Spiderweb Games - Interview @ IndieGames

IndieGames Lena LeRay published a new interview with Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb Software earlier this week. Credit for this news-bit goes to Kordanor.

You've rereleased Exile twice now, first as Avernum and then again as Avernum: Escape from the Pit. The same is true of Exile 2 as Avernum 2 and then Avernum 2: Crystal Souls. What motivated you to rerelease them not just once, but twice?

A lot of reasons. I think releasing remastered versions of quality old games is a pretty established practice in the industry now.

For example, consider our newest rewrite, Avernum 2: Crystal Souls. It is a rewrite of Avernum 2, which came out in 2000. Fifteen (!) years ago. I think it's pretty fair to rewrite a game that old.

In the intervening decade and a half, a lot has happened. My interfaces and design have gotten a lot stronger. The resources available to me for art, sound, etc have grown greatly. Meanwhile, fifteen year old programs don't run well on Macintosh or 64-bit windows. The rewrites have three purposes: to make them function in the first place, to make them better, and to use the new engine to port the games to tablets. There's been a lot of demand for our games for the iPad, but this takes a full ground-up port. The archaic code won't work.

Rewrites of fifteen year old games are going to be a good part of our business going forward, as they are great games and the demand for remastered versions is high. Simply put, they sell really well. It helps that we don't half-ass these rewrites. Everything about them, ever space, every item, every line of dialogue, is gone over. Lots of new material is added.

More information.

as a person who only just popped his cherry on avadon 1 and now enjoying avadon 2 (its awesome on tramadol after getting a tooth pulled) i certainly appreciate the rewrites. the old games were difficult for me to get into for the exact reason of the clunky interface.

I never played Avernum just the Geneforge series and Avadon so for me this is great. Escape from the Pit is next on my list

Spiderweb games are something I tend to keep installed, migrating from old computer to new computer. One of my biggest disappointments when moving to Windows 7 was that none of my old 16 bit programs worked without running in a VM, including the Exile series. I am glad to see the new and improved versions that will run on a modern OS.

Shame though that he keeps dumbing them down from remake to remake: less skills, far fewer spells, reduced party size, reduced monster sizes, etc.

Also these "I'm proud to make old-school games" interviews are getting old, this must be the 100th interview like this that I read. His blog posts are usually far more interesting.