Manny Granillo

Manny Granillo started his career as a playtester for The Immortal. He then landed a job in quality assurance and tech support at Maxis, where he got to on such classics as RoboSport, A-Train, SimAnts, SimLife, SimFarm, and SimCity 2000. In 1994 he moved to Mindscape, where he produced for Dragon Lore: The Legend Begins, and co-designed and produced Legions. The latter is remarkable in that it is one of the few native Windows 3.1 games, but it got very bad reviews, which did not influence his career there in a favorable way. He was listed under "special thanks" for The Raven Project and Angel Devoid: Face of the Enemy, but then moved on to Sega. Here he was one of the many producers producer of Sonic 3D Blast.

In 1997 he founded Hoplite Research. In the press release he called himself an industry veteran, his company an interactive think-tank devoted to innovation in entertainment technologies, and ensured the public that his team had worked on such titles as SimCity, Centurion: Defender of Rome, Myst, and Quake.

The first product seems to have been Corps Command, a PnP strategy ruleset for those who like to play with tin soldiers. 2000 saw Extreme PaintBrawl 2, a sequel to the last Build Engine game, and 2002 Hooters Road Trip for PC and Playstation. A planned sequel, Hooters Road Trip Overdrive for the Xbox never came to pass and not much more was heard of Hoplite Research.

Links

• Hoplite Research's mysterious website, hosted on geocities. With some detective work I made it to the Corps Command page. Can you?
• It will keep you amused for a while, SoulBlazer says about Legions, but does'nt have the gripping 'one more turn' feature:

  After playing the game for a bit, the flaws come to the surface. In a nutshell, the game is too SIMPLE. Comabt is handled abstractly, by selecting a tactic when you engage enemy units. You have no control over your cities/towns and can only move military units. Diplomatic options are limited, the AI is horrible, and even at the highest difficulty levels the game is easy to win once you know what you are doing.

• Who knew you could recycle crap, wrap it in plastic, and sell it again? Tal Blevins muses after playing Extreme PaintBrawl 2:

  While Extreme PaintBrawl 2 is a slight improvement over the original, that's not saying much. The biggest problem with Extreme PaintBrawl—namely the mind-blowingly poor AI (or lack of any AI at all)—is still apparent in this sequel. There's been hardly any improvement in the AI whatsoever. As a matter of fact, I'm going to go as far to say that the program utilizes AS—Artificial Stupidity.