News
Issue No. 14 - December/January 2004
Great People, Great Place
‘The people that make SA Great’ is the theme behind a media campaign launched across the State in December.
The campaign promotes inspirational South Australians who are achieving their business goals through innovation, risk—taking and entrepreneurial vision.
The first three of 10 South Australian individuals and enterprises included in the 12—month campaign are Martyn Manuel, Managing Director of Fibrelogic, a fast growing bore equipment company; Kea Dent, Managing Director of Dentsleeve, a leading gastro—intestinal analysis company; and Greg Siegele, CEO of Ratbag Games, a world leading developer of video games.
In a candid interview with SA Great (only fraction of which is used on air) Greg is very frank about the challenge of succeeding globally in such a competitive market—and the benefit of doing so from Adelaide.
“Ratbag is a video game developer. We make games for the Playstation 2, Xbox and PC. We’ve been around about 10 years now and we’ve made 8 games," says Greg.
“Three of our games have won international racing game of the year awards. We are a household name over in the States where we specialise in North American motor sport simulation.
“I started the company back in 1993 with Richard Hausen who was my best mate from Grade 1 at school. It took us five years to get our first publishing deal. Up until that time we were both on the dole.
It took us five years to get that first deal, but then we had only 10 months to make our first game, which was a racing game, Power Slide. It was certainly a very daunting task and I must admit that everybody in our office didn’t believe that we could do it. I was the only one that thought that it was possible and so I just kept everybody focused on what they had to do this week. And just by taking it in small steps, we managed to get over the line.
“But it did take a great deal of sacrifice from everybody in the company. I think we had ab...
