Stormfront Studios Interview

Critical Gamer has posted an interview they did with former Stormfront Studios president Don Daglow about his perspective on the “console wars” that existed decades before the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 showed up. The only Stormfront title he mentions by name is Stronghold, but it’s an interesting read nonetheless:

In the 1980s when you were working for Intellivision, the first Console Wars started. Can you tell us what it was like experiencing the console war while actually working for a console company? How did it affect the games industry?

Don Daglow: (You know it’s funny because it was all exciting and all fun. We had no conception of it. Both sides were winning. Both sides were making a lot of money and both sides were growing. They were selling more, growing more and making more than we were, but both of us were doing great.

For me it was very surreal. In ‘˜79, I was writing games as a hobby but I was teaching middle-school. And when I heard about a job as a game designer at Mattel, I immediately applied and got hired. I was lucky to be at the right spot at the right time. So I’m going to work every day pinching myself because I’m doing games for a living. And I thought, I’m just a schoolteacher, when will they find out I’m just a schoolteacher, not a hacker/programmer. They’re paying me to make games!

And then we were competing with Atari. But there wasn’t this sense of hatred, it was just an, ‘˜of course our system is better than theirs’. And yes we had secrecy and it was important that .vil Atari’ sometimes came and took away some of the programmers from our teams. Of course the companies were doing things to each other, but we didn’t particularly feel hostility. So there was a rivalry but it was more like sport teams competing. You don’t really want to hurt anybody and everybody’s winning but you want to be the best.

The strongest memory I have is not so much about the wars against Atari, even though that was all we talked about. The strongest emotion I remember is going to work everyday thinking, how did this happen? How did I grow up from being a classroom teacher to doing this in like a year and a half? And I’m sitting in these executive meetings at Mattel, where I had to wear a coat and tie, and I’m just thinking; was I struck by lightning, am I dreaming? That was the dominant feeling for me because it just came out of nowhere, that this thing I loved to do suddenly became a career.)