Page 1 of 6 Dissecta 22 Nov 05: Heroes of the Pacific
Heroes
of the Pacific: Dissecta Report
Based on the Dissecta event held 22 November 2005
with Ben Palmer and Justin Halliday, producers at IR Gurus Interactive.
Introduction: the Heroes of the Pacific story starts with Ben Palmer, before he and his team joined with IR Gurus. Ben takes up the story...
No Money, No Team
Ben says Heroes started in 2003 when it was just himself, "deciding what I could do with no money and no team in which to build a game in order to go on and start franchising ... and all those wonderful dreams you have" adding "when you have no responsibilities or any other thing to worry about." He came to a couple of conclusions very early on he said.
"It needed to be on a PS2 to achieve any credibility in the marketplace, that being the most challenging platform to program on." "Secondly it needed to have some unique feature to make it cut through, to ensure people sat up and took notice in the wonderful world of publishers."
To address these issues Ben said they looked at what the PS2 was capable of achieving and how they could exploit this.
"we could set it over water which was a big cop out and which meant that as we didn't have an artist we could get away with doing very little landscaping and terrain"
In the end Ben, who is an old school programmer, came up with the second world war dogfighting game we now know as Heroes of the Pacific. At the time the World War 2 genre was breaking into popularity, but they thought they had an opening in the flight simulator space. "Nobody was really doing the dogfighting" said Ben, and "getting hundreds of planes in the sky at once could be the unique feature" of the game.
The Demo
Ben took the proof of concept to a few "friendly" publishers, and received positive support for the concept which was encouraging.