The Escapist Issue #77 Now Available

The seventy-seventh issue of Escapist Magazine contains five new articles, including one that tracks the rise and fall of Troika Games.

During Troika’s seven-year existence, they never worked with the same publisher twice, and the company was constantly criticized for releasing inspired but bug-ridden work. Running with such a small team was partially to blame, but Troika also ran into a lot of problems with their numerous publishers. “One of our titles was even pulled out of our hands so that it could sit in a box for four months while [the publisher] finished translations. All we could do was work on the patch during that time. Adding insult to injury, a final production copy was leaked out and passed around on the Usenet for those four months,” Anderson says.

But that’s how things are for the low man on the totem pole, especially when big publishers are concerned. Boyarsky was hoping Troika could avoid constantly being the “new guy” from the onset. “Troika’s original goal had been to just be exclusive to one publisher, kind of their external RPG dev team,” he says, “so we wouldn’t have to always be scrambling for contracts. At first, Sierra seemed to be that publisher – even when they weren’t sure about an Arcanum sequel, they had us working on something else. But then Sierra had its own problems, and that was the end of that.”