Page 3 of 6 Dissecta 22 Nov 05: Heroes of the Pacific
"Trade shows are very distracting" Ben remarked, while individual meetings allowed him to speak with the acquisitions and marketing people at the one time.
Ben said they were "almost successful." While the demo tour attracted a lot of interest the business risks, associated with not having a team, were too great for publishers. The tour cost half as mush as the demo.
Plan B
While creating the demo Ben had also been working on an alternative financing model that would see the studio and project becoming independently financed rather than being a gun for hire; a publisher would need to contract to take the project while the project's cashflow would be independently financed and paid out by the publisher when the game was completed. This would allow more independent and ownership over the game. And this is where IR Gurus came into the picture.
So with the aid of a merchant bank and a publisher guaranteeing to take the project on completion, and working with IR Gurus, the project was financed and it was all systems go.
Full Team Ahead
At this stage, in about October 2003, Justin Halliday came into the team as producer, to see the project to completion. Justin was formerly at Atari Melbourne House.
"What we had at that stage was effectively a very rudimentary code
base of the game, which was the original demo"