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November 2002
Stalker Entertainment
We talk to Mike 'EvilTwin' Danylchuck, the game
designer at Stalker Entertainment. Danylchuck was a miracle maker back
when he worked for Hearme (creators of Mplayer), he was a great co-worker
to have. Since then his heart was to create games that kick bootay. Mike
is known not only for his full time no eat no sleep hours on these titles
for Stalker Entertainment, but to me he's known for being such a great
friend to have all of these years. Enjoy! - CaliGirl
[LadyGamers]: What is it like to be a hot new
developer in the gaming industry?
[Mike Danylchuck]: Incredibly stressful, but preferable to having an ordinary job.
[LadyGamers]: All of you have some type of background in
multiplayer gaming services. What do you feel a brand new gaming service
company would need to do to service such a huge entertainment industry?
[Mike Danylchuck]: I don't see a lot of room for a new independent gaming service right now. PC game developers already have the Zone and GameSpy to choose from, and many publishers have come up with proprietary solutions like Battle.Net, WON, EA.com, etc. with varying degrees of success.
If a new service did try to enter the scene, they'd probably be better off catering to the trend of integrating online matchmaking and server browsing into the games themselves than by developing an external client like TEN, Mplayer, or GameSpy Arcade. External clients certainly have their benefits, but creating a new one wouldn't be as beneficial as creating a good, solid set of tools for developers to integrate into their games. GameSpy's made some good progress in that area, but the market is big enough for some competition.
[LadyGamers]: Stalker Entertainment released an id Software
related game on a console platform. Do you have plans on getting into more
console games or will you get more into PC related titles from here on out?
[Mike Danylchuck]: We're definitely focusing on consoles. The market is larger than it is for the PC, and the budgets are comparable, so it's much less risky to develop for a console platform. That's not to say that we won't release PC versions of our games, just that consoles are our top priority.
[LadyGamers]: Did any of you attend E3 at the beginning of this
year? Were there any interesting games worth talking about?
[Mike Danylchuck]: Yeah, we went down for some business meetings and wandered around the show quite a bit. There were a lot of cool games there, but nothing really stood out from the crowd (I didn't see the Doom III video until QuakeCon). I did like the grappling moves in Dead to Rights though, and the graphics in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers from Stormfront/EA looked really, really good.
[LadyGamers]: All of you moved from California to Texas at
different times in the last year or so. Do any of you miss the state at all?
If so, what do you miss about California?
[Mike Danylchuck]: Yeah, I miss my family, friends, the weather, hills, mountains, large bodies of water, liberals, Amoeba Music in Berkeley, and Pancho Villa Taqueria in San Mateo, aw yeah.
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