Earlier this week, the folks at InstantAction unveiled their first in-house project from the Vegas studio. Surprisingly, this game turned out to be a music/guitar game that leverages users' entire music library on the hard drive. At the time of the announcement we hopped on the phone with CEO Lou Castle to talk about the new Instant Jam game, the progress of the InstantAction business, and the state of the industry. IndustryGamers' full Q&A is below.
If you ever owned a PlayStation, there’s a chance you have heard of Thrill Kill, a violent, sexually suggestive fighting game that never saw the light of day. Not from the outcries of concerned parents, but by executives at the last minute.
I remember reading about some of the development of Thrill Kill in Gamepro magazine, and it getting the AO rating. That alone in '98 warranted a purchase, because.. well, it's an AO game, man.
Then EA canned it so they wouldn't hurt their image, which really sucks for the development team and their hard work. Overall, though, no biggie. We still have Mortal Kombat and can find Thrill Kill online. And not to mention with the releases in 1998 - arguably the best year in video games ever - Thrill Kill may have been overshadowed anyway.
I had a copy I burned and played. I believe you can still download it and play it on an emulator. It was quite bad actually.
Aside from being an unfinished game, I had a good time with it. I thought it was like that arcade game pit fighter. Imp the pimp or Belladonna the dominatrix were awesome!
I read somewhere, if not stated in the article, that this game evolved into wu tang shaolin style, which ended up for me being one of the best fighting games ever. A 4 player fighting game is still unheard of today. I know it may fall into the brawler category, but whatever.
You're correct. And yes that was an awesome game. I was surprised it was actually good my friends and I had a blast with wu tang.
I've had bootlegged version of Thrill Kill on my modified PS1. Wasn't that great but it was brutal and 4 player vs. was pretty frantic.
Louis Castle, co-founder of Westwood Studios, and the new head of Amazon Game Studios, Seattle. If you’ve ever played a Real-Time Strategy game, you know Louis’ work.
Having recently headed up online gaming platform InstantAction, newly hired Zynga VP Lou Castle is aware of some of the bigger challenges facing online companies. Castle had worked up a partnership with David Perry's Gaikai to facilitate some of the streaming on the InstantAction platform, but overall he's not confident in cloud gaming as the ultimate solution for everyone. Nevertheless, he does believe that streaming will one day be the future of games.
Agreed, Onlive is already doing it, only thing is you need a good internet connection,which is getting cheaper and cheaper every year.
