![]() ![]() The plan of attack was simple: Infogrames would fund three months of pre-production. Hopefully at some point, George Miller would change his mind. His glass half full response: start making the game anyway. So despite its pedigree and its storied history with licenses, when Melbourne House came calling for the Mad Max license the answer, like the others, was a resounding no.īruno Bonnell wasn’t to be dissuaded. In 1999 a Mad Max video game was a tough sell. Some say Mad Max director George Miller was so burned by an early Mad Max video game, released on the NES in 1990, that he was reluctant to take the plunge all over again. So many studios had called asking for the Mad Max video game license that Kennedy Miller Mitchell considered hiring someone just to pick up the phone and say “no” for eight hours a day. One small problem: Melbourne House didn’t have the license to make a Mad Max game. ![]() His thought process was, ‘you’re Australian. Bruno Bonnell wanted Melbourne House to start work on a Mad Max video game. Stop working on them right now!'”Ī shock for all in attendance, but Bruno Bonnell had a different plan. “We gave a presentation of all the games we were working on to Bruno Bonnell who was the CEO,” he remembers. Mark remembers the first meeting between Melbourne House and Bonnell. In 1999 Mark Morrison was a designer at that studio, a man proud of the fact he squeezed three typos into the name of DETHKARZ, the last game he worked on.īack then Melbourne House was working on a number of projects, including a sequel to DETHKARZ, but that changed, almost overnight. In 1999 Bruno Bonnell was the CEO of Infogrames, a gaming powerhouse that purchased Melbourne House on the absolute brink of closure. He believes Bruno Bonnell bought Melbourne House because he really, really wanted to make a Mad Max game. These are good reasons for buying a studio, but Mark Morrison has a different theory. They were well on their way to developing a reputation for building 3D racing games in a time when 3D racing games were very much in vogue. Even in the late 90s Melbourne House was capable of great things. Others believe Bruno Bonnell was merely interested in the raw expertise. Once upon a time Melbourne House was one of the best games development studios in the entire world. Later came Hungry Horace and the seminal Way of the Exploding Fist. Established in 1980, Melbourne House’s first video game was The Hobbit, a text adventure released in 1982 that went on to be one of the most successful of its time. Melbourne House was an Australian studio with a long and storied reputation. Some suggest it was the historical significance of it all. No-one really knows why Bruno Bonnell bought Melbourne House. ![]()
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