Many space trading and combat games owe allegiance to classics such as Elite and Escape Velocity, so what was the inspiration for Warpgate?
Mark Levin: Each member of the team brought a different inspiration to the table, but for me it was almost solely Escape Velocity. I wanted to recapture the feeling that the events and situations you participate in or even just witness passing by are only a small subset of everything that’s going on in the universe; that at any moment, the player will have a range of things to do, or places to go, or the option to take a break and watch the game systems interact with themselves. Other team members have been inspired by Elite and other space games, as well as Fable and freeform adventure RPGs, or more formal RPGs like Fallout. We even played Dope Wars at one point. Personally, I was able to get even more enthusiastic for Warpgate by channeling my outrage over the revelation that Ambrosia’s announcement of an official Escape Velocity game for the iPhone was an April Fools joke. They think they can toy with my yearnings like that? Why do you think this sort of game will work on iPhone? Fr
