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'They are understanding, but if they see something they need changed, they are very vocal,' Bergman said.Īfter years of coding, designing the art and writing the back story for the game world, 'Vendetta Online' officially went live in May 2004 with distributing and marketing support from Strategy First, a Canadian game publisher. Keeping up with that feedback, fixing bugs and building new content means the development team needs to be nimble, flexible and tireless - essentially the same qualities that got the company to where it is today. 'We really communicate with our user base,' Bergman said, describing 'Vendetta' players as a 'pretty intelligent group.' 'We've built up quite a rapport.' A mission editing program lets players craft new scenarios, which are then submitted to the community corps for review, feedback and evaluation by the studio.

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The small player base and story-driven nature of the game have helped build a tightly knit online community, Bergman said, noting that 'there are a lot of people interested in the role-playing aspect' of the game.Īnd to get players even more invested in the game, Guild Software announced late last month that fans will be able to help design 'Vendetta Online.' The game's new 'Player Contribution Corps' can build and test new missions and create new user-interface features, among other options for creating content. In addition to space battles, 'Vendetta' includes trading, mining and player blockades that can have direct effects on the game's economics. They enjoy a higher intensity type of play style.' We have a different philosophy - we are willing to take risks.

'There are some scary concepts that are worrisome to a lot of game designers. 'We think we are in our own little niche,' Bergman said. And 'Vendetta' lacks the 'perfect safety' as a place to play because the game lets players attack one another at any time, with many fewer safe havens than most online games. With a base of about 1,000 subscribers, 'Vendetta Online' is tiny compared to 'WOW,' which has more than 11 million players who pay ongoing fees to play together online.īut Bergman says they are not competing with WOW - their genres are different. 'I was playing these space games, and I had no idea what an MMO was at the time,' Bergman said about the massively multiplayer online game genre, which is currently dominated by 'World of Warcraft.' The team has been engineering its own wars among the stars ever since.

Programmers Ray Ratelis and Michael Warnock joined their ranks, and their efforts culminated in 'Vendetta Online,' a massively multiplayer online game in which players build a space ship, explore and adventure in an always evolving virtual universe. They were both interested in designing demonstrations of their coding abilities. The 'we' Bergman is talking about includes Andy Sloane, a programmer, whom he met when they were just teenagers - well before Guild Software became a company.Īs budding programmers, they were both visiting bulletin board systems, which are dial-in network systems where people discuss common interests.

'Network games were just coming to the fore. 'We were meeting in my parents' living room at the time,' said John Bergman, the studio's managing director. This tiny game studio based in the Wauwatosa Research Park formed about 10 years ago the way many built up back then: a small group of friends with passion and talent started working on projects that soon grew to take on lives of their own. Guild Software has been making virtual-world online games before the genre hit the big time.

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