These plans included the development of a new game called Obsidian for SegaSoft, described by Wired at the time as "a Myst-like exploration and idea game". In 1995, the company reflected on these failures in a rather candid conversation with Wired, where the spokesperson Anna Caldwell and executive vice president Peter Barrett revealed that it had decided to stop focusing primarily on action games and try for something more ambitious instead. Cadillacs and Dinosaur was one game and Loadstar was the other they came out at the same time and both game designers David Fox and Brian Moriarty were complaining, ‘You’re killing my game design here.’ We really took a hit in the first round of publicity because we so oversold what we were doing compared to what we delivered because we cut down on the gameplay too much." Others inside the company believed they were far too simple compared to what the studio had been promising in the media, and that they failed to capitalize on the hype.įassberg tells Time Extension, "In the first round of games from Rocket Science, the emphasis on making it look good meant that we kept simplifying the game. ![]() As Rocket Science personnel later admitted, these games were rushed to get some products out on the market fast and didn't necessarily perform as well as the company had hoped. When Rocket Science released its first two games in 1994 for the Sega CD - the on-rail shooters Loadstar and Cadillacs and Dinosaurs: The Second Cataclysm) - the reaction from the media and players was far from adoring. While it felt wonderful at the time, this was a very bad idea." Judging by the ink we had gotten, we were the hottest company in the game business, with stories in Fortune, Forbes, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and the cover of Wired magazine. The story had universal appeal, and we spun the tale to keep the buzz going. Writing on his blog in 2019, Blank stated, "Our “Hollywood meets Silicon Valley” story played great in Silicon Valley, they ate it up in Hollywood, and the business press tripped over themselves to talk to us. The amount of positive press felt like a blessing at first, but eventually turned into somewhat of a curse. The publication Wired featured the company on its front cover and called it "the first digital supergroup", while trade magazines couldn't help but shine a spotlight on the Rocket Science story. Rocket Science was absolutely stacked with top-tier talent and its CEO Steve Blank hoped that this approach would generate some good publicity for the company, which it quickly did. The November 1994 issue of Wired featuring Rocket Science on the cover - Image: Wired Elon Musk worked at Rocket Science for an hour in IT, or in programming (I can’t quite remember)." "And one of the heads of the company Peter Barrett invented CinePak, which was the first video compression software that was available. "Even on the engineering side, our head of engineering invented Quicktime," Fassberg adds. ![]() Meanwhile, some of Rocket Science's other hires included Alex Laurant (who went on to work at ILM), Jay Schuster who later worked at Pixar, the Hollywood visual artists Mark Sullivan and Rich Cohen, and former Lucasfilm Games designers David Fox and Brian Moriarty. Matthew Fassberg, for example, came from a background in TV, having worked on channels like MTV and Comedy Central. This took us back to 1993, which is when the company Rocket Science was initially formed.Īt the time, Rocket Science was a hot new start-up within the Bay Area, making a name for itself by hiring the best talent it could find in film, games, music, & television. ![]() ![]() So, in order to mark this occasion, we thought it would be a great time to chat with the Rocket Science producer Matthew Fassberg to find out more about the ambitious studio, Obsidian's tricky development, and how this surprising rerelease came to be. Normally, this would be where you'd expect the story of a game like Obsidian to end, but remarkably, earlier this year, it became playable again after more than two decades of being abandonware.
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