Around late 2008/early 2009, Pandemic Studios was having trouble. In order to delay what seemed more or less inevitable, they had a series of layoffs, and eventually it was my time to go too. I was sad to leave, as Pandemic was my first job in the game industry, and despite the later frustrations, I can’t say I had a bad time there. In fact, I had a great time, and further, I owe much of my world view of the game industry to my years at that studio. It was formative stuff. But nevertheless I was at peace with having to go. I had been there for 8 years (a long time for the game industry!), and honestly, I was excited to try something new.

Being still young and without responsibilities, that “something new” meant seeing if I could somehow get my own game studio off the ground. My idea was to try to make and publish (or get published) a game for Xbox Live Arcade. At that time, XBLA was a proven venue for smaller indie style games, even before the indie movement was in full swing, and so the idea felt sound. Looking back, it’s obvious now that I was on the tail end of the XBLA wave, and what I should have embraced was iOS and Android development. Unfortunately for me and my business dreams, I’ve never been much good at reading the industry.

Well in any case, with that general plan, flawed as it may have been, I dove head first into indie development, making this game I called Anthem. Anthem, like Chess Quest, was inspired by Puzzle Quest and its magic design formula that purposely pairs the tactical core with the strategy outer loop. My theory was that if Puzzle Quest can use this formula to make a boring match-3 style core game enjoyable, I could make an equally compelling game or better, using a core game that was actually fun - such as Asteroids.

As you can see from the photos and video, we made tremendous progress. Aspects of it were not yet competitive certainly, but there was much to love already by the time I was showing it around. My hope was to get the funding to get the rest up to speed, and then finish it. By the way, “we” above includes, yet again, my long time friend and collaborator Mark! It also includes John St. John (aka Trenthian), who would help with future projects as well.

Looking back, I’m a little surprised at the doors I was able to get into with just my small demo and my industry contacts. To be fair the contacts probably had more to do with this than anything else, but having a running prototype to show and talk about helped for sure. I had many good conversations and one near miss on a publishing partner, but in the end I was never able to seal the deal, and with time and funding drying up, I thought it prudent to move on.

Like all the various projects I’ve abandoned over the years, I still look back fondly on Anthem and see a spark of greatness in there. I don’t know that it’s visible to anyone but us folks who worked on it, but it’s there, and I know the game could have been great. But if nothing else, there was much learned - I solved new programming problems, which expanded my programmer’s toolkit in useful ways. And I learned lessons in running a business, as well as a few lessons for life. But those are topics for another day.