Curt Schilling was one of the best ever at tossing fireballs past major league hitters, but as it turns out, there were times he’d have rather been throwing a different kind of fireball at orcs and goblins.
Most people know about his 20 seasons in the major leagues, in which he was a six-time All-Star and three-time World Series winner – but little about his off-the-field hobbies of immersing himself in MMO’s like “Everquest” and “World of Warcraft.”
“I think one of the only differences from me and the hardcore D&Ders out there is that I was blessed with ability to throw a baseball really fast and accurately,” Schilling told us.
Schilling took that love for all things fantasy gaming and founded 38 Studios and has spent much of his retirement from baseball creating a new MMO and a single-player role player called “Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning” – which will release on Feb. 7.
The team working on “Reckoning” is a murderer’s row of talent -- including head designer Ken Rolston of “The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind” and “The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion,” and story and lore by fantasy author R.A. Salvatore. There’s also artwork contributed by “Spawn” comics’ creator Todd McFarlane.
Schilling spoke with Red Bull USA about the vision behind “Reckoning” and how baseball and video game producing is more alike than you might think.
Red Bull: It seems like most pro athletes become managers or sports broadcasters after they retire. What led you to start a video game company?
Curt Schilling: Well, I didn’t want to manage and I didn’t want to broadcast. I’ve been a gamer my whole life and when I was looking at the end of my career, I wanted to do something that I had a passion for if I was commit time and passion and energy into it. So this was a natural fit for me.”
What has sort of been the response from the game industry and the sports world about you creating a video game?
Nothing surprising. In the last five years, I think the attitude has changed a little bit. When we started showing gameplay a year or a year and a half ago—it got a little more real for everyone. I think there are still questions about what this is going to be, and whether or not it’s going to be successful. I hope a few days from now, those questions get answered when our game launches.”
A lot of athletes play video games, especially on the road—but they tend to play sports games or shooters like Call of Duty. How did you get into fantasy RPG’s?
I’ve just always been a fantasy gamer. I mean, I played sports for a living, so hopping off the diamond, going home and getting on a console to play a baseball game wasn’t what I was after. Fantasy, I think, is inherent in all of our DNA’s to some degree.
"In Boston, J.D. Drew, Coco Crisp -- a ton of my teammates, far more than you might expect, played console games."
Were you one of the biggest gamers in major league baseball? Was there anyone else – a teammate or someone else -- who you loved to talk or play games with?
There was a lot. In Boston, J.D. Drew, Coco Crisp -- a ton of my teammates, far more than you might expect, played console games. Everyone in baseball played Madden to some degree. We had a lot of free time and it was a way of occupying your time and staying out of trouble as well. We competitive gamed a lot, it’s almost like Hollywood.
I know a lot of people in Hollywood who play MMO’s and fantasy games but it’s almost like taboo and publicists really go out of their way to put that person’s life not in public. I always found that funny, it’s like everyone’s doing it but they don’t want anyone else to know about it and I’m not sure why. I think a lot of it centers around the word “nerd” or “geek” which in my mind, we’ve completely flipped the definition of that word. Now, it’s like if you don’t have an iPhone or iPad and you can’t download an app or can’t look up something on Wikipedia or Google, that makes you a geek or a nerd rather than the opposite.
What was your specific vision with Kingdom of Amalur?
The vision is here is that it’s more than just one game – this game is sort of the leadoff hitter for us. We have a completely new fantasy intellectual property and our goal is to make it as something as big as “Star Wars” or “Lord of the Rings.” We’ve been in production of the MMO for over 5 years and the single-player RPG is the kickoff to that. I couldn’t be prouder of what’s taking us to market than “Reckoning.”
I’ve heard a billion different comparisons to other games so far when people talk about “Kingdoms of Amalur” –Do all the comparisons to other games bother you at all?
Love it. The challenge is that, yes, there are any number of games from “Shadow of Colossus” to “God of War,” to “Fable” to “Skyrim.” There are a ton of influences on what we did. Where we start to be different is that every feature or feel that we took from another game, we didn’t try to put a touch of that in our game, we tried to take what we loved and tried to execute it front to back. The “God of War” comparison is a good one—I mean maybe visually it looks like “God of War,” and X and Y are the primary attack and it may feel like there’s not much depth to that.
But once you start to look at the combos and the moves and the interactivity of the ranged and melee weapons and the magic and you begin to understand you can physically get better at the game if you want to—that’s something you can’t get in a 45-minute demo. On the flip side, from a story perspective, there’s are 200 to 300 hours of game here if you’re a completionist. You don’t know how far and deep we’ve gone with our lore. Every one of our races has its own language, has its own music, has its own dialect, that’s pervasive throughout our entire IP.
In baseball, you have a game everyday to prove yourself, but in the gaming world, your next “performance” can take years to release. Is that tough for you?
I’m a firm believer of things are what you make them. In my mind, this is the exact same thing as a baseball season, but it’s just longer. It’s a long, arduous and demanding process. But if I’m focused on what game 161 is going to be like on opening day, I’m going to kill myself. So, this, more than anything I’ve ever been involved in is about focus. Keeping people focused is where this becomes something important.
There’s a lot of talent on the Kingdoms of Amalur team- does it compare it all to any of your Red Sox teams as far as the amount of talent?
Absolutely. If you look at 38 studios and the talent--they’ve combined to ship 12 billion dollars in product in the past 12 years and I’d stack the talent we have to any company or genre in the world. It’s not enough, it’s about execution, and I think we’ve done that.
"There’s a saying in baseball -- you play for the name on the front of your jersey, not the name on the back."
Playing baseball is obviously much different than producing a game, but was there anything in your past career you could draw on or any sort of philosophy that maybe helped you with this game?
Everything. There’s way more crossover and carryover than you might imagine. Because at the end of the day, success is about the people. That doesn’t change in any big business. You’re only as good as your last product and when you don’t have a product, you’re only as good as your first. And so, for me, this is an industry that fails to understand or doesn’t know what a true team environment is.
There’s a saying in baseball -- you play for the name on the front of your jersey, not the name on the back. When you get people at this level, and getting them to buy into something bigger than yourself, it’s far more beneificial professionally and personally than going down your own path. That’s been my job and my role, to let these guys do their magic.
I would love to tell you that I’m a junior game designer and I’m good at it, but I’m not. I suck. I think I know good games, I can tell the difference between a good and a bad game even if I don’t like the genre. It’d be stupid of me to commit time and money to a company where I wasn’t letting these people do what they do best.
What’s more stressful: pitching in the World Series or releasing your first video game?
Very much the same. This is more so to me. Pitching the World Series I was doing what I was doing what I did best. I knew how to throw a baseball, I didn’t care what stadium it was in because in my mind there was no one who could beat me in October. I had a lot of confidence, I had been doing it since I was five years old. As a pitcher, once the ball leaves your hands, so are the results, and that’s where we’re at now where the ball has left our hands. The game’s gone gold, and it’s going to be in people’s hands soon so there’s a feeling of helplessness that is uncomfortable. But I have faith and I’m proud of what we’ve made. I think it has potential to be Game of the Year, but we’re done and we have to let the players decide.
Can we expect to see any kind of special Curt Schilling loot like a World Series ring that gives +1 to Luck or a Bloody Sock medallion?
It’s funny--we don’t want to take ourselves too seriously, but at the same time--we’re not making a comedy. The IP is something we’re passionate about. We want a respectful tone about what we do. Maybe sometime down the road we’ll come up with some silly and goofy thing, but it wasn’t a smart move this time out.
For more from Ryan Smith, follow him on Twitter: @RyanSmithWriter
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