Metlay made some very astute observations about the concept
of TML getting together and doing a game. I'd like to comment
a bit on what he said.
The chaos that ensued when TDR was formed (ah, but it was fun...)
was a demonstration of why committees are bad business.
I got the distinct impression, however, that despite the
failure in general there were a lot of people with talent
and energy at that time.
A subset of the TDR group could easily do a complete game
system if they wanted. The TDR group contained many more
highly talented game design people than the average game
company. The problem isn't talent, but too much of it;
TDR was open and had a lot of people, where a successful
project would have to be more selective, not for talent
but for ability to work together and constructively
criticize. We've seen several successful small scale
collaborations here, the trick is to take them as the
lesson and generalize a bit 8-)
- -george