Game Development Livestream - IP-based Games

Jon Radoff: All right, everybody. Welcome back once again to the game development live stream where we talk to game designers, developers, technologists, everyone who is involved in the process of game development. This is a very exciting talk today, one that is near and dear to my heart as well, because we're talking about IP based games. We're talking about making some of those beloved worlds that have ever been created, bringing them to life and games, and then sometimes even taking game IP and turning it into novels to television shows to movies. This is really cool because we have some amazing guests here, but first I'm here with Paul, who is my co-host, Paul, introduce yourself real quick and then we'll get to our guests for the day.

Game Development Livestream: Absolutely. Hey, everybody. I'm Paul. I've been making games for about 25 years. I've, you know, relevant to today. I've worked on Star Wars products and Simpsons products and all sorts of IP, but I also made a lot of non-IP and a lot of IP inspired. So sort of the middle ground between the two where you dive into the good style of the IP, which you don't actually use that IP. So I'm really looking forward to our conversation today. It's going to be very exciting.

Jon Radoff: Yep, and I'm Jon Radoff, the other co-host of the show, CEO of a company called Beamable, where we make a development platform for the back end of games. The Star Trek game that I worked on is that the posters behind me there. So that'll hopefully give me a little street cred alongside Walking Dead and Game of Thrones. But let me introduce a couple of guests here today. So first, Alan Dean Foster. Thank you for joining us. If you have done anything in science fiction, you have been connected to Alan Dean Foster. It is literally impossible for you to have not come across Alan's work. Alan, just give us the brief intro of yourself, who we'll dive in a little bit later into what you've done.

Game Development Livestream: I've been writing for more than 50 years. I've written 140 books. A lot of other stuff. The story for the first Star Trek movie. And I wrote the book version, the first book version of an original video game book called Shadowkeep. So I've been floating around the peripheries of the game industry for a long time. And I look forward to being in the center of it for a change.

Jon Radoff: And Alan is now part of a new game project, which is using mid world. We're going to talk about mid world and that universe as well in a moment. But Alan, the other Alan, Alan Wilson, that's how you came to the table here. You've also done IP based games. You're connected to the mid world project. Tell us a little bit about why you ended up on this program today.

Game Development Livestream: I should ask you that question. The quick version is Alan Wilson, co-founder of Propire Interactive. For those who don't know, we did Red Oxtra killing floor, Manita, published a bunch of other titles. A lot of things going on. I went into semi retirement, mostly retirement, whatever you want to call it last year. And now I get to choose the projects I work on more. One of them is just sitting on the peripherals of the mid world project that you're talking about helping you guys where I can trip wire, just a brilliant perspective. Another stuff was ever moved. We did a lot of discussions about doing video game into other media. And we also had some interesting discussions about taking well known IP into video games. But we can come on to all of that later. Fantastic. Okay. Thank you. You probably better call me the sort of lesser of two islands or something.