[Humerox]

Why would Sony acquire itself?

Brad McQuaid interview excerpt:

Question: I thought 989 was almost exclusively a sports game company? Had they done anything else? I never really understood how you guys got "in" with that crowd.


At the time, 989 (then Sony Interactive Studios America) was split into two main studios, sports and non-sports. John Smedley was the Executive Producer (and later Director of Development) of the non-sports studio. Both studios worked primarily on Playstation 1 (and later Playstation 2) games.

But John was heavily into online PC games (mostly pay-for-play games like Cyberstrike). He also really wanted to work on some, so he started development of Tanarus (a non-persistent online tank warfare game) as sort of an experiement and technology proving ground.

Some time later he felt he was in a position to get additional funding and start an online RPG, and the EverQuest project was approved (not that it had that name yet (Steve Clover named EQ), nor even a team). He also didn't really have a lot of PC-oriented developers, much less RPG-types, so he looked around for local developers.

He saw the WarWizard 2 demo Steve, I, Kevin Burns, and Bill Trost had put together. He then noted that Milo Cooper (then at 989, working on the Gameday series) had done the art for WarWizard 1, and talked with him about us.

So John hired Steve and I to being work on EQ, and I was later able to bring on board Kevin, Bill, and many others.

The online games group grew and grew until we pretty much were our own studio in addition to the sports and non-sports studio. But then when PS/2 was announced, 989 management needed to expand to keep developing PS/1 titles and expand to the new platform, and so we (the online studio) spun off into our own company (Verant Interactive).

We'd by then started work on many titles (the game that would become SW:G, EQ expansions, Planetside, Sovereign, etc.), and found another Sony company (Sony Online Entertainment) to fund those titles.

Even later, after EQ launched and was extremely successful, SOE ended up buying Verant, and the rest is history.


Question: If meself recalls correctly, methinks it went, "Red Eye Entertainment" > "989 Studios" > "Verant Interactive".


The first company was Sony Interactive Studios, which was under SCEA (Sony Computer Entertanment America).

Later, this company changed names to 989 Studios.

Even later, btw, after we were gone, 989 Studios changed it's name to just SCEA, but kept 989 Sports as a 'brand'. SCEA is still in San Diego (and many other locations) making PS/2 games.

When it was 989 Studios, we left the company and founded Verant Interactive.

For a very short time, Verant was RedEye, but there was a name conflict, so we went to Verant.

Verant Interactive, an independent company, was then later purchased by Sony Online Entertainment (a totally different Sony entity). SOE is under Sony Digital which is under Sony Pictures.

The Verant name then faded away and now they are simply SOE.

Complicated? Yeah, I can barely keep it straight.


So no...it was not always Sony. Now you know the rest of the story.