Long-time industry veteran Mark Skaggs who has created several million/multi-million unit selling PC games and has experience running large teams like Electronic Arts Irvine Studios, has become the latest Advisory Board member to join David Perry's Project Top-Secret game team, and he will be kindly contributing his time to the largest community-developed videogame project ever created.
"Mark is one of the guys placing a lot of value and respect on the talent that's emerging from indie teams and colleges all over the world", says Perry.
With over 60,000 people now signed up to work on designing this project and an estimated 11 teams each secretly working on their submission for the big Top Secret game development competition, the secret is now out! The winner of the design competition gets a dramatic career boost as the Director of a professional team on a future Acclaim massively multiplayer game. The winner of the development competition will have all their traditional hurdles instantly removed by Acclaim, hurdles that often prevent small teams from being able to compete with the professionals. They will be paid $100,000 prize money on the spot, they also get $1,000,000 to go against licensing any engine technology or middleware in the world that they used to make their game, and they get a full industry standard video game development contract, making them a bona-fide professional development studio, day one.
"I've known Perry for years and love to see companies like Acclaim still willing to take serious creative risks in the name of growing our industry", said Skaggs, "Maybe this is the future? For example, when we made the Command & Conquer games, instead of our small team having to make every single bit of content – imagine if 1,000 or 10,000 people were on the team making the content – how would that change the concept of today's video game design? I'm sure there's a lot to be learned here and there's no sign of the internet's influence on gaming even slightly slowing, so I'm looking forward to rolling up my sleeves and helping out."
The Top Secret Game will be a free-to-play title and will be based on a Beast Racing concept, created by the community, that's like no game design ever created before.
Perry adds, "As a benefit to Mark, working closely with these people, I'm positive he will find amazing talent on this team that he will want to work with in the future. I certainly have been hiring people directly out of the forums, so the system is already working."