Very interesting interview. Definitely worth it to take your time for to listen to the whole thing.

Thanks Lipo-fish

Thanks for sharing Phat, I'll make sure to give it a listen at some point!

Very interesting interview, thanks for sharing

So I finally gave this a listen a couple of weeks ago, here are some quick thoughts. I really enjoyed hearing Pritchard talk about the state of the games industry and RTS developers in particular during the late 90's. I've played way too many games of that era and it's really cool to see how everyone had their own take on the genre. In the end though I believed there ended up being a fair amount of clones of the more successful games such as AoE and StarCraft, though I suppose they always stuck to trying to do something of their own as well. The market today really feels a lot more like it is dominated by a few professional studios, but I kinda miss those crude 90's RTS:s.

One of the most interesting things he mentioned was probably the unreleased fantasy game built on the Genie engine. With that and those "Stratos" screenshots, it seems like there were quite a few early prototypes of games made in our engine. In the end we ended up getting only three of them, which each have their certain very distinct quality.

It's also pretty sick how Winzett got his cars put into both AoE games. In our game it's even more apparent as the unit is named Winzett's Z. I think we got the more realistic one with the rocket launcher though. I mean what's the deal with those little flaps on the Cobra Car?