Special III – Katie Hallahan, Phoenix Online Studios

For our third and final off-season special, we complete our trilogy of prodding well-known adventure game people to give their take on the state of the adventure game industry. This episode, we light some poultry butts on fire and address several elephants of varying colors in the room with Katie Hallahan, co-founder and PR director of Phoenix

Continue reading Special III – Katie Hallahan, Phoenix Online Studios

For our third and final off-season special, we complete our trilogy of prodding well-known adventure game people to give their take on the state of the adventure game industry. This episode, we light some poultry butts on fire and address several elephants of varying colors in the room with Katie Hallahan, co-founder and PR director of Phoenix Online Studios.

Phoenix Online Studios rose to prominence by being the studio to channel Jane Jensen’s post-Sierra game design career into products such as Moebius and Gabriel Knight: 20th Anniversary Edition. They also published that other horror game that Fred will not shut up about — the one that’s not Amnesia — and they did a King’s Quest fan game, which I assume is a rite of passage for any serious game development studio that isn’t Wadjet Eye.

Phoenix has had to endure not just a few swipes from our side in the past — some constructive, some downright unprofessional — and Katie takes them admirably in stride as she sets the record straight on vase-knocking squirrels, sliding tile puzzles, and why you can’t pick up wine bottles unless you really need them.

More than that, she also offers some genuinely fascinating insights into what Phoenix, a contemporary “pre-bubble” company founded around the same time as Wadjet Eye, does to stay afloat in this current climate of indie game saturation and Kickstarter fatigue. (One interesting tidbit is that Phoenix “did Kickstarter before it was cool,” as Katie puts it — their first campaign launched before Double Fine’s (in)famous record-setting Broken Age campaign!)

Behold with your auditory organs a woman who didn’t have to be nice to us but totally was anyway on YouTube, or at the bottom of this page in pure, unadulterated eargasmic format:

We do want to thank Katie a whole heap of a lot for bringing this off-season trilogy of ours to a close on a classy high note. For a show like ours — where three people sit around and talk about making games instead of actually doing it — it’s been really educational, dare we say illuminating, to hear Katie, Dave and Shawn regale us with the tales of what it’s actually like in the digital trenches. The challenges they face bringing us entertainment, as I think has been evidently demonstrated over these three episodes, are not to be taken lightly, and it’s easy as a consumer to feel entitled or to be dismissive about just how much work goes into making an adventure game — or any game for that matter.

That’s not to say there aren’t those out there who are just shit at what they do, or just try to pass off any old rubbish in the hopes of making a quick buck. I think it’s clear, though, that the three people we have had the privilege to interview (in our highly unprofessional manner) are not those people. You may fault their games on any number of subjective grievances, squirrely or otherwise, but you cannot fault them for believing wholeheartedly in what they do.

So, on that pretentious bum note, that wraps up our off-season special jaunt. It’s been fun exploring the hitherto unexplored “guest interview” part of our podcasting repertoire, which is something we may run with when we get around to doing our regular 4th season of this show. We’re still not quite sure how that’s going to work out, but we will of course let you know over on them there Twitters.

And don’t forget, if you’re in London around the 19th and 20th of November, 2016, do swing by the AdventureX convention and say hi. We’ll actually be there in person! Perhaps even doing a live round of Open Crowd Source? Fingers crossed on that one.