Hi-Rez is developing a new MMO called Global Agenda and it is looking to be something special for the MMO genre. I talked to Associate Producer and PR Specialist Michal Adam about the origins of Hi-Rez and their title: Global Agenda.

What are the origins of Hi-Rez Studios? How did it come to fruition?

Hi-Rez Studios was established in 2005 by Erez Goren; a long-time video game enthusiast. When he was younger, he used to write games for fun and one actually got published by Atari. We have it here in the studio – it’s a baseball game. But the video games industry took a hit in the mid-80’s and Erez went on to co-found a company with his brother called Radiant Systems.

Radiant focused on an intuitive Point-of-Sale system that is almost like a video game in itself integrating touch screen graphical terminals, customer service kiosks, and automated movie ticket stations. Under his guidance, it grew to be a publicly held company.

In 2005, after success in other entrepreneurial ventures, Erez invested his own money and pulled team members he’d worked with previously to start a new company – his own video game development studio. Today, Hi-Rez is a 45 member studio and entirely independent and self-funded.

Erez is not only the sole financial source behind the studio and game, but he is also the lead designer on Global Agenda. It’s unique for the financial source to be so hands on the project; Erez is usually the last person to leave the office, always trying new things like rebalancing weapons.

What is the goal of Hi-Rez Studios?

The goal is FUN. Because we are an independent studio, we are able to create games that are in line with our own vision. We also have the advantage of following our own production schedules and can therefore focus more on the quality of the game than the number of months or years that it takes to develop. But the number one thing on the first design document was “has to be fun.” We ensure this by deploying a daily build and testing internally almost every day. This allows for rapid prototyping and implementations of systems in the game

What facilities do you have? What kind of systems are you developing on?

Our facilities are quite nice – we have a spacious studio in a northern suburb of Atlanta. We are developing Global Agenda on the Unreal 3 Engine. Around the office, we mostly we use Dell XPS systems, but not everything was purchased at the same time and you’ll see a variety of PCs and specs at each developer’s work station.

You also have your own Motion Capture Studio?

We have a motion capture studio on site. Actually, we have one of the only motion capture studios in Georgia. The data we capture serves as a solid base movement for our animators. We’re also able to have a lot of fun with emotes and in-game movements, since we own the equipment (often developers have to rent motion capture facilities for their projects, which can get costly).

Georgia recently introduced a tax incentive to boost the entertainment industry. Can you explain that?

Something I think is true for most states is that they want to draw the entertainment industry to produce in their “backyard.” Think about how many jobs a project can create! For example, when a film is being shot in a location, it creates a need for various crews, set designers, local food catering for those on-set, actors, etc., which create lots of jobs around the film site.

The same is true for the gaming industry, and Atlanta has a really great pool of talent coming from local universities like Savannah College of Art and Design, Art Institute of Atlanta, and Georgia Tech, to name few. They produce highly skilled artists, programmers, and designers who, up until recent years thought they would have to go to California to get jobs in gaming. SCAD has a game design program; Georgia Tech has a Computation Media program too. There is a lot of talent coming out of the state.

The Entertainment Investment Act increased tax breaks for productions that were half a million dollars and higher to 30%. It is one of the most aggressive rates in the county! The EIA was something the Department of Economic Development pushed through. It’s very exciting; more companies are motivated to start in Georgia. Hi-Rez is proud to be Georgia’s largest homegrown game studio.

Are there any plans past Global Agenda yet?

The entire studio is focused on the single project. We really want to ship an excellent game and support the quality of Global Agenda.

It’s interesting to see a developer entirely funded by one source, and one who has their hands in every aspect of the game. Hi-Rez Studios looks to potentially become a major force in the development community. Look for the Global Agenda Q&A tomorrow, where GotGame learns more specifics about the first title from Hi-Rez Studios.

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ATLANTA (April 29, 2008) – Delta Air Lines March for Babies Team and the March of Dimes Georgia Chapter have partnered with Game for Charity to launch the first-annual online game tournament.  For an online donation, participants play a five-minute online puzzle game, with the winner and runners-up receiving 25,000 SkyMiles and $250 in prizes. 
The tournament is open to the public, including all Delta Air Lines employees, subsidiaries, and affiliates.  To donate and play:

• Go to www.GameforCharity.com/MoD/Delta.  
  
• Make a 100 percent tax deductible donation and play.  Donor scores will appear on the Leaderboard and donors may play and donate as often as they like through May 23.
  

100 percent of all proceeds go to the March of Dimes Georgia Chapter. 
“Delta’s March for Babies Team is proud to partner with the March of Dimes for this unique online game event designed to raise awareness and support for an organization that works tirelessly to improve the health of babies by preventing birth defects, premature birth and infant mortality,” says Paul Jacobson, SVP & Treasurer at Delta Air Lines. 
“The Internet has become a major source of contributions by individuals”, says March of Dimes Georgia State Director Mark Gibson.  “We are excited to be a leader in ePhilanthropy and working with Game for Charity on this first-ever online game tournament.  Utilizing the Internet to raise funds reduces costs and allows more of each dollar donated to go directly to the organization.”
“It is a pleasure and honor to partner with the March of Dimes”, says Andrew Wells, CEO of Game for Charity.  Americans gave more than $6 billion online to charitable organizations in 2006 and the figure is growing by 51 percent a year, according to the ePhilanthropy Foundation.  “We are providing innovative charitable organizations and corporations with the tools to facilitate online giving with the most popular activity on the web, online games.”  More than one-third, or 34 percent of Internet users in the U.S. play games on the Internet at least once per week, according to Parks Associates a research & analysis firm. 
About Game for Charity:
Game for Charity is a wholly owned subsidiary of Atlanta based Rezilio.  Game for Charity’s patent-pending method and technology allows not-for-profit organizations and corporations the ability to utilize casual games in a skilled tournament fashion over the Internet to raise funds.  For more information visit GameforCharity.com.   
About March of Dimes – Georgia Chapter:
 

The March of Dimes is the leading nonprofit organization for pregnancy and baby health. With chapters nationwide and its premier event, March for Babies, the March of Dimes works to improve the health of babies by preventing birth defects, premature birth and infant mortality. For the latest resources and information, visit marchofdimes.com or nacersano.org.
About Delta Air Lines:
 

Delta Air Lines operates service to more worldwide destinations than any airline with Delta and Delta Connection flights to 306 destinations in 58 countries. Delta has added more international capacity than any major U.S. airline during the last two years and is the leader across the Atlantic with flights to 37 trans-Atlantic markets. To Latin America and the Caribbean, Delta offers more than 500 weekly flights to 57 destinations. Delta’s marketing alliances also allow customers to earn and redeem SkyMiles on nearly 16,409 flights offered by SkyTeam and other partners. Delta is a founding member of SkyTeam, a global airline alliance that provides customers with extensive worldwide destinations, flights and services. Including its SkyTeam and worldwide codeshare partners, Delta offers flights to 841 worldwide destinations in 162 countries. Customers can check in for flights, print boarding passes and check flight status at delta.com

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In the last two decades, obesity has soared in the United States. According to the Centers for Disease Control and the National Center for Health Statistics, 30 percent of American adults are obese. And this increase isn’t limited to adults. Since 1980, more than three times as many children aged 18 and under are obese—or around 15 percent of all American minors. Of the nearly 300 million people alive in America today, nearly 70 million are overweight.

FATWORLD constructs a small-scale society in which players decide what to eat, how much to exercise, what foods should be sold and what regulations should be imposed to determine their own health and that of their community. The game’s goal is not to tell people what to eat or how to exercise, but to demonstrate the complex, interwoven relationships between nutrition, obesity and social factors like budgets, the physical environment, food subsidies and government policy. FATWORLD is a game for adults and teens, but it can also serve as a starting point for discussions with children about nutrition, health and socioeconomics.

“Existing approaches to nutrition advocacy fail to communicate the collective effect of everyday health practices,” said FATWORLD lead designer and Persuasive Games co-founder Dr. Ian Bogost. “Video games are a remarkable medium for overcoming these failings. In a video game, we can simulate the passage of time and give players a view of their future selves based on their current habits. In a video game, we can simulate the interactions between multiple factors and complicate common views on nutrition and obesity. And most of all, in a video game we can change the rules.” Bogost, who is also a professor of digital media at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has written extensively on video games as tools for social intervention, most recently in his book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Video games.

In FATWORLD, players create a world, design a character and live out an accelerated life in that world. Players choose starting weights and health conditions, including predispositions toward ailments like diabetes, heart disease or food allergies. When entering the game, each player will have to construct menus and recipes, decide what their character will eat and which foods to avoid, choose the type of exercise to do (or not), and run a restaurant business to serve the rest of the community. By choosing a character’s dietary and exercise habits, players can experiment with the constraints of nutrition and economics as they affect their character’s general health. Will it be wheatgrass and soy or fried chicken at every meal? How much can your character afford to spend on food, and how does that affect his or her general health? Characters who eat more than they burn will get fat. Characters who eat poorly will develop adverse health conditions. Characters who don’t exercise will move around the world more laboriously. Disease and death will eventually ravage players with poor health, whereas those with good health will live to a ripe old age.

In FATWORLD, players also have an opportunity to influence public policy by visiting the Govern-O-Mat and to get a glimpse into their own character’s health—if they can afford it—at the Health-O-Mat. Players can alter guidelines on merchandising for FATWORLD, changing market dynamics to encourage certain products and discourage others. For example, the player could ban partially hydrogenated oils in FATWORLD, effectively removing them from the store shelves. Or they could ban meat or fruit, for that matter.

“The main social change we’re interested in stimulating through the game is the idea that personal responsibility should not be the primary answer,” said Bogost. “We need higher-order interventions, including certain regulations, to really change our collective well-being.”

FATWORLD includes a Recipe Exchange, where players can export recipes and meal plans they create in the game and upload them to the website, and they can download content other players have created. The website also features links and resources for learning more about food politics, obesity, health and nutrition, diet and exercise. FATWORLD is the sixth project to emerge from ITVS’s Electric Shadows initiative, a special fund for innovative Web-original projects.

About Persuasive Games
Persuasive Games designs and distributes video games with a message, games that push at the boundaries of the medium. Titles invite players to experience social issues, politics, news, brands, and other topics in fun and engaging environments. Games are often thought as only a leisure activity, but Persuasive Games designs to both entertain and teach. Recent clients include: Cold Stone Creamery, Domino’s Pizza, Cisco Systems, Red Octane, Shockwave, CNN.com, UK Clinical Virology Network, Chrysler, and NYTimes.com, with works featured on CNN, MSNBC, MTV and G4TechTV, in The New York Times, and via many other media outlets. Think games are just for fun? Think again. For more information about Persuasive Games, visit www.persuasivegames.com.

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National MS Society Georgia Chapter and the MS Society Georgia Chapter launches online gaming tournament to raise $50,000 and giveaway over $5,000 in prizes.

ATLANTA (December 4, 2007) – The MS Society Georgia Chapter and Rezilio, an Atlanta-based game developer launches the worlds first not-for-profit casual game tournament. Game for Charity’s patent-pending method and technology allows not-for-profit organizations the ability to utilize casual games in a skilled tournament fashion over the Internet as an incentive to donors. ‘Tis the season for giving and the National MS Society Georgia Chapter needs your help to end the devastating effects of MS. Join the movement by playing a five-minute puzzle game.

To participate in the MS “Play for Cure” event: 1) Go to www.GameforCharity.com/MS 2) Donate $15 and receive three game play opportunities 3) Play a five-minute puzzle game and potentially win over $5,000 in prizes All donations are tax-deductible and 100 percent of all proceeds go to charity.

“Game For Charity radically changes the way charitable organizations can leverage the internet to raise funds”, says Roy Rangel, president of the National MS Society’s Georgia Chapter.

“Typically by the time a charity hosts a fundraiser, such as a golf tournament, it costs 85 cents per every dollar donated, whereas, Game for Charity and an online game tournament only costs 20 cents per dollar, allowing 80 percent of the donation to go directly to the charity.” “It is a pleasure and honor to partner with the MS Society”, says Andrew Wells, CEO and co-founder of Game for Charity. Online giving is a small percentage of the $223 billion given by Americans to charitable organizations last year and it’s growing by 51 percent a year, according to the ePhilanthropy Foundation. “We are providing innovative charitable organizations with the tools to marry the hyper-growth of online charitable giving with the most popular activity on the web, online games.

About Rezilio: Rezilio products and services include: not-for-profit through Game for Charity http://www.gameforcharity.com, consumer gaming portals Playzi http://www.playzi.com, and skilled gaming technology and casual game development through the corporate office of Rezilio http://www.rezilio.com.

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If you’ve time, go play the five-minute game and keep up our rankings.  BigFish is one of the largest online game distributors in the world.  

Go to:  http://www.bigfishgames.com/online-games/ 

Click on “Online Games” tab 

Enter your email address (they don’t spam and you can chose opt-out) 

Click on Lightning Bugs 

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ATLANTA (November 19, 2007) – Game for Charity announces two online charity game tournaments live with National MS Society and Cochiti Indian tribe. Game for Charity’s patent-pending method and technology allows not-for-profit organizations the ability to utilize casual games in a skilled tournament fashion over the Internet as an incentive to donors. The offering has a high-yield return to charities with 80 percent of entrance fees going to the charity. 
Online giving is a small percentage of the $223 billion given by Americans to charitable organizations last year and it’s growing by 51 percent a year, according to the ePhilanthropy Foundation.  “We are providing charitable organizations with the tools to marry the hyper-growth of online charitable giving with the most popular activity on the web, online gaming. More than one-third, or 34 percent of Internet users in the U.S. play games on the Internet at least once per week, according to Parks Associates a research & analysis firm”, says Andrew Wells, CEO and co-founder of Game for Charity. 
Roy Rangel, president of the MS Society’s Georgia chapter, says “Game for Charity not only provides us with the lowest-cost fundraising mechanism but also allows us to interact with our donors in a fun, memorable, and entertaining way”. 
 

“We are partnering with Game for Charity to raise funds to build a learning center that teaches the Cochiti children their native language”, says Dr. Lily-Wong Fillmore, a specialist on the revitalization of Indigenous Languages and retired professor from Cal Berkeley.  “The Keres language is in jeopardy of being lost forever and along with it the cultural identity of the Pueblo Indians”.
To play, support, and potentially win more than $10,000 in prizes go to:
Cochiti Indian tribe – www.gameforcharity/IKLC 
National MS Society – Georgia Chapter – www.gameforcharity.com/MS
 

About Rezilio:
Rezilio products and services include: not-for-profit through Game for Charity http://www.gameforcharity.com, consumer gaming portals Playzi http://www.playzi.com  and Playoki http://www.playoki.com, and skilled gaming technology and casual game development through the corporate office of Rezilio http://www.rezilio.com.

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Atlanta Business Chronicle

by Justin Rubner

A new Atlanta Internet company is looking to marry the worlds of charitable giving and video games.

The company, Rezilio Inc., has just raised its second round of angel capital and in November will launch what could be the first provider of online games aimed at charity campaigns.

Rezilio is targeting a demographic that CEO and co-founder Andrew Wells says is seriously under-served by the video game industry — charitable 35- to 49-year-olds, primarily women, who like to play “casual games.” Casual games, such as Pogo, don’t require a lot of game play time, for example — something research indicates is appealing to female gamers.

While traditional fundraising events such as golf are expensive to put on, have few players and involve high fees, Rezilio plans on charging low fees and expects 4,000 to 5,000 players for its first campaign in November. Rezilio will host online game tournaments that pit users against each other in cyberspace. Winners, as in golf, will receive cash prizes.

The company also plans a service called Playoki for gamers interested in participating in skilled tournaments, which will let them place wagers.

As for the nonprofit element, Wells, a former Capital One Financial Inc. director, says 80 percent of entrance fees will go to charity. Nearly 20 percent will be retained by the company while a small portion will go to game winners. Wells expects Rezilio to post $3 million in revenue within the first year and forecasts $28 million for the third year.

Online giving is a small percentage of the $223 billion given by Americans to charitable organizations last year. But according to the ePhilanthropy Foundation, a group that trains charities how to use the Internet to raise funds, online giving grew 51 percent in 2006.

Wells hopes to ride that trend along with another — the boon of the casual game market. The market is expected to grow from a $2 billion industry in 2006 to a $13 billion one in 2011, according to video game market research firm DFC Intelligence.

Bill Winter, an attorney at Morris Manning & Martin LLP who heads the firm’s digital entertainment group, says most game companies have been focusing on the coveted 18- to 34-year-old male demographic. But younger males, he says, tend to favor “shoot-em-up” and strategy games, while women tend to like social and puzzle games. In addition, 40-somethings tend to give to charity more often, he says.

“Casual games appeal more to women and older people, who have the capacity to give larger sums to charities,” said Winter, who represents Rezilio. “The company has done an excellent job at marrying the right demographic group with a group strongly interested in charitable giving.”

One nonprofit Rezilio plans to work with is the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. Roy Rangel, president of the society’s Georgia chapter, says competition amongst nonprofits to get contributions is tough. With so many worthy causes, he says, anything that makes a donor more involved is a good thing.

Making Rezilio appealing, says Rangel, is that the society won’t have to pay a dime. For the November video game tournament, he expects to raise $300,000 — 10 percent of the society’s annual revenue. “We don’t put anything in, so that’s net profit,” said Rangel. “Other events we put on are costly.”

The company plans to introduce a new game every week for several months. The games will be pre-existing ones such as Tetris, but will be made more visually appealing. Sometime next year, Wells says, original titles will begin to be released.

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The organizers of Game Developers Conference 2008, to be held in San Francisco next February, are now accepting submissions to present lectures, roundtables, tutorials and poster sessions at GDC 2008, with submissions due by October 1st.

GDC 2008, which is run by the CMP Game Group (as is Gamasutra.com) will take place at San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center February 18 – 22, 2008. Abstracts can be submitted via the official GDC Call For Papers website, and prospective speakers can address topics ranging from game production and business to programming, art, design and audio.

In addition, this year the conference is seeking casual, independent and ’serious’ games content, each of which will be addressed during two-day pre-conferences on Monday and Tuesday of the GDC, as well as in traditional hour-long sessions throughout the main conference Wednesday through Friday.

Abstracts are reviewed, graded and selected by the GDC advisory board before final decisions are made on specific sessions. The GDC 2008 advisory board includes four new members, each with considerable talent, knowledge and experience in videogame design and visual arts; they are Pandemic Studios’ Carey Chico, Square Enix’s Ichiro Otobe, Blizzard Entertainment’s Rob Pardo and SCEE London Development Studio’s Dave Ranyard.

The advisory board also includes fourteen additional senior industry figures including Cerny Games’ Mark Cerny, Exigent’s Paul Steed, Eidos’ Julien Merceron, Microsoft Game Studios’ Laura Fryer, Shiny Entertainment founder David Perry, Electronic Arts’ Louis Castle and many others.

In addition, for the second year, the GDC Call For Papers site features an all-new welcome video featuring advisory board member David Perry helping those applying for the first time to understand what makes a successful submission.

“One of the key elements that makes GDC the one crucial developer event of the year, is that the content is presented by the world’s leading developers at the cutting edge of game creation,” said Jamil Moledina, executive director, Game Developers Conference. “To that end, we are encouraging multiplatform and interdisciplinary sessions; asking developers of casual, online, mobile, serious, and indie games to submit targeted talks for the main conference; and offering our call for papers significantly closer to GDC.” 

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