In creating a new title, what experience or technology does Day 1 bring from its work on MechAssault?
Jon Kimmich: MechAssault was a new title, built from the ground up, based on the BattleTech IP, but heavily adapted to suit the strengths and weaknesses of a console platform, vs. the PC versions of MechWarrior that had come before it. Day 1 as a company cut its teeth on both the challenges of the Xbox hardware as well as the Xbox Live online platform. For the first year of Live’s existence MechAssault was by far and away the most popular game on the service. MechAssault was lauded for its destructible environments before destructible environments became the “back of the box” feature that everybody touts today. We were the first game to do downloadable content and the first to implement a persistent competition space with the Conquest mode of MechAssault 2. When Live added new bleeding-edge features, we bled. Along the way we’ve built a considerable expertise, both in technology and design know-how, which gets applied to all of our current and future projects.
