Anne-Marie Huurre is Founder and Executive Producer at WomenWise, a gaming company whose new game Legend of Lotus Spring, an adventure story based on a romance that happened over 100 years ago, was designed to be played and marketed to women. Learn in this amazing interview about Anne-Marie Huurre's dream of making a game that targets women, as well as her "uphill battle" bringing this title to market.
Q: First, tell us about yourself and how you got interested in computer games and the industry. Tell us about some of your prior gaming titles, if any.
A: I started my career in journalism and used it to move into my first love which was and still is producing. As a producer/director of commercials, corporate programs, live satellite broadcasts etc., I had to keep up with technology to keep an edge over competition, and to continually prove I was not the "token" female. I started my career when women were lucky to be given broadcast jobs as weather "girls." Heaven forbid someone like me showed up on set as director - educated, in my twenties, tall and blonde!
As a Xerox media producer I was privileged to work with research and development teams. I saw a computer, a thing called a "mouse" and other high-tech stuff at least 10 years before it reached the market.
I had a Commodore 64 in 1982, and confess I did better playing the flight sim than learning how to save a word processed file on that five inch floppy.
I was curious about emerging technologies as a tool, and wrote to a man who went to Sweden in 1987 to bring one of the first CD-ROMs to North America. Later, I became the executive producer at his educational publishing company.
I knew how to produce, budget, market get animations created etc., but I knew zip about software development. Who did when less than 10,000 CD-ROM computers in the world existed in 1989?!
I'm a quick study and hard worker, but only with a sense of humor and the help of the fantastic men on the R & D team could I produce and direct over 20 educational titles. And I secretly played tiny files on floppies called games; titles way before Myst or the 7th Guest!
As part of due diligence I recommended the company work with some outside folks to create a game. I executed, produced and brought to market the title "Jewels of the Oracle." It was one of the first games created in Macromedia Director. I'm proud of it because of its equal appeal to both men and women, non-violence, intelligent game play, and how the title grew with the technology as it reached the market. It sold more than 100,000 copies in less than six months, made it to the top 50 of PC Data Reports and was versioned for seven countries; pretty good for 1995.
I left the company and went to Michael Copeland, CEO at Corel, and as producer, got the funding for another game called Jewels II/Gems of Darkness, again designed by Courtland Shakespeare.
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