How much influence did you have on the WoT computer game, what is your feeling about the game, and what is your opinion about the community? And, within the community it is well known that a lot of readers got into the game, but the other way around as well: a lot of gamers tried the books, the Wheel of Time books and liked them, and what is your opinion about that?
I saw the computer game as a way to attract people to the books. That’s why I agreed, when I was approached by gaming companies, who started wanting the rights. But I also wanted it to be something that was going to be decent. So when I signed the first contract, I made sure there was a particular clause in the contract. And they brought me the plans for the game, now, they’d showed me a couple of games that they’d done previously. When they brought in the plans for the game. What they had done with that was file away the numbers off the previous games, took the files’ serial numbers off, and put some whiteout over the names, and blacked out the names for my book into the … over their old games. And I said no. I don’t like that. I would like you to do this, and this, and this. I would like this to be possible, and that to be possible. And they said, “well, we can’t really do that.” And I said, “well, ah I guess…well, there is this paragraph 24, subparagraph z, and I’m invoking that now, and here’s a check, that’s the money you gave me, goodbye.”
…go away. Here, I’m giving you back the money, go away. So they were shocked. And they came to me and said, “look, no, we’d really like to do this, and we’ll do the things that you’d like to do”. Well, they did. Took them over two-and-a-half years. They had to sell their company to a bigger company to get the money to finance it, [laughter] but that was okay. And I liked the fact that one review said that they’d used the Unreal Engine better than Unreal did. I liked the fact that they were hired based on my game, the game based on my books, that they were hired to write the next Unreal game, the sequel to Unreal.
I like the fact that although the Unreal Engine turned out to be incapable of doing some of the things that I wanted them to do, because they knew about these things that I wanted them to do, they were hired to rewrite the Unreal Engine so that it could do the things that I wanted it to do that previously it could not.
What is going to happen, I don’t know… [asked Mike Verdu about this] …to do more computer games. But then a French company bought Legend GTI and Mike said, “they’ve told us, we must go into a new direction,” and I asked, “what is this new direction?” And he said, “I don’t know, they won’t tell us. They say we’re supposed to wander around until we find it.” So I don’t know what’s going to happen there. I think maybe there’s been too much wine before the meeting but I have no idea what will happen there.
I think the game is visually beautiful, but I’ve never played it, because I don’t play that type of game. When I’m on a computer and I’m not working, which is not very often, I play chess, or perhaps a strategic simulation of a battle. Free-fight games for every war, that sort of thing.
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