"Spending that many years disconnected from your audience, sort of working off by yourself, wasn’t creatively fun for me. The breaking point came when the 12 to 18 months development cycles Roberts was used to stretched into a four-year slog with Freelancer.
"One of the reasons I sort of left the business for a while was because I was feeling increasingly disconnected from my audience," he said. Roberts also said he was drawn back by the ability to interact directly with the audience while making the game through forums and extensive websites, a huge change from the more isolated development he was used to in the '90s. That’s very exciting to me, because that’s sort of my fantasy, playing something that has the visual fidelity of a movie to it." Now I’m sort of looking at stuff that I could do in real time that, when I was making the Wing Commander movie, we needed millions of dollars of SGI machines and days to render. I was always very frustrated by that in the past. Why come back to game development now? It's all about the technology, and Roberts tells Ars that the tech has "moved on enough where I felt like I could do a whole different level of fidelity in terms of simulation of the world and the visuals I could deliver on that. Since then, the site has come back and the effort has raised over $2.6 million in pledges from fans eager for the spiritual successor to Wing Commander, including over $850,000 more from a Kickstarter set up later. The initial interest in the game was so high that it overwhelmed Robert's servers and brought down the site's proprietary crowdfunding solution for a few days. After spending a decade away from the game business producing movies, the man behind legendary PC space sims like Wing Commander, Privateer, and Freelancer jumped back into the scene with a breathtaking video demo for Star Citizen, a new space sim effort in the same vein as the earlier games for which he's famous.
Say what you will about Chris Roberts, the guy knows how to make an entrance.
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