Commercial Videogames

Terry Borst/Frank De Palma:
Winners, Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences Cybie for Best Writing

Remember how cool the original Star Wars was?

Well, imagine if you actually were Luke Skywalker… The fate of mankind is in your hands… Blow it, and aliens will be walking down Sunset Boulevard like they own the joint…

And it’s all gonna be on your head…

Terry Borst/Frank De Palma:
Nominees, Game Developers Spotlight Award for Best Interactive Writing

You know how it is: you win the galactic war with the aliens, and that’s when the real trouble starts…

C-can’t we all just get along?

• Both CD-ROM epics star Mark Hamill, Malcolm MacDowell, John Rhys-Davies and many more… Oil up that trigger finger and give it a go…
• Check out the Wing Commander III and Wing Commander IV demos…
• Check out an overview, and partial list of magazines discussing Wing Commander IV.
• Visit a Wing Commander fan page. Fandom’s an amazing thing…
• The “sophisticated storytelling” of the Wing Commander series is now the subject of graduate school theses and screenwriting textbooks. Here’s a thesis (see Chapter 4). And see Aristotle in Hollywood.

Digital Anvil, headed by Chris Roberts of Wing Commander fame, developed Freelancer for Microsoft. Chris put together much of the old Wing Commander team, and Frank De Palma and I worked on several drafts of the massive script.

Due to the game’s long gestation time, not all of our screenplay made it into the final product. Nevertheless, we lay strong claim to sharing authorship of the screenplay.

Freelancer was even more ambitious than the Wing Commander franchise, in that it upped the role-playing component (you could be one of a number of characters), and created an entire economy that you had to navigate and master. The universe was truly the universe, with dozens of worlds to explore, and the storyline is positively epic: one could look at it as the War and Peace of the genre.

I’ve worked (and been paid) on other produced commercial videogames in their early stages (creating treatments and concept documents), but don’t claim any authorship (or screen credit) on these. Because I signed NDAs (non-disclosure agreements), I can’t speak their names.