Hot Dates

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Kiev, 2006. A few years into the development of STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, the natives started to go postal. Despite hyping their interactive nuclear assault since November 2001, the development team GSC Game World had no end in sight.

Release dates had passed like stops on a train route, but the developers were determined, so they buckled down: "We'll announce a release date when it's finished," they said. But PC gamers were furious. First came ventings on fansites, then the developers began to receive death threats.

"As you can imagine," says Oleg Yavorsky, senior PR manager, "it was hard for the team to keep their ears and eyes shut to the public and move forward."

STALKER eventually pounced onto shelves in 2007, and although it didn't disappoint, it proved that release dates are about as trustworthy as politicians. These plastic promises anger fans and drive developers to the point of nervous breakdown, yet they're as common as ticks on a stray cat.

PC gamers waited with bated breath, to the point of asphyxiation, for Half-Life 2, but the game took an eternity to complete. Likewise, Half-Life 2: Episode 2 teased us with expectation until its eventual release, alongside Team Fortress 2 (nine years in the making), in Valve's The Orange Box. Doom 3, BioShock, Crysis: all were delayed.

Meanwhile, other PC games - such as Duke Nukem Forever, Too Human, and StarCraft: Ghost - have turned release dates into Monty Python-esque jokes. When we eventually play these games, we'll be flying around in hovercars.

And the fun continues: Spore's release has been put back until at least April, Warhammer Online was moved from early this year to the summer, and who honestly knows when the world will see GTA IV?

SLIP SLIDE MELTING
According to Michael Goodman, a video game analyst at Boston's Yankee Group, sliding release dates are part and parcel of the games industry: "This has been going on for years."

The main reason for this, he says, is the amount of work at stake - "hundreds of thousands of lines of code" - and the fact that setting a release date on anything that takes production time of between 18 to 24 months is inevitably fickle.

Lara Croft creator Toby Gard, whose PC game Galleon was due in spring 2000, but ended up slipping more times than Britney Spears' garter-belt, agrees. "Pretty much every ambitious game I can think of has taken years. If anything studios are getting better at scheduling to all the unknowns of development."

These unknowns might include song licensing issues, or censor demands, or PC porting challenges (reportedly the case with Assassin's Creed, delayed until early 2008). But lofty ambition, combined with developer naivety, is usually to blame. "Galleon? Oh man," frowns Gard.

"That is such a long story. I've wondered whether I should write down the madness of the development one day. It was a right soap opera I can tell you. To cut that long story short though, it was too ambitious. It was basically an insane game design, so it was all my fault."

GSC Game World, however, delivered on their bonkers ambitions. "STALKER was the first large-scale project for us," explains Yavorsky. "The concept outlined in our design document demanded a ton of various features.

Some elements of the design were totally new for first-person shooter games, so a lot of the development turned into a trial and error process, which effectively cost time. That said, we developed the game engine and the tools in parallel with the game, which didn't help save time either."

Delayed games aren't always about creative challenges, though. Ubisoft recently announced that four of their upcoming games - one an existing franchise, the others "new brands" - were being frozen until next financial year, starting April 2008, due to "positive trends" in Ubi's game sales.

You see, sliding releases are often strategic manoeuvres - publishers can delay games because they've already made enough loot and want to save some ammo in their cannon. Sly, but true.

"There's definitely a strategy to release dates," says Michael Goodman. "Releasing a game is not dissimilar to the thought process that goes into releasing a movie." But while a movie studio executive would rather eat their own feet than withdraw the latest Harry Potter or Shrek from a summer schedule, game companies do so without hesitation.

Why? "Because it's no great loss to them," continues Goodman. "They may show demos and game trailers, there may be buzz about a game in magazines, but they're not going to invest marketing dollars in a product that is not ready."

STUPID GAMERS
If developers can't deliver on their promises and publishers only launch games when they feel like it, why have release dates at all? Well, it's all a marketing ploy. Release dates create buzz and expectation.

We hear about a fantastic new game and save our hard earned: then the date slips, we bitch about it, another date emerges, and we get excited all over again. When the game is eventually released, a year or so late, we buy it anyway. Unlike the movie industry, delayed game releases do not always mean lost sales.

As for the industry, perhaps they should cop on to the fact that a groundbreaking title need not take a lifetime to complete.

The first Tomb Raider took only eight months to finish and even then the game had little by way of a schedule: "We didn't know who our producer was until the game was a month or so away from being done," says Gard. "When we did meet him, his job appeared to be to ask us what we had still to do and how long it would take, then tell us to do it in half the time."

Release dates burn holes in everyone's calendars, but as much as gamers hate their unreliability, rest assured that developers are likely hate them even more. "Developers are creative people, so they need milestones to plan out their work - otherwise the development could go on eternally," says Yavorsky. "At the same time, ill-planned milestones can make developers' lives miserable."

So, hey, when a developer breaks yet another release date, go easy on the death threats.

Pavel Barter