Joe Martin – Product Marketing for Startups

Update: Unlimited Hyperbole is no longer available. There are two episodes preserved by the Thief community on Youtube which are linked in the episode index, however other episodes have since been lost to time.

These days, publishers and journalists love to talk about how big a business games are. Just a single big title can bring in millions of pounds and keep thousands of employed, for example, while even indie developers can succeed admirably. The less talked-about side effect of all this though is that when games do fail, they fail hard.

Our guest this episode knows this all too well. In addition to working on the usual spate of cancelled games, Nicoll Hunt also worked on one of the biggest gaming flops ever, APB. Now, Nicoll discusses what that collapse looked like from the inside and why Realtime Worlds went out of business. He also touches on some of the cancelled games he worked on at Codemasters.

Unlimited Hyperbole is a short podcast about videogames and the stories we tell about them. The show is divided into seasons of five episodes, each with a precise topic. This time we’re talking about ‘The One That Got Away’ – but to find out more, read after the jump.

So.

I’ve been getting a lot of comments lately about the depressing tone of the podcast or, as some call it, the ‘mournful quality’ of the show. One person even said I sound like Marvin the Paranoid Android. I don’t always intend to do that though; it’s just the way my voice sounds. Sorry.

For once, I don’t actually have a huge amount to add as a comment for this episode though – I think it pretty much stands for itself. Instead, here are some links that are related to the show, if only tangentially.

• I Fight Bears – Nicoll’s site
• You Won’t Respawn Tomorrow – A great article about the closure of APB
• A Life Well Wasted: Episode 2 – Contains some great thoughts about the closure of MMOs
• Punchbag Artists – A great and unrelated piece I read yesterday

That’s all, I guess.