Stargate Worlds :: News :: Press Releases :: Cheyenne Mountain Holds Press Junket

COMPANY INTRO

By Timothy Jenson, President and CEO

Let me start off with maybe a little bit of history about our company. About four years ago some avid game enthusiasts and some excited fans of Stargate, namely Jim Brown, Todd Ellering and Daryl Wofford had an idea to create an MMORPG based upon the Stargate story line. Since MGM is the owner of the Stargate property the first critical task for them was to convince MGM of the potential value of that idea. The three of them created a preliminary design and a business plan and after some extensive series of meetings, interviews and presentations, they convinced MGM to consider moving forward with the licensing arrangement. The next step and a key requirement of MGM was to find the necessary capital to get the project off the drawing board and into production. This proved harder than expected. Finally in the summer of 2005 the project was jump-started by a Mesa, Arizona based entrepreneur and visionary business man by the name of Gary Whiting.

After his careful review of the initial proposal and business plan, Mr. Whiting formed and arranged for the funding of Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment. In July 2005 Cheyenne obtained from the initial three creators all the rights and intellectual property associated with Stargate Worlds and officially began to do business.

From the beginning the company's goal was to find the best and the brightest people in the game industry and to build a truly great game with exceptional graphics and superior gaming experience. The first key position sought by the company was an industry leader, an expert in game development and particularly someone with MMO expertise. The company's search successfully attracted a true industry legend, Joe Ybarra, who joined the Cheyenne team in July 2005. Joe quickly saw the possibilities for a Stargate MMO and realized the opportunity to build a truly world-class development studio. With Joe's game development experience on board the next key position to be filled was for a business leader who could organize the administrative functions of the company so that Joe could focus on building world-class entertainment products.

In August of 2005 the company asked that I join the Cheyenne team to give Joe the support he needed not only to make Stargate Worlds a great success but to position us to become a premier entertainment company.

Our first public announcement was on January 31, 2006, and was the culmination of the work that had been in creation for nearly four years. Now in full swing, Cheyenne has a growing staff of top industry veterans and is poised to deliver well beyond the dream begun by the three original creators. Cheyenne is now rapidly becoming the leading developer of interactive entertainer software products. The company is dedicated to creating cutting edge unique entertainment. The company expects to develop highly recognizable brands with high quality technology, distinctive artwork and rich game play. Cheyenne continues to recruit top industry talent to ensure its success as a game development company.

STARGATE WORLDS INTRO

By Joe Ybarra, Vice President of Product Development

One of the things I will begin this conversation by saying is the fact that we are currently still in preproduction of our product. Part of our strategy as far as the preproduction cycle is concerned is to try to get some of our customers involved, which is the reason why we have launched our forum site already a couple of weeks ago. Very shortly we will be launching the community site for Stargate Worlds. We plan on continuously updating the community site and the forums with information about our product, as we evolve the details of the design, and as we are able to share more and more information about what our plans are.

I think we will begin by talking about, what are the elements about Stargate that are particularly attractive from an MMO perspective? I think the most obvious one is the concept of the Stargate itself. The Stargate, as we know from the TV series, provides us with a vehicle that allows us to basically transport our players anywhere in the universe. By anywhere, we mean any obvious planet surface, in outer space, inside interiors of space craft or ancient ruins or various other locations. It is a perfect vehicle for us to be able to transport people and it gives them a sense of awe and exploration.

Starting off with the game environment, we have the opportunity to transport people anywhere in the universe, we plan on taking great advantage of that. This implies of course that there will be a fair degree of use of instances in our game. By the same token, there will also be very large scale wide open play environments that people will be able to play in. One of the components that we are really focusing in on heavily in this game is to find areas of play for the users that are not directly combat related. So because we will need a lot of playfield area in which to enact that, this is an area that we are focusing a lot of attention on. At the same time we also really want to capture the feel of science fiction, so we do plan on having quite a bit of content that is related to alien civilization both extinct as well as current.

We have lots of alien races and different types of possibilities, for what players might be represented by. The most obvious of course is the Jafa as one of the game characters in SG1. It is not a human so we would expect that the players would be able to play Jaffa and various other non-human races. They are still investigating the possibility of which kinds of races we would like the users to be represented by. We have some pretty interesting ideas in that area, so stay tuned as we get more details out on that. Again, we will be concentrating on making sure we have lots of different races.

We want to have an environment in which the users can do things that are not combat and have a very rich and compelling game experience. So to that extent we are designing a very elaborate construction system for allowing players to construct different housing, different activities on planet side.

For instance one of the things that we have discussed is the idea of constructing a mine so that you have a mining facility and refinery that allows the users to process the raw ore and turn it into something that is usable as a commodity. That is just one example of constructions. We also have the opportunity to have an elaborate tech tree. And the tech tree gets into the idea that we have several advanced alien races such as the Asgard. They have a very rich and detailed technology base that we can allow users to explore and, if you will, level up in their skills and the knowledge base about that type of technology.

Lastly, trading. We think it is really important that we support the free economy, if you will, and allow players to trade freely between each other between planets as well as smuggle when we try to move contraband from say the Goa'uld technology base into the Asgard's technology base.

Having said that, I will speak about combat now because combat is going to be the biggest percentage of play activity, as is in any MMO. In our game design we will be supporting four-player squads. For solo players, if it turns out that you cannot find or you don't wish to fight with a whole bunch of other people then we will provide you with AI-driven bots that will support you in various different missions and activities.

Combat in our game is going to be very modern, as it is in the TV series, so the users will be equipped with P90 machine guns as well as shot guns, as well as other types of modern equipment including explosives like hand grenades and C4 explosives and what-not. We also are putting a high premium on stealth, using the terrain and other things for cover so that users are not going to be exposed to machine gun fire or other things.

The last thing I would like to talk about is, about our structures for social aspects of the game. MMOs are really about communities of people and because they are about communities of people we feel that one of the areas that we could do some innovative work is to really try to make the guild systems and the squad systems and all of the hierarchies in-between a very compelling play experience for the user. So to that extent our plans are to try to work with guild leaders and other people who do these things on an ongoing basis to find out what kind of tools they need to help organize their guilds.

We also plan on having play activities that are related specifically to guilds. One of the big concepts that we have been discussing has been a guild leveling system. The guild itself actually generates through the course of its members various points or the equivalent of experience points so the guild itself is progressing. As a result of the guild progressing, it will unlock construction capabilities, expansion capabilities, technological abilities as well as the obvious economic benefits.

HIGHLIGHTS FROM PRESS QUESTIONS

John Callaham, Gamecloud: Have you selected the graphics engine for this game yet?
Joe Ybarra, Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment: We are going to make an announcement sometime very soon about where we are going with technology. But the answer is that we are actually pretty far along on the client side engine to the extent that one of the deliverables for the close of preproduction is our first playable prototype.

John Callaham, Gamecloud: Is it possible that we could see a crossover maybe event in the game itself? Maybe referred to in the TV show and vice versa?
Joe Ybarra, Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment: That is one of our goals. Clearly one of the issues with that is the flexibility of the coordination of all activity given the fact that they have to make the show and then it has to be scheduled to be aired and it has to be timed perfectly with the release of an update. So it is going to be a challenge for us to be able to do that, but it is our goal to try to accomplish that.

Bart Fiddler, Gamergod: Is Stargate Worlds based on a twitch-based combat? Almost a first-person shooter? Or will there be more of the overstyle MMO skills-based combat?
Joe Ybarra, Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment: We are looking at this as more being the skill-based type of combat system. We actually have a posting on our forum that talks to this point. But basically the idea is that if we try to do something that is very twitch-based in a very traditional MMO environment, we don't have any real control over the number of users that are in a particular area and obviously we have no control whatsoever over the bandwidth and the system specifications of the end user. So if we try to do something that is very twitch-based in a very open environment like this we run the risk of some customers being penalized just because they have a bad connection or some other issue that we have no way of being able to work with. To that extent we want to stay with the traditional type of MMO. It is a hidden turn-based environment. When I said hidden and turn-based of course if you look at any modern game we will use World of Warcraft…as an example, although that game design is not a twitch-based environment the combat pacing is so fast that it just seems like it is real time. Our game will play very much like that.

Laura Griffin, Stargategame.com: I was wondering how the impact of the Stargate Alliance game being cancelled has affected any of your strategy towards your news …your interaction with MGM…anything like that?
Joe Ybarra, Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment: No, it has no effect whatsoever.

Laura Griffin, Stargategame.com: Okay, so your timing…you did not have any plans changed when they announced the downfall of alliance?
Joe Ybarra, Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment: No, that was actually completely independent of the work that we are doing. A lot of what we have been trying to accomplish here is that we had to be a certain percentage of the way down the road here as far as the work is concerned and the evolution of our company. So that probably dictated our timetable more than anything else did.

Laura Griffin, Stargategame.com: You guys have no involvement with the cancellation of Stargate Alliance?
Joe Ybarra, Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment: That is correct.

Laura Griffin, Stargategame.com: Do you guys have an about timetable of when you are going to be looking to release the games? Are we talking two or three years down the road?
Joe Ybarra, Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment: Yes, we have a timetable and we are not really at liberty to discuss that just yet. But we will certainly make announcements about that as it becomes appropriate.

John Callaham, Gamecloud: Are you guys searching for a publisher for a game? Or are you guys going to be handling that yourselves?
Joe Ybarra, Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment: Yes, we are in the process now of talking and exploring possibilities for publication.

Jaina Mistry, Stargategame.com: About the guild…will there be any interactivity between guilds say forming alliances between the guild themselves instead of just players and characters in the game?
Joe Ybarra, Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment: Absolutely. We really want to encourage that big time because we believe that in order for some of the play activities to take place in this game that the guilds may have to get really big in terms of greater than 500 people playing in the guild. That is part of our design architecture for the guild's progression system here is that for example if you want to build a Goa'uld mother ship that the amount of resources and manpower required to do something like that will be fairly substantial. To do that it may in fact require the efforts of several guilds working together to accomplish that feat.

Bart Fiddler, Gamergod: One of the things that I haven't heard discussed was specific missions and/or quests. As we travel into the Stargate to an unknown world are we going to be faced with basically open-ended series of rewards for the discoveries or the things we find on the planet? Or before we actually enter into the Stargate will we be given a specific mission or quest?
Joe Ybarra, Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment: Yes to both. The quest architecture that we have is one of the very first things that we started working on when we began work on this project. As a result of that we have a fairly elaborate and interesting paradigm for how we are going to have a quest and the quest logic of the system. So going back to answering your question is any time you are going to initiative quests on one side of the Stargate and then they will take you through and have specific missions but we also will have much more elaborate and complex environment requesting than what you might normally see in an MMO especially as we try to intertwine activities that relate to the guild, squads, to non-combat game play and to exploration. As I said we will have a very elaborate and very robust questing environment. It is sort of like as a player you are playing the TV show is what it comes down to. More highlights to come... check back for updates!