Generals gone gold!

Wednesday 22nd January, 2003 · 0 comments
Posted by Mats0174, .

Generals has gone gold on monday, the 20th,

EA announces that the upcoming Command & Conquer game is complete and will ship on schedule.



Electronic Arts has confirmed for us that Command & Conquer: Generals has gone gold and will ship on February 11. The development team at the Irvine, California-based EA Pacific studio submitted a final candidate version to EA last week, and the game is now officially complete and ready for manufacturing. Generals is the first game in an original Command & Conquer setting that borrows from modern-day conflicts.

"From the beginning of the development of Generals, we wanted to offer players a Hollywood version of the war you're seeing on CNN with the much-loved C&C feel," said Mark Skaggs, general manager of EA Pacific. "The team is incredibly proud of the outcome and we can't wait to get the game in players' hands."

To go with that, Mark Skaggs explained what happens when a game goes gold:

Just a bit of insight for everyone on what happens after a game goes gold and the "gold discs" are sent to the disc manufacturer.

When you send a product to manufacturing it usually takes 24-48 hours before you get a "silvers" back for verification. A "silver" is a disc produced from the "glass master" that is used to mass produce the discs for the game.

After the silvers are verified, then duplication can begin according to the manufacturing schedule of the disc duplicator.

Once the discs are duplicated, they have to have their labels painted onto them and the be put into the jewel cases. Jewel cases are put into retail boxes along with various other paper goods, including the manual.

After the boxes are put together then, they are put into bigger boxes that hold sets of something like 24.

Once all the big boxes are ready, they are shipped to EA's distribution warehouse in preparation to be sent to distribution centers across the country or directly to retail stores.

Add up all the time involved there, including sending the discs to the warehouse, and you can see that it's about a 3-4 week process Generals is ready to be shipped to retail stores.

Another factor that adds time between gold and retail is the fact that we're doing a simultaneous world-wide ship in 8 different languages. Not an easy task, but EA's a pro at doing this sort of thing.

Have fun everyone,

Mark

You'll notice I have a bit of catching up to do, seeing our recent downtime, but it's good to be back!