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Jane's A-10 Warthog
Moving Toward Multiplayer
Rather than being offered a new project, The A-10 team's individual members were either reassigned or they left the company altogether. According to Swofford, "Many of the people on the A-10 team were transitioned into online projects which were underway at the time." Apparently, not many stayed. A source on the A-10 team states that out of a team that numbered around 20 individuals when it was cancelled, "Right now, there are only seven of those people still at Origin. They are all on Privateer Online." A-10 did, however, almost get revived after cancellation, and Electronic Arts entered into talks with old hand Tsuyoshi Kawahito to perhaps reuse the A-10 code on a project for his own firm, Third Wire Productions.
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According to Andy Hollis, these talks never proceeded past the negotiation stages. As Hollis puts it, "Had it actually gone forward, it probably would have made more sense for it to happen as Longbow 3, but the reality is that combat sims are really just nonstarters as far as the sales and marketing people go." So the revival of A-10 died before it started. The last single-player study sim to carry the Jane's label was F/A-18, a product of the Baltimore Skunkworks team that did F-15. But even that team is out of the flight-sim business now, according to Electronic Arts, and its current project remains a mystery. Rumors have been circulating that the team is now working on PlayStation2 titles, a rumor Andy Hollis denies.
The irony of the A-10 story is that a game whose cancellation has widely been held as the death knell of the hard-core sim was conceived and developed as nothing more than a vehicle for generating fast revenue for Origin Systems by using existing technology and personnel. And even if the game had shipped on schedule, it is likely that it would not have changed the business calculus at Electronic Arts and Origin by a single integral. Simulations no longer provided a return on investment that justified their production. This didn't mean they didn't sell: Private Electronic Arts' sales numbers show that the original Longbow shipped more than 600,000 units worldwide. And, together, the five Longbow releases (Longbow, Flashpoint: Korea, Longbow Gold, Longbow 2, and Longbow Anthology) shipped more that 1.2 million copies. But the cost of production had gotten inordinately high, and returns were steadily diminishing.
In the words of Andy Hollis, "Everybody was feature-creeping where the bar was," and expectations for new sims had simply become too high. "Building a product that would satisfy all these expectations would cost a tremendous amount of money," and the result is that "no one wants to go there." Are flight sims dead forever, then? "I'm sure sims will make a comeback," says Hollis optimistically. "If everyone leaves the field, then someone is bound to step into the void eventually." But how long flight-sim fans are going to have to wait remains an open question.
[Thanks go to Gordon Berg for assistance in the preparation of this article]
To GameSpot
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