From Variety: {link no longer active}
He s not only an award winning author and the writer of Ender’s Game, he s also a hardcore and old school gamer. So old school, in fact, that he regularly challenges his wife to competitions on the Millipede arcade game in his house.
I’m a game lover, he says. I’m a game addict. I progress from game to game to game like the progression of opium to heroin to morphine. When I am not playing Civilization, I have this nagging feeling that there are cities waiting for me — which is pathological, I realize.
As a child he was a regular fixture at his local 7-11, found in front of the Super Breakout machine. So it’s really not all that surprising that as an adult, he has worked regularly in the video game industry.
These days, he s collaborating with Chair Entertainment on Shadow Complex, a platform shooter that will be available exclusively on Xbox Live starting Aug. 19.
The rest of the interview with Orson Scott Card is interesting, and it shows how a downloadable game from a little known developer can start to call to even the hardest of geeks through a few key ways.
Among the great moves by the company:
– Engaged with author Orson Scott Card for the game’s story
– Collaborated with hot developer Epic Games (Gears of War 2)
– Stuck to an old school mainstay, the 2D shooter
Now, Chair Entertainment has the usually-grousing geek crowd salivating to play a game with a fever pitch that wasn’t at all seen with its previous XBLA effort, Undertow. What a difference a geek makes.
