By John Walker on July 11th, 2011.
Over the weekend, Eurogamer posted a story about how PCs are better than everything else, including new babies and planets with rings. Well, those weren’t quite their words, and nor were they of Mark Rein, VP of Epic, but he said something close. He in fact said that, “We’re at the stage in the life of the consoles where the PC has shot by them in terms of capabilities.”
By Kieron Gillen on July 21st, 2010.
The Microstudios panel proved to be the most controversial and widely talked about at Develop 10, but the exchange of commentary followed by detente wasn’t all that was worth taking away from the gathering, where Beatnik‘s Robin Lacey (Plain Sight), Positech‘s Cliff Harris (Kudos, Democracy, Gratuitous Space Battles), Introversion‘s Mark Morris (Darwinia, Defcon, Uplink) and Hello Games‘ Sean Murray (Joe “They’ll all be in” Danger “if there’s not a PC port”) talked about the state of the Microstudio. Starting with what a microstudio is anyway…
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By John Walker on July 20th, 2010.
Mark Rein has said sorry to Cliff Harris over his comments at last week’s Develop Conference. The Develop website reports that Rein was mortified when he learned of Cliffski’s upset, and has written him an email to apologise. The text of the email is available in full over on Develop. Rein makes it very clear that he does support indies, and that his passion and big mouth got him into trouble. It’s an extremely contrite response, and one in which he makes his motivations for interrupting Harris’s panel very clear, along with explaining how Epic isn’t the enemy of the indie. How has Cliffski responded to this? I’d wager good money he’ll let us know in the comments below.
By Kieron Gillen on July 16th, 2010.
It really was the Develop for it. After Schafer’s lobbing of the prick-stick at Kotick, Cliff Harris returns from there to write a furious blog post arguing that Epic’s Mark Rein is “a jerk”. Which is a lot milder than prick, but Cliff keeps-on-keeping-on climaxing with him telling that Triple-A bosses should “Fuck off”. The cause for his concertation? Well, it’s the microdeveloper panel at Develop where Harris – on the panel – took umbrage with Rein – in the front row – interrupting the discussion to give him a piece of his marketing wisdom. Go read Cliff’s takes on the event – though I was actually at the event, so will hopefully write it up soon. It’s worth noting that Rein’s interruption came when Cliff was talking about his time with Lionhead and getting into trouble with PRs for speaking to the forumites. However, it quickly continued into the wider area, with Rein basically acting like a fifth panelist for the closing section.
I’m hoping this erupts into a full-scale war between the American Mainstream and British Independents by next Develop, and look forward to Terry Cavanagh saying that Valve are a big bunch of tossers or similar.
By Alec Meer on July 1st, 2010.
More bigwig fruits from my time at GameHorizon now, chums. I managed to snag an hour with Epic’s outspoken vice-president Mark Rein, who bought me a cheese sandwich, showed me prototypes of the Unreal engine running on iPhone, iPad and Android (platforms which he considers “the future”), and let me spam him with questions for GamesIndustry.biz.
Come the end of the interview, I swapped out my GI hat for my RPS hat (eight feet high, made of diamonds and love) and harangued him a little about Epic’s stance on the PC these days – they suffered a whole lot of shelling from the angrytank following some disparaging comments about the platform, and the revelation that Gears of War 2 wouldn’t come to our beloved boxes. For Rein at least, the idea the Epic are now anti-PC is a misconception…
By Kieron Gillen on February 26th, 2008.
He’s joking, obviously. Cliffy B’s lovely. Eurogamer mentioned this quote yesterday, but have put up the full interview today. In it, after the terrier of Eurogamer Tom Bramwell stops trying to make him talk about Gears of War 2 for a whole page, he starts talking PC…
“Hey, Cliff is Cliff, and he’s making a console game, and that’s what he’s focused on, so that’s what his thinking is all about. But as a company, we make PC games. We love the PC, it’s our heritage, we want to see it be strong, and we want to sell games like Unreal Tournament III and Gears of War on PC, and have them sell as well as they do on console.”
He goes on to talk about the PC Gaming alliance and his actually positive feelings on the sales of UT3. Jump in here to skip the Gears of War 2 harrying.
