A Note About Lion
Edward J. Pollard
So, Lion is gone.
In retrospect, I'm not surprised at all.
Now this is not a personal attack against Lion at all, but my observations
as a Mac user, one who likes to play games. Why am I not surprised?
My first observation is that I own nothing that was ported by Lion. For the
longest time I almost laughed at the offerings! Doom II! Super Wing
Commander! So long past their media-prime that I bought other games
instead. Doom was just a glorified version of Whack-A-Mole (remember that
carnival game?) that has zero lasting value in the fact of the next
generation of 3D action. Wing Commander? 3 and 4 are entertaining
interactive movies, Super WC is a relic. I don't pay $50 for Relics.
And you know, I did not feel a loss by not having Doom II as soon as my PC
brethen. I had Marathon and I enjoyed it much more. Even in the most paltry
times I have alwasy found a game I truly enjoyed for the Macintosh. Id
software games are lousy single player games, truly lousy. I have no desire
for Quake either. Duke has class, Quake doesn't.
Duke Nukem is the only Lion port that excited me at all, probably since
Duke is still a big game. Big in the way War2 is, lasting appeal. That is
why it sold so well, but I imagine for Lion it was too little too late.
I'm only sorry to see Lion go because of the state of the Mac industry, it
looks bad. If Unreal never gets ported I'm not going to mind that much
anyway.
Now don't call me a heretic or convict me of treason. I have no personal
grudge or emnity against Lion. But their "games", which are all someone
elses games anyway, never excited me. At all.
So I never bought them. Bye Lion.
These are my opinions.
--
Edward J. Pollard
University of Lethbridge Computing Services Department
pol...@nospam.uleth.ca
Michael M. Eilers
In article <pollej-ya02408000...@news.uleth.ca>,
pol...@nospam.uleth.ca (Edward J. Pollard) wrote:
> So I never bought them. Bye Lion.
... and somehow, the lack of *your* personal purchase doomed Lion? I am
afraid you are reaching a bit in your estimation of your power as a
consumer!
Actually, your opinion of the games they ported has nothing whatsoever to
do with the demise of Lion. You are misinformed about how the porting
process works--Lion did not make money on the *sales* of the products they
ported (please correct me if this is a mistaken supposition, Mark &
Bruce)--they made a flat fee for the cost of porting the title, nothing
more. Therefore the sales were not connected to Lion directly. Lion
depneded completely on cash from new porting contracts--a well which could
dry up at any time, and which gave them a fixed income, a dangerous
situation for any company.
The fact that you liked or disliked their ports is utterly irrelevant.
michael
"Surely it is those who find their own lives meaningless who must strive to impose meaning on the Universe as a way of making up for personal lack."
--Isaac Asimov, "Knock Plastic!" reprinted in _Magic_
Michael M. Eilers * Fearful Symmetry Designs
Bruce Burkhalter
In article <eilersm-1008...@ip13.tucson.az.pub-ip.psi.net>,
eilersm@YOU_KNOW_WHAT_TO_DO.mindspring.com (Michael M. Eilers) wrote:
> In article <pollej-ya02408000...@news.uleth.ca>,
> pol...@nospam.uleth.ca (Edward J. Pollard) wrote:
>
>
> > So I never bought them. Bye Lion.
>
> ... and somehow, the lack of *your* personal purchase doomed Lion? I am
> afraid you are reaching a bit in your estimation of your power as a
> consumer!
>
> Actually, your opinion of the games they ported has nothing whatsoever to
> do with the demise of Lion. You are misinformed about how the porting
> process works--Lion did not make money on the *sales* of the products they
> ported (please correct me if this is a mistaken supposition, Mark &
> Bruce)--they made a flat fee for the cost of porting the title, nothing
> more. Therefore the sales were not connected to Lion directly. Lion
> depneded completely on cash from new porting contracts--a well which could
> dry up at any time, and which gave them a fixed income, a dangerous
> situation for any company.
That isn't strictly true. We had royalties on most of our projects but
the products seldom sold enough for us to actually get paid royalties.
Bruce Burkhalter
che...@eden.com
Edward J. Pollard
In article <eilersm-1008...@ip13.tucson.az.pub-ip.psi.net>,
eilersm@YOU_KNOW_WHAT_TO_DO.mindspring.com (Michael M. Eilers) wrote:
> In article <pollej-ya02408000...@news.uleth.ca>,
> pol...@nospam.uleth.ca (Edward J. Pollard) wrote:
>
>
> > So I never bought them. Bye Lion.
>
> ... and somehow, the lack of *your* personal purchase doomed Lion? I am
> afraid you are reaching a bit in your estimation of your power as a
> consumer!
> The fact that you liked or disliked their ports is utterly irrelevant.
It is relevant in the means that people are moping about "Oh poor lion":
when in my personal estimation they have not contributed anything
worthwhile to the Mac gaming expereince.
Take some lithium. You are way to exciteable.
Edward J. Pollard
In article <cheese-1008...@net-7-157.austin.eden.com>,
che...@eden.com (Bruce Burkhalter) wrote:
> > more. Therefore the sales were not connected to Lion directly. Lion
> > depneded completely on cash from new porting contracts--a well which could
> > dry up at any time, and which gave them a fixed income, a dangerous
> > situation for any company.
>
> That isn't strictly true. We had royalties on most of our projects but
> the products seldom sold enough for us to actually get paid royalties.
>
> Bruce Burkhalter
Thank you for helping establish that once again Michael is full of shit and
spouting it to the world as his gospel Bruce :-)
And I really don't mean personal offense Bruce, but I did not find appeal
in most of what you guys did port.
Matthew Vaughan
> In article <cheese-1008...@net-7-157.austin.eden.com>,
> che...@eden.com (Bruce Burkhalter) wrote:
>
> > > more. Therefore the sales were not connected to Lion directly. Lion
> > > depneded completely on cash from new porting contracts--a well which could
> > > dry up at any time, and which gave them a fixed income, a dangerous
> > > situation for any company.
> >
> > That isn't strictly true. We had royalties on most of our projects but
> > the products seldom sold enough for us to actually get paid royalties.
> >
> > Bruce Burkhalter
>
> Thank you for helping establish that once again Michael is full of shit and
> spouting it to the world as his gospel Bruce :-)
>
> And I really don't mean personal offense Bruce, but I did not find appeal
> in most of what you guys did port.
Well, Michael was right in that almost all of Lion's projects ended up
being effectively fixed-bid, since they never actually got any royalties
from them... (on the other hand, maybe this means they (Douglas)
negotiated well... Think what would have happened if they'd demanded less
up front?)
And I guess all this means you're not interested in many of the games most
other people are interested in, since Lion pretty much only ported top-5
or top-10 games from the PC. Which is your right - you can certainly have
your own opinion, but I don't think anyone much cares, and you're just
inviting yourself to be kill-filed as a troll... (No sooner said than
done!)
--
Matthew Vaughan
matthewv at mindspring dot com (damn spammers...)
Classical Music and Macintosh computers? Yeah, you could say I'm in the minority...
Douglas Grounds
> It is relevant in the means that people are moping about "Oh poor lion":
> when in my personal estimation they have not contributed anything
> worthwhile to the Mac gaming expereince.
In an objective sense, I doubt you are correct. Over the last 4-1/2 years,
we've done the following titles: Mario Teaches Typing CD-ROM, Super Wing
Commander, Wing Commander III, Wing Commander IV, DOOM II, Ultimate DOOM,
Duke Nukem 3D, and were working on Deadlock, Shadow Warrior, and Unreal.
That we have "not contributed anything" is a bunch of baloney. We did
fairly good jobs on all of those projects, although no one - and no product
- is perfect. We made sure that the network modes allowed a wide range of
choices (more protocols than Marathon, PC compatability, etc.), we made
sure they had Mac interfaces, and we optimized everything as good as we
could given the amount of time we had.
I don't care if you bought them or not. I know not all of our games will
appeal to everyone. However, it IS VERY IMPORTANT to have Top 5 PC games
available on the Macintosh. It's important because when people go to buy a
computer, they need to look at the Mac and see that they can get the
"really important" games on both platforms. Otherwise, they might decide to
buy a Windoze machine. In addition, it's also important to have unique
titles available on the Mac, too.
And in this case, my opinion is that of my (former) employer. ;)
Douglas Grounds
(Ex)President
Lion Entertainment, Inc.
Bruce Burkhalter
> I'm only sorry to see Lion go because of the state of the Mac industry, it
> looks bad. If Unreal never gets ported I'm not going to mind that much
> anyway.
>
> Now don't call me a heretic or convict me of treason. I have no personal
> grudge or emnity against Lion. But their "games", which are all someone
> elses games anyway, never excited me. At all.
I have no problem with your attitude. I would disagree that these games
shouldn't have been ported. I lot of people bought them and I lot of
people liked them. It is also important to have the top games on the
Mac. It would be a very bad sign if even the top selling PC games aren't
coming out on the Mac.
One other thing. It wasn't our idea to come out with games so long after
the PC version. Obviously it is in our best interest to come out with
games as close as possible to the PC version. You would be suprised how
hard it is.
Many companies don't even want to talk to us until the game is out. Then
the negotiations start. We have to look at the code to evaluate the
difficulty. For one game I had to fly to Rhode Island just to look at the
code. The company would not send it to us to look at regardless of how
many non-disclosure statements we signed. A couple games have take over 6
months to get a contract. This really screws us up because we can't
commit many (if any) resources to a project unless we know it is really
going to happen. Just because we have negotiated for a couple months
doesn't mean we will get the contract. It is really frustrating.
Oh well, that's life.
Bruce Burkhalter
Lion Entertainment
che...@eden.com
Matthew Vaughan
In article <cheese-1208...@net-2-117.austin.eden.com>,
che...@eden.com (Bruce Burkhalter) wrote:
> Many companies don't even want to talk to us until the game is out. Then
> the negotiations start. We have to look at the code to evaluate the
> difficulty. For one game I had to fly to Rhode Island just to look at the
> code. The company would not send it to us to look at regardless of how
> many non-disclosure statements we signed.
Also, since you guys were in the business of porting top-5 games, how
would you even know a game was a smash success on the PC until it was
out? I mean, sometimes you just KNOW, but not for sure until the sales are
there. These companies aren't about to spend a ton of money porting it to
a much smaller market if it doesn't sell well on the PC in the first
place.
> A couple games have take over 6
> months to get a contract. This really screws us up because we can't
> commit many (if any) resources to a project unless we know it is really
> going to happen. Just because we have negotiated for a couple months
> doesn't mean we will get the contract. It is really frustrating.
>
> Oh well, that's life.
>
> Bruce Burkhalter
> Lion Entertainment
> che...@eden.com
--
Bill M Catambay
> I have no problem with your attitude. I would disagree that these games
> shouldn't have been ported. I lot of people bought them and I lot of
> people liked them. It is also important to have the top games on the
> Mac. It would be a very bad sign if even the top selling PC games aren't
> coming out on the Mac.
>
> One other thing. It wasn't our idea to come out with games so long after
> the PC version. Obviously it is in our best interest to come out with
> games as close as possible to the PC version. You would be suprised how
> hard it is.
>
> Many companies don't even want to talk to us until the game is out. Then
> the negotiations start. We have to look at the code to evaluate the
> difficulty. For one game I had to fly to Rhode Island just to look at the
> code. The company would not send it to us to look at regardless of how
> many non-disclosure statements we signed. A couple games have take over 6
> months to get a contract. This really screws us up because we can't
> commit many (if any) resources to a project unless we know it is really
> going to happen. Just because we have negotiated for a couple months
> doesn't mean we will get the contract. It is really frustrating.
>
But with all this experience under you belt, it seems now would be an
excellent time to use that experience and begin building new games from
new ideas! Prepare for the Rhapsody OS, and you've got 100% market
share. Is this even a consideration?
Regards,
Bill
--
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Skanky
In article <5stk9b$m...@alycia.dementia.org>, c...@alycia.dementia.org (Chris
Hanson) wrote:
> In article <bill.m.catambay-...@129.197.20.15>,
> Bill M Catambay <bill.m....@NOSPAM-lmco.com> wrote:
> >But with all this experience under you belt, it seems now would be an
> >excellent time to use that experience and begin building new games from
> >new ideas! Prepare for the Rhapsody OS, and you've got 100% market
> >share. Is this even a consideration?
>
> Games cost money to develop. Can you afford to finance a Rhapsody
> game? Can you find investment for a Rhapsody game?
Shareware games (like the kinds Ambrosia makes) cost almost nothing to
develop as they are simply labors of love for a single programmer (Ambrosia
has gotten a little bigger than this now, but they started this way).
Michael M. Eilers
> In article <bill.m.catambay-...@129.197.20.15>,
> Bill M Catambay <bill.m....@NOSPAM-lmco.com> wrote:
> >But with all this experience under you belt, it seems now would be an
> >excellent time to use that experience and begin building new games from
> >new ideas! Prepare for the Rhapsody OS, and you've got 100% market
> >share. Is this even a consideration?
>
> Games cost money to develop. Can you afford to finance a Rhapsody
> game? Can you find investment for a Rhapsody game?
well, that's kind of the whole idea of Rhapsody--2 years from now, when it
has a user base and is up and running, a programmer will be able to tell a
potential investor: "I'll write this once and it will run on 5 different
platforms out of the box." A pretty convincing argument compared to the
way it works now (I'll write this once, then hire a team of programmers to
port it or licence it out to other companies to port.)
Godling
Douglas Grounds,dgro...@lion-ent.com,Internet writes:
> It is relevant in the means that people are moping about "Oh poor lion":
> when in my personal estimation they have not contributed anything
> worthwhile to the Mac gaming expereince.
In an objective sense, I doubt you are correct. Over the last 4-1/2 years,
we've done the following titles: Mario Teaches Typing CD-ROM, Super Wing
Commander, Wing Commander III, Wing Commander IV, DOOM II, Ultimate DOOM,
Duke Nukem 3D, and were working on Deadlock, Shadow Warrior, and Unreal.
I agree... I own several titles done by Lion that would probably not have
been there had it not been for Lion, like Doom II, Wing Commander III, and
System Shock. Also, although, like Doug said, no port is perfect, I must
admit all of the ports I have seen are done DAMN well. Just compare the Doom
II port with the Hexen port, although Presage's job was decent, it left
something to be desired as far as speed and responiveness. Sad to see you go
Lion, but please, get Shadow Warrior into the hands of the public... I love
that game.
Ben
Mark Adams
> I agree... I own several titles done by Lion that would probably not have
> been there had it not been for Lion, like Doom II, Wing Commander III, and
> System Shock. Also, although, like Doug said, no port is perfect, I must
> admit all of the ports I have seen are done DAMN well. Just compare the Doom
Actually Lion didn't do System Shock, I did that with Ken Cobb when we were
both back at Looking Glass.
Mark Adams
Maverick Software (http://members.aol.com/mavsftwre/home.html)
Chris Hanson
Todd Bangerter
In article <MarkA38-ya0240800...@nntp.ix.netcom.com>,
Mar...@aol.com (Mark Adams) wrote:
> Actually Lion didn't do System Shock, I did that with Ken Cobb when we were
> both back at Looking Glass.
>
> Mark Adams
Speaking of Looking Glass, Mark, do you think you could convince them to do
a port of Flight Unlimited 2? It looks incredible! Everyone should take a
look and clamor for it to come to the Mac.
http://www.lglass.com/
-Todd Bangerter
-taba...@fas.harvard.edu
Ceri Alun Morgan
In message <eilersm-1008...@ip13.tucson.az.pub-ip.psi.net>,
> In article <pollej-ya02408000...@news.uleth.ca>,
> pol...@nospam.uleth.ca (Edward J. Pollard) wrote:
>
>
>
> ... and somehow, the lack of *your* personal purchase doomed Lion? I am
> afraid you are reaching a bit in your estimation of your power as a
> consumer!
I actually didn't read his post that way... I'm sure that he's not the
only one to think as he did, anyway.
> Actually, your opinion of the games they ported has nothing whatsoever to
> do with the demise of Lion. You are misinformed about how the porting
> process works--Lion did not make money on the *sales* of the products they
> ported (please correct me if this is a mistaken supposition, Mark &
> Bruce)--they made a flat fee for the cost of porting the title, nothing
> more. Therefore the sales were not connected to Lion directly. Lion
> depneded completely on cash from new porting contracts--a well which could
> dry up at any time, and which gave them a fixed income, a dangerous
> situation for any company.
Even if this were true, which from reading reading some of the other posts,
it is not, sales of a game are still important to Lion. If they port a
game that sells extremely well, don't you think that they can get more money
for their next game than if the game bombed?
> The fact that you liked or disliked their ports is utterly irrelevant.
I'm sure that no one who worked at Lion would agree with that... at least,
I hope not.
-Ceri