Feature: 'Wideload Games' Alexander Seropian on Outsourcing for the Living Dead'

In today's main Gamasutra feature, Howard Wen interviews Wideload Games founder Alex Seropian on life after Bungie, and the pluses and minuses of outsourcing and coordinating work on his new game Stubbs the Zombie. As Wen explains in his introduction: "In 2003, Alexander Seropian founded Wideload Games, Inc.; and he and his initial staff of ten people (most of who, like himself, once worked for Bungie Studios) in Chicago, Illinois went to work on a game built upon the Halo engine. Two years later, their result has little in common with the hard-core science fiction world of Halo; Stubbs the Zombie flaunts a decidedly eccentric premise. It's a third-person, comedy-horror actioner. The player assumes the role of Edward "Stubbs" Stubblefield, a traveling salesman who was murdered in 1933. Flash forward to the year 1959 -- Stubbs has been resurrected as a zombie. So he goes on a rampage wrecking havoc throughout an anachronistic "City of Tomorrow." He can attack people by lobbing his guts to go off like grenades, spraying them with his flatulence, or -- in an homage to Evil Dead II -- detaching his hand to possess them. Of course, humans can be transformed into the fellow undead when Stubbs attacks them directly. The zombified can then do Stubbs' dirty work of terrorizing the living. In fact, recruiting others to do the so-called "dirty work" was one of the business goals behind the founding of Wideload. When Seropian, one of the designers of the original Halo, left Bungie (which he co-founded) in 2002 after the release of Halo, his next venture was to go small: He started Wideload as a smaller game studio where most of the development would be accomplished by outsourcing various technical and asset work to others." You can now read the full Gamasutra feature on the subject (no registration required, please feel free to link to the article from external websites).