If you could choose 1 company to work for and create your dream game, what would it be ?

If I could be completely honest, I would choose LionHead and use their Fable IP to make a completely mmo fable similar to the first game but balanced to be fun with a huge skyrim like world for Albion.

What would you do ? Be creative if you want, combine companies if needed lol.

 

I'd probably work for @zombiegorilla. He seems like a nice guy. And his company seems to be reasonable enough.

 

Probably Bethesda, then I'd show them how to turn Elder Scrolls into an MMO that actually resembles the single player games in terms of character consequences etc.

 

I'd need to either (a) go back in time to the early days of the Genesis and work for a company like Konami or Sunsoft or (b) win the lottery and start my own company because I am not interested at all in making games the AAAs are doing these days.

 

Oh god, none of them. I'm really happy working for me, thanks tho!

 

I would love to have a team of people working with me on my current game! I just have no money to hire anyone or know anyone willing to work on a project:/ But I guess that's what hypotheticals are for

 

Origin. Creating Worlds.

 

I'm a huge Blizzard fanboy, but I feel that working for them could totally kill that, and that is not a chance I want to take.

So instead, I'll go with Bioware. We're making KoToR 3 boys.

 

I'm already at my dream company/job. My dream game changes fairly often, but between the two I am working on, it's pretty close (one for visuals and the other for gameplay)

 

I'm a nice guy when people do things my way.

 

Myself of course! The freedom I have you cannot get working for someone. I find that the boss see's things my way all of the time. I've worked for two of the largest corporations in the world, but find working solo much more satisfying.

 

Obsidian Entertainment - let's make Knights of the Old Republic III
or
Paradox Interactive - they recently acquired the World of Darkness IP

 

I tried that. It honestly sucked. My boss had such terrible time and project management skills that it was always crunch time. He also kept wanting me to get into things like marketing and sales, which are quite frankly boring.

 

I would need a time machine to work for Apogee Software.....

 

Interesting.
...

[...considers making a joke about sexual harassment... decides, this may not be the place for that]

 

This... so much this.... My perfect company would be ´ Dad´s Inheritance´...

But to be honest, I am not really limited by money, more just by time. And having enough money to hire people just opens up more cans of worms that I already dealt with... no thanks.

 

Isn't "working for a company" to "create your dream game" an oxymoron? When you work for a company you make their game! Even most executive producers/lead designers are not making their dream games, especially in a big company.

 

This.

I'd hate to work for another company but my own.

 

That'd work!

 

Through the power of necromancy, Looking Glass Studios.

 

Riot.

 

Same only in my case it would be Infocom during their peak.

 

Infocom during their peak is pretty much what inspired me to want to make games. Zorks were awesome, but Hitchiker's was amazing! I had been making little games and generally goofing around on the computer, but Hitchhikers was so engaging that that I really serious about making bigger and more fun games.

[name-dropping]
A few years back, (before we became Disney), Steve Meretzky (game designer at Infocom who wrote HHGTG, and Leather Goddess of Phobos), joined our studio, and had the opportunity to work with Steve on a few things. Nothing that launched, but it was amazing to get work with guy that wrote the game that basically inspired me to be in this industry. He was a really nice guy and very creative. It is still a high-point in my career to get to work the person that inspired me in the first place.
[/name-dropping]

 

Just for short term: ArenaNet. I want to say I was part of Guild Wars at some point. Otherwise the indie thing is pretty e̶p̶i̶c̶ stellar!

 

Yea, that would be a great place to work. They came over to our place last year for LoL boot camp, and they were all stoked/proud about thier company and product. In a very genuine way. (They call themselves "rioters").

 

I'd rather work for myself.
But I would have to say Nintendo!!
And my Dream game would be, to create a Virtua Fighter type fighting game.

PS: Wow! If that happened, something tells me Nintendo, Mr. Miyamoto +his Team and I might not get along, only when it comes to game ideas. Lol! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
The whole thing might end up being a SMASH BRAWL, in the entire office for days!! Lol!

 

You're such a tease. I'm definitely jealous. Zork got me started programming and my first goal was a game framework for text adventure games. I've yet to fully realize one to the degree I aimed for, but that's mostly because my interests have largely shifted beyond that at this point.

One day I need to sit down, with either C# or Java, and build a framework. I've had ideas lately concerning reflection.

 

No way! I had the same urge. I created something like that in Applesoft BASIC, called "The Shire." It was modeled after the Eamon Adventures (anybody remember those?), but had high-tech features like an 80-column screen and lowercase letters. Basically there was a main program, where you could inspect your character, buy and sell gear, etc., and then you would insert the "adventure disk" and enter the adventure. The adventures were independent, and the idea was that they could be written by lots of different people, though in practice nobody ever wrote any but me (and I only wrote like 3, compared to the many dozens of Eamon adventures).

So, in retrospect, I guess that was the first (but certainly not the last) of my projects that worked great, but never caught on.

 

This is a super rough question because inevitably a precondition of it being a dream game scenario is that you personally would get to put some of your dreams in that game. Depending on the size of the production team and your place in that team you might have extremely small input.

So as many have said .. running my own company with enough resources to make the game I want to make is really the #1 choice. That will probably never happen so I make the games I can manage to make for now in the evenings and weekends while I churn away at standard software development during the day.

After my #1 choice it gets hard to pick one so .. I'll just throw out some that I would have loved to work for:

• InExile right now!
  
• Bethesda (any TES title) (I actually did a phone interview with Tod Howard to work on Oblivion but didn't get the job!!)
• Bioware before they abandoned PC (Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale's etc)
• SSI back in the gold box days or Eye of the Beholder days
• Valve - anything, anytime, any game! But if I had my choice I'd take L4D and turn it into a co-op dungeon crawl game with similar gameplay rules.
• SirTech on any Wizardy game!
• Looking Glass on any Thief game

 

I really like DONTNOD. Anything from them I'd be happy with.

Or maybe Harebrained Schemes. Shadowrun Returns (and sequels) were amazing.

 

Klei Entertainment, Mark Of The Ninja was really awesome.

Blizzard too, to create the first offline game by them.

 

Id Software, in late 1990 / early 1991 during the development of the first Commander Keen. A chance to work with Carmack and Romero during a time when the PC was still this unexplored wilderness with seemingly limitless potential. Also, the chance to work on Doom from the beginning.

 

Not necessarily. A lot of people's dream game is a current IP already made, but it's a style game they want. As someone mentioned before, they would want a different Elder Scrolls Online experience. Or me for example, I wanna take the Fable IP and make it into the best mmo around.

 

Also, I'm really enjoying everyone's answers ! I'm happy to see there are a lot of people who would be happy, or I guess are happy, being just themselves. It's also really cool to see all the different companies being brought up, and how much of them are more towards early 2000's to 2007 when it comes to the state of their company. I guess where at their prime imagination wise lol