After taking a year "off," veteran game developer David Perry appeared at Montreal Games Summit 2007 to talk about his supposed vacation. It turns out that he's going back to the scene with three MMORPGs being developed under his belt, and he talked about the free-to-play model which will make his projects work.

More on David Perry's keynote speech at the full article!

Acclaim, the game company running DANCE! Online in North America has announced that Paris Hilton and The Ramones are joining the mix of artists for the game's song collection, adding more star power to the already solid mix. Particular tracks have not been specified, but they're guaranteed to be revealed in further announcements.

DANCE! Online is the North American counterpart of the Chinese online dance game Super Dancer Online. The title features a game very similar to the classic Dance Dance Revolution series which can be played via keyboard or dance pad.

DANCE! Online is currently in open Beta form and can be downloaded for free and tested at home. The game will have an online store which will vend items that will allow you to customize characters with an insane amount of shirts, hairstyles, clothes and other things that will make your character unique.

Seasoned dancing game veterans who are out for new challenges will find the twists in Super Star mode, River Notes mode and Reverse Notes mode very exciting. These modes will have everyone shaking their tail feathers like never before.

According to IGN, some 350,000 individual users ave signed up for the DANCE! Online Beta and are already testing the dance floor. If you like dancing and competing with people online, get DANCE! Online now and tell us what you think.

Volunteers of David Perry's Project: Top Secret will have something to expect this Christmas since they have been such very good boys and girls. And what is this great big present? Volunteers will be given all the tools necessary to develop the Top Secret racing MMORPG.

"This is like Christmas for the mod community," said Perry. Like Christmas it is, since the brave souls who volunteered working on the game will be able to choose and use any game engine of their choice, be it the Unreal Engine, Crysis, or id.

IGN's Modcenter is in charge of giving out various development tools to the participants of Project: Top Secret, while Acclaim will pay for the usage of every budding game developer's gaming engine of choice.

Since Project: Top Secret will eventually award the person who made the most contributions into the development of the game, the free usage of tools is nothing short of entirely helpful, and awesome.

If you're interested in joining the community effort of making the next best MMORPG, then there's no more reason to hold back: the gaming development tools are already taken care of.

 

If you have what it takes to create what you think is the best MMO, then you may just be the one that David Perry, Director of Project: Top Secret, is searching for. In Acclaim's pursuit of completing its Project: Top Secret, Perry is calling any and all individuals (professionals or otherwise) who have a passion in gaming to participate in what could be the creation of one of the most creative and imaginative MMOs to date.

With the position of Game Directorship up for grabs, the lucky participant who manages to snag the prize will be able to earn in royalties and all the other perks that come with such a responsibility. And since we're talking about royalties, there's quite a possibility to earn a large amount.

Project: Top Secret is already underway for several months, and so far they managed to lay out the basic premise of the game: a racing game jam-packed with features, and they're just waiting for the individual who's going to make the most difference in creating the game. The said individual will be awarded with the responsibility to helm a future MMORPG. If your dream is to create video games, then this certainly is it.

Interested? Do check out the Read link for more details!

Acclaim Games recently showed their moves on the dance floor, err, MMO block, by launching their latest online game DANCE! Online. Bound to be your little tween sister's new best friend, DANCE! Online is a free-to-play MMO dancing game and it will feature top talent and recordings from the Warner Music Group.

According to Howard Marks, "this is by far the closest collaboration any major music label has ever had with an online game". With artists like Paris Hilton and Ashley Tisdale among many others on the Warner recording stable, we bet a lot of people would have fun with this game.

Anyhow, the U.S. open beta for DANCE! Online will be starting this week. Atlantic Records' recording artist Cupid will make a personal virtual appearance in the game. Other artist-related announcements will follow where they will create their own avatar and play the game live online and chat with fans.

The game will feature the artists' latest music and personalized virtual items including artist-branded clothing and accessories. Players can compete to win autographed merchandise and other artist-branded products. Players could use either their keyboards or PC-compatible dance pads for their character to rule the dance floor.

Dave Perry should be very proud of his on-going project aptly dubbed for now as "Top Secret." After explaining the mechanics of the competition behind the making of the said MMO video game, the community's response to it has been nothing but overwhelming. To date, there's more or less 23,000 different individuals who want to become a part of this community project.

Talking to gaming site Games Industry recently, the founder of Shiny Entertainment finally revealed some important details on "Top Secret." According to Dave Perry, it's going to be a racing game and Acclaim is more than happy to support this proposition. Perry shared,

For our first project we'll make a racing game, simply because as a genre it really needs fresh new ideas. We're betting that with 23,000-plus developers we'll be so buried in new ideas, it's going to be tough to choose between them all - a nice problem to have.

For those who missed it, this "Top Secret" project has been making a lot of buzz across the gaming industry for the past few months now. David Perry made an open call to interested individuals, preferably students, to help out in making the game. Whoever person "shines" the most during the development will become the director of a future MMO, and it's guaranteed to be published by Acclaim.

Acclaim recently surpassed the 1 million mark in terms of registered users. We can only imagine that this "Top Secret" will continue to add to the momentum the publisher is currently enjoying. Some of the titles under its belt include BOTS!!, 9Dragons, 2Moons, and DANCE! Online.

Top Secret, apt name for something that was heard little of in the Game Developers Conference almost two weeks ago, is Acclaim's recent MMORPG developed by the end-user. Jon Wood of MMORPG.com was able to sit down with Acclaim's CEO Howard Marks and Chief Creative Officer David Perry to talk about Top Secret.

While Top Secret will be backed by 100,000 developers, they would mostly be game development students, avid fans, and amateur game development teams all working to carve out something out of nothing.

And they're not hoping to make just another off-the-wall MMO either. They hope to make something that the game industry has been lacking for quite some time.

Ever since the game industry's blind move into great graphics and mediocre gameplay experiences, the numerous titles available on all game platforms today lack creativity. Everything and anything banks directly from past award-winning franchises and intellectual properties. Perry, who left Shiny Entertainment, decided to hold a contest pitting actual game developers against everyone else.

The idea of competition with cooperation, as he believes, should be able to bring a community closer together. After a similar experience with Acclaim's past MMORPG 2Moons, Perry wanted to tap into that community involvement and twist it into an even broader, more positive direction. Is Acclaim thinking about saving on development costs? That's narrow-minded speculation and the details on the whole mechanics of development is still in the works.

As Perry said, "We're not saving a penny team-wise." Acclaim still needs its own development team to smooth everything out. What the others will be getting from the experience is the know-how, getting spotted by other development companies and by pushing out an eventually free MMORPG loved by an entire community.

Looks like Dave Perry's Top Secret will be well underway very soon. Just last week, over 20,000 volunteers signed up for the project, making Acclaim's team the biggest in game development history.

We earlier reported that Acclaim and 24-year industry veteran Dave Perry are working on a ground-breaking project to build a massively multi-player online RPG wherein ordinary people will be screened and given the opportunity to learn the ropes from Perry himself. A winner will be chosen among the finalists and a contract to direct a future game is the ultimate prize.

"I want it to be a title they own and feel excited about," said Mr Perry, a 24-year veteran of the games industry." He also commented that he was amazed at the overwhelming response and said he expects to have a total of 100,000 members in the team by the end of the registration period.

However, the maestro clarified that he and Acclaim are not doing this at a whim and said, "We are not doing this for fun; this is a professional game we are trying to make. It's a business."

The registration has almost no requirements and Perry says that resumes do not really matter. What he says they are after is not technical skills but raw, unadulterated creative impetus from the game community. He also foresees that people from other game outfits will be walking amongst the respondents in search of unrefined gems and hire them for their projects.

In the end, Perry says, the entire game community will benefit from their project and he says that it will very well lead to the business proving to the world that the industry is much larger than people think.

Star-studded David Perry has a lot of things to say about his upcoming project with Acclaim Games. To those of you who missed it, it's not going to be just any game. Selected applicants will form a new development team and come up with a new free MMO game. The ultimate prize is the chance to be the overall director of the said game.

Perry shared that he has been helping new talents into business for years now. Some of his past projects included helping out at Westwood College and investing a lot of time and effort with his local IGDA chapter. In relation to the "Top Secret" project, he explained,

This is really that concept on steroids, instead of just hosting students and gamers, this way we will all work together and make a game. The goal for the first game is actually just to keep it fun and get something shipped. Then we can see who did what, and who did well.

Apparently, this competition is nothing but the tip of the iceberg. Perry commented that after this, the winner will get his/her own MMO and that winner will be able to invite any talent they enjoyed working with. The director then shared that Acclaim will try to give people as much space as they need in developing the game. He commented,

The design, like before, will be based on voting, with the cream rising to the top. If you need to work on something semi-privately, you can ask the moderator to carve some space for you. So a small group can bang away on an idea and present their results. If I like an idea, I'll make it happen.

Even though it's a free MMO, Perry clarified that participants will still get something out of it. And he doesn't just mean the experience or an entry in their resume. Perry divulged then that there's actually a competition within the competition. Anybody who is capable enough will get a job offer to join his team. And then he added,

They will make royalties off the game. Hopefully they will have a pre-built audience so they will make good money from their first title. If they do a great job on their first title, obviously Acclaim would be dumb to let them go, so a career could be the final prize.

Lastly, Dave Perry commented that they are not trying to make a World of Warcraft clone. He explained that they are trying to push the paradigm forward and doing another WoW will never do that. He believes, though, that a good place to start is in a genre that everone has experienced:

I'm keeping this game simple so we can aim to be done within 12 months. I don’t want to start a 5 year project. I think we will start with something in a genre that everyone has experienced, that everyone has opinions on, and then challenge their brains. What would make this genre more fun? Prepare for plenty of discussion.

Acclaim Games has earlier announced that it is starting a collaborative effort to build the most original MMO game to date with star director David Perry  codenamed "Top Secret."

The game breaks new ground because behind the development of the new game is a competition in itself. Here's how it works- Acclaim will select a group of applicants from its game community to become part of the new game's development team.

Prior experience doesn't matter as Perry claims that the raw talent and passion in the applicants is their main target. The participant who exhibits the qualities needed to make it big in the industry is selected during the process, is declared the winner and gets a  shot to get his life changed.

"This is the only chance I know of to jumpstart a directorship career in the video game industry," Perry says. He also added “Everyone wins. They get to learn how to make professional games, and if they get anything in, they get a real professional credit on their resume.”

Acclaim CEO Howard Marks likened the project to a reality TV show, saying,

'Top Secret' is like 'The Apprentice' meets 'American Idol' meets 'The Video Game Industry'. We’re giving our players a chance to work on an online game that we will actually develop and publish. Our community really loves these games and knows what it takes to make a hit. And it will be a dream come true for one lucky star that shines the most throughout the project.