Spawn creator touts Project Copernicus as 90% finished
Stop us if you’ve heard this before — one of the big names behind 38 Studios’ doomed Project Copernicus says that the game was amazing and virtually finished and someone would be crazy not to pick it up.
In an interview on Kotaku from Toy Fair, Spawn creator — and Copernicus Art Director — Todd McFarlane says that Curt Schilling “got it 90 yards” and it was only “10 yards away from the goal line.” Never mind that Schilling played baseball and not football.
If I could pontificate for a moment… putting aside the question of quality, which is subjective, there seems to be no objective way to state that Copernicus was 90% complete, as McFarlane seems to claim. As one commenter on the Kotaku article states, having a working beta is about 50% of the job. It may seem like there’s not much left after that point, but as any experienced MMOer — much less MMO developer — knows that’s only the beginning.
And, as someone who’s done some programming himself, I can testify getting your code to compile correctly and run without errors is great — then you’re just down to making it run correctly, which is another chore in and of itself. And for games, there’s the added duty of making it be entertaining, which is another, more nebulous, milestone.
The notion that an art director with virtually no background in software development could label an MMORPG — which are among the most complex systems in all of gaming — as practically done seems more than a little dubious, even if it does come from someone as successful as McFarlane.
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