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“We’re excited by the opportunities that mobile gaming offers, so mobile will play a larger role in our History Games Channel initiative in the coming months. We want to keep giving players new ways to remain connected to History games.” “We believe by unifying a feature set across all of our Games sites we will be well-positioned to offer advertisers unique ways to engage with our active and growing game community.” With so many of the History Channel’s TV Shows lending themselves so well to potential video game crossovers there is an absolute wealth of content for potential developers to get stuck into. The imagination runs wild with the possibilities for shows such as Ice Road Truckers and Mega Disasters. For now though A+E Networks are concentrating on their next release, Top Shot, which has been developed with Fifth Column and seems an obvious choice for gamification.
WGE:MAG spoke to Andrew Marsh, President of Fifth Column Games to get the lowdown on their work on Pawn Stars: The Game and Top Shot. Who Are Fifth Column Games? Fifth Column Games (www.c5games.com) is an independent video game studio I helped found in 2011 with industry veterans Adam Lipski, and Mike Fahmie. Located in San Francisco, Fifth Column is dedicated to crafting high-quality games that leverage powerful technologies to deliver fun and unique gaming experiences. As President I contribute heavily to design, but also to engineering, creative direction, and other aspects of running the studio. Adam, CTO, is in charge of the technical direction of game development. He oversees the integration of new or emergent technology into the games, guides engineering, and makes sure that nothing explodes. Mike, founder and Chief Creative Officer, has experience writing particle engines, shaders, renderers, and even working for NVIDIA. Mike oversees the creative direction of on all projects, contributes ideas and vision, and makes sure they can be implemented.
It’s early days but Kris has seen the signs for another hit for the History Channel: “We launched Top Shot through a web version of the game at History.com <http://History.com> and a sneak peek of the Facebook game can be seen at playtopshot.com. In about month’s time we will release the Facebook game in its entirety followed shortly by a mobile game. We’ll have cross-promotion activities to link each of the games and the show.
Adam and I are pioneers of social gaming and between the two of us have shipped more than eight titles for Facebook including Pawn Stars: The Game, Mighty Pirates, Happy Pets, Restaurant Life, Spin-It-Up Slots, Know-It-All Trivia and World War II. All three of us love games: love to play them, and even more than that, love to make them.
“Looking at the success of shooters on other platforms, we realized that we had the ability to fill the current vacuum for shooters on Facebook. Top Shot is the perfect property to translate into a social first person shooter game because the show already is a game in its own right - with self-taught marksmen testing their skills with weapons from all eras of human history in different historical themed challenges. The show is like a shooter brought to life - now we’re bringing that experience back to gaming but in a social setting.”
I first connected with Kris Soumas, the head of games at A+E Networks through a mutual friend. She gave me advice on business direction and I talked to her about social game development. Pretty soon I was working as a consultant on Pawn Stars: The Game, and soon after I put together a team to take over development.
How did the meeting of AE and Fifth Column come about?