APB launch ends blood, sweat and tears
Five years of blood, sweat and tears — and late night takeaway pizza — has finally brought its rewards for a leading Dundee computer games company with the launch of their latest title.
Building a character in APB.
- By Graham Huband
- Published in the Courier : 30.06.10
- Published online : 30.06.10 @ 12.47pm
Marketgait-based Realtime Worlds have lavished thousands upon thousands of man hours on APB (All Points Bulletin) over the past five years in an attempt to break in to the highly lucrative online gaming community.
The company is hoping APB — which was released in America on Tuesday and will be available across Europe and the UK by the end of the week — can emulate the success of the market leading game World of Warcraft, which generates more than 1.5 billion dollars in revenues each year.
APB is based among the urban sprawl of the fictional city of San Paro where there is a brutal turf war between the Enforcers and Criminals.
Realtime's studio manager Colin Macdonald said the release of APB was a "huge moment" for the company and its 200-plus employees and he said initial feedback to the game had been overwhelmingly positive.
He said, "Reaction has been great so far.
"Although the game isn't on sale here yet, we've allowed early access for those who have placed pre-orders so there is already thousands of folk having fun with it.
"One of the great benefits of it being an online game is that we can continue indefinitely to keep adding to it and tweaking what's already there — so we encourage everyone to let us know about any aspects of it they're not so keen on, and we can look to work on these for a future update.
"It is a huge moment for Realtime Worlds — it (APB) has been in development for over five years, currently with a team of 200 on it, so literally litres of blood, sweat and tears have all been poured in along with several tons of pizzas keeping everyone fuelled up as they've worked late into the night on hundreds of occasions.
"As a games developer, that moment when you walk into a store and see your game on the shelf is always an emotional moment, so we're very much looking forward to that."
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