Is Obduction one of those ideas that was floating around for a while or was it something new just for the Kickstarter? You’ve mentioned there were a number of larger projects you were kicking around at Cyan and pitching around to publishers. Myst was so popular that Rand (right) and Robyn (left) were featured in an advertisement for The Gap. We had a Japanese company and we actually took it to several publishers and they said, “Eh, I don’t get this. We didn’t have necessarily a publisher that was interested at the time. Frankly that’s what allowed us to do Myst. We started with small projects and then took the money from those and put it back into larger ones and back into larger ones. It’s almost like what we did when my brother and I started the company. I think we would’ve just stuck with the smaller things and tried to build ourselves up by the bootstraps. RM: At this point, I don’t really think so.

They’ll say, “Can you guys do this?” or “Can you guys change this?” or “Can you put more guns in it?” or something like that.ĭo you think Cyan would’ve eventually buckled to publishers or tried to find a publisher that supported you more?

Anyway, long story short, the whole idea of being in control of your destiny and publishing yourself and being able to do things this way is a breath of fresh air even if they’re not as big of projects as a publisher might fund, they’re more efficient because the publisher can sometimes delay a project. We had our Broderbund days and that was a pretty good publisher as far as that goes, but we also had horror stories with a few other ones.

It’s frankly spoiled us because we bit our teeth with the publisher model and it’s good if you get a good publisher. And the mobile market not just as a platform for development but as a platform for publishing as well. The thing that’s been keeping us alive is a lot of our legacy products and the mobile market. RM: Honestly I think we’d be concentrating on smaller projects.

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