about Legends of Future Past. How many people
worked on it? What difficulties did you have bringing the project to
fruition? Maybe go into a brief explanation of how it all worked.
(Younger readers won't a clue how any of this worked.)
Originally, there were only a couple of us at the company—me and Angela
(who I later married). There were a dozen Game Masters who developed
content, using a scripting language we developed for online game
creation. As things started to grow, we added other people to help with
billing, customer service and
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group of us, several went on to very
interesting careers in the game industry. One of our first game masters
went on to become an executive producer for Sony, and built online games
like Star Wars Galaxies (pre-NGE!) and Everquest 2. Another started an
online collectible trading card company which was acquired by Sony. And
my longtime friend Ichiro Lambe, who was both a Game Master and coder,
ended up starting his own very successful indie game studio:
Dejobaan.
Do you recall how many players dove into Legends?
Microscopic by today’s standards. I can’t recall the exact number, but
I’m certain that more people play Mafia Wars in a single hour than ever
played our game back in the 1990’s.
What challenges did a text-based MMO present?
MMO was a term that didn’t exist when we started. We thought of it as
interactive fiction. The challenge was keeping things fresh—we thought
of television as our competition, which led us to focus on live
roleplaying events. That worked fine at the scale we operated at. In
some ways, it’s good we never needed to “scale” it to the level of a
true MMO, because we’d have lost the sense of immersion and storytelling
that was present in LoFP.
When and how did Legends of Future Past end?
It ran for 8 years—long enough for it to overlap with the creation
of new MMORPG products like Everquest. I’d have liked to see it go
longer, but towards the end it wasn’t financially viable; keep in mind
that operating data-centers on the Internet was exponentially more
expensive back then compared to today.
It seems to me that Legends of Future Past had some really big ideas,
concepts, and goals -- interactive fiction, strategy with friends,
ever-expanding worlds, morality, skill-based class systems, fun, etc. --
that really haven't changed much over the last 18 years. Do you think
the medium will ever attain "perfection" in regard to those goals?
I think there’s an awful lot of room for growth in online roleplaying
games. At Disruptor Bean, we’d like to incorporate some of the elements
you just mentioned into the new territory of social games—which is
exciting because most people think it can’t be done within the limited
environment of places like Facebook.
If a gamer weaned on the likes of City of Heroes and World of
WarCraft was suddenly presented with Legends of Future Past, what would
the reaction be?
I think the market is accustomed to immersive graphics. It would be hard
to turn back the clock on that. There is still a market for text-based
games, but it’s very limited.
The ad copy for Legends of the Future Past makes a lot of boasts.
Hindsight being 20/20, what might you have changed about the ad copy?
I think I’d skip some of the self-congratulatory adjectives like
“monumental” and let the breadth of the world speak for itself. I do
think we did a reasonably good job of focusing on the “experience” of
playing (that you could have adventures, romance, an escape from
reality) rather than the “features.” Maybe we could have focused on the
experience even more. Even today, many people still remember the feeling
that LofP gave them—although most don’t recall what the game mechanics
were like.
Who did the illustrations?
Good question. It’s been too long for me to remember. If the person who
did it reads this, I hope they contact me.
What life lesson did Legends teach you?
I was a college drop-out when I started it who knew very little about
business. Although I had previously written some shareware games and a
commercial BBS program—it was LofP that taught me a lot of (sometimes
painful) lessons about how to bootstrap, build teams, generate a profit
and create something out of nothing. It taught me to always be in
learning-mode, because the ground is always shifting beneath you.
The digital infrastructure that exists today is very different than
what was available in the early '90s so does it ever cross your mind
that Legends of Future Past should make a dramatic and graphical return?
The essence of Legends of Future Past was the storytelling and
relationships within its community. If there’s a good way to recapture
that aspect in a more modern interface, we might do it, but I suspect it
would need to be something quite different than the 3D graphical MMOs
that exist today.
There are some people out there that think game developers and
entrepreneurs like yourself are swimming in giant bins of money. Can you
confirm this?
I don’t think there are many entrepreneurs who are driven exclusively by
money. For me, it’s the drive to change the world in awesome new ways. I
really believe in capitalism, competition and entrepreneurship as the
trinity that can make the world a better place.
Your latest venture is called Disruptor Beam. What's that all about?
We’re creating social games, which I define as games that you play
primarily with your friends. Today, that means Facebook games—but
ultimately it’s a very large, very diverse market. We think there’s a
huge opportunity to raise the bar by introducing elements from
roleplaying games like storytelling, consequences, relationships and
interesting virtual economies.
(May 14, 2010)
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