Canceled Sega Project: "Carbondale"
Does anyone out there know anything beyond what's contained in this press release? The product manager, Cord Smith, is on Twitter.
Quote:
CARBONDALE - Aliens have landed in Carbondale and they are killing anything that moves. Your natural instinct is to flee, but a severe mid-winter blizzard has cut off all hopes of escape.
Quick! Grab a gun, a sledgehammer, a scythe, any weapon you can get your hands on. Your only hope for survival is to stand your ground and fight - in the mall, the old Carbondale high school, city hall, even the sewer system if you have to.
This is a fight to the death and it's going to be bloody.
The battle isn't real, though. It's one of the biggest video game releases of 2004 being developed by Sega. Thousands of people, maybe even millions, will be fighting to save Carbondale from alien beasties next year.
"Initially Sega said 'We want to place this game in a small town,'" said Cord Smith, product manager for Sega of America. "Initially they said an East Coast town, but they just wanted something that wasn't the West Coast. (The Japanese game designers) are familiar with San Francisco and California culture, but to them, that's not America. America is what's between the two coasts."
Smith knew right where to bring the game's Japanese development team. He grew up in Du Quoin and earned a master's degree in fiction from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Smith is also virtually the only Midwesterner working at Sega's San Francisco office.
"In the office people make fun of me because I'm one of the only ones who's from the middle of America," Smith said. "Carbondale is this mythical place that we all kind of laugh about, because I love it. I told them, 'Based on all these locations (you're looking for), I can't think of a better place for you to go.'"
The other people at Sega agreed. Smith is now spending nine days leading a team of eight game designers from Tokyo around key Carbondale locations, including University Mall, the old high school central campus, the police station, city hall, water treatment plant, local homes and apartments, and yes, even the sewer system.
"They're soaking all this in, with the biggest smiles on their faces," Smith said. "They keep saying this is kind of what they imagined, but they're blown away that everyone has a yard, everything's beautiful, everything's so lush and green."
The game's designer, Shinichi Ogasawara, says bringing the design team all the way from Tokyo to see the Midwest for themselves is the best way to create a realistic small-town environment.
"Usually we are living in Japan and what we know about America is mainly from L.A. or San Francisco and the West Coast," Ogasawara said through an interpreter. "When we came here I think we're seeing the real Midwest life of the U.S. It's quite different from what we're used to, but I think this will add much to our game."
The team is shooting digital videotape and still photographs that will be used to provide the textures of the games' three-dimensional environment. Some team members photographed close-ups of anything that could be interactive, such as light switches and the weights used by Carbondale firefighters. Other team members photographed walls, ceilings, floors and artwork hanging on walls.
I was really looking forward to this for some reason. I guess all the hyperbole about what a huge project it was going to be captured my imagination at the time.
