Age of Conan

"To begin with the basics: He works as a Product Manager at Norway's only international computer games developer, Funcom. This suits him well, seeing he has a great interest in games and technology in general. Before he came to Funcom he used to work as a journalist at Norway's largest national newspaper, VG, among others. I also wrote for the website Gamer.no and a few other press mediums. " taken from http://www.erlingellingsen.com/biography.html

Era, or Era Online:

He started working on this game in late 1998 and continued until the middle of 2000. I designed and programmed it myself, but had huge help doing the graphics from various people I cooperated with via the Internet. It reached a beta stage and was very playable. Today, there are several spin-off games based on the engine and the design. Era is also my own personal fantasy setting that is based around the world called Menath. The classic version is today offline. http://www.erlingellingsen.com/era.html

From what ive read, hes the guy that sipped champaign with his co-workers and watched the subs and logins roll in "quote end quote" from one of his few monologues at the game launch...

From the feel of it, they never stopped :/ and they forgot to invite the rest of us along..... <sadface>

I fail to see the relevance of this post really.

Erling is probably one of the best people for the type of job he has. His job is marketing and product management - and he has done a good job.

Age of Conan sold well over 700.000 copies - i'd say thats a success for marketing and with that it's a success for Erling.

Ive heard a rumor it sold over 700k copies. Has anyone else heard that anywhere

BRB checking the news wires......

Originally posted by ZeGerman1942

I fail to see the relevance of this post really.

 

Erling is probably one of the best people for the type of job he has. His job is marketing and product management - and he has done a good job.

 

Age of Conan sold well over 700.000 copies - i'd say thats a success for marketing and with that it's a success for Erling.

Sharing information is what this topic is about. People talk about him all the time so I thought I added some info on who he is and what he has done. No agenda nothing but just sharing this with the community in the AoC section.

fair enough.

Erling didn't program Era Online from scratch.   He modified an existing VB 'small-scale' mmo engine.  It was called Ore or something like that.  The graphics were chicken scratch and the game was horrendously laggy probably running on dialup hosting.

Furthermore, he was full of himself then.  He use to do his own, LONG, over worded introduction in Era Online that was rather annoying.  Furthermore, Era Online ripped alot of ideas from Ultima Online and half the interface things were missing and not working.

"Erling Ellingson is the fat lying marketing face of a comedically incompetent and delusionally arrogant games company called Funcom.

Their inability to take feedback, learn from past lessons or program code that isn't hilariously broken and amateurish have made them the laughing stock of the MMO developer community."

qft lol :D

I find it quite sad that people have to use personal attacks on someone who works/worked for Funcom.

He marketed the game well, he hyped the game well. But it was not him that bought 700k copies.

It is always down to the end user to buy the game or not. Anyone who bought Conan either:

- was stupid enough to believe every word the hype machine (both funcom and player driven) put out

or

- wanted to have a look at the game regardless of the hype machine

either way, it is certainly not one man's fault that the game is bad and did not deliver and it's certainly nobody's fault but our own for having bought the game in the first place.

I'm gla