Big Huge Games Q&A on GamingExcellence talks with Brian Reynolds about Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends, their upcoming real-time strategy game: "Oh plenty of times. We come up with all sorts of game ideas that don't end up being enough to do as a project. Although sometimes we can file them away and use them in other ways later. For example at the time we were pitching Rise of Nations we also had an idea to do a game based on the Arabian Nights... but we couldn't find enough material to make a whole RTS about it. But it lingered in the back of our minds and then when we started to do a fantasy game one of our early thoughts was 'hey, we could get some of that Arabian Nights stuff and do it in a fantasy way'. Similarly the Vinci partially evolved out of the fact I'd always wanted to do an Italian Renaissance game (but again not enough material to be a whole game), partially out of an idea one of our friends had about the great inventor's sketches coming to life, and partially out of my fascination with those drawings (you probably saw them on the cover of the Civ2 box!)."