Goodbye Pandemic LA

I was working at Pandemic Brisbane for about 3 months before we merged with BioWare and Elevation Partners invested 300 million into the company. Two years later Pandemic and BioWare were sold to Electronic Arts for about 800 million. About 18 months later the Brisbane studio was shut down. Today the LA studio has also been shut down. Read about it here.

It's interesting to note that John Riccitello left EA in 2004 to form Elevation to buy Pando/BioWare to then go back to EA in 2007 and buy Pando/BioWare from Elevation. According to this article he made 4.9 million from the deal (the second time)

And the image up the top? Well the high point on the left is when Pandemic was bought at $60 a share. And it's been an impressive ski slope ever since.

Things I learn't today.

I learn't some stuff today. Nothing life changing but interesting. I spent the day at a Microsoft information workshop demo presentation thingo. And it was kind of interesting.

So the first thing is that Microsoft has this product, we could call it a "suite" of products called Expressions Studio. It was news to me. But there were a couple of really interesting bits. First the Encoder product has a screen capture tool and a webcam broadcasting feature. Which was pretty damn cool.

The next thing is they have this other product called Blend. And let's be honest here, it's trying to be a flash "killer". That's a long road to travel down BUT, I was impressed that the file format was XML. Well it's called XAML, but you get the idea.

Also I saw XNA 3.1, and it was cool but I was mostly impressed with the automatic method creation button in Visual Studio. Looking at it from a person who teaches Artists how to program I'm sure most of the class would run to the hills if I told them they had to work in XNA. But Visual Studio will become a good addition to the advanced students.

Now why is all this interesting you ask? Because of this site . Everything on that site is free to any student and faculty staff member. And that's a free perpetual license FOREVER.

I literally heard the words "Free, really? wow, that just saved us a fortune" and this from a high school teacher who was complaining about the cost of the Adobe Creative Suite to teach a bunch of students a product that they can't afford.

Sure the education pricing of Adobe products is good. But it's not FREE.

7 years ago I didn't think a Microsoft console would outsell a Sony console. I'm going to pick the underdog here. So if, and lets be honest it's a big if. If in 5 years Expression Studio overtakes the Creative Suite in the number of people using it, then I just want to say I called it.

MattD