Take-Two chairman Strauss Zelnick, speaking at the 2008 Smid Cap Conference today, is explaining why his company is rejecting EA’s offer to purchase the company for $26/share. In the process, he is detailing Take-Two developers’ past successes, current projects and future opportunities.

Gamers, let me direct you to slide 24 of Zelnick’s presentation, “Potential Untapped Opportunities.”

• Next to “MMOG/Online Gaming” we’ve got “Civilization” and “BioShock” listed under the column “Potential Take-Two Opportunities.

• Next to “Traditional Media (Film/DVD)” we’ve got “BioShock” as a “Potential Take-Two Opportunity.”

So… should those opportunities remain untapped, “BioShock” and “Civ” fans? Or do you want Take-Two to tap away?

I own a PC. I like PC games. But as I said yesterday, the “Civilization” series simply isn’t up my alley. It’s why “Civilization Revolution”’s streamlined approach clicks.

But what if I’ve tired of the players in the lobbies of Xbox Live and PlayStation Network. We’ve heard the complaints before. What if I want “Civilization Revolution” on my PC? Unfortunately, a producer at 2K Games says it’s “never” going to happen.

He repeated the word “never” twice when I asked, actually.

They must really mean it. But why?

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Sorry, Sid Meier, but I haven’t spent more than 30 minutes with any version of “Civilization.” My first look at one of the games’ thick manuals was enough to suggest that maybe this series, despite the universal critical acclaim, wasn’t for me.

But, the idea behind “Civilization” — world domination — is compelling. It’s this underlying interest that excited me to check out an hour-long demonstration of “Civilization Revolution,” Firaxis and 2K Games‘ attempt to make “Civilization” console-friendly.

Most previews I’ve read for “Civilization Revolution” have been written from the perspective of a gamer familiar with the series. I’m absolutely not. My challenge to “Civilization Revolution” was simple: if you really are a console-friendly version of a complicated PC strategy title, I should be having fun before the demo’s hour is up.

Yesterday, I made my way over the Golden Gate Bridge for the first time to visit 2K Games’ offices in Novato, California, about 25 minutes north of downtown San Francisco. Finding their office was no small feat; there were no gigantic logos to guide me through the surrounding construction. 2K said I wasn’t the first to lose their way.

The demo was meant to focus on the multiplayer features, but producer Jason Bergman suggested I spend a little time in the tutorial first. While the 2K Games PR representative in the room resisted at first — the rep wanted to make sure my time was spent with the multiplayer they were specifically showing — Bergman’s suggestion eventually won out.

Good thing, too. Without the tutorial, my impressions might not have been nearly as positive (or coherent).

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(Below is part of my latest GameFile column. For the full thing, check out MTVNews.com)

…No one else wanted to talk about Bach. I didn’t even know the proper Bach-related follow-up. There were reporters from Maxim, Popular Mechanics, AOL and other outlets around the table. (Sid only said, “Oh, cool!” when it was mentioned there was someone there from MTV News).

Someone asked him what the most important innovations in gaming history were. Meier should know, since he’d been making games for about two decades. I think the question came from a public-relations guy who was otherwise asking questions that somehow kept involving mentions of “Civilization: Revolutions.” This one question, though, elicited a good response.

Meier stopped to think of three innovations more important than anything else in gaming history. The first he mentioned was IBM making a personal computer. Another was the development of “Sim City” and other games that encouraged construction, rather than just destruction. The third, Meier said, was Nintendo’s Official Seal of Quality, a 1980s stamp of gaming quality that he said helped counter the flow of bad games that had drowned so many previous video game consoles.

For more on my lunch with Meier — a lunch desgined to emulate the literary conversations once held at the Algonquin Hotel by Dorothy Parker — check out MTVNews.com

In a conference call to further detail plans to purchase Take-Two Interactive, EA CEO John Riccitiello offered some insight about his plans for the combined company, if the deal went through.

First of note for gamers is that Riccitiello said “I wouldn’t change a line of code in ‘BioShock‘ nor would I in ‘GTA‘ or ‘Max Payne‘… what we would do is sell more of it.” He said EA’s distribution network could get those games in places Take-Two doesn’t reach.

He also said the purchase was enticing for EA because his current company is “underrepresented in M-rated content.” Getting the creators of “GTA,” he noted, would suddenly give EA the top M-rated content in the world.

Riccitiello also name-checked Sid Meier of Firaxis and Greg Thomas of 2K Sports studio Visual Concepts and as valued members of Take-Two. Regarding the potential combination of EA and Take-Two’s sports business, Riccitiello said that he thought highly of Thomas but that “in terms of the sports business, from any sort of organizational perspective, we think it is way too early to comment.” He also shot down the idea that the purchase would leave EA without competition in sports, naming “Wii Sports” and “Hot Shots Golf” among the company’s apparent rivals.

The lion’s share of Riccitiello’s praise during the call was for the top men at Rockstar Games, whose distinct publishing labels were cited as an inspiration for EA’s current structural division. Financial analysts on the call tried to get Riccitiello to address their feelings that it would be expensive to bring Rockstar Games’ management into the EA fold, but the EA CEO said the conference call wasn’t the proper forum to discuss how EA could pull that off.

Riccitiello did reveal that EA’s interest in Take-Two goes back quite a bit. He said that his first inquiry into Take-Two began last summer and noted that he put the brakes on an attempt by EA to buy Take-Two when he took his CEO spot at EA last April. “At the 11th hour I recommend the board not to pursue it,” he said. He felt his own company needed to shift its own structure into its current four-division set-up before taking on Take-Two.

Riccitiello and CFO Warren Jenson also stated on the call that they were surprised at Take-Two’s rejection of EA’s offer. “It is our objective to make this a friendly deal,” Jenson said. They said they expected someone to buy Take-Two, whether it’s EA or not.

(On a side note, tomorrow will mark one year since Riccitiello was announced as the next CEO of EA, though he didn’t assume the position until April. The executive has written quite a first year for himself at the publishing giant. )

When big financial news is breaking in the gaming industry, I look to Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter to break things down. I caught him on the phone today while he was having brunch at a yacht club (the same yacht club he was last brunching at when the Activision Blizzard deal was announced).

Who is this EA-Take Two deal good for? What would happen with sports and the cost of sports games? And why does he think Rockstar won’t necessarily be a part of the deal?

Pachter broke it down for me…

Multiplayer: Is this a good deal for EA? Good for Take-Two?

Michael Pachter: Probably yes and yes.

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These days, if a publisher’s not actively working on something Wii related, stockholders are asking why. With Wii’s momentum showing no signs of slowing, would a company actually cancel an in-development Wii title?

2K Games (and by association, their owners at Take-Two Interactive) did that last week, when IGN revealed revealed the console version of Sid Meier’s strategy series, “Civilization Revolution,” was no longer coming to Wii, but still on for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Nintendo DS.

What they didn’t announce was why they were canceling it, so Multiplayer got in touch with Firaxis Programmer Scott Lewis to figure out what happened.

Here’s the official line that 2K Games dropped to the media last week:

“Development for the Wii version of Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution is currently on hold. We are focusing our attention on creating the best possible Civilization experience for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Nintendo DS platforms.”

There has to be more to the story, though, right?

In a world of rapidly rising development costs, canning a potential money maker isn’t done on a whim. I’ve kicked off my new career at Multiplayer by catching up with a developer who is finishing up work on the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions, to learn why Sid Meier’s opus won’t have any waggle functionality in 2008.Read on for his response.
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