Trip Hawkins Tears into Portal Runner game review - fun read

[DigitalSpace]

The following link contains a letter former 3DO president Trip Hawkins sent to GamePro concerning the score they gave the stinker Portal Runner (a 2 out of 5). Man, is this great. :lol:

Link (http://www.gamedrool.com/article.cfm?blog_id=1895)

[killswitch64]

That is some pretty funny stuff. Portal Runner did suck though!

[jer7583]

wow. Trip Hawkins and GamePro fighting. Two forces of great evil. It's like seeing hitler slap osama bin laden in the face.

I always knew trip was a corporate tool, but that letter was rediculous.

My favorite bits:
The audience for games no longer consists of one iconic block of angry young men who cannot get a date on Saturday night. Reviewers who don't consult with the game publisher about the intended audience, and don't attempt to position a game in terms of who might like it and who might not like it, are unprofessional.

So reviewers should check with the publishers to see if its okay to give a game a certain score, sounds great, trip!

Most of you have editorial staffs that are dominated by angry young men that are poorly trained and represent a narrow and anarchistic element of the world's population. They have a negative attitude and are looking for what is wrong with something, instead of looking for what is right and who might like it.

Oh, so thats why you see no more than 5-10 games a year in any major publication that get below a 6.0-7.0 average score.

[Wshakspear]

He he he...an old fashioned girly slapping match. Gotta love'em!

[PsyClerk]

Trip Hawkins is one of those guys whose time has come and gone...only he doesn't realize it, and probably never will.

According to his letter there, 3DO decided to sacrifice gameplay in an attempt to 'broaden the market' as they say. Thank god that didn't fly. And the whole letter reads like a whiny CAG who threatens to never shop at EB again after they wouldn't price match an insane advertising error from a competitor. Waaaah!

[rapsodist]

I've always thought that Trip Hawkins is a damn cool name. But I guess he's not such a cool person. He spent a good portion of the letter talking about professionalism when the letter itself doesn't adhere to it at all. He basically resorts to petty personal attacks and even hints at a form of extortion. I don't think anyone outside of 3DO would disagree that the company was a large contributer to the "bad game" contingent of the past decade. Keeping that in mind, Hawkins doesn't have much ground to stand on with his statements.

But I think that we'd also need to take a step back and put ourselves in his shoes. GamePro never should have given Portal Runner a cover for its preview. That act alone would have misled Hawkins and 3DO into believing that GamePro was a big supporter of the game. Nobody should really be making friends here, but Hawkins might have felt personally betrayed when GamePro suddenly decided to give the game a scathing review after going so far as to previously honor the game with a cover. GamePro's negative review is what the game really deserved, but you also have to see this situation from Hawkins' point of view. Unless he's a total bastard, his letter is probably something that he wrote irrationally in the heat of the moment and is now something he greatly regrets sending out (and not just because it's been publicly posted on a blog).

[tickdude]

Do any of you remember Scorpia? She was Computer Gaming World's adventure/role playing game columnist in the late 80's to mid 90's. I think she railed on Might and Magic one year and Trip Hawkins wrote a really pansy reply to the editors.

Do any of you remember this fiasco?

[guessed]

I haven't read the whole thing yet, and I am too lazy to do a JSweeney format-style post, but things I have noticed so far:

He threatens several times to pull his advertising if they don't give his games good reviews.

He claims that there is something fundamentally wrong with people who do not enjoy Portal Runner ("...But personally, I think that really means there is something wrong with a man like that, not with Portal Runner...").

He expresses concern that the critics who review his companies games may be *gasp* critical. Umm, Trip, they are supposed to be looking "for what is wrong with something". That is their job.

He suggests that the same reviewer who previews the game, should stick with it through the entire process and be the one to review the game. While there is nothing wrong with this suggestion per-se, it could lead to the reviewer developing an unnatural attachment to the game, and thus giving it a better review, thinking of it as one of his "children" in a way. I don't have a problem with one person following a game through the production process, but they should not provide the only review. The consumer will not have as much background on a game as the reviewer who has spent months with early builds and access to the developers. If possible, a reviewer should review a game from the standpoint of going in cold.

Oh, god, it got worse. I just reached the part where he mentions "in passing" that 3DO is one of the magazines biggest advertising accounts, and that he is cutting back on the advertising (extortion: give us good reviews, or we will give you less business -- nice).

"If a consumer sees a bad editorial, and a positive ad, they are going to assume the ad is biased (what is frustrating is that often it is the other way around)." -- Uh, advertising is biased. It is supposed to be. Can you imagine a company spending millions of dollars to convince the world that they have a mediocre product?

Trip feels that reviewers should handle game reviews with kid gloves. His assumption is that if games are generally reviewed more positively (than they deserve) it will be good for the industry, the game publishers, and therefore the magazines (from which the game publishers buy advertising). Of course, he is dead wrong. When a magazine is found to be an unreliable source for information, people stop reading that magazine, but there is a more profound potential effect on the industry if all publications start going soft -- another industry crash. If a casual gamer drops $50 on a game because he read some good reviews, is he likely to keep going back to get more games, or is he more likely to think, "Hey, if this game got a really high score, and I didn't enjoy it, then gaming probably isn't for me. After all, every magazine rated it a 9 out of 10, so, this 'Superman 64' must be one of the best games. I just don't get what this gaming thing is all about. Oh well, back to my racecar driving, professional football, and active sex-life."

There is a reason why game publishers do not write the game reviews.

I realize that this is a pretty old letter, and that most of my text is in the present tense. So be it. BTW, I did read the whole thing, it was shorter than I thought it would be.

[PsyClerk]

Do any of you remember Scorpia? She was Computer Gaming World's adventure/role playing game columnist in the late 80's to mid 90's. I think she railed on Might and Magic one year and Trip Hawkins wrote a really pansy reply to the editors.

I wonder what game that was. Might & Magic was awesome back in the day, but the last handful of iterations were duds.

Anyways, I was thinking it would be entertaining to see Scrubking's reaction to this letter. However, I think upon seeing it he would turn into the Incredible Hulk and decimate a small town in his fury.

[rapsodist]

Do any of you remember Scorpia? She was Computer Gaming World's adventure/role playing game columnist in the late 80's to mid 90's. I think she railed on Might and Magic one year and Trip Hawkins wrote a really pansy reply to the editors.

Do any of you remember this fiasco?

I'd like to read that letter, too. If Hawkins has a history of irrational critic-critique behavior, then you can just cancel my previous post and condense it to an out-of-context quote: "he's a bastard."

[oddjob93]

wow. Trip Hawkins and GamePro fighting. Two forces of great evil. It's like seeing hitler slap osama bin laden in the face.

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

[epobirs]

Portal Runner should have been a decent little bargain game but 3DO pretty much couldn't do anything right. It needed at least another two months of work including feedback from playtesters. Compared to numerous other $20 gems out there this is ample evidence of why 3DO collapsed. THe industry wasn't in a malaise so much as the consumer's standards had risen.

I've never really understood what Trip Hawkins is supposed to be good at. He made his early fortune in Apple stock after being a yes-man for Steve Jobs. (This is worth a few million bucks actually but soesn't mean you know how run a company.) Many think it was Hawkins' idea to package EA games like recrord albums and promote the developers but it wasn't. I've met that person when he was working for Cinemaware, although I'm blanking on his last name. Richard Something or other.

I had an encounter with Hawkins at the 1985 CES where he lied to my face. At the time, the One on One Basketball game was one of the hottest items around, believe it or not. The Atari version was taking forever to appear and this was baffling to us who knew what was involved in porting from the Apple ][ to the Atari. Without any enhancements to take advantage of the Atari's superior hardware a port by an experience programmer took about a week. It was very easy to make an Atari 800 pretend to be an Apple and use big chunks of code intact.

Word got around that the hold up was due to EA waiting for a new copy protection method to use on the disks. They were willing to hold up the game for months for this addition. EA was still small enough then that Hawkins was hanging around the booth and talking up the products himself, so I put the question to him whether it was true that this was behind the delay.

He gave me this ridiculous load of bilge about EA developing a system to let them port between platforms really quickly and the One on One Basketball was the first being targeted as they got this wonder tool perfected. Now, if I were waiting for a port to a radically different system than the Apple, say an IBM PC, this might make some sense. But being familiar with the process of Apple to Atari ports I offered that this was like sitting home and starving rather than hiking through rough ground to the supermarket because the paved highway was due to come to your house in just a few months. It just made no sense to hold up and easy port while waiting for a tool to mitigate the difficult ports.

Hawkins went ballistic on me, raising his voice and going on and on how people like me had no idea how the business worked and blah blah blah. I offered in return that he apparently had no idea how transparent his lie was to someone with direct experience of the subject matter.

When One on One Basketball finally arrived for the Atari computers I was able to download the broken file the same day. Sure was worth waiting six months for that new unbreakable copy protection scheme, wasn't it, Trip?

[epobirs]

I realize that this is a pretty old letter, and that most of my text is in the present tense. So be it. BTW, I did read the whole thing, it was shorter than I thought it would be.

Nah, Hawkins is notorious for this kind of crap. You can find many other accounts of his asshat behavior. Keep in mind this is a guy who got his start being a Steve Jobs protege. When you learn your management technique from one of most repugnant personalities on the planet the rest should come as no suprise. (For a perfect explanation of Steve Jobs, see 'Accidental Empires' by Robert X. Cringely.) All of the people I've ever met who quit from Apple in the 80's all gave the same reason: Steve Jobs.

[lordxixor101]

Well, Trip does have an ego, there is no doubt about it. From reading interviews, its obvious that he thinks he's smarter than anyone else in the room (I wonder if Peter Moloyx (I buthered the last name) is like that).

That being said, he is a very intellegent man. He's grown with the industry for a long time. That being said, it is sad that he goes off on a review. I wonder what part of the story though we aren't hearing. He's gotten terrible reviews before and didn't go off on the magazine. If he really felt like Portal Runner was better, why not ask for a second review by another person than just blanket threats and insults (being a large advertiser, if he requested a second look at the game, I bet he would have gotten it). I wonder if he had a wink wink nudge nudge deal with someone there, and then felt like he was backstabbed.