Totally Games Q&A with Larry Holland
We get an opportunity to discuss the future of Totally Games with President and Creative Director Larry Holland.
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We recently had an opportunity to get in touch with the President and Creative Director of Totally Games, a small California based development studio. Having a good number of successful projects under their belt (Secret Weapons Over Normandy, Star Trek: Bridge Commander, X-Wing series), we discuss the future of Totally Games, current projects, and what's in store for the coming years.
Shawn Snider (GamingExcellence): Hi Larry, I just want to take a second to thank you for taking the time to answer a few of our questions. First off, can you give us a little bit of background on Totally Games, and your background in the industry?
Larry Holland (Totally Games): Sure, I’m happy to answer your questions and to give people a peek into what’s happening at Totally Games, my Marin County based game development studio. Being a small developer that releases products just once every year or so, it’s a big event for us to be so close to releasing a product that we have been quietly working on for so long and hard. So quietly that occasionally I have to respond to silly questions like whether we’re still making games! The answer is a big yes, we’re still going strong! In fact we’re cooking up something very cool. In some ways it’s similar to what we’ve done before and in some ways it’s very different from anything we’ve done before. Totally Games has always been about making totally fun, totally involving games, period. And we’ve been making these sorts of games for over 20 years, since the days of the Apple II and C-64 through various Next Gen debuts and the PC game explosion right up to the latest platforms. So what’s a totally involving game? Well, I think you know the type of game I’m talking about. It’s one that immerses you so completely that time warps, hours fly by in what seems just seconds. You can’t stop playing it, you’re on the edge of your seat, and you’re in a special zone. For decades we’ve accomplished this primarily in the areas of space combat and flight action style games, both single and multiplayer. Our games have often been more recognizable than our name. Back in the 90s I felt like we should have made one of those American Express commercials that says, “You may not recognize us, but you know the games we designed and developed”, fade to shots from X-Wing and TIE Fighter. Besides these acclaimed games based on Star Wars we have had a real love of depicting the epic aerial battles of WWII, having designed and developed numerous games that put you into the cockpit during the critical air combat moments of that war, like Secret Weapons Over Normandy and the Battle of Britain.
As far as my own background, my game career has almost always been inextricably linked with Totally Games. I did have a short life outside of games and that was when I was charting a path in the fields of prehistoric archaeology and anthropology. At this time of my life the biggest mystery and challenge was to understand how we developed into human beings. On the way to grad school though I realized I’d rather dream up and build my own fantasy worlds than to dig up the remnants of old, dead ones. So I started programming games in 1982 on the C-64 and have continued designing and programming them ever since. I had a short stint with a now long defunct game company called HESWare in the early 80s before striking out on my own in 1984 to form Totally Games. I’ve been running this game company ever since.
Shawn: So Totally Games' isn't a new development studio. In fact, you've developed large and successful projects with both LucasArts and Activision, the latter being Star Trek: Bridge Commander. Looking back, Bridge Commander defined a new approach to the Star Trek games, creating a strategy game that utilized concepts typically found in a flight simulation, rather then taking the traditional RTS route of the Armada series. What did you learn from this sort of project where you've applied a lot of innovation around a series that has been primarily entrenched in a different genre? How do you feel this has helped the company develop and mature?
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