Creativity

Cheap video cameras with pretty good quality have created a wonderful world of small independent films.



Check out these by Jeff Fitzsimmons (sound design by Drew Cady):



http://www.seismicislandlabs.com/12742.html



and this three-parter by Virgin alumnus Doug TenNapel:



http://www.sockbaby.com/



When Doug worked at Virgin he had a notebook full of crazy ideas and sketches which he luckily kept to himself and didn't show the management. Virgin Interactive internal development was the master of the movie property adaptation, but not good at all at original stuff. Doug's original ideas would have been wasted at Virgin. Luckily when Dave Perry split to form Shiny he didn't have a game idea ... and Doug's notebook filled the role, hence Earthworm Jim was introduced to the world.



Another Virgin Interactive alumnus is John Botti. John had prototyped an entire game called "Greed" and about 1/3 of the levels were done. It was a perfectly fine platform game, especially for the time, because it was a bit on the edgy side, compared to other things in the day. That got cancelled. John also talked us into letting him spend $100K or so on a video shoot of crazy wi-foo stunt work, which he planned to rotoscope into a game. This is long before the Matrix.



That never went anywhere either.



This leads me to my hypothesis: some organizations are good at adaptations and some are good at original work, but the skills of one do not really help you with the other. Trying to get original work out of an organization that is skilled at adaptations is very hard, and vice versa.