Once again you find yourself apart of a new company. How does it feel?
It's exciting, and fun, but most of all a LOT of work! But the opportunity to create a business from the ground up, with principles and an environment you believe in, make it really worthwhile. The fact that the partners are some of my closest friends also helps make this a great situation.

How hard was it to leave a company with an established name to start something of your own?
Leaving Firaxis was difficult because of all the cool people there. However, I've become a big believer lately in jumping into the deep end and forcing yourself to swim, so I wasn't that worried about leaving the established company for a more 'risky' startup. Of course, with Brian as your marquee designer BHG is not really as risky as most similar ventures ;-).

Fans and industry analysts alike are puzzled not only by your decision to leave Firaxis, but also at the timing of your move: you were named as the "lead man" for CivIII after Brian's departure a short while ago. Can you elaborate on your motivation(s)?
Civ III would have been a great product to work on, but frankly I've worked on turn-based games for close to nine years, back to Civ I. Since I haven't gotten to play around with real-time other than Gettysburg, I was excited to go with Brian and see what he could do. He's so great at maximizing the fun in any given game, that I know we'll have a first-rate product on our hands at the end of the day.

Can you comment on the state of Civilization III and Dinosaurs when you left? Do you think the "Dino in 2000, Civ3 in 2001" assumption still has some basis?
I can't comment on any plans for Dinos or Civ ship dates. Civ III has an excellent core design, based in part on all the fan suggestions, and I'm confident it will be a lot of fun when it's released. I didn't have a lot of contact with Dinos, and don't know very much about the product beyond it's subject matter and really cool initial graphics engine.

Sorry I can't be more help!

What kind of effects do you believe your move will have on the development of Civilization III and Dinosaurs? Do you believe Firaxis can compensate for your and others' absence?
It depends on who they hire. There are a lot of great people left at Firaxis who will have an opportunity to step up and do some high-profile work, but I suspect they'll still need an experienced designer or producer at the helm. If they can get some people in there quickly, they can minimize their issues.

I have great faith in Chris Pine, the lead programmer on the product and one of the more intelligent, hard working, and quick-learning people I've ever met. Also, Nick Rusko-Berger has been an excellent art lead throughout the project and has some great 'look and feel' & interface ideas. If they can fill out the designer\producer end of things, they'll be in good shape.

As "Vice President Of Operations And Development" of BHG, what does your job description dictate are your responsibilities?
The "Operations" part of my title basically covers external business relationships, whether with publishers, payroll companies, or test services.
The "VP Development" label describes organizing and directing the internal non-programming development team, much like an Executive Producer.

Given the recent announcement about the kinds of titles Big Huge Games is planning on developing (in the immediate future anyway), is this an indication that you are you bored of TBS games? :) If not, what is the reason(s)?
Well, speaking for myself, I am a little tired of working on TBS games, to be honest. I'm not tired of PLAYING them--I still love those games and will continue to play them. But the 'piece-slide' model of TBS games lacks some of the excitement of seeing your world come alive as you do in an RTS.

Plus, I do feel like a lot of the obvious cool ideas have been covered in TBS, while there's a lot of innovation left on the RTS side of things.

We saw on our forums the DNS info on your bighugegames.com registration. It appears that Ensemble Studios is involved. Is this something insignificant or does it incidicate something more important between the two companies (see forum thread)?
It's pretty insignificant, but what you're actually seeing is just some old friendships in the industry at work. When we announced Big Huge Games we of course snagged "bighugegames.com". However, the guys at Ensemble Studios knew from their own experience that the analogs at .org and .net could easily be snapped up and held for a high price. They called to suggest that we get those addresses too, but since we happened to be travelling on business at the time they went ahead and claimed them "just in case" on our behalf.

It was a very nice and helpful gesture on behalf of fellow developers, and shows how classy that organization is. We have immense respect for the Ensemble team (which includes our good friends Bruce Shelley and Sandy Petersen with whom we used to work at Microprose) and for the products they have created. There are not at this time any plans whatsoever for us to work directly or indirectly with Ensemble Studios; this was simply a little favor and helping hand from one group of friends to another.

While at Firaxis one of the duties you took upon yourself was being apart of the team that stayed in touch with the fans regarding game/team progress, updates etc. Will you carry this torch with you to BHG?
I certainly enjoyed my contact with the fans and thought they brought a tremendous amount of cool ideas to the design of SMAC, SMACX, and Civ III. I hope to continue this contact, although it will be a good long time until we're ready to really listen to ideas and suggestions.

Of course, Apolyton has been a great resource for us all along, and it will be one of the first places we post when it comes time to look for player input ;-).

Finally, can you give us any hints as to the topic of your first game? Are your plans/preferences towards historical or science fictions games?
We have about five or six ideas floating around right now, ranging from our traditional subject matter to some more esoteric stuff that hasn't yet been done in a strategy game. We're looking to involve our eventual publisher on our choice of topic, as we want them to be as excited about the game as we are. So it will be a bit yet until we can make any annoucements on what kind of game we'll do.

BONUS
And a question for Jason Coleman: the press release mentions the "Jackal development library that powers Gettysburg! and Alpha Centauri". What exactly is it?
(From Jason): "Jackal is a code library upon which all the Firaxis games have been built. It includes everything from its own windows management system and multi-player support to 2d, 3d, and voxel graphics".

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