Looking Glass Studios - Paul Neurath Interview

A site called Grupo97 has an interview with Paul Neurath, co founder of Looking Glass Studios, about the famous studio.  More recently, Paul's current company Floodgate Entertainment co-developed NWN: Shadows of Undrentide and Dark Messiah of Might & Magic, though this isn't part of the coversation.  I'm not sure much is revealed but it's a walk down memory lane for fans:

Over the years people usually realize and accept both errors and successes committed in the past. Looking Glass main successes are evident, but what about errors?

We surely made many errors over the 10 years we were in business. All companies do; more so if they do anything interesting. We did try to learn from our errors.

Some of the errors we made…

- We should have dialed back somewhat the level of depth and complexity we put in some of our games, and put more emphasis on accessibility. We did learn from this, and Thief was the result.

- We did not put sufficient emphasis on pure visual pizzazz for many of our games. Fight Unlimited was an exception; but for our other titles the level visual eye candy, and providing fast and smooth frame rates, was not on par with the blockbusters of the time. This hurt our sales.

- We spread ourselves too thin in terms of genres. Nearly every blockbuster studio of that time had a tight focus, such as only doing PC first-person shooters, as often as not just a single franchise. We did 3D fantasy games, 3D science fiction games, flight simulators, sports games, and others genres. In hindsight, we were slightly crazed to try to tackle such a wide palette as a small company, and it meant that we could not build the level of expertise in any single genre as we otherwise could.

- We were undercapitalized for what we were trying to do. As an small but ambitious studio we tried to push ourselves and do a lot; but often with not quite enough capital. It was a risky strategy that ultimately contributed to our demise.

I could go on, but that’s probably enough to mention for now.