There's a whole lot of bad economic news floating around these days, from bank crises to mortgage failures to credit crunches to the ever-present specter of layoffs. In such an environment it'd be easy to either cling to the security of a safe job or -- if you are the victim of a layoff -- to scramble and grasp at the first thing that comes along. For some people, though, what might be a disaster looks like an opportunity. For Dusty Monk, a 15-year veteran of the gaming business, the worst news one might imagine was the spur for him to attempt to live out his dream and create the game he always wanted to make.
"I've been around this industry for 15 years," Monk says as we begin our conversation. "I'm very aware of what's going on in the world and the kind of environment I'm launching in." Dusty Monk is better known to strategy game fans as a long-time senior programmer for Ensemble Studios, where he was primarily responsible for unit pathing and movement for several installments of the Age of Empires series, as well as the recently released Halo Wars. Bringing up that title is a bittersweet memory for Monk, as it was the last game created by the strategy game stalwarts before Ensemble was closed by Microsoft. "There was a lot of anger toward Microsoft at the time," Monk remembered.
According to Monk, senior personnel at Ensemble were aware for some time that Microsoft had planned on shutting the studio down after Halo Wars was completed. He also gives credit to those same senior managers for going to bat for their employees to tell them what was going on. "They really stood up for us," Monk said. According to him, such honesty paid off for both the company and the game. While there was certainly some resentment for being shut down, according to Monk something strange happened once the staff was told about the closure.
"We could have done a half-assed job on Halo Wars," Monk said. "That was certainly some people's first reaction. When we sat down and thought about it, we realized that this would be our swan song as a studio. We wanted to give Ensemble the send-off it deserved." While he won't describe the atmosphere at Ensemble during those last few months as "happy," he says there's a great deal of pride in Halo Wars and the team really gave it their all right until the day it shipped.
Faced with unemployment for the first time in many years, Monk says he thought seriously about his options. "I could have looked for a job right away and probably found one. The industry always needs good programmers, but that really wasn't what I wanted to do." As he considered his last few years at Ensemble, what he realized was that the one project that had really gotten him excited was the cancelled Halo MMO. Monk is a huge fan of the genre and cites long stints in World of Warcraft, The Lord of the Rings Online and Warhammer Online, and claims to have tried plenty of others to see what could be learned from them. This was the kind of game he had always wanted to make, and he realized that he might finally be in a position to do just that.
"I sat down with my wife and we went over the numbers," Monk said. "Never mind the economy, this wasn't the best time to start this because my wife is also starting a new venture. I have enough money in savings and stuff to float the company for a year or so." According to Monk, the toughest conversation he had was with his kids when he had to explain why mommy and daddy were now going to be home every day. After that, it was simply a matter of reaching out to people who he could contract to begin putting together the prototype for his new MMO. Some were former Ensemble personnel, others came through professional freelancing companies with particular talents on call. Monk is the only full-time Windstorm employee for right now.
