| Apolyton: |
For those of us who haven't been around long enough to remember (everything about) you, what is your relationship with the Call To Power (CtP) series? Since when were you involved in the project and what role(s) did you play in its development?
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| David Ray: |
I worked as a software engineer (fancy name for programmer) on Call To Power II during the final half year of it's development. Since I came on to the project so late I sort of had the job of picking up the odd coding tasks that were just sort of scattered. I didn't actually develop any major subsystem, but I worked on most parts of the game at one time or another. I also helped debug scripts, and helped the designers to figure out how to implement things they wanted in the system.
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| Apolyton: |
We know you no longer work for Activision. How do you look back at your time at Activision in general and the CtP project(s) in particular?
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| David Ray: |
I really enjoyed working at Activision, and I enjoyed working with the extremely talented team of people they had, and I was hoping it was going to last longer than it did.
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| Apolyton: |
Do you know and can you tell us how many copies of Civilization: Call To Power (C:CtP) and/or Call To Power II (CtP2) were sold altogether?
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| David Ray: |
I don't have any idea.
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| Apolyton: |
The 'Civilization' name was dropped from the sequel to 'Civilization: Call To Power' due to absence of a license to use the name again. Do you believe that this helped, hindered or was indifferent with regards to 'Call To Power II''s sales numbers and reviews?
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| David Ray: |
I don't think it made any difference whatsoever. Turn based strategy games are a rather niche market, and I think for the most part people who are into these kinds of games knew what it was.
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| Apolyton: |
Within the Civilization community, little is known about what happened after the release of CtP2. It's often thought that Activision rushed the game to release, quickly made a patch to fix a handful of the most glaring bugs and then pulled the plug on the series altogether, firing the entire development team. But this is mostly based on rumour and conjecture. What's your side of the story? What really happened? Did you part with Activision on good terms?
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| David Ray: |
First off, I left Activision on outstanding terms, I couldn't have asked for them to treat me any better. The release of the game wasn't rushed as much as the rumours imply it was. It was a little rushed in the final days, but no more so than any other game I've worked on. We had a pretty well defined date of when it needed to ship. And we knew we'd be working on a patch afterwards, which is completely normal for the PC game market. When I started at Activision, it was during a period when upper management had wanted to expand internal development.
Over the course of the next few months some major changes in the upper management of Activision took place. The new management group decided that Activision should focus it's energies on publishing, rather than development. We were told months in advance that we would be let go at the end of the project, and were asked to stay through the end of the patch, which we all agreed to do. From a personal stand point I didn't like leaving after only 6 months of being there, but from a corporate standpoint, I agree they did the right thing for the good of the company. They also offered to help place us at some of the development companies they contract with and/or own. So they really treated us very well, giving us plenty of heads up, and helping us in every way they could when it came time for us to leave.
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| Apolyton: |
Based on you personal and professional observations, what do you believe the likelihood of a continuation of the Call To Power series is? If you see it as likely, can you offer any timeline predictions? Ultimately, do you feel that there is more work to be done that could be explored in a Call To Power III and beyond, or are you satisfied with the series ending with two titles to its name?
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| David Ray: |
I can't imagine them doing another CTP title, just because of the current market position. I think that the turn based games have become too small of a niche. I am disheartened by that however, because I really enjoy these styles of games as well.
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| Apolyton: |
[H]ave you kept in contact with some or all former CtP team members or did you lose contact altogether?
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| David Ray: |
I'm really bad about keeping in touch with people, but I am still in touch with Joe Rumsey (Mr. Ogre), Dave White, and Dan Hagerty.
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| Apolyton: |
Do you think that, all things considered, the CtP games were a success? Are/were you satisfied with the final results? Some people praise the series
for its innovativeness and modmaker-friendliness (open file structure, powerful scripting language; and now the release of the source code), while others criticize it for being a poor rip-off of CivII and for its many bugs. How do you feel about the game and these opinions?
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| David Ray: |
Success in this industry is pretty much measured by total sales, information I don't really have access to, so I don't have a feel at all for how successful the games were. I was satisfied with how the game turned out, I felt that it was a fun game with lots of flexibility for the mod makers and overall it was what we set out to do. I would have liked to do more with it, like an expansion pack or something. As for the critics who feel it's a rip off of CivII, I challenge them to go to a game store and find any games on the shelves that couldn't be considered a rip off of some earlier title. There are only a handful of genres that games fall into, and every one of those genres had a "first" game that was like that, and every other title in that genre is a "rip off" of that first one.
As a game developer we're aware that we are not the first for most of the games we make, and what we strive for is to add something unique with our version. I believe in CTP2 we added a lot of things to the genre of TBS games.
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