Brought to you by The 14th Brigade and Beyond Alpha Centauri

What is this anyway?

"Focus on Firaxis: A Look Inside the Company" is an inside look, via interviews, at the company that brought the world a little closer to the Civil War through Sid Meier's Gettysburg! and is now taking us to the stars through their latest work, Sid Meier's Alpha Canturi. SMAC, which is the subject of this web site, is a turn based game similar to Civilization and will be released by Firaxis sometime in 1998. These interviews, done in February and March of 1998, were meant to give you a closer look at the minds that make up Firaxis.


Questions about Firaxis' present, past and future

To the Interviews...

Thanks...

Thanks to all the employees of Firaxis that took time from their busy schedules to answer the questions. Special thanks go to Lindsay Reihl at Firaxis for helping to set this whole thing up and acting as a middleman (middlewoman, whatever). Thanks go to Susan Brookins for listening to me whine. Thanks also go to Mike Ely for being the super cool guy that he is. And of course thanks to the Gamestats Family for supporting this web site.

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Name: Susan Brookins
Title: Master of Miscellaneous

LDespot: What did you do for SMG?

Susan Brookins: Kept coffee, soda and snacks in good supply and planned the "shipping" party. LDespot: What are you working on for Alpha Centauri?...

Name: Lindsay Riehl
Title: Marketing

LDespot: What did you do for SMG?

Lindsay Riehl: I worked with Origin's marketing and public relations department to get the word out on how cool Gettysburg! is....

Name: David Evans
Title: Mr. Sound Guy

LDespot: What did you do for SMG?

David Evans: Sound fx, sound driver programming, recording, and anything else related to sound....

Name: Mike Ely
Title: Technically Programmer/Designer, but in practice I do all kinds of stuff. I'm also the Firaxis Webmaster, which is a pretty fun job.

LDespot: What did you do for SMG?

Mike Ely: I did a lot of work on both of the manuals, created the tutorials, helped a little with the multimedia, and wrote the line draw routine used to draw the fences in the game (yes, I'm pretty proud of that last one)....

Name: Tim Train
Title: Producer/Designer

LDespot: What did you do for SMG?

Tim Train: My main contribution was writing, editing, shooting, and producing the multimedia footage in the game. This was a lot of fun, and involved combing through hundreds of hours of archival footage, as well as a trip to 1997's Gettysburg re-enactment for a little filming. I also assisted with the marketing\PR effort on the product, and worked on many miscellaneous development support tasks, such as manual writing, playbalance, and tutorials....