Jessey – Tell us a little bit about the Dragon Fantasy series.
Adam Rippon – Dragon Fantasy started a long, long time ago. Bryan and I were both 14 and I had been working lots of fan translations of SNES RPGs and through that I had caught the bug of wanting to write my own. Neither of us knew all that much about programming, let along level design or project scope. I wrote this gigantic story about eight different heroes, and you could pick four of them to be your main party; the game would have different outcomes depending on who you picked. But it would always start with the same scene: Ogden, a dock keeper from Derwent Village would investigate a kidnapping and confront an evil that was way too powerful for him. Of course, in that original version of Dragon Fantasy, called Talisman, that was pretty much the end of Ogden’s hero days, and he would pass the torch to the younger generation.
Bryan and I made fourteen (!!!) different attempts to build Talisman, starting with QBasic, moving onto C, eventually trying to build it for Windows, Gameboy, and Gameboy Color. The two of us won the Montana State Computer Fair in 1998 for the last DOS version (R7), which is funny considering Bryan hadn’t even stepped foot in Montana, where I’m from – and still hasn’t to this day. The Gameboy Color version (R12) ended up being good enough that it got Bryan and I jobs in the game industry, and we largely shelved the project aside from a Gameboy Advance multiplayer test (R13) that I did by myself in 2001 and a Gamecube version (R14) Bryan and I both worked on in 2002. Having gotten jobs in the industry, we eventually lost interest in the game and let ourselves become jaded industry professionals.
Fast forward to to 2010 when my father, Tom Rippon, passed away after a two year battle with cancer. I realized that while my dad had had a long, successful career as a sculptor and had many great works to his name, I had nothing to call my own. Given that the character of Ogden was based on my Dad, I decided to start working on Talisman again in my spare time. By the time I showed it to Bryan three weeks later, it was mostly playable and fairly feature complete. We worked on it in our spare timetime for several months, with my wife providing background art and our artist Kevin doing the battle start, and finally released it for iOS on August 23rd, 2
011.
We called it Dragon Fantasy as a joke, because at the time we didn’t intend to pursue the series any further – we were just happy to finally have something to call our own. Little did we know that the game would be fairly successful and well reviewed, otherwise we would have given it a different name!
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