[ Author: David L. Craddock; Title: GameDev Stories - How Games Are Made; Tags: video games, chat ]
[ John Tobias, "Ko-Kreator" of Mortal Kombat ]
Mortal Kombat remains one of my favorite franchises, and not only for its hard-hitting combos (er, kombos) and the spectacle of its finishing moves. Even thought 11-year-old David thought Street Fighter II the better game, Capcom and its World Warriors had nothing on Midway and MK's mythology.
There's a difference between a game's story and its lore. Naughty Dog tells stories. Dark Souls rides on its lore. So did the early Mortal Kombat titles. In the days before flashy 3D graphics and photorealistic cutscenes, the endings of MK games rewarded players with two or three still images and as many paragraphs of text describing what happened to the player's chosen "kombatant" after he or she won the tournament. But there was a catch: Those endings weren't "kanon." (Okay, enough with substituting Cs for K.) Each ending was a what-if scenario that detailed what might happen if Reptile, or Sub-Zero, or Tanya, or Mileena, or whomever won the tournament. Players had to wait until the next Mortal Kombat to see which of those endings Midway formalized as part of the mythology, if any.
While interviewing MK co-creator John Tobias--one half of the "Noob Saibot" character that debuted in MKII--for Arcade Perfect, my 2019 book about arcade-to-home-system conversions, we talked about the genesis of MK, concepts for characters, the emphasis on lore over storytelling, and more.
David L. Craddock: I'm interested in the many ways games tell stories: some through traditional narratives, others through game systems. To start at the beginning, how did you get your start in the games industry?
John Tobias: I was hired at 19 right out of art school. I joined Williams Bally/Midway in 1989 and started working on what became SmashTV. I got to work with Mark Turmell (NBA JAM) and Eugene Jarvis (Robotron, Defender, Stargate, etc.).
Craddock: What led to you teaming up with Ed Boon, Dan Forden, and John Vogel to create the inaugural Mortal Kombat title?
Tobias: Ed was already there programming pinball machines and joined the video game department to work on the High Impact football game around the same time. He and I were both working on follow-up games when we had the idea to do a one-on-one fighting game. Dan Forden, who did our audio, worked with Ed on High Impact and joined us on MK shortly after we started as did John Vogel who put together many of our backgrounds.
Craddock: Was the idea of doing a 1-on-1 fighter a direct response within Midway to the success of Street Fighter II?
Tobias: I remember thinking of Karate Champ at the inception of our idea to do a one-on-one fighting game. But, there was a good stretch of time between that idea and when we actually started production on MK because Ed and I had to finish our prior projects. I think it was during that time that I remember Street Fighter II being released and doing well in arcades, which helped us convince our management to let us do MK.
So, while the original concept wasn't a direct response to Street Fighter II, I think the eventual green light for us to move forward was in part based on that game's success in the arcades.
Craddock: What was the driving idea, or motivation behind, MK1's setting? It had a very Chinese/martial arts movie vibe to it.
Tobias: I had been a huge fan of martial arts films since I was a kid and so the opportunity to use those influences was something I couldn't pass up when we started working on MK. I've heard MK described as Enter the Dragon meets Star Wars and I think both of those were also part of our DNA. What made Mortal Kombat unique was that it was really a bundle of never before bundled together concepts.
Craddock: How far along did the concept of a game starring Jean-Claude Van Damme progress before it was reworked into the MK1 we know today?
Tobias: We pivoted away from JCVD pretty early in the process. I believe we had already developed the core of our game's premise while we were in those talks, but the idea was that JCVD would either play as himself or as one of the characters in our story. Johnny Cage being a Hollywood movie star was directly influenced by the possibility of JCVD's involvement.
Craddock: I read that you'd been wanting to do more with story prior to MK. Did you see this game as your opportunity to flex more of your storytelling muscle? Or did that come later?
Tobias: I think I learned on SmashTV how powerful a familiar premise and theme can be in conveying story to the player without much, if any, actual exposition. But, I remember feeling frustrated while working on the sort of sequel to SmashTV called Total Carnage. Because we were working on an arcade product, story was certainly secondary to gameplay and so I felt it wasn't being taken as seriously. Ed and I were given free reign to do what we wanted with MK. I saw that as an opportunity to try some things out with how we presented our story.
Craddock: Do you remember roughly where the ideas for the seven fighters came from?
Tobias: The initial roster evolved from a set of character archetypes. Because there were so few characters at the time, we were able to lean on that concept as a way of informing the player on who the characters were and how they related to each other within the context of the larger setting. Liu Kang was the hero, Johnny Cage was a sidekick, Raiden being a god implied wisdom as a mentor character. Every character fell some place on a basic spectrum of archetypes. In the first two games we were dealing with a relatively small list of characters and so we were able to manage that effectively. That became more difficult to manage as the roster grew in later games.
Another part of character creation was what they looked like, which also played a role in conveying story. Very simple visual choices led to questions by the player that helped layer story. Kano has one eye; how did he lose the other? This guy puts on a pair of sunglasses at the end of a match; why? Liu Kang's intro says he's a Shaolin Monk but he doesn't dress like one; why? Goro is a monster and clearly not like the other characters; where is he from? This woman is in the US military; how does she relate to the mystical nature of some of the other characters?
Also, if there were influences from other media, we typically used it because we felt it would help the player identify with a character. If making a character resemble 'that guy from that movie' helped establish the character in the mind of the player, we saw that as an opportunity. Being an arcade game, we didn't have a place to unfold story exposition so we had to take advantage of telling story any way that we could.
Craddock: As a kid, I was drawn to MK1 in large part because of the mythology. The game intrigued me in a way SF2 didn't. Was the emphasis on characters and setting a conscious response to distinguish MK1 from SF2?
Tobias: We did everything we could to differentiate from SF2, but I don't remember our fiction being in response to anything they did or didn't do. I think MK had its very own vibe. Yes, it was a one-on-one fighting game, but it offered a very different experience than Street Fighter both in mechanics of play and visual space.
Right out of the gate it was a good thing that we had made the choices we made because it offered a somewhat familiar and yet very unique experience. I think that combination of novelty and familiarity is present in almost every successful game even today. I also think that the time we spent developing the characters and story, which was an odd thing to do in an arcade product, helped build a larger world in the minds of our players. That impact lives with MK even in its most recent iterations.
Of course, our brand of violence is in large part what gave us a seat at pop culture's table. But, the attention we gave to developing those early games and the incredible work being done at NetherRealm today is what has assured that MK was no passing fad.
Craddock: How much of MK's mythology did you envision during development of the first game? Or was that first development cycle so tight that you primarily focused on material needed for the game?
Tobias: We had the base of our fiction pretty well thought out in the first game and what didn't actually make it into the game through the methods we had available, I had scribbled in a notebook or sitting in my head. What was important for us was to establish; here is this world where there exists a mystical martial arts tournament and here are these fighters and why they compete.
Basic stuff but the groundwork for everything that would follow in subsequent games. Our development cycle was tight, but not so tight that we would pass on an opportunity to embed story into the game.
Craddock: What influenced the decision to create Shang Tsung as an older character?
Tobias: We wanted to imply that the host of the tournament had a long history. Making Shang Tsung an old sorcerer created instant implications for us in terms of how he fit into the larger fiction and making him a shapeshifter played directly to a villainous character archetype. I also thought about a character from an old Shaw Bros. film called Clan of the White Lotus. He was an aged fighter with flowing white hair and beard who had mastered mystical techniques.
That sorcerer-like character type was prevalent in many of the kung-fu films I had seen as a kid and I think was the basis for Lo-Pan in Big Trouble in Little China, which had a superficial influence on Shang Tsung.
Craddock: MK seemed to explode right away, with comic books and other products available at or near the game's launch. I loved the comics. Did you push for those, or did Midway come to you with the opportunity to write and illustrate them?
Tobias: I wrote and drew the comics that were sold through the first two arcade games. That was entirely our idea and a way for us to get actual story exposition out into the players hands. All of the ancillary stuff came a few years after the first games.
Craddock: How did you want the comics to tie into, and/or expand upon, the mythology detailed in the first game?
Tobias: The comics that we sold through the arcade game were meant to work as setups for the game fiction. They told a story that led up to the game leaving the rest up to the players to sort out in their heads. So much of the fiction in our games was implied and it was amazing how well that worked for the player. They were willing and able to fill in the blanks based on the tidbits we shared.
The Malibu licensed comics came a few years later and were not canon to the actual games.
Craddock: Was Boon interested in contributing to the game's mythology/lore, or did he need to concentrate more on coding?
Tobias: Ed and I had our expertise, but efforts were always very collaborative and so ideas flowed between us and really anyone involved with the game. Although I focused on the actual fiction I would say that MK's reputation for being mysterious with mythology and lore came just as much from Ed's penchant for hiding things in the game itself as it did from anything we did with the story.
Craddock: Liu Kang's Fatality in MK1 stood out from the rest. The screen didn't darken, and it was quite tame--a cartwheel into an uppercut--compared to others. Why was Kang's Fatality designed differently?
Tobias: That was a conscious choice to differentiate him as an enlightened, former Shaolin monk.
Craddock: Meaning no disrespect, but Goro was an even more memorable boss character than Shang Tsung, even though the Goro fight preceded the final battle against Tsung. Not only was Goro's mythology enthralling--a half-human, half-dragon badass--but the audiovisual touches you and the team added to the match before Goro were fantastic, specifically the screen shaking and heavy footsteps. You knew something bad was somewhere above you, and you almost hoped you'd lose so you wouldn't have to find out who or what it was. But even more fascinating, to me, is that Goro was sculpted from clay and animated via stop-motion animation. What was the process of bringing Goro to life?
Tobias: The only experience I had with stop-motion animation prior to Goro was on a film short that I did with my brother as kids using our Star Wars action figures and a super-8. Any difficulties I had with Goro were due to inexperience. The mini-stage setup for Goro was incredibly crude, but I suppose it got the job done. I think the concept of incorporating a stop-motion puppet with digitized actors in a video game was novel enough to give us a pass on quality. No one had done it before as far as I know.
The Goro puppet itself was amazing. The sculptor, Curt Chiarrelli, did a great job of interpreting my drawings. The one thing that made it somewhat difficult to animate was that Goro's armature was built with wires. It worked okay, but would've worked better had we done it with ball and socket joints as I believe Curt had suggested. I think we were looking to save time and money so we cheaped-out. We should've listened to Curt because on our later puppets for MK3, Motaro and Sheeva, we went with full skeletal armatures which made it so much easier to pose the figures.
Craddock: In 1992 and '93, MK was infamous for its gritty atmosphere and violence. How did the team decide to go in that visual direction?
Tobias: I think the gritty came from the digitized technique we used to create the graphics. The violence kind of grew out of the inherent nature of two fighters beating the heck out of each other. MK's fatalities were entirely about getting a positive reaction from the players by creating something that was hidden from the average player and a spectacle when pulled off. We wanted them to be events that put an exclamation point at the end of a match.
Craddock: Did you expect the amount of blowback MK received, going all the way to the government's attempt to censor the game?
Tobias: We didn't expect any of that. We were buried in wanting our players to have a good time.
Craddock: Were you aware the Genesis and Game Gear versions would include a blood code?
Tobias: I only vaguely remember being aware of a blood code and I don't remember whether that was during the course of conversion development or after the release. Ed was much closer to the code side portion of the ports and if I learned of the codes it would've been through him.
Craddock: Mortal Kombat was largely responsible for the creation of the ESRB rating systems for games. I understand the need for that system, but I disagree with any form of censorship. Nintendo effectively censored an artistic creation when they forced Sculptured Software to sanitize their ports of MK1. What were your thoughts on that?
Tobias: I have a mixed reaction to the issue. We developed coin-op games for the arcade crowd, which in our experience skewed older than console players at the time. But, in hindsight the industry itself was maturing and it took a while for us to see that happening. I was 21 when we started development on the first MK and I hadn't stopped playing games. My friends hadn't stopped playing games. Certainly the older players we saw in the arcades hadn't stopped playing games. So this idea that video games were only for kids was a misread by the industry and the public at large.
There was an assumption that people stopped playing video games just like they stopped playing with toys. The reality was that video games had become a form of entertainment that reached beyond our childhoods and so the idea of games themed toward adults was a reality that took some time for people to grasp. Nintendo had a very specific demographic that they thought they were catering to and when MK showed up on their system it acted as a disruptor, so I understand their reaction.
Unfortunately, I think Nintendo tried to take advantage of opportunistic politicians looking for headlines to gain an advantage over their competition with Sega and it backfired. Thankfully, when the dust settled the ESRB was the result and I think that it was a reasonable reaction to the whole dilemma. It was pretty much an acknowledgement of video games as a legitimate form of entertainment that caters to all ages.
Craddock: How did MK1's success influence the team's development process within Midway leading into MKII?
Tobias: MK changed my professional life forever. Our MKII team only grew by one additional artist. The core group of Ed and me, Dan Forden, and John Vogel remained although I believe John may have been busy with other projects as well. The new artist who joined was Tony Goskie and he was a significant addition. Our fiction in MKII introduced the realm of Outworld and Tony was a huge part of visualizing what it would look like.
Craddock: Was Kintaro easier to create, move, and animate, since you had the experience of working with Goro under your belt?
Tobias: John Vogel animated Kintaro in MKII. In fact, I remember John buying action figures and cutting up and gluing parts of armor onto the new puppet that Curt had created. The puppet was created the same way as the original Goro. I think John did a better job of animating Kintaro than I had done with Goro.
Craddock: In evaluating MK1 and working on II, where did you see room for improvement?
Tobias: We knew that we were going to have more time on MKII and that there were improvements to the process that we could make. The compressed schedule of the first game was cause for a lot of happy accidents in design, but now we could take those learnings and create something bigger and better.
On the art side of development, there were things like color palette management and moving from an analog to digital camera capture with the characters that gave them a much cleaner look on MKII.
Craddock: MKII's backgrounds and characters are gorgeous--in a bloody yet colorful sort of way. Its art direction still holds up today. What visual direction were you aiming for? And, how did you want the game to differ from MK1's visual style?
Tobias: The first MK had a very raw, digitized look. That choice was made in part because of time constraints, but it was also an aesthetic choice we felt would give MK a unique visual style amongst its competitors. On MKII, with the introduction of the Outworld, we saw an opportunity to create more richly colored visuals.
We did coordinate the colors of our characters in contrast to the backgrounds so that they wouldn't get lost. Characters were typically composed of flesh tones and a primary color or two, which let us cut loose on the environment visuals. I think that in combination with improvements in how we captured footage of the actors added up to what gave MKII its unique visual approach.
Craddock: As if you and Ed hadn't attained immortality already with the first MK, Noob Saibot made his debut in MKII. Who came up with the Noob Saibot character?
Tobias: That was Ed! I gave Ed a bunch of random color palettes for the ninjas and he snuck Noob Saibot into the game entirely on his own. I added fiction and history to the character later, but Ed was responsible for the inception.
Craddock: MKII's home release came 18 months after its debut in arcades. That seems like an exceptionally long time between arcade and console releases. Do you know if there as any particular reason for that?
Tobias: I don't remember why that would've been other than maybe having to do with the release of the arcade game. I think the coin-op was officially released in the spring time and so it's possible that the port would not have been ready in time for that holiday season.
Also, that would've only been several months from the arcade release, which would've upset arcade operators who were dependent on coin-drop. There was a feeling that the home release could affect their earnings and our relationship with the distributors and operators was very important.
Craddock: How soon after MKII released in arcades did you and the team break ground on MK3?
(JT) I don't recall exactly. I know after we locked down software and began manufacturing the coin-ops I turned to creating the MKII comic book that we advertised in the arcade game. That was great fun for me and a good break from pushing pixels. Also, the team probably spent some time decompressing before we rolled on to MK3. But, we didn't float too long. It was business as usually for us. We had that blue collar Chicago work ethic engrained in our souls.
Craddock: Of all the MK games you worked on, which is your favorite?
Tobias: For nostalgic purposes I'd say MK1 was my favorite only because we were so innocent and had no idea of the success that was ahead of us. That's a very rare experience for anyone who embarks on a creative endeavor. It was just us. No one told us what to do or how to do it. We had absolute creative freedom.
Craddock: Ed Boon says Scorpion is his favorite character. Who's your favorite?
Tobias: I love all my children!
Craddock: I love the speed and gameplay of MK3, but I've always been curious why its violence was even more over-the-top. For instance, a single character would explode and shower the screen with multiple skulls, rib cages, and more than four limbs. Fatalities were more over-the-top, too, such as Jax growing into a giant and stepping on his opponent. Why was this more comical style chosen?
Tobias: Because bigger is better! Honestly, I don't know that we were comical on purpose as much as just wanted to be more over the top with the violent aspect.
Craddock: Arcade and console hardware seemed to exist in a symbiotic relationship: Conversions of coin-op games gave consumers reason to spend money on a game once and play it at home, but arcade games were graphically superior to consoles, and boasted unique apparatuses such as cockpits and huge screens. Was this relationship as symbiotic as it seemed, or did the home console supplanting arcades seem inevitable, then or in retrospect?
Tobias: Actually, in my experience it was quite the opposite. For me it was the unique peripherals that made arcade games special. It was the seat and steering wheel of a driving game or the actual molded gun of a shooting game. For fighting games the pads of home consoles were inferior to the feel of an actual joystick and mounted buttons.
I think that's true to this day. But, in the late 90's and early 2000's when the graphic quality of the consoles caught up with what we could do in the arcade, that's when players began to stay home. Today the arcade experience has kind of had a resurgence. Not so much with the barcade retro scene as much as the new location-based event games you find in places like Dave & Busters.
Craddock: I've learned a lot about the obstacles console and PC programmers faced in bringing arcade experiences into the living room. Pac-Man for the Atari 2600, for example, was incapable of rendering circular dots—at least at the time Tod Frye worked on the conversion—and TV screens were wider than they were long, forcing Frye to rejigger Pac-Man's maze. Frye's conversion was judged harshly, and was considered partially responsible for the North American video game market's crash in the '80s. Do you feel conversions like Pac-Man and programmers like Frye were judged too harshly then or now, given that consumers—and most critics—couldn't understand the restraints that developers charged with home conversions had to work within? Or should that not matter?
Tobias: It's funny you mention the 2600 Pac Man game because I remember being bent as a kid that it differed so wildly from the arcade version. I remember flipping through the manual and reading the dots described as wafers to kind of explain away the square shape. My view on that changed when I began actually working on games and understanding how hardware limitations can put a pretty low ceiling over your head.
For what it's worth, I loved every game I played on our 2600… even the bad ones! That was a magic time for me. Even the crash was magical for me because the games were discounted to $2 or $3 bucks!
Craddock: Do you keep up with MK? What are your thoughts on the franchise?
Tobias: Yes I keep up when I can. I visit NetherRealm on occasion and the guys will share works-in-progress. They're kind enough to send games to me when they're released and I'll typically play through the single player modes. I really only started playing again at MK9 and I think the new versions are amazing. I'm always excited to see what they'll do next and the graphic capabilities are incredible. Honestly, I'm in heaven when I see how cool the original characters are interpreted in the new games.
I think MK is a forever franchise. I felt that way when I left Midway and I feel that way today especially with Warner Brothers' acquisition of the property. Like any franchise it may have ups and downs, but it is engrained in popular culture because of its birth in the 90's and will remain a staple as longs as it's dusted off and kept polished. Its relevance today is entirely due to the great work being done at NetherRealm.
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[ Philip Oliver of the Oliver Twins ]
As a kid, I was convinced games came from two countries: Japan and America. Or more accurately, Nintendo and "everywhere else." When my interest in games expanded from playing everything I could get my hands on to reading about how games were made, I learned about superstars in the UK, a curiously little-explored country in the context of the games industry.
Everything is relative. Philip and Andrew Oliver, better known as the Oliver Twins, created not only some of the best-selling computer games in the UK where PCs like the ZX Spectrum gained more traction than the Apple II I grew up playing and programming on, they made some of the best games, period. As part of my research, I went back and played several of their Dizzy platforming games and could see what the UK viewed the character as its Super Mario.
Prior to talking to Philip and Andrew together for a project still brewing as of this writing, I talked to Philip for background on how he and his brother took an interest in playing and making games and their early days publishing through Codemasters.
David L. Craddock: How long have you and your brother Andrew been interested in making games?
Philip Oliver: Forever, really. When we were working as 11-year-olds, 12-year-olds, we were interested in computers. We were always interested in the same things. But of course, even if Andrew was just another me, when Andrew's there and interested in the same thing and he's doing stuff, he'll discover some things and I'll discover some things. We share, but we're on the same level as well. If you try to share that with another sibling who's not the same age or mindset as you, they're like, "So what? You printed something on the screen. So what?" Well, it's actually really clever. It took a lot of work, especially because we did it in assembler. Printing a message on the screen in assembler? You think that's easy?
Around 1980, you had games like Pong, but what we were seeing in the UK was in electronics stores and electronics sections of stores, you had rip-off consoles. I think we got one in '79 as a Christmas present. It was really good fun to put it under the family TV and play with it. Before then, everything on the TV was broadcast, whereas now it was like, "Wow. We're actually controlling this." Then our older brother got a ZX81, which was little more than a calculator, quite frankly. But technically you could program it. We said, "I wonder if we could recreate Pong." It's so basic, it struggled to do even that. You had 1K of memory, so you type one sentence and you're out of memory. Little more than a glorified calculator, but it was still fascinating that you could still kind of control things.
We always say, "The one thing you learn from ZX81 is you need a better computer." So we did. We moved on to /Dragon 32 where you had a keyboard, color, and 32K of RAM. Then we were able to knock out some fairly interesting games in BASIC and go from there.
Craddock: When would you say you went from hobbyist programmer to contemplating it as a… if not a career, then a way to earn money doing something you enjoyed?
Oliver: Christmas '79, so practically 1980, we started. Then the ZX81 came out a year later. The Dragon 32 we bought was the summer of '82. That's when we really started programming our own little games. By '83, we started to publish. The games got better and better.
The way games were (published) was quite often in listings. You had manuals which had a few games in them, simple games like Pong. Then you'd type them in and play with all the variables. Then magazines in shops had listings. You'd say, "Oh, I wonder what this one is?" They took forever to type in, and what we always found was that no one had a Dragon 32, so we had to type in listings from other formats and see if we could get them to work. We learned a lot in that time. It was reverse-engineering other people's listings: from the manual, from magazines. Just mucking around: I wonder what happens if you do this?
The way we learned assembly wasn't dissimilar. Trying to figure out how the screen was mapped was just random pokes to memory: "If I poke this location, it crashes. If I poke this location.. well, it didn't crash, but it didn't do anything. Let's try another location!" Then a pixel appears on the screen and you go, "Oh, a pixel. What if I add one?" A pixel to the right-hand side appears. Why is it a different color? You keep trying things, reverse-engineering how the screen is laid out. When I was tired and bored of what I was doing, he would say, "Get on. You've got a job to do." I'd say, "Oh, come on. If I'm going to do this, you've got to do that." That meant progress was always twice as fast, but also, if you had low points like, "Ugh, I just can't get my head around this," you had somebody to (help).
They talk about pair programming these days. That's what we were doing: We were pair programming, only we didn't call it that in those days. It's just someone going, this is the theory, this is the code; why isn't it working? Then you've got somebody at your level to talk it through. While talking it through, you spot (the issue) yourself. Or they might say, "We've gone in completely the wrong direction." It's very helpful.
Lots of people want to make stuff. Hence the reason Lego is so successful. But with physical stuff, you're limited by what you can afford. When you've got a computer, the only restriction is what you can fit in memory and your imagination. It's like, "I don't have to go to shops and buy anything, which is just as well, because things cost money. It's all here. I've just got to figure it out." That was part of the magic.
Craddock: How did you and Andrew publish your first games?
Oliver: It was a case of wanting more people to see it. You've done something and you're really proud of it, and you want to show off, quite frankly. But hey, someone's going to pay you for it. The other thing is all this equipment is expensive. Buying a computer for us back then, we were schoolkids. It was 200 pounds for the Dragon 32, and that was back in the early '80s. That's a lot of money. So not only do you want people to see your stuff, you're going to say, "Well, if you're going to see it, play it, and enjoy it, could you give us some money? Because we've got a checklist of stuff to pay off: debt with our parents, who loaned us money; but also, there's so much other cool stuff we want to buy!"
It wasn't that we wanted money for the sake of money. There was cool stuff we wanted to buy with it, even other games. Beyond '86 or '87, both of us stopped playing games as a pastime. We weren't getting anywhere by playing someone else's game. But if we make our own games, we put something out there, and at the time we were hugely successful. We wanted to do that. I like looking at games for the first 10, 15, 20 minutes, just to see what someone else has done and how they achieved it. After that it's like, "Yeah, okay, I get it. I know what you're doing, and it's interesting, but I'm not going to lose 100 hours in this thing."
Craddock: What I noticed about your games is that they were all accessible. The controls were never overly complex, which allowed virtually anyone to sit down and learn your games.
Oliver: We started with home computers, and home computers have a keyboard. So people kept coming up with more key combinations: "Press this and this to do that; now press that and that to do this." That meant that when you were trying to play, you also had to read the instructions at the same time. You're trying to play the game, and it's like, "Oh, something's happening! What key do I use for that?" We were always trying to get our games down to four directions and one action key. That's it. Nothing else.
As you went into consoles, that was natural. We did lots of NES games, and you only had two action buttons. If you look at our NES games, you'll find that quite often we didn't even use the second button. It doesn't do anything because we only wanted to use the minimum amount of buttons. One thing that annoyed me as consoles got more complex is the number of buttons.
Craddock: Many fans became aware of "the Oliver Twins" through Dizzy, your platforming series published by Codemasters. How did you and Andrew get involved with Codemasters?
Oliver: We were around 17 or 18 when we met Codemasters. We had the choice of going to university, and we didn't want to. It seemed boring, and there weren't any games courses back then. We took a year off to "make games and get it out of our systems," as our parents and other people would say. But they were as well, by the way. Richard (Darling) is the same age as us, and David is one year older. The reason they formed a company was their father was a businessman. Although they were writing the games, he was making sure it was a limited liability company, setting up the accountant and lawyer, finding offices, and all that.
Although Richard and David are credited as the geniuses behind Codemasters, which they are on paper, their father was a businessman helping them because he'd run businesses. Average of 20 hours a day, seven days a week. We didn't even have to do laundry or cook or anything because our parents were there. At age 19, we bought a house and immediately got a cleaner so we didn't have to worry about ironing, washing, hoovering, and things like that. We did do the cooking.
We'd already had a few games published by other people at that point. It was a very cottage industry back then. Everything was a bit amateur. Several of the companies were visited were just people in their living rooms, but they called themselves publishers. You'd see adverts in magazines and ask to have a meeting with them, then you turn up and you're in someone's living room. We decided we needed to find a publisher that would treat us with a bit more respect, and get our games out there and pay us better.
We were creating games that we thought were pretty decent by that time. Pretty decent, but we were getting 200 pounds a game. It didn't seem right, so we went to the trade show with the idea that we'd show them cassettes of games we'd done. We'd put our games down and say, "These are the games we've done. If we were to write games for you, how much would you pay us?" They said, "Oh, decent game like that? Ten thousand pounds." It was like, "Really?" They said, "Yeah." We said, "Well, that's fantastic. We'll do that."
At that point, Super Robin Hood was code on a sheet of paper. What happened was we didn't bother meeting anybody else at the show after that. We'd already been around to Activision, Electric Dreams, Mastertronic, and a few others. But after that was said, we got straight into the car, got home, and we said, "We've got to make this game, and we've got to make it so fast they don't change their minds." Really, he was probably saying that to every developer, and it wasn't contractual, and we didn't know if he would follow through. But we took it as a verbal contract. We were a bit naive.
It took about a month. We only had one computer, so we took it in turns to program, taking shifts to sleep. We spent the majority of time programming. When we were both awake, it was a case of working out code on paper so the minute you've got a gap, you're like, "Get out. I've got to type all this lot in." We did finish the game in a month and took it back to them. We drove it to their offices and said, "Okay, it's done. Here it is." They loaded it up, looked at it, and said, "Yeah, that's really good. We'll draw up a contract." They went into a back room, printed off a two-page letter--that's really what it was; it wasn't a contract--and they came back and it said 10 pence royalties per copy sold.
We said, "Wait a minute. That's not what you said. You said 10,000 pounds." They said, "No, that's if it's a huge bestseller. That's what you'll get because that's what the royalties will become." We said, "Here we go again." We'd already been shafted quite a few times by publishers. Obviously seeing our disappointment, the two Darling brothers, Richard and David, went and had a chat. They came out and said, "We'll advance you 2,000 pounds here and now. We'll write a check because it is a good game and we think it will do really well. We're going to do a production run, which means as long as we sell them all, you'll get that amount anyway."
So while we were disappointed, we said, "Okay, 10,000 pounds is still 10 times what we've been getting, so we'll take it." The game went straight on to become number one. They converted it to the Commodore 64 and the Spectrum, and it probably made us more than 10,000 pounds--probably as much as 15,000--within the next six months. Once we'd done that once, it was like, "Well, we've got to do that again."
We got into this mentality of, "We can do a game a month and get it to be number one." We said, "The best way to do this is to reskin the game. There's no point rewriting code if you don't have to." That's where Ghost Hunters came from: It was basically a reskinning. Just a character running around platforms, but rethemed to ghosts. It was Luigi's Mansion before there was a Luigi's Mansion. When we saw that game, we said, "That's the vision we had! We just couldn't do it with old technology." We got our check, and this was a few months after we'd left school. We had a building society; it wasn't even a real bank. It was quite funny because they'd sent this check which was worth many thousands of pounds, and when we walked in, the cashier was a girl who'd been in our classes at school. That was quite funny.
Craddock: What led to your and Andrew's split from Codemasters?
Oliver: We decided to do Grand Prix Simulator, which was a massive hit. We went back and did another platformer, Dizzy, which was another massive hit, based on a funny little cartoon egg. That went ballistic. We cranked the royalties up to 12 pence, then 12 and a half pence, then they changed it to a percentage because they wanted to change prices. But a percentage meant they were taking more money at retail and we were getting less per cassette.
Things got a bit fractious. When we got to Dizzy 3 in September of '89, pretty much every game we were doing was a bestseller. We knew that, and we knew this game was the best game we'd ever written. Nobody cared about IP then, so we said to them, "If you publish this game, you have to acknowledge that we own this game. We own Dizzy." They said, "Yeah, yeah, we'll do that." We said, "No, you've got to put it in writing." They didn't bother to do any admin. They just duplicated a game, sent it to shops, and it went ballistic.
On covers, they'd write, Copyright is shared between Codemasters and The Oliver Twins. We had to say, "That's not what we said." That's where things started following apart. Then there were issues with Nintendo. We were trying to produce 8-bit games for the NES, but they didn't want to get a license from Nintendo and have them control everything. So they did unapproved games that got around the NES chip, and technically they did a good job with them. Games could be produced and put into shops, but with the politics surrounding that, we didn't get paid for most of those games.
The way Codemasters set this up, and they were good at this so there were good years and bad years: There was a certain royalty available for a game. In the early days it was 10 pence, then it went up, and finally to a percentage. But they had a simple rule: If someone else converts your game, you get half the royalties and they get half the royalties. If they get an advance, it's an advance on their half of the royalties. A lot of our games came out on the C64, and the Atari St, and the Commodore Amiga. We always got half royalties if it was (a conversion of) one of ours. In recent years, we've discovered a couple of games that made us say, "Hmm. We really should have had royalties on that one."
Micromachines actually started life as Grand Prix Simulator. We were invited into a meeting to discuss it, because it was Grand Prix Simulator on the NES. They said, "We're going to change the name and theme, so we won't pay you any royalties." And we just agreed. We just accepted that. What would have been a good idea was to say, "Eh, we'll take a smaller royalty," because Micromachines did quite well. But we just said, "Okay, fine." It would have been quite good to take some royalties. It seemed fair: The game had to be recoded completely, and they were going to change the theme so it's miniature vehicles in a big world. It wasn't really our game, even though it started out that way, so we said, "Yeah, that's fair."
And I still think it is, but it would have been nice to get paid for that and all the other Nintendo games we wrote. Half of them didn't get released. They only came out recently through the Kickstarter.
When we developed for NES, we got an office and started hiring people just at the point when Codemasters started running into issues and stopped paying us. We had to stop paying people, but we'd burned through all the money. That was a shame.
Craddock: According to records, the Oliver Twins developed approximately seven percent of computer games sold in the UK. How did you arrive at that figure?
Oliver: Seven percent was a number we'd worked out around '87 or so. They used to print statistics of all the top-selling games: how much they sold, what percentage of the market they had. This was quite early in our Codemasters career, the seven percent. We kept getting seven percent quoted back to us, and that was before most of our games had released. I said, "We got way more successful after that."
Many years later, when we were writing our book, we said, "We're going to work this out. What was the maximum percentage we got to?" We got to 16.4 percent of the market at one point. We found some charts so we could do the statistics. I had to go into Excel and make a spreadsheet. And a lot of games were conversions of ours, and we said, "That counts," because the game wouldn't exist without us. If we hadn't made a game first, there wouldn't be a conversion.
Craddock: One thing I admire about your process is the games you and Andrew created were of high quality even though you were releasing them at such a rapid rate. Usually you have developers like id Software and Blizzard, who take the "when it's done" approach, or you have franchises like Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed where they're mostly good, but sometimes you play an installment that clearly needed more time to bake.
Oliver: We had different theories than a lot of people. They would spend ages trying to hone one particular game, whereas we were a bit more slapdash about it: We're spending a month on this, and then we'll ship it. We tried to make it the best we could. That's why we worked 20-hour days, because it was like, "Ah! Only three days to go and this is really not playable!" But we were quite happy to sort of let things go because we were selling at budget prices.
Other people, if they knew they were selling their games at three to four pounds more than our games, they were just sitting there honing and honing and honing. That would take months, whereas we'd say, "Just throw it out there. If we need to make a better game next time, we will." If you look at the first Dizzy game, it did okay. The second one did better because we'd honed a lot of stuff. The third one was freaking awesome because we'd learned so much from the first two.
That was the same with all our games. First Grand Prix Simulator, then look at the second one; we'd cleaned up everything from all the lessons we'd learned. We had this iterative process. These days people do that by doing patches and updates. Effectively, we were just iterating very, very quickly when a lot of people weren't doing that. And some of our games weren't successful, like 3D Starfighter. Someone asked me the other day, "What's your least favorite game? The one you're not really proud of?" I said, "Well..." But sometimes you do things thinking, Yeah, this will work. Then you get halfway through and realize, "Oh. This doesn't work. We'll, let's just patch it up the best we can. We're not charging a lot of money for these games."
Another one that isn't amazing is Panic Dizzy. We'd seen Tetris on Game Boy and said, "Oh my! That's amazing! How can we do a puzzle game?" We came up with an idea; somebody else actually code it. It didn't really play that well. The problem was the other people were on royalties. We didn't feel we could just bin the game because it was like, "Well, we're binning your money, and then you'll expect us to pay you compensation." So we tidied it up as much as we could and put it out there.
The funny thing is, it got some good reviews. It got some bad reviews too, but also some really good reviews, and I've met people who said, "It's really good!" I just think, Yeah. If you like. We don't think so. Occasionally you're surprised when a game finds a market. And back then, people didn't know what to compare a game against. If you knew the market, you knew the best games out there. But if somebody's only got three games and they buy yours and say, "Ah, I love this, it's brilliant," you say, "Well, you haven't seen the better ones in the genre."
To be honest, it's amazing the games were as robust as they were. There were many games with Codemasters in the second half of our cycle where they wouldn't even load them up in the office. We drove them to the duplicator ourselves. And how much testing had they had? Codemasters didn't have a testing department for the first few years. They had a producer who'd load it up and say, "Yeah, that's good enough. Do you think it's good enough?"
For us, the maximum we would play a game is a day. If we didn't find any bugs? Ship it. Several times, we know they didn't even load it up. Fantasy World Dizzy, our biggest seller--they never loaded it. There were several games we drove to the duplicator, so it didn't even go to the Codemasters office. The post was really slow back then. If you had a deadline coming up, like Christmas, you'd say, "If we take it to the duplicator rather than put it in the post to go to the duplicator, we could probably get it into the shop within a week." We'd call Codemasters and say, "We'll take it ourselves," and they said sure, so that's what we did. It's amazing there are as few bugs in the games as there were.
The other thing is, when you've got so little memory, you don't have a lot of room for code. The code that's there is being run through so many times that any errors show up pretty damn quickly Fast Food, a maze game and Pac-Man-inspired: If the code works on level 1, there isn't new code for level 10 or 30. All that happens is you get a different maze made from different variables. Testing level 1 means the code works for every level. That isn't the case when you have bigger games. There are so many situations where code is only used deep into the game. Our code had to fit into around 8K to 10K, probably not even that much. And the code has been iterated so many times. If you can improve it to get more speed out of it, then fine. Otherwise, leave it alone.
We loved going into stores and reading reviews of our games in magazines--when they were nice. Most of the time, they were. A lot of it was showing off, but when money started flowing, we said, "Oh, this is quite good. We could buy a sports car. We could buy a house." That was nice, too. But it started with creativity, then showing off, then you publish and lots of people play it and you can show reviews to your mates at school. It started with, "Hey, we can impress each other." The circle got wider, and the games got better, and the money got interesting as well.
Craddock: How did you and Andrew go from pair programming to growing your company and branching off into your own specialities?
Oliver: Back in those days, you didn't have designers, but obviously games had to be designed. You also had to have graphics. We didn't have any artists, so I ended up doing a lot more design. Although we both could code, on Super Robin Hood, we split that into foreground and background. I code the foreground, and he did the background. That's how we did it for a few days. Then I ended up doing a lot more of the design side and preparing all the artwork. It was all smoke and mirrors.
As long as a game is fun, you can get away with things. We couldn't do tree physics, but we could do it well enough that we could just ship games. So I ended up doing more design, and then more preparing graphics. When we started doing external stuff like meetings and sending stuff to publishers, we actually had a conversation. I said, "If I reach out to somebody and they call back, they're going to want to keep talking with me. I'd better keep talking to them." But if I'm talking to that person, and I've got my sales presentation together and know the pitch, I should pitch to other people. So, actually, I'd better do outward-facing stuff. Then we started talking to journalists, so I did that as well. Accountants, lawyers, and so on. He did all the code.
When we went to running a business and hiring people, he said he'd take care of all internal dev: scheduling, managing, making sure games are good. I took care of cash flow and any external factors. I did NES, Genesis, 6502, then 68000. Then PlayStation came out, so I stopped programming when that was on horizon. I didn't want to learn another language, and I wouldn't have time anyway because I'm too busy being pulled into all these other things. Andrew carried on coding until 1998, '99, on a lot of PlayStation One games. When it got to PlayStation 2, he said, "I'm out."
You're supposed to hire people who are better than you are. All the programmers and artists were hired were way better than I was. I know my limitations, and I kind of don't miss it because I don't think I'd be good enough. The game we'll put out on Switch will be free because it's not going to be as Rayman or some of these other games you see.
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[ John Staats, Designer, World of WarCraft ]
John Staats and I share a couple of important things in common. We've both written extensively about Blizzard Entertainment's culture and games, and we both hail from Ohio. Staats recently self-published The WoW Diary: A Journal of Computer Game Development, which serves as both his memoir of his time in the games industry working as World of WarCraft's first level designer, and an inside look at how the genre-defining MMORPG was made.
Staats lives half an hour from me, so we met at a coffee shop to talk growing up in Northeast Ohio, the formative days of WoW's team, the as-yet-unknown medical condition that forced him to retire from development, and the factors that prompted him to write The WoW Diary, in this interview originally published on Shacknews.com as part of a deep dive into narrative design.
David Craddock: I don't often get a chance to talk with game developers in Akron, Ohio. Were you born and raised here?
John Staats: Yep, born and raised in Akron, Ohio. I went to Kent State and got a degree in graphic design, so I have an artistic background. From there, I went to New York for 10 years and worked in advertising. While I was there, I developed a penchant for making 3D levels. I grew up playing Dungeons & Dragons, so I wanted to walk around in my own levels.
From there I started making maps for first-person shooters: for Quake, and for other various FPS games. I ended up with a portfolio that I could use to apply for jobs in the gaming industry. Unfortunately, a lot of the jobs didn't look very promising. I wanted something that was stable, because I was in a good situation in New York. I didn't want to jump ship, especially changing industries, if (I was going to be out of a job in a year). Blizzard seemed like a very stable company, so I got the interview and made the move.
Craddock: Blizzard has been relatively stable, more than most. I've noticed over the last 10 to 15 years that the games industry has taken on more of a Hollywood model of production: a studio will staff up for a game, and then everybody gets let go. They end up being nomads, moving from project to project.
Staats: Yeah. It's always been like that; you just didn't always hear about it. In the 1990s, games were smaller, so you didn't need a big staff. With greater technology, you need experts in every single (discipline), plus your budgets go up. It's crazy how expensive games are to make.
It's just a different employment model. A lot of people will work for a company, but they'll do it as a freelancer. Now some people are getting benefits as freelancers. What companies do to reduce overhead is, if you have 100 people, that's, say, two million dollars if everybody takes a month off and then their employer hires then back the next month. Freelancers can charge more money per hour; they usually make more per hour than employees. It usually evens out.
Craddock: Did you play Blizzard games before working there?
Staats: I was a big fan of WarCraft II, but I was also a big fan of all strategy games. The success of WarCraft II and StarCraft meant (strategy games) went real-time. I actually held a grudge against Blizzard because every game went real-time, and so many of them were just terrible.
But I'd never played Diablo. It was too simple, too unlike old-school RPGs (like Fallout). I kind of went to Blizzard hoping I'd be working on a WarCraft title because that was the one property of theirs I really, really liked. They wouldn't tell me what I might be working on while I was there (for my interview), but I knew it couldn't be a sports game or a shooter. (laughs) They would joke, "It's definitely not a racing game." I was able to narrow things down when I saw, for example, how small the team was. Once I signed the NDA and made the move, they told me.
Craddock: Were you familiar with MMOs?
Staats: It was all EverQuest back then. A friend, my roommate, brought home EverQuest. I quickly arrived at a crossroads: either play EverQuest all day, or make levels. I couldn't do both. (laughs) Level design is more time-consuming even than playing MMOs. I was doing 100-hour weeks. There was an eight-month period where I didn't have a job, and I was spending crazy hours making levels.
Craddock: What was your schedule like while you were learning? Were you teaching yourself? Collaborating with others?
Staats: I remember I started with Quake 1, one of the first true-3D games. I'd spent years making awful, awful maps. That continued through Quake 2. Most of my maps were just... There were so many mistakes that took so long to correct. If a dungeon was too small, too cramped, you didn't know until you'd built it. You couldn't just resize it; you had to throw it away and rebuild. That was your option. People didn't have patience for that, but I wanted to do this badly enough that I would redo my levels over and over and over again. It takes a lot of desire.
I had no idea I'd come out the other side with a portfolio. It was just something to do. I worked with other modders, and we'd check out each other's maps. I'm doing the same thing now with board games. Actually, this place was a hangout for a lot of board-game designers. (Points) That table was where we'd playtest each other's games. We'd critique each other's work.
For level design, there were also lots of tutorials. That's a sub-sub-sub culture of designers: people who do nothing but make tutorials for how to do things. They're doing that now on YouTube.
Craddock: Since you started out making 3D levels, it sounds like you had your eye on working on 3D games even though you liked WarCraft II, a 2D game.
Staats: Oh, yeah. I played around with 2D stuff with WarCraft II (map editor), but it was all drag-and-drop, super-simple stuff. You don't need an artistic eye for that, really. To some degree you do, but 3D level design means you need to be an artist first, and you have to like architecture, and you have to like roleplaying games enough that you'd spend crazy hours working to make a play-space immersive. It takes a lot of time.
Craddock: Especially at Blizzard. With their policy of "we release games when they're ready," you have to be prepared to spend lots of time refining and polish.
Staats: Very much, and if you aren't at the conjunction of all those disciplines, plus enthusiastic about gameplay, you're not going to be a good level designer. Some designers are artistic, but they're not good level designers. It's a hard position to fill. I think I was the only person who was a genuine level designer on the (World of WarCraft) team when I started there.
Blizzard calls them "environmental artists," now. They don't really have level designers in the first-person-shooter tradition of the discipline where they do everything, because they know everything. Right now (at Blizzard), the artists just do art. They don't do layout or gameplay.
Craddock: So you were the first level designer on WoW?
Staats: Yeah, because they were having trouble hiring people. Nobody who was any good (at level design) wanted to go to Blizzard because they had no reputation for 3D games. WarCraft III, at the time, was a joke. They'd scrapped the engine a number of times. Diablo II was all randomized, 2D tiles.
Level designers traditionally don't jump from job to job. Typically, if you leave them alone, they're happy. That was true with me. You don't have to pay them a lot. I was working for nothing. My opening salary was $50,000, which is really low for level design.
Craddock: And for living in Irvine, California.
Staats: Oh, yeah. They were making six figures in Texas on Star Wars: Galaxies. Working at Blizzard had an appeal, but you might have had to live in someone else's house because you couldn't afford the cost of living on your own. Their level designers were all the drag-and-drop guys (on 2D games). They weren't a super-specific specialist they needed; (management) didn't really know what to do with level designers when they hired us.
Craddock: How far along was World of WarCraft when you got to Blizzard? What did you start out doing, especially considering the role of level designer sounds like it was undefined?
Staats: My first day on the job, they showed me the game. It didn't look good. It was a guy in his underwear--there was no armor in the game--running around on AstroTurf. That was their first grass: gritty, green AstroTurf. There were really crude trees, nothing like Blizzard-quality stuff. But that was what they had in-game, and that was pretty much it.
I remember there was an ogre, and he said, "This is how combat works." The player runs up to the ogre, types something. No swinging of swords, no hit reactions, nothing. Someone told me, "Looting was working last week." There was nothing working at all. I was thinking, Okay... this is really weird.
That was my first exposure to an unfinished game. When I was making levels for Quake and Quake 2, I had the discs with all the finished artwork, all the textures, all that stuff. You could use scripting systems. Everything was done. When a game is being built, nothing is done. Everything is ugly. It was like, oh boy--this isn't fun.
We used the Quake 3 engine to build our first maps. They were little caves and goldmines built from Quake 3's geometry. We all had Quake 3 discs. We'd have the Quake guy with a rocket launcher in these early WoW maps, as if we were making deathmatch maps.
Craddock: And running around at, like, 90 miles per hour.
Staats: Yeah, and that's actually a very good point: Going that fast is no way to tell how big your map really is. It would be really hard to have an idea of how long it takes players to go from point A to B. We were modding Quake 3 just to check out our maps, but they didn't look anything like what World of WarCraft would become. Our maps were all hard shadows, really dark, hard edges on everything rather than the soft WarCraft looked.
We worked that way for six to nine months. Then we threw all that geometry out the wind. That was after working 80- to 100-hour weeks. We decided, "This isn't the right way to build. Let's throw it all away and start over." That's what game development is. Everyone's got that story, not just the WoW team.
Craddock: Was there any expectation at that time that you were working on assets that would make it into the final game? Or was everyone just experimenting?
Staats: We were just building in our own editors. You couldn't even see anything in-game. Programmers had code on their screens, but the game wasn't there. Everything was bare bones.
Craddock: What was the first area you worked on that, even though it likely underwent lots of iteration later, ended up making it into WoW?
Staats: It was a raid dungeon. That was the first thing I built that went into the game. It was terrible, inflexible geometry. I was learning a new editor and building everything wrong. The texture artists hated my textures because I didn't build them correctly, and I hated them because there weren't a lot of textures made for the game, so I couldn't make one area that different from another.
No one liked the game back then. Even the texture artists didn't like their textures, but they were still figuring out what worked. Eventually all those textures got scrapped. I think we hired somebody a couple of years later who repainted everything. The goldmine was probably the very first (area) that survived. The textures were mushy. It was just a different style from the final project. Everything evolved so much. It takes months to do a single dungeon.
Craddock: How long were you the first and only level designer on the project?
Staats: I'd say about a year. We hired a couple of people from the FPS community, but neither of them stayed on long, especially after we switched away from the BSP editor. That's what they were used to. They liked what they knew, and that's how people are.
Everybody left after the game shipped; I was the last one there. It was just burnout. The problem was it was a game that took so long to make, and it wasn't changing. Usually you ship a game, you're done, and you go to the next title. With WoW, it was rinse-and-repeat: updates, expansions. Just the same thing. Usually people jump ship to go to art director positions at a smaller company or something.
Craddock: I've talked to a lot of developers from Blizzard Entertainment and Blizzard North about that. When a Blizzard game comes out, it's a global event. Everybody knows your game, and that's a great feeling. At the same time, you're looking at peers in the industry who shipped four or five titles in the time it took you to release one.
Staats: That's true with MMOs. On a larger project, at the beginning, you come on board and you're not wearing as many hats. You're pigeon-holed: instead of working on a team, you're working for a department. You don't learn as much as you would by going to a team with cross-disciplines that need lots of people. Smaller teams are just easier to work on.
Everybody gravitates to that, every studio. Once you hit 30 to 40 employees, people break down into tribes and departments, just because it's easier to keep track of people that way. That's true of advertising, game development...
Craddock: Any industry.
Staats: Yeah, and any company. Just growing pains.
Craddock: As a level designer on the original World of WarCraft, did you shape your levels around a story or quest being told?
Staats: Usually, that came from a creative director. Sometimes you come up with your own idea, run it by a creative director, and he or she gives it a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Some are a lot easier to work with than others. Some are jealous of anybody who tries to add to their vision.
Luckily we had a great creative director. I've heard horror stories about people being standoff-ish and protection of ideas. Chris Metzen from Blizzard was the exact opposite. As long as your idea didn't conflict with something, he was always saying, "Yeah. Go. Rock and roll." He was not details-oriented. As long as your idea fit the general vibe of the game, he trusted people to just go.
Craddock: Those tend to be the best managers, right? People who hire employees and let them do what they're best at doing.
Staats: Oh, yeah, for sure. Every management job is different, but once Metzen knew somebody got it, he could just say, "Okay, this cave is filled with monsters. It's basically the Isle of Dread from Dungeons & Dragons. You got it? Good? Okay, I'm outta here." Literally, in a couple of minutes, that's what you'd get. Then you were free to come up with ideas around that.
That was one way of (leading). There are a million ways to do it, but I think companies who hire book authors are just doomed. It's a very different discipline. I even talk about this in my book. Lore, at least at Blizzard, is the first thing that changes. I've been reading up on George Lucas and Walt Disney, just studying up on their takes on narratives. I recommend the book Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler. It's a really long book, but it's an exhaustive account of Walt Disney. He's pretty much the first person in the entertainment industry who instituted a hyper-polished approach to content. Blizzard has that reputation in games.
Craddock: How do you define storytelling as a level designer? What's your role in that position?
Staats: Immersion is what people really enjoy about a game. That's what they mean when they say "storytelling." People say Half-Life has the best story, but if you look at the narrative, it's as bare-bones and corny as any other shooter. But when you look at artificial intelligence, level design, scripting--those work together to immerse the player so they can project themselves in the game.
Storytelling in games is a Borg weapon. It has to be simple because you're getting chat messages, combat messages, you're focused on the UI, their health, the combat, traveling. You can't have a subtle story with all that going on. It's just not going to combat. Players would rather stay alive than really appreciate the subtle things you can do. In a book, you can do that, because there's only the book. Same with a movie.
When you bring a storyteller from books or movies into a game, they're surgeons. They're these fine artists who will come up with a fine idea, but the programmers will say, "We can't do that." That author could have spent 16, 32 hours, who knows, on that idea, and it's shot down in a second. That's what game development is. Story isn't the lowest common denominator, but you have the determine the bandwidth you have to tell a story.
Somebody made a dragon at the end of World of WarCraft. I think he spent four weeks making this dragon, and usually you're spending maybe five days on something like that. So, okay, our first raid boss is a dragon. That's the story. It's not some grand arc. I've heard of some studios where art directors rule that way, and they end up getting not as much bang for their buck. They have tons of people working to pull off this one story element, and okay, it's great, but that comes and goes. Then you've got the other 98 percent of the game to make.
You have to get a lot of bang for your buck. That's why story is the first thing to change. In this book about Star Wars, I learned there wasn't originally a Princess Leia. Someone pointed out, "George you need female characters." Luke Starkiller was going to rescue a male friend, so Lucas changed that friend into a princess. Classic fairy tale stuff. This was going to take place on Cloud City; they wouldn't be going to the Death Star. It was only when a Fox executive said, "No. We're not making a Cloud City. Use the sets you have." Lucas said, "Well, I suppose that's better. We have some sets for the Death Star." Lo and behold, they came up with the Death Star.
That's how stories are told in collaborative mediums. A lot of people don't realize that.
Craddock: That's so true. I've had some novels published, and I've also written for games. As an author, I'm hidden away in my writer's cave with an endless budget—
Staats: (laughs) Yeah, yeah.
Craddock: —because I'm like, "I can write whatever." But when I worked at a game studio, I remember going to one of the directors and saying, "You know, the way NPCs give dialogue, it's just one line in the dialogue box at a time. You have to keep clicking an arrow to get the next line. It's so tedious. Could I just get a single dialogue box?" Engineering came back a few days later and said, We don't have the budget for a scroll bar." I was like, "... oh." That was a huge lesson for me: In collaborative storytelling efforts, you have to consider every discipline and all resources, not just your own.
Staats: Yeah, so you get it, right?
Craddock: Yeah.
Staats: But a lot of people who want to get into games aren't programmers or artists, so they say, "Well, I could just write the story." The value of a storyteller in most games is, I'm sorry to say...
Craddock: They'll write on their resume, "I am skilled in Microsoft Word."
Staats: (laughs) Exactly. It's a tough position because you have a lot of studio heads who want to be the storyteller also. It's just a really hard gig to get, and you're only relevant for the last five percent of the project, especially if you're writing your own engine. If you licensed an engine, then okay, you can ramp up. Usually, the story is whatever elements get created. I've seen studios that work the opposite way. Bigger companies that work on console games have console budgets, which are 10 times what computer budgets are.
Craddock: You'll also see games that play more like interactive novels or movies, and gameplay is a certain type of interaction, usually making decisions that move the plot and character arcs to the next beat. I believe with Telltale's The Walking Dead, they had a story more or less hammered out first.
Staats: Yeah. Doing anything licensed is very hard because you're starting with a much smaller budget, and you have to spend a lot of that budget on securing the license. That also means you're more constrained in terms of user interface, frame rate, all those limitations are a lot harsher. You also usually have to get decisions approved by whoever your licensor may be.
Craddock: You mentioned immersion as key to telling stories as a level designer. What are some details you add to levels to do that?
Staats: Sometimes you can't. Sometimes you don't have the art assets. If you can show an abandoned caravan, great. If you're trying to establish a setting, you hope you have the art assets to do that. You can make it somewhat on your own if you have the skills to also make art assets.
Level design is kind of weird because there are all kinds of level designers. There are scripters, who are the storytellers. They place entities in the map that walk, talk, and so on. I'm more of the architect: I'm dealing with architecture and solid stuff. Dealing with, say, scripted monsters throughout a level is a completely different set of skills. They're not artists; they're more on the engineering side whereas I'm more on the art side.
Those guys, when they see a room that I've made, they'll look at the elements. If I built an altar--usually because I was trying to think of something to put in the room--they'll say, "Oh, the altar's part of the story. What can I do with that? Well, there are alcoves nearby. Maybe there's a relationship between the alcoves and the altar." That's where a lot of stuff happens. Sometimes you'll have somebody make a blueprint and hand it off to the environmental art team. One guy may work in Adobe Illustrator making blueprints for the art team to implement.
All stories are so different. Some just tell themselves. Others are revealed and happen in a specific room. Some dungeons I made didn't have much of a story. You're saying, "All right, let's just do a cave and we'll put a boss monster at the end." It's more or less finding the milieu for the story and jamming out ideas that fit that style. I did tombs for World of WarCraft, all the crypts and stuff like that--anything for the Undead. They said, "Oh, if you add a few more rooms, we can make that into an instanced dungeon." That became Scholomance. I had no idea they were telling any story at all. Sometimes they look at the things I'm creating and say, "We could tell a story in this spot."
So, you can start with a story, or end with a story, or retrofit one. I think a bit of both is the right way to do it. Whether your setting is the Wild West or a pirate cove, as long as you have an identifiable genre, you can come up with a lot of ideas for it. If someone says, "We've got a bunch of black panthers with tentacles that also vibrates so it's hard to see. Try making a dungeon for that." It's weird because you don't really know what you're doing. Should it be a cave?
Probably the Undead is the easiest (theme) to create for. People respond to skeletons, spiderwebs. We all have very real-world reactions to those things. We don't often see pirates. We're not that familiar with the Wild West. But we know what a coffin is, and why it's scary.
Craddock: Did you just gravitate toward creating environments for the Undead race?
Staats: We volunteered. We had so many dungeons to build. The producers would say, "Who wants to build this?" and one of us would say, "Yeah, I could make something like that." Take the Undercity, the Undead city. That was the one area in the game that made me quake in my boots. I didn't want to build it because I had no vision for that whatsoever. I had no idea how to build, for example, a sewer system for an underground city.
That was one instance where the dungeon designers took over the idea and changed it from Chris Metzen's idea. They were so passionate about their vision, and they came up with an area that was so Gothic and beautiful, and I'm so glad they did that.
Everything else I made for the game was something I wanted to build. To be honest, I wanted to build everything. That's why I built half the dungeons. I volunteered for everything. I just had a whole bunch of ideas for this stuff, plus I had a history with Dungeons & Dragons.
Craddock: What are some aspects of level design that players may not notice or be able to put into words, but that you, as someone from that field, know are super-important to any area?
Staats: Immersion is the one thing I really care about. Some people will say art style as a way to put their personal stamp on something. I like interesting layouts, and being able to reuse rooms. If two big rooms are next to each other, I like to break the wall between them. If you give players a window that looks into another room, you're providing them with a different viewing angle that excites the eye.
You're trying to excite the eye as much as possible. Often you want something in the foreground, mid-ground, and background. What you get is a parallax effect. Players can tell they're moving forward if there's a parallax effect. By walking, they feel like they're making progress. If they're in a long hallway and there's nothing good to look at, it's not as fun. Even though you're just walking in both situations, walking through one area feels more rewarding than another because you're giving people a sense of moving forward.
I also like making rooms that haven't been seen before. There's one room in Blackrock Depths where I made the ceiling and floor, but I got rid of the walls and made a lavascape: river in the background, a bridge far-off. There's a lot to look at, and it's claustrophobic, but beyond all that is this huge scene. It's a refreshing change from the hallway-room-hallway layout of a dwarven city. Having varied geometry is important.
Craddock: We've talked about the hours you worked. I've spoken with developers who didn't mind crunch when they were younger. They didn't have families and were happy to spend all their time at a job they loved. When did you start feeling burnout? Or did you?
Staats: I was used to it. When I started, I was 30. I'd spent 10 years in New York's advertising industry. People would stay at work even when there wasn't work to do. They were the second or third generation of account executives. That's how their parents worked, so that was just what you did. If somebody else was working, you'd hang out at work and keep them company in case they needed you.
Southern California had a totally different culture. I worked longer hours because I wanted to. Other people worked 40-hour weeks. There was one guy who was from Painesville, Ohio. He said, "I want to clock in and clock out. I don't care what game we're making as long as they pay me." That was fine. He was a great texture artist, and that's what he wanted to do.
Craddock: I know a medical condition forced you to leave the industry. In fact, I believe you have trouble even playing games for prolonged periods. What is that condition, and how did you get it?
Staats: Man, it's undiagnosed. Let's say I'm modeling a palace. I'm creating a wireframe, and I'm working on one corner of the palace. The screen is flat, so when you're looking at corners, I can't tell the difference if it's a far corner or a close corner until I skew the distance; then I can see the parallax of vertices moving quickly or slowly. When you're 3D-modeling, you're constantly (skewing perspective) just to make sure you're manipulating the correct vertices instead of something else.
You're also using hotkeys a lot. Both of your hands are constantly clicking and tapping. It's way more intensive than just typing. When you're typing, you pause and think. With modeling, I was doing that all day long. When I write, I can work maybe four to six hours before I'm burnt out. I started out using Dragon Voice to Text. It's really good, way better than dictating to your phone, and Microsoft's (Word) voice to text. That's what I used for my first pass on my book.
For editing, I can type, but I've got maybe two to four hours a day in me before I want to take a break. Level design is 12 hours, 14 hours, 16 hours. It requires a long day to get anything done at all. And I don't play games. I'd rather use energy to answer an email than play games. It's an either-or scenario.
I've had experimental drugs, everything for arthritis, but I don't have symptoms of that: my hands aren't puffy. Right now, as we're talking, I haven't used my computer today. I've tried tablets, and I'll notice that the tips of my fingers, if I'm texting a lot, start aching. Both hands are affected. Nobody knows what it is.
Craddock: I understand you started writing your book at Blizzard. What compelled you to start documenting the process of making World of WarCraft?
Staats: Things were such a mess. No one had answers for anything. BSPs weren't working. They told me 3D Studio Max wasn't going to work, although that turned out to be a good tool. Until programmers can spend four months testing something and then say, "Yeah, this will work," we had no answers.
I was amazed that one of the top game companies in the world was figuring out everything. WoW was crashing and burning. WarCraft III was crashing and burning. Everything was such a mess. It was also my introduction to game development, and I said, "This is fascinating. I want to tell this story from a man on the street's perspective on what it's like to work in this industry." The book isn't technical. I'm not a programmer. I wanted to dumb it down for anybody to understand what it's like to work at Blizzard, and what it was like to make World of WarCraft.
I took notes every month. I'd go into my email program and see all the messages about things that had happened: We were right about this, wrong about that. I also worked on Saturdays just because I didn't like Southern California, so that's how I spent my weekends. I could get a lot of work done. One Saturday a month, I'd take notes. I also interviewed people to educate myself, and I'd tell them what I was working on. I talked to the CEO, the founders.
They were cool with it. At the time, Blizzard was only around 200 people. They weren't too worried about employees going off the rails and saying things. I wanted to publish after the game was done, rather than when the game launched. Blizzard has this credo of nobody taking credit for everything, so everybody can take credit. That's one reason I waited so long: the bodies are dead and buried. It's a totally different team, so nobody cares who was the art director, who came up with transparent water. I don't want to be the person doling out credit. I think the book is pretty accurate, but I didn't want to be the person who got things wrong. It's such a collaborative process.
Craddock: How'd you choose to use Kickstarter?
Staats: I definitely wanted to publish on my own because I wanted control over it. I wanted to have credibility. I didn't want this to be a PR piece. I designed the book to look like a textbook. It's not colorful. It doesn't even look like it has anything to do with computer games. Even though I'm sure this cost me a whole lot of sales, I wanted the credibility of, "This isn't Blizzard writing its autobiography focused only on the sunny side." There's a lot about the squabbles, the debates. I wanted to humanize the story.
I wrote the whole thing and took it to Blizzard. Their chief of staff was my old roommate, and I'd played poker with Mike Morhaime and all those guys, so they gave me a sweetheart licensing deal. But it took them nine months to get two pages of an agreement written. But they need time to get everyone on board. They have to make sure I'm not saying anything that would damage the company. They didn't change anything except for one quote, because they couldn't verify whether the person had said that. So I said, "I'll just stick it in prose and make it look like I said it."
The first Kickstarter failed miserably. I thought I could just say, "Hey! Blizzard guy over here!" I think I got 300 backers. I changed the scope of the Kickstarter, and I knew nothing about it before that. I hadn't even bought anything off Kickstarter. I sat down with Gerald King, who's a consultant for Kickstarter campaigns. One of the things he told me was, "You need to get (coverage lined up with) websites early, six months ahead of time at a minimum."
Running a Kickstarter is as much work as writing a book, if not twice as much more, but you do have control over things. I did the video, the PR, everything. My next project is a board game, and I'm going to do everything myself again.
⁂
[ John Romero, Co-Creator of Doom and Quake ]
Working at id Software in the 1990s was like working inside a bunker, only with more pizza, soda, and video games. The studio started small and remained small through development of Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, and Doom. After Doom's release in December 1993, John Romero turned his attention to scouting for opportunities to collaborate on external projects related to id's games, namely strategy guides and ports.
Romero set aside time to talk with me about multiple ports of Doom, as well as a wild three-week period spent converting Wolfenstein 3D to the Super Nintendo. We also found time to talk about Doom's brand of narrative design and how speedrunning has become a meta form of storytelling in games.
David L. Craddock: The interesting thing about Doom ports, for me, is that they were faithful to the original game. The versions on SNES, Jaguar, and 32X were missing bits and pieces here and there, but they were still Doom. Then came the PSX port. It's my favorite port. It's missing some geometry and levels, but it adds so much: new levels, new lighting, new audio. What was id's level of involvement with this port relative to the others, and why was it such a different type of port—still Doom, but more its own thing?
John Romero: Midway had been around for decades. We respected Midway. Other companies that worked on Doom ports, we didn't know them that well. But Midway was known as a quality company back then. Jay Wilbur and I drove down highway 45 on the way to Houston. They had an office probably halfway to Houston, two hours down highway 45. (Video game producer and director) Michael Gottlieb was there. That was the first time I met Michael. We met so we could talk about Midway working on ports of Doom.
We decided that because we trusted Midway, we wanted them to do their own thing. That's why they had the freedom to add colored lighting, add a whole new soundtrack—just do what they could do with Doom to make the PlayStation version more special than the other versions, which were straight ports from the PC. Even the Jaguar version, which we did (in-house), we didn't do anything special with it. We just wanted to make sure it ran as fast as the Jaguar's chip could allow.
For PlayStation, we decided to give Midway creative license. They did a really great job on the audio and level design. We were very happy with it.
Craddock: That set the stage for Doom 64, then? Because that was another instance of a game with "64" appended to the title, but instead of a port—like Quake 64 and Duke Nukem 64, for instance—it was a completely different game.
Romero: Yeah. With Doom 64, because the PlayStation port was a great job, we decided to let them really go all out with Doom 64. They could do what they wanted: make it a different story, not even on the same narrative path. That's what they did. They wrote a whole new engine, completely new levels, higher-res graphics for characters.
To make sure it was a fast game on the N64, Aaron Seller, the lead programmer, came down to Texas. We got him an office on our floor. That way he could ask (John) Carmack questions anytime he got stuck. It was almost an embedded port job. Aaron was a super-nice guy and very dedicated, just so focused to make it really good. He was like us: a great programmer who worked really hard. We liked seeing that Midway had programmers like him.
Craddock: How important were ports to id? You've told me in the past that you were pushing to do more work with external studios so that id would continue to grow.
Romero: For sure. It was ports, hint books, and making sure they were high-quality. I think Cybex came out with one of the first (guides for an id game), and it had these black-and-white pictures. I thought, No way am I ever doing this again. I asked Jay, "Could you get in touch with Prima? They're high-quality." Prima did the Hexen hint book first, and they did an amazing job.
The cool thing was Prima Publishing was located in Rocklin, California, where I grew up. When I went home to visit my parents, I went over to the Prima office and hung out with them for a while.
But the ports of Doom were... (laughs) There were a bunch of them. Even Sega, when they were doing the 32X version, it was iffy. The 32X didn't have a very powerful co-processor. (Author's note: Sega's 32X add-on for the Genesis commandeered the Genesis as a co-processor.) Sega sent an engineer over with a motherboard that was the prototype of the 32X. He laid it out on our pool table, hooked up a monitor to it, and we got to look at the code. Carmack got as much information out of him as he could give about the processor, and then gave the engineer suggestions to make the blitter (circuit or coprocessor that moves and processes data quickly) go a little faster.
That's how Sega got the 32X version running. It didn't have a very large (on-screen) view. It was very under-powered.
Craddock: I was even more surprised Doom existed on the Super Nintendo. I found that version in a bargain bin at my local K*B Toys for, like, 20 bucks. I remember it came in a red cartridge. I also remember it wasn't very good, simply because the SNES was so old by that point.
Romero: We didn't even think to do a Super Nintendo version of Doom. That hardware was absolutely not made for 3D. It was kind of like the Amiga: the Amiga was doomed to not play 3D games back then. Super Nintendo was good for horizontal scrolling, parallax effect, all that stuff, but Mode 7 was as crazy as it got.
So we were really surprised when a Doom cartridge for Super Nintendo showed up at the office. We were like, "What?" We plugged it in and ran it, and were like, "Oh my god. Doom is on the Super Nintendo." Sculptured Software in Salt Lake City had decided they were going to port Doom. They reverse-engineered it and sent it to us, and we said, "Um. Okay. We'll get this published." That was probably one of the rare times when a company decided to do a port and then just did it for free.
We were really surprised. We didn't think the Super Nintendo could do it, but incredibly, that was so many people's first exposure to Doom. When that cartridge arrived in our office, my dad lived in Salt Lake City. I'd lived there for a little bit. The next time I went to see my dad, I went to Sculptured Software's office to say hi and compliment them on their work.
So, I went, but I didn't tell anyone (from the company) I was coming. I just showed up. The woman at the desk thought I was there for a job interview. (laughs) I met the Mortal Kombat team there. Sculptured was one of the best Super Nintendo developers around, and they'd gone over what they needed to do for Mortal Kombat.
I was walking down a hallway with some of those guys, and I noticed this door. There were generally two people per room back then, and on this door, I saw the name Peter Ward. Being an Apple II nut, I knew Peter Ward had made one of the coolest Apple II games, called Black Magic. I knocked on the door. This guy opened it. I said, "Are you Peter Ward?" He said, "No. Peter's sick today."
I said, "Oh my god! Well, can you tell him John Romero came by and said Black Magic was incredible?" The guy said, "No. Way. You played Black Magic, too?" I said, "Yeah, and South Pacific Quest. He (Peter) won't believe I played that, and it was really fun." It was one of Peter's first games. I said, "Peter is badass."
I never heard from Peter. He stayed in Salt Lake City and worked for a few companies there.
Craddock: Peter wasn't able to come to any of your Apple II parties?
Romero: Nope. I never heard from him. We did hold another Apple II party before we moved to Ireland. There were a couple of people who were kind of obscure who I got to meet. There was one guy, Hunter Hancock, who wrote one game in his entire life; it was called Cyclod, published through Sirius Software. (Author's note: Cyclod was Hancock's only original game, but he also converted Sneakers, a Space Invaders clone, to the Atari 800.)
I also met Stuart Smith, the guy who wrote Ali Baba and Adventure Construction Set.
Craddock: At what point did Sandy Petersen jump on board to re-engineer Doom's levels for the SNES port?
Romero: I don't quite remember. When (the port showed up in the office), it hadn't been published yet, so there was still time to modify stuff. Sandy was the right person to do it.
It was funny: We (didn't do many ports in-house), but we did do Wolfenstein 3D for Super Nintendo. That was a time-crunch job. Have I told you about that one?
Craddock: No.
Romero: Oh my god.
Craddock: (laughs)
Romero: When Wolfenstein 3D came out, that was the first time we'd seen one of our games blow up like that. Around the same time, Imagineer, this Japanese company, calls and talks to Jay. They want to publish it on Super Nintendo, and they would give us $100,000 down to start. It was like, "What?! This is amazing!" Now, Wolfenstein 3D made something like a quarter of a million the month it came out. With no advertising. Everything was just insane, and another $100,900 sounded cool.
We knew that we ourselves would not be doing the port, because we were busy making Spear of Destiny. Also, we were working with Atari to do a signature character for them, the way Mario and Sonic were Nintendo's and Sega's signature character. We created this character called Pounce. We were also working on porting Wolfenstein 3D to Lynx. I think I still have some of the graphics for that.
So we didn't have bandwidth to do this Atari character, and the Super Nintendo (port of Wolfenstein), and Spear of Destiny. There were only four or five of us back then, plus Jay and Kevin (Cloud). So we contacted a programmer we knew, who had been around forever in the industry. He was as technical as it got. He'd programmed the Super Nintendo, the Mac, the Apple II—everything. We contacted him and he was super-excited about the SNES port. We gave him all the assets, and continued working on our own thing.
We kind of forget about it. Then, it was March of '93 or so. Seven or eight months had passed. Imagineer came back to Jay and said, "Is the Wolfenstein 3D port done yet?" Jay said, "Oh. Shit." He ran to us and said, "Guys, what's the story with the port?" We said, "Oh. Fuck."
Craddock: (laughs)
Romero: We tried to get in touch with the port guy, and for a while we couldn't. Then one day his wife answered the phone and said, "He's sick," and all kinds of bullshit excuses. We hung up and said, "We have to do the Super Nintendo port as fast as possible, because this guy can't or won't do it." Now, we were busy making Doom at that point. We stopped all work on Doom and had to learn how to program a Super Nintendo. Learn about the graphics: what format they're in, the layout of the screen, all that shit.
To convert the whole game over, we couldn't have dogs (due to Nintendo's family-friendly) policies. We made them rats. We did all this shit, and it took us three weeks. We were on turbo speed. We needed to get back to Doom, so we had to port Wolfenstein as soon as possible. It took three weeks in crunch mode to get it done. That was the first time we'd had to do that kind of crazy bullshit.
We went home to sleep, but came back in. Those were 16-hour days. We had to get back to Doom, so we worked really fast. Adrian (Carmack) had a process where he could take the game's VGA art and convert it pretty quickly. He didn't have to do too much special stuff other than resizing, and making sure the overall feel of textures was similar to the PC version. John had to create the engine. I think he may have done it in C, which then got compiled into assembly language. The renderer was written in 65816 assembly language; that controlled the hardware. That's when he figured out how to do the blitter quickly with a piece of hardware that was not made to do that, so he could help the Sega guy (with the 32X port of Doom).
Craddock: As a kid, I didn't have a Jaguar, but I remember the marketing hype. Atari promoted it as the first 64-bit console. What did you think of the hardware?
Romero: Yeah. The next (port) was the Jaguar version of Doom. It was probably another three weeks to a month of work, something like that. It wasn't a big crunch. Shawn Green came into my office and stayed there so he could code as well. Carmack was doing the renderer; Shawn and I were doing everything else. That was kind of fun.
The Jaguar was not 64-bit. I think the address bus was, but we had no control over that. It was like, "Nice try, Atari." It was really 32-bit.
Craddock: That's on par with Sega's "blast processing" marketing, although that did exist, just not exactly in the way they advertised.
Romero: (laughs) I know. We tried our best. It was not a bad version, but the PC blew everything away back then. I don't remember that port being too tough. I think Jaguar's resolution supported Doom in its native 320x200. If that worked, that meant everything else would be a lot easier.
Craddock: These experiences sound like game development in a nutshell: Every day you face new problems, and you need a solution for all of them yesterday.
Romero: Yeah. It was an Apollo 11 situation, basically. Except we weren't going to die. (laughs)
David L. Craddock: This feature covers the many types of narratives than can exist in games, from traditional stories you take part in to models of non-authorial storytelling. An increasingly popular one of those is the speedrun, and one of the first games I recall that took a huge step in formalizing the idea of beating a game as fast as possible was Wolfenstein 3D. You'd finish a level and see a par time. Wolf3D cracked open that door, but Doom kicked it off its hinges thanks to technology, introduced just a year after Wolf3D, that let players record gameplay and upload it. How did all of that, the idea of par times and letting other players record their records, get started?
John Romero: In the '80s, nobody wanted to speedrun. Everybody needed to play as long as they could on one quarter. It was all about, can you beat this game on a quarter? Can you break Pac-Man or Donkey Kong by getting to the game? (Records were) all about the longest time spent in games; nobody focused on getting through fast until computers and the fact that you could record gameplay and play it back.
There's a website called Doom Honorific Titles. It opened in May 1994, and it's the Twin Galaxies of Doom speedrun titles. These are demos you can play back (in-game), made by people who played Doom with certain designations in mind, such as a pacifist run where you only use fists or something; and a Tyson run, which may also include the pistol. There are Schwarzenegger titles, epic titles--all these titles. The rules say exactly what you need to do to get that title, and you have to submit your demos. All demos are checked to make sure they weren't made with machine assistance (author's note: programs that optimize gameplay as players play), and they'll give you a title on the site. That's how speedrunning stuff started in 1994.
Craddock: You're the one who set all the par times, right?
Romero: Yeah, yeah. That was all my idea. This started with Wolfenstein 3D, and the game was so fast--it ran at 70 frames per second, because VGA monitors synced at 70 frames instead of 60 like most monitors today--and we wrote the game with super-fast assembly code. The program's mouse sensitivity was so high that I could strafe with the mouse at this insane speed. Doom couldn't touch it; it was crazy.
Doing this, I could get through all the levels of the first episode within five minutes. That's in the hint book, at fast: My time to get through is something like five minutes and four seconds, something like that. I can't remember exactly, but it was really fast. With a mouse plus a game running at 70 frames per second, I wanted to see how fast I could get through this stuff. When I started finishing it pretty quickly, I thought, I'd better add par times. The par times in Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake are not the length of time it takes me to get through as fast as possible; that's a really shitty time rounded up to 30 seconds. The closest 30-second increment is what I could do.
Craddock: Let's deviate for a second. id had this reputation for breaking boundaries in the early days of computing technology. When everyone said smooth-scrolling graphics couldn't be done on a PC, John Carmack did it. Was getting Wolf3D to run at 70 frames per second another hurdle, or was it relatively simpler?
Romero: Ray casting was really fast. There are only 320 operations maximum to render a full screen back then, because VGA mode was 320x200. To do each vertical column required one ray cast to see which pixel it hit on a wall, and then render that part of the texture. If you shrink your screen (viewing area) down, that's far fewer ray casts for that 90-degree field of view. If you have your screen really small, you're only drawing 10 pixels or something; every nine degrees, you're getting a pixel, and you're only scanning it 10 times, so it's super, super fast.
We made it that fast with assembly language, using what we called a vertical span blitter. We took a column and made sure it was zoomed in. If you're near a wall, it's a hugely magnified texture versus a wall off in the distance. That's less texturing that you have to draw: the faraway walls are faster to render because you're not rendering as many pixels vertically. The walls you're close against eat up more time. The span blitter handled a pixel column for every column you were trying to render. Normally, full-screen was 320x200, so it was only looking 320 times. It's super-fast because it's all 80x86, optimized assembly in VGA mode.
The reason Doom didn't run at 70 fps was because there was so much AI going on in the background, and it took more time to render every pixel than Wolf3D did. Wolfenstein didn't have lighting in it. Everything was always at the same brightness, so it rendered as fast as you could render things. Doom had more operations. There's a light value we have to index into. In assembly, there are more instructions for pixels. We still did a vertical span blitter in Doom, and it was optimized for not tilting left and right; the walls were straight and vertical. Just to make sure the game didn't have any dips in (performance), to stay at a nice, even speed with all the extra AI going on, we limited Doom to 35 frames per second.
Back then, the CPU drew pixels. GPUs didn't exist. Everything you had was trying to put pixels on the screen.
Craddock: One of the stories I told myself as I played Wolf3D was trying to creep around and stab guards in the back, just trying to be stealthy as much as I could. Was that an homage to Castle Wolfenstein?
Romero: Yeah, and it was really hard to come up behind somebody like that, so (one-hit kills were) a reward.
Craddock: id's shooters tells stories through level design: lighting, environment, flow, positioning of enemies and items. What was your process for designing levels in Wolfenstein 3D to tell these stories, since that was a game where you were all still kind of cutting your teeth?
Romero: Building maps was the most boring part of making that game. Tom Hall and I were both like, "Oh my god, this is the most braindead shit ever." It was easy to make maps. The only interesting part of making maps was setting up sound areas, and putting secret areas in with pushwalls.
It was easy. We'd draw a bunch of rooms, figure out the pathing, make more rooms, put some secrets in every once in a while, put some keys in, place Nazis and dogs, and then fill in sound zones. For that, we used colored background tiles. If we filled a room with yellow and the hallway outside was blue, if I shoot a gun out in the hallway--I'm on blue--everyone in the room, in the yellow sound zone, can't hear me. If I open a door, the hallway's blue floods the room and changes yellow to blue. Now we're all in the same sound zone.
In Wolfenstein, you could go up to a door, open it, and run backwards down the hall while shooting. Everyone in the room would hear you because the sound zones were connected.
Craddock: Yeah, all the hallways were orthogonal, and levels couldn't have multiple floors. What were some of the ways you and Tom flexed your creative muscles to make maps as interesting as possible?
Romero: It was funny. Tom would imagine what a place would look like, and try to make it look that way. In Hovertank 3-D, he would drop green squares. They were huge walls, but to him, it (represented) a hedge. He's imagining a park, and there were hedges, even though there were no textures. When we got to Wolfenstein 3D, we were just trying to bash out levels as fast as we could.
It's easy to draw a level, but making sure it plays well takes time. You have to start it, pick stuff up, make sure where the map falls in the sequence of maps has the right difficulty, that the placement is good so there's no unfair stuff like enemies that just mow you down. If you get mowed down on a later level, such as map 7 or 8, you want to make sure you hide a powerful weapon near the beginning of the level, maybe in the first room behind a hidden wall. We had secrets to place, and we had to constantly test to make sure levels played well.
We wanted to make surprises for players. Maybe you're in a blue hallways and the next room over is yellow, but somewhere far away we put yellow on the floor of a little closet with a Nazi in it. As soon as you open the door to a connecting yellow room, that monster gets activated and starts coming for you. Things like that make a map more interesting and fun, because players can hear doors opening at a distance and realize an enemy is looking for them. That was the Wolfenstein 3D version of hearing monsters (snorting and growling) as they hunted for you.
It was all about suspense. I was just talking to someone about the importance of audio in Doom. We had to make sure the audio was super-suspenseful, so you were terrified hearing monsters move around. Monsters make different sounds: the Pinky's sound, the Imp's sound. You hear these things and don't know when or where they're going to pop out, but you know it's around a corner somewhere.
Craddock: That's a great point. I've told you how much I love the PlayStation port of Doom, but they had to cut down on sound effects. One result of that was monsters all made the same one or two sounds. That made it harder for me, as someone who had played countless hours of Doom on PC, to know what was coming. That's part of a level's story: Being able to hear a monster and know exactly what it is so you can prepare to fight it.
Romero: Yeah. That was a great version of Doom in all other areas.
Craddock: I prefer Doom over Doom 2 even though they're both great, because I feel Doom has better pacing and a better mix of horror and action. Midway leaned into that by composing its own sound track and sound effects for the PlayStation port. I'd never thought about how much the atmosphere of a game, and my approach to playing it, could be altered by changing audio.
Romero: Yeah, I liked it. We really trusted Midway when they worked on ports. Doom 64 was an excellent example of totally trusting Midway to make something new with Doom. Every other version of Doom were ports: Sega 32X, Super Nintendo, even the Jaguar version, which we programmed ourselves; it was as faithful a reproduction as possible. Doom on PlayStation had new music and sounds, extra levels. It was very cool.
With Doom 64, Aaron Seeler was this great programmer who made sure he got as much information from Carmack as possible by having an office right outside his door. It was such a different version of Doom, but it was really well done.
Craddock: It was its own beast. What I loved about Doom 64 was, after playing Doom, Doom 2, and Final Doom, I wanted something different, and Doom 64, although it had action, was heavier on exploration and simple puzzles.
Romero: I really liked it. We knew we could trust Midway.
Craddock: I was replaying Wolfenstein 3D, and one thing that stuck out to me was how the starting room of a level sets the tone for that level. In E1M1, you're in a cell. You go into the corridor, and there's one guard around the corridor. Next corridor: one guard. After that you come to a larger room and there are two guards. There's an escalation to tension. The secret level of episode one is this giant maze with colored walls, and you have to explore for a little while before you find an enemy. How important did you consider starting rooms when you were building a level?
Romero: Hugely important. Before Doom--I'd say starting in Wolfenstein--I wasn't thinking much about how visually great a level's first room was; we were really limited in what we could show. We had no lighting. It was barebones. We just tried to make maps fun.
With Doom, that's where design thoughts started happening. I thought, I want a level to look really cool at the start so they can take a minute to just look and wonder what's out there. I wanted to make sure when a level started, there was something interesting about (that location). That's what I did with all my levels with Doom, and with Sigil (Romero's fifth episode released in 2019) as well.
Craddock: Doom's first visual, the first room of E1M1, kind of follows the story from the manual. That story is simple: you're a lone marine assigned to guard a door, you hear your peers fighting and dying, then silence. You open the door, and that's where the game begins, and the first thing you see is the corpse of a marine. What did you want that room, and the placement of that corpse, to convey to players as the very first sight they'd see in Doom?
Romero: I didn't want it to be a massive bloodbath right away, because otherwise you should have been involved. I wanted you to think, That guy just got killed, and then I guess the demon took off. Maybe it was a shotgun zombie who went off to the left, or an Imp killed the marine and went a few rooms deeper. You think, Oh, wow, some shit happened. I'd better watch out. I want you to explore, but also know bad things can happen to you.
If you're playing on Hurt Me Plenty or any easier difficulty, you won't get attacked in that first room or the one to the left, where you go up the stairs to get green armor. That's because I want you to explore, get used to the controls, get used to going up and down stairs, check out the lighting, look outside and see lighting--all this stuff you can do before you get to the first door. You still know someone was killed, so you have to watch out.
In fact, if you look through the far window, the Imps (on the ledge) will throw fireballs at you from across the level.
Craddock: I liken the marine corpses to bread crumbs. You see one or two in every level, and I think, Wow, this guy, my fellow marine, made it this far. That makes me feel like even more of a badass because I'm still alive and still pushing through.
Romero: Exactly!
Craddock: I love that you can open a wall to enter that courtyard with the blue armor, too. You look out the window, see that courtyard, think, How do I get in there?, and if you explore, you'll find a way in.
Romero: Yep. We added that in version 1.9, the switch that opens that wall. If you played an earlier version, you couldn't go outside until you made it to the zig-zag floor room (bordered by slime).
Craddock: What prompted you to add that switch in such a late update?
Romero: It was for deathmatch. The rocket launcher and blue armor are out there, and it opened the far wall (leading into the zig-zag room) too. If I'd have thought about it more, I could've made that switch accessible only in deathmatch, but I didn't think about how I could have done it.
Craddock: I read in Masters of Doom that Carmack was initially opposed to adding secrets in Wolfenstein 3D, but I wasn't clear on why he put his foot down.
Romero: It had to have been both Tom and me together. I don't think either of us said, "We need pushwalls." We didn't even have that word available. Coming off of Commander Keen maybe two weeks earlier, after making seven Keen games and hiding a ton of secrets everywhere--they were elaborate and fun to find; making levels for Keen was so much fun--we started Wolfenstein and thought, Well, (secrets) are gone. That was the fun part. We were moving around killing stuff, but thinking, Where's the rest of the gameplay? Picking up score items isn't fulfilling. That's not even an objective. If we'd had objectives like "Find the golden cross," that would have been cool. I'd have found the gameplay more fulfilling, but it would have also led me to say, "Well, could we hide them somewhere?"
Tom and I said, "We need hidden areas for 1UPs, treasure for points, and guns. You could get the machine gun earlier than normal because we hid it on the first level. We wanted to hide things to make the game more fun. We told John, and he said, "I don't want to do that." We said, "Why not?" He said, "Because that violates the purity of the engine." Wolfenstein's engine was really clean, the way it worked. It was simple and elegant, and he didn't like putting pushwalls in because it was a hack to the engine; it wasn't made to do that. We said, "We have to have this." He said, "No."
It was probably a month and a half, and we kept on bugging him. He finally did it. Do you know how long it took us to make Wolfenstein's shareware? Four months. Just the shareware episode, so 10 levels. That was the whole package: the "Read This" in the menu with all the instructions, the visual layout (of menus) with text and graphics, all the enemies you see--which are only a couple--and then the boss at the end. I think the officers came in on episode two. So, there weren't that many characters, but there were enough that it took four months to get everything together, including the engine.
That's really fast. Most people can't do anything in four months nowadays. Then it took us two more mnoths to deliver 50 more levels with five more bosses, and a hint book, which was really fun to write. When we were working on the game, Scott Miller had this idea of different packages. The first package was for the trilogy, then $15 for episodes four through six; and $10 for the hint manual. You could buy any of those separately, or get the whole package for 60 bucks. Everybody bought the whole package. It's like, "I might as well. I don't want to wait." Remember these were snail mail days.
Craddock: I love strategy guides. I have a modest collection. I was one of those kids who bought them to read them, like a novel. Cover to cover. Writing strategy guides is just writing a different kind of story.
Romero: Making the levels was more boring than writing hints for the levels. We had to do layout, and we had a NeXTSTEP machine to make the manual. Putting those together was easy. Tom and I traded off: We wrote hints for our levels. I made maybe less than half the levels in Wolfenstein, and I wrote the hints for them.
It was really creative: How many times can you say "Shoot the Nazi?" It's boring to say that. "Shoot the Nazi in the corner and take the whatever." We had to come up with so many ways to make reading that book interesting. It's such a funny book to read. You get to the end of a level, and you could just tell we were going nuts writing this damn strategy guide.
There was a point, probably at the beginning of the '90s, when "users" was not a term specified for games. People said it all the time, but that belonged in a fucking checkbook program. "User" isn't someone playing a game. That's "gamer" or "player." But what else can you call them? That gets old after a while, too.
Craddock: Finding secrets in Wolfenstein was difficult. That's not a criticism, but there were only so many textures to work with, far fewer than in Doom. Textures played a huge role in finding secrets in Doom levels: you learned to look out for things like a stain on an otherwise clean wall, or a misaligned label. Given that Wolfenstein was so limited in comparison, what was your process for deciding, "Well, this portrait of Hitler has a secret room behind it, but that same portrait over there does not?"
Romero: The only thing we cared about was that we tried to put textures on walls that hid secrets. That's so people weren't (pressing) every wall. There were some secret walls that were plain. We'd say, "Let's mix it up. We'll have a picture, a blank spot, and another picture, and the blank spot will hide the secret." We would make little patterns like that, and that was about it.
While we were drawing levels, we would create the (main) path and say, "Hmm. This might be a good spot," because it was a room the player was doing something in. Normally, if there was a long hallway, we usually wouldn't put a secret there. A hallway is just a path to get from A to B; we didn't want players to hump the wall nonstop. Usually secrets were found in rooms where shit happened. It was an extra reward if you decided to explore the room. We didn't want to encourage (searching out secrets) in hallways.
Craddock: Did you and Tom have most of the maps done by the time Carmack came around to secrets, or did you have to go back and insert them?
Romero: It wasn't too bad to go back through them. By the time we got to secrets, we probably had a month of development left on only the shareware episode, so we only needed to revisit 10 levels. If that would have happened at the end of (having to release) 60 levels, it would have been insane. We probably wouldn't have done it, because there were no patch updates and stuff like that back then.
Craddock: What would you consider some of the most important design lessons, the dos and don'ts, from making Wolfenstein that you wanted to inform Doom?
Romero: The stuff we took out of Wolfenstein, we definitely would not do in Doom. Stuff like searching dead bodies and dragging bodies around hallways, stuff like that. We knew that anything that was not involved in the core loop, shooting and moving, was slowing down the essence of the game. We knew that's what Doom should be: Blasting shit, solving puzzles, getting to the exit. That's still the goal (in modern shooters); they just look cooler. We didn't throw in shit that meant nothing in Doom, because we'd already experimented with that in Wolfenstein.
Craddock: Coming off of Wolfenstein, what would you point to as the defining moment of Doom's level design?
Romero: Yeah, and the thing is, I'd just finished making DoomEd (the game's map editor). This whole time, Tom had been struggling because Doom wasn't the kind of game what he really loved, which was Commander Keen-type stuff: happy and fun. First we blew away Nazis; now we were blowing away hellspawn. He just wasn't as excited, so he wasn't as inspired to see what Doom could be. John (Carmack) had said, "Go get a book on military building construction." Because Doom took a place in a military installation on a moon. Tom followed that, but it was just a bunch of offices. It was really boring.
When I finished the editor, I said, "I need to focus on the levels because they need to look really cool and we're not there yet." The day I started, I was playing around in E1M2, seeing what the engine could do within the editor I'd just finished. I said, "I need to define our style for building levels," because that hadn't happened yet. We needed a direction. I said, "What would be a really cool-looking room that takes advantage of heights and lighting?" We didn't want Wolfenstein-angled (orthogonal) walls and stuff like that.
In E1M2, I made the lift that you take down into a dark room. Imps on ledges above you start hissing and throwing fireballs; monsters down below, on your level, shoot at you. That was the room I made. And when I first made it, it wasn't as dark. It was a bit brighter, but there was a contrast between the lighting where the Imps were, and down where the player was. It looked really cool, but more importantly, it didn't look like anything else we'd done.
I got Tom, Adrian (Carmack), and Kevin (Cloud)--that was everybody except John Carmack, because we only had five people--and I said, "Look at this room." They were like, "Whoa, yeah!" It's funny because today it doesn't stand out, but back then it did when we had nothing else to look at and describe as cool. We realized, "This is it. This is the style."
Tom was making stuff for the second and third episodes, so I started making levels for the first episode. It was an abstract type of style. I wasn't trying to make anything realistic, so that military construction book can just get the hell out. I wanted to make levels that I thought were fun to play and looked cool, and wanted to use whatever the engine had to do that.
Beyond that, I needed the power to do whatever I wanted. When I was in a level and came up with an idea--like, "I want a broken florescent light" or something--I'd go into the editor, add that type of light, a special sector light, into the editor, and then I'd write code to make that kind of sector (possible) in the game, and then I'd run the game and see how it looked. I'd repeat that until it looked like the right type of blinking. There was light flickering around fire, like torches; there were blinking lights synced to one or two kilohertz of time frames; there were all those glowing lights. I programmed them because at some point I'd want them for what I was designing.
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[ John Broomhall, Composer, X-COM: UFO Defense ]
Writing a book is like tipping over a domino. First one falls, then it strikes another, which falls and knocks against another. Before you know it, you have a Rolodex of programmers, artists, designers, musicians, producers, testers, directors--everyone you need to make a video game. Except in my case, they've already done that, so I have everyone I need to write about how they made the video game in question.
Julian Gollop, rightfully hailed as an innovator in the 4X genre of strategy games and in the industry at large, was kind enough to read an early copy of Stay Awhile and Listen: Book I back in the summer of 2013 and write an enthusiastic endorsement for it. I mentioned to Julian that I would love to write the story of X-COM, and before I knew it, I was back on the phone (Skype, but don't nitpick) with another legendary designer, learning his story and broadening my outreach to talk to as many of X-COM's talented creators as would return my cold calls and emails.
I am immensely thankful that John Broomhall was excited to participate. A long-time composer in the games space, he shared a wealth of information about his early inspirations, how he came to work on UFO: Enemy Unknown (its original name in the UK) and X-COM, and how he approached conceptualizing and recording the game's spooky soundtrack.
If you're interested in the full story of how X-COM was made, keep an eye on @davidlcraddock on Twitter and my website, davidlcraddock.com, for news on my upcoming book about the game's creation and the early career of Julian Gollop.
Craddock: What led to your interest in music, and your drive to make music for a living?
John Broomhall: My interest and passion for music originated in childhood, growing up surrounded by very musical family members. As soon as I could physically reach the piano keyboard, I started trying to play it – and as soon as I could play it at all, I started developing my own musical ideas. During my teens, I played in various bands and continued writing instrumental music and songs. While I dreamed of a full-time career in music, for some years the need for job security and regularised income meant working in an entirely different field during the day while spending every other every spare moment working in recording studios, all the time looking for opportunities to progress.
Meanwhile, I was gaining a lot of invaluable experience and a useful secondary living playing keyboards and arranging music, writing and recording on jingles, sound tracks and artists' albums.
Craddock: Were you interested in making music and sound FX for games, or was your involvement in the industry a happy accident?
Broomhall: The original job opportunity at MicroProse really came from left field. At that time, the European HQ of the publisher was located deep in the Cotswolds, just 45 minutes' car ride from my house – not that I knew that. In fact, apart from playing Space Invaders and Defender in arcades or pubs, I knew very little about computer and videogames.
When I saw an advertisement in the local press, I was intrigued. The main job search was for 3D artists, but in the small print, it mentioned the company was looking for someone interested in and 'knowledgeable about midi and synthesisers.' Eventually, it turned out, they were really looking for an in-house composer, but that person had to be technically minded.
I responded to the ad and entered a musical beauty pageant, creating demo pieces for supposedly fictitious game briefs which actually turned about to be real games in the making – Harrier Jump Jet and Fields of Glory (I've still got those demos somewhere). It took several months of back and forth, but eventually I received an offer letter inviting me to join the games industry as MicroProse's European in-house composer – an enormous blessing, which obviously changed my life.
Craddock: Since your career in the games industry began, you've become associated largely with video-game music. What caused you to focus so heavily on this industry?
Broomhall: Since I joined MicroProse, I've never looked back. The videogames industry feels like a natural home and it's been fascinating to see it make a journey from bleeps and bloops to the likes of the San Francisco Symphony and (I feel) privileged to walk every step of that journey with it. The rapid growth in the scope and sophistication of game audio content is something I've always sought to evangelise and champion, whether by writing and commentating on it, or working with organisations like the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA), or lecturing at universities and conferences.
I've also recently co-founded Game Music Connect at the Southbank London, www.gamemusicconnect.com with my composer friend, James Hannigan, specifically to celebrate and explore the amazing music of videogames and the extraordinary talent behind it.
Craddock: How does the process of writing music for a game differ from writing other types of music?
Broomhall: These days, it doesn't really differ fundamentally from writing music for TV or film in so far as the techniques and equipment and software the composer uses are standard. But depending on the genre of game, and the anticipated implementation of music, there are some special factors a videogame composer may have to consider. By this I'm referring to so-called 'interactive music' – music which attempts to respond to certain game events and prevailing game states - for instance, becoming more intense and threatening as the player's danger level rises.
The other difference for videogame composers is, in many instances, not having moving pictures to score to, therefore having to rely more on discussions with the team, pre-production artwork, (and other development assets).
Craddock: Outside of UFO or any specific game, what role do you feel music should play in video games?
Broomhall: Well, a book could be written on this subject alone. But I'd say setting the scene, reinforcing and underpinning drama, and a story-telling function but it depends greatly on the type of game. The way music is used in Mario compared to The Last of Us is completely different. Both are completely valid.
Craddock: How would you describe the work culture and atmosphere at MicroProse in those early days?
Broomhall: Right back at the first interview, I was told by Steve Hurley (then development manager), "We work hard, we play hard," and that was certainly true. When the company was still privately owned, the management had complete autonomy and there was a slightly wild-west feeling about things. Clearly, the money was rolling in and the company was expanding rapidly – maybe 35% a year at that time. So you'd get a memo come round – "We're all having a BBQ this afternoon" – or you'd get an envelope under the door with a bonus cheque saying, 'Well done, you're doing a good job!' It was pretty amazing.
The recreation area included a kitchen – as I recall, manned all day by the legendary 'Topsy' and her daughter, who lived in the local village – and they made the best bacon and egg baps for miles around. You could hang out in there whenever you liked – shoot some pool, and play the arcade machines.
So that was one side of it, the relaxed atmosphere and sense that you were doing something very cool and funky, and getting paid well for it. The flip side of the coin was that people really did work long hours, and there was very high commitment to get the games finished and shipped. It would take whatever it would take – with people working through the night (and we will have to draw a veil over the activities of those night crews on the legendary "shelf" – a mezzanine floor in the second building).
It's amazing to look back and picture Bill Stealey bouncing through the door of the audio room, thrusting his hand out to shake mine, saying, "Hi John. 'Wild Bill'." He certainly was an impressive character. And on another occasion, game design legend Sid Meier swung by my office and complimented my music in his quiet tones That was special.
I was soon flown out with Andrew (Parton) and another programmer genius, Adrian Scotney, to visit the Hunt Valley office in Maryland, USA to hang out and talk turkey with our opposite numbers. It was all very exciting. Writing music for MicroProse at that time, in that place, was an enormous privilege and they were fun times. My wife used to ring up, and rather than ask, "Is my husband in the office?" would ask, "Is my husband in his playpen?" and for a long time it seemed like every game I worked on was either No. 1 PC game, or at least top 5. Halcyon days!
Craddock: In 1991, PC games were just coming out of the beeps and boops era and entering the age of Sound Blasters and Adlib cards. What was the process of not only creating music for World Circuit, but getting it to sound respectable with such limited technological resources? What were some of the challenges you faced?
Broomhall: When I joined MicroProse in 1992, we still supported the PC (speaker) as a sound format; when you selected an audio option, say, Adlib, or SoundBlaster, or LAPC-1, there in the list was PC Speaker. Certainly, MicroProse was right to seek a composer who would have technical understanding of MIDI (and other formats) because writing music for these formats was not everybody's bag.
In fact, writing the music – the composing – was arguably only half the job, and the easiest half at that. What was much tougher, but vitally important, was battling with the hardware to make the music sound reasonably acceptable on say, a 9-voice FM synthesis soundcard. Coming from a recording studio background with SSL mixing desk, 16- or 24-track tape, reverbs, delays, synthesisers, drum machines et al--it really was quite a challenge to work with such rudimentary technology.
The Roland LAPC-1 card was the best of the crop and a nice little synth (the equivalent of a Pro Audio Roland MT-32), but the FM cards were really hard work, and that's not to mention formats like the MegaDrive (Sega Genesis), Atari ST, and Amiga. So, for a game like World Circuit, I started with the LAPC-1 and worked much like I would in a recording studio, using my MIDI sequencer of choice, Cubase.
I was extremely fortunate to work with Andrew Parton who was then in charge of all of the music and audio programming and also designed the sound effects. He was a ninja programmer and a compassionate one, in that while some of my peers in other companies were trying to edit music in hexadecimal editors, Andrew wrote DOS utilities whereby I could connect my normal studio sequencing equipment to a PC and address the soundcards as if they were external midi modules in a studio. He also wrote a utility that showed me how many voices I was using. I remember the whole screen would flash red when I exceeded the voice count and this was very helpful, forcing me to go deep into my MIDI programming to see why notes were being stolen – normally down to sloppy note endings.
After creating the relatively painless LAPC-1 version of a game like World Circuit, I'd then have to tackle the SoundBlaster/Adlib version, creating instruments sets that would be somewhat akin to the Roland version. There was no reverb on these cards and everything sounded incredibly flat and boring. The only way you could alleviate that, really, was partly through dynamics and mainly through using midi echoes where you make a copy of the notes, turn the velocities down and move them later in the track so they play back much as an echo would. The trouble was, that immediately doubles your voice count for that part. So, it was all a balancing act, but we got through it and Andrew made it as easy as possible for me to do the best I could.
Craddock: Did you enjoy creating game music back then, or was it a process that became more interesting and rewarding over time?
Broomhall: When you put together the working culture mentioned above, with the people, and the fun times and the pioneering spirit, it was a compelling package and I was 100% into it. It was a struggle working with some of those limited hardware formats, and there were moments I just felt I couldn't do it, but in the end, necessity turns out to be the mother of invention. When I worked on one of the early PC games out of the UK development side of MicroProse – a horror game, called The Legacy (created by Jim Bambra, the design guru who went on to form Pivotal Games) – I was told that the sound effects for the game would be much more important than music and that I could have three musical voices – three note polyphony – for the music – that's hardcore! But, you think about it, you mull on it, and even with three voices of FM, and it is possible to come up with a sinister, spooky music track on an FM soundcard.
Of course, when games started to be shipped on CD-ROMS, CD-quality music, recorded like music for any other medium, became possible, whether played as red book audio or streamed at a lower sample rate. And it's that simple step forward that really unlocked the door to the world of game music we have today, from a technical viewpoint. Naturally, that's made today's music creation more vibrant and interesting with unfathomable possibilities, but nothing can take away from the magic of those early days and the dark arts of MIDI!
Craddock: How did you become involved on UFO?
Broomhall: My early recollections of encountering UFO are seeing the game still in development running on Andrew's PC and him telling me that we were probably going to work on it, and that the QA department couldn't get enough of it and thought it was a brilliant game. It was subsequently signed (to a publishing contract) and I had the relative luxury of quite a long lead time to acclimatise to the title and really soak in the vibe before seriously sitting down to write the music.
Craddock: What was the work culture and atmosphere like at MicroProse during UFO's development? How had it changed from when you first started?
Broomhall: It was much the same, but I think we were gradually becoming more and more business-like and financially driven. No question though, we were still buzzing creatively.
Craddock: According to UFO's credits, you captained music development, and Andrew Parton worked on the sound effects. What did your collaboration with Andrew entail related to UFO specifically?
Broomhall: You're correct. I handled the music, and Andy covered the sound effects. But his role was much more than that. You have to remember, we were in the era of DOS games and there was a whole job of work writing and maintaining drivers for all the various soundcards emerging, as well as creating tools and utilities for audio implementation and programming sound and music playback functionality. So, in simple terms, he created the tools that enabled me to do my job and we would work closely together to make sure everything sounded like it should do in the latest game build.
Craddock: What theme and atmosphere did you want UFO's music to set? Players and critics around the world have praised UFO's tension and underlying dread that players felt as the game unfolded. Did you want your music to feed into that?
Broomhall: Yes, without a doubt. Once the dramatic intro was done with and the player was in the Geoscape section, I wanted the music to (fill) them with a sense of unease and foreboding – a perpetual gloominess that the next UFO threat was inevitable and the world now had to live in this atmosphere of dread anticipation and grimly determined resistance. In the tactical game, it was all about providing a tense backdrop.
Craddock: The music for the tactical missions (aka the "Battlescape" view) is my favorite track in the game. It's this low, pulsing rumble that ebbs and flows as the level goes on. How did you hit on that sound?
Broomhall: Thank you very much for those comments, which I really appreciate. I talked about creating music for soundcards by starting with the higher quality technology (such as) Roland LAPC-1 and then kind of downgrading the music for the lesser capable cards. But something very significant had changed in my approach by the time I worked on UFO. I had come to realise that it actually made a lot more sense to tackle the biggest technical challenge first – the FM 9 voice soundcard – and that if you wrote the music taking into account the limitations of those cards, you made your life easier. Upgrading the same music for the better tech was, relatively speaking, a breeze.
So the sound of UFO on a SoundBlaster card represents the original concept, and the timbres come from custom designing FM synth sounds in the MicroProse editor, I think created by Andrew. In practice, what this entailed was mucking about with the editor, experimenting with the game in mind, to create instrument sounds that might be useful and fit in with the UFO vibe. Out of that process, came an instrument palette that I could load into the soundcard and address via midi from Cubase running on an Atari ST.
So to return to your question about the tactical mission, that's where the sounds come from. Compositionally, the pulsing was a device to set up tension and a kind of dread and inevitability, but long before I'd heard my eminent friend, Professor Stephen Deutsch talk about habituation and how you can set up a pattern that people lock on to--which you then disrupt (e.g. some of the Ostinato figures in Psycho which Stephen talks about in one of his talks), I stumbled into a similar idea. I thought it might be good to very subtly change the tempo up and down a couple of bpm here and there so that just when your brain had locked on to the repeating pattern and its regularity, it was subliminally disrupted. It turned out this was very unsettling. With that as the backdrop, I added some slightly odd notation - in itself, uncomfortable - and then on top of that, there's some randomly placed strange alien FM noises.
Add that together and even though it's only a two-minute loop, people from all around the world, through all the years since the game was released, have told me it had a profound effect on them. Sometimes it all comes together, and I'm very thankful about that. I am also mindful that when this music is being heard by the player, they are engaged with this intense strategic combat and focusing on, and caring about the characters they have created and nurtured - so it all works in concert to provide a compelling gaming experience.
Interestingly, quite a few people have told me they loved the interactive music in the Battlescape but the truth is, it is not interactive. It just seems that way because, many times, one of the weird sounds in the music will coincide with something significant in the player's experience. It just shows how powerful sound is and what an immersive experience that game play was.
Craddock: UFO's intro went from eerie during the silent invasion of the aliens, to pulse-pounding as the invaders struck and cut a bloody swathe through civilians. What was the collaborative process between you and the artists for creating the intro? For example, did you wait to see concept art/storyboards before creating the music?
Broomhall: For the most part, I believe it was John Reitze who created the intro sequence with its wonderful stylised graphics. I would pop down to the art department to see what he was doing and I suppose my brain soaked in all that imagery and plotted what the music might be like. At some point, we must have had the final sequence to work (with), although I seem to remember it may have arrived in sections. Andrew took care of all the programming and synchronisation timing so that the sound effects he created would trigger on the right animation frame, but how he made sure the music stayed in sync, I really don't know. Again, I started with the SoundBlaster version knowing that upgrading to LAPC wouldn't be a problem. So where did these music ideas come from? Simple though it was, compared to today's lavish CGI, that intro sequence John R created had a very strong identity, atmosphere and vibe. As a composer, it's hard to see how you couldn't have ideas when the graphics and story are grabbing you by the throat.
One question I can answer here is who's is the voice you hear in the intro saying 'Warning, warning – UFO detected!' Now, I could be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure we recorded a very nice lady from business management, called Valentina Britten. We certainly recorded her for other intros because she had a cool American voice and a strong presence – I could definitely have imagined her as an XCOM soldier, or commander. I think Andrew recorded her with some cruddy microphone, straight into a SoundBlaster soundcard, but it kind of worked.
Craddock: Did the "UFO" theme influence your composition while working on the game? To put it another way: when you thought of extra-terrestrial invaders, did any particular sound or theme come to mind?
Broomhall: What influenced my composition were the story and the visuals. There was no particular sound or theme that I can remember influencing me particularly, and of course, you'd have to be really careful about that for copyright reasons, it was the game itself that conjured ideas in my mind for how the music should sound and work.
Craddock: What equipment, both in terms of instruments and hardware, did you have to work with?
Broomhall: Aside from what I've already mentioned, the only other significant piece of equipment was a midi keyboard – a humble JV30. There were no drums, guitars – nothing like that. The only 'instrument' was the synthesiser on the soundcard itself at this time.
Craddock: Could you describe the environment in which you worked on UFO's music? Did you have a sound room in the back of the studio?
Broomhall: Andrew and I shared an office on the first floor – you could hardly call it a studio, though we did have some nice amplification equipment and good speakers. For some reason, I remember it had nasty muted yellow wallpaper, no windows and only up-lighters and office lamps for illumination so it was quite a gloomy, isolated office, stuffed with computers – perfect, really. You could almost imagine it being a monitoring station within an XCOM base!
Craddock: How often did you interact with Julian Gollop, and what did those interactions consist of?
Broomhall: I think on this first X-COM game, I didn't really see that much of Julian or his brother, Nick, except when they visited the offices and at the end of the project when they worked in-house for a while. But I'm sure we had meetings to review work in progress and I'm very grateful that the Gollops gave us such a lot of creative freedom and trusted us to come up with something good on the music and sound effects.
Craddock: Did Julian provide much direction for the music, or was that left up to you?
Broomhall: Well, you should definitely ask Julian the same question, but my memory is that we took control of the music and sound effects direction ourselves. Naturally, if we'd come up with something which Julian and Nick hated, or passionately believed wasn't the right fit with the game, then we would have certainly had to respond but thankfully that just wasn't the case.
Craddock: Could you share an anecdote or two from your days working on the original UFO?
Broomhall: I think somewhere around this time, I was struggling to manage on my PC with 20 megabyte hard drive, and I remember going to my boss with an earnest request and well-thought out justification for why he should let me upgrade to a 30 megabyte hard drive. Now, I have a telephone in my pocket with 16 gigabytes of memory and an audio production PC with 64GB of RAM. Unbelievable.
Craddock: Which of the pieces you created for UFO stands out to you the most, and why?
Broomhall: I guess I like the Geoscape best musically, but perhaps the piece that stands out most for all the reasons I mentioned above is the music for the tactical game. It just seems to have nailed the right mood.
Craddock: What did you enjoy most about working on UFO?
Broomhall: I think the best thing was having a sensible amount of time to really get into it. From the time I joined MicroProse to around the time we did UFO, we'd had many fire-fighting emergencies having to produce music and sound for a lot of projects very quickly, but with UFO there was a sense of time and space to really immerse myself in the subject matter, experiment and live with things for a while. That, coupled with the creative freedom I was given, the increasingly better understanding of how to work on soundcards and the unique toolset Andrew provided, is probably why it turned out well, aside from pure creativity.
Craddock: When did you consider the music for UFO "finished?" Was there some specific moment or final bit of tweaking that made you say, "Okay, this is it"?
Broomhall: Someone once said to me, 'games are never finished, they're abandoned'. There's certainly some truth in that.
Craddock: Is there any particular piece from UFO's soundtrack you wish you could go back and rework?
Broomhall: No. For its time and taking into account the rudimentary technology we were working with, I'm very thankful to be able to say, I don't think there's anything I would change. It has a charm and appropriateness to the graphic quality and even all these years on, the FM music still sounds pretty spooky and atmospheric and I love the sense of time passing that the sequenced synth parts in the Geoscape give.
While I wouldn't want to change the original music, I am very interested in re-imagining it in the future in various ways. Another project I worked on around that time (also very dear to my heart) is Transport Tycoon – and I've recently had the opportunity, thanks to another genius game creator, Chris Sawyer, to completely reboot the jazz soundtrack for the new iOS/Android versions of the game. It would be great to do something similar for XCOM/UFO.
Craddock: Looking back, what does UFO mean to you?
Broomhall: It represents a clear high point in that particular phase of my career in games. I was enormously fortunate to be the one to have the opportunity to create music for this iconic title and I've probably had more fan mail about this game than any other I've ever worked on. It's really nice to know that it hit the spot with gamers all over the world.
Craddock: What brought about your departure from MicroProse?
Broomhall: After ten great years with MicroProse throughout take-overs by Spectrum Holobyte, Hasbro Interactive, and Infogrames, during which I worked as Composer, Game Producer and Head of Audio, I parted company with the firm, going freelance with my first title being the huge music and audio production that was the game of American Idol/Pop Idol.
Craddock: How do you feel music in video games has evolved since the days of Civ1 and UFO? Not just in terms of composition, but in how music can enhance and complement game play and visuals?
Broomhall: With the advent of digital music replay, the door was opened to unfathomable possibilities. I suppose the key difference between the days of UFO and the days of The Last of Us is that the technology is not constraining and controlling what the content can be. You are only limited by your imagination, creativity and budget. I mentioned interactive music. The way that music can be implemented to support game play is very greatly more sophisticated than the approach taken in the early days and the increasingly standard use of live players means music has a more human, organic feel to it.
Craddock: Of the many games you've worked on, which is your favorite, and why?
Broomhall: I am very glad to have worked on X-COM/UFO – it's right up there. But there are many projects I've worked on and enjoyed greatly for very different reasons. I loved writing jazz music for Transport Tycoon. When working on Geoff Crammond's F1 simulations - driving round Silverstone racetrack filming at 5:00 a.m. and practising wheel changes with the Arrows F1 team was crazy. I loved delving inside world-famous multi-track recordings when working on Guitar Hero DLC. Recording awesome singers in Nashville when working on American Idol was a privilege. Watching the B-Boy Championships up close and personal with Crazy Legs and hanging with the DJs on-stage at the Brixton Academy when working on B-Boy was very cool. Spending a week at George Lucas's Skywalker Sound recording strings as a music supervisor and co-composer on Xbox One launch title Forza Motorsport 5 was mind-blowing.
⁂
[ Dave Ellis, Guide Writer, Civilization II and X-COM ]
I miss official strategy guides. I collect them, and as a kid, would slip them between the folders of my Trapper Keeper to smuggle them into school and read them behind a wall of textbooks throughout the day. Yes, I was that weirdo who read strategy guides like novels. I admired the artistry that went into their layouts and text, and was agog at the info they offered up in the days before GameFAQs and, more recently, YouTube and Twitch streams.
That's what made talking with Dave Ellis, strategy guide author for many books, Sid Meier's Civilization II and UFO: Enemy Unknown among them. He also authored the Civopedia, Civ II's massive in-game encyclopedia of information on ages, civilizations, technologies, and more--a game construct that made a huge impact on the development of X-COM. Our conversation was not directly relevant to the story of how UFO/X-COM was made, but I enjoyed it and wanted to share it with you here.
Craddock: What led to your interest in computer games?
I played my first coin-op video game when I was 9...Atari's Breakout, at a bowling alley where I bowled on a league. That would have been about 1974. I was instantly fascinated by video games, and I eventually got myself an Atari 2600 by saving up paper route money. I was hooked from that point on.
Craddock: Did you always want to be a designer, or were you happy working in any position in the industry?
When the video game craze started to take hold in the late 70's and early 80's, I saw a 60 Minutes segment about Atari. One of the things they talked about was testing video games. I was a full-on video game junkie at that point, and I told my parents that the job that I wanted was testing video games. Not particularly realistic at the time...
I actually eventually wanted a career in film or television production. I really never thought seriously about a career in games until I was actually working at MicroProse.
Craddock: How did you come to work at MicroProse?
While I was in college, I had a job selling computers at a small retail store. I got to play a lot of games on a bunch of different computers--we sold Commodore, Atari, and IBM compatible machines and software. After I left retail, I got a job working for the government in DC as a "telecommunications specialist" (which amounted to a glorified telephone operator that also sent occasional telexes...remember those?). The money was better than retail, but I hated the commute and the job was boring. I started browsing the help-wanted ads in the paper every Monday morning.
One day, I saw an ad for a customer service rep at MicroProse. I loved MicroProse games and knew a lot about them, and I had a lot of practical experience in computer customer service, so I applied. I figured it was something I could do that was closer to home and more fun until I figured out what I wanted to do long-term. That job turned into a career.
Craddock: What was the culture and atmosphere like at MicroProse?
Second to none. If you ask pretty much anyone who worked at MicroProse, they'll tell you it was the best job they ever had. I've never worked in a more creative and fun environment. We worked hard, and we sometimes worked long hours--but, for the most part, we did it because we absolutely loved what we did and we were proud to be a part of creating great games. We did things together as a studio all the time--from paintball to RC monster truck rallies to putting together an impromptu band to play at the company Christmas party.
We also got to do a lot of cool things that were directly related to work--like visit and tour the Oceana Naval Air Station while working on Fleet Defender Gold.
Like I said, we worked hard--but we had fun doing it. That's an important part of game development that is often lost in today's crunch time all the time game development studios.
Craddock: Your first job was in customer service, I believe. What did the job entail?
Answering phones and mail (actual mail--we didn't have e-mail at that point, although we did have a BBS which was run separately from customer service). People would call or write in with problems and we'd either talk them through the problem or send them a patch disk to fix known problems. There were 3-4 of us in customer service at the time. We were always pretty busy.
Craddock: Can you share any anecdotes from your customer service days? Any flavor: bizarre, humorous, frustrating, etc.
Windows was the bane of our existence. It was pretty new then--all of MicroProse's games were DOS games up until around 1995 (if I remember correctly), but machines were shipping with Windows 3.1 pre-installed. The problem was that DOS games required a certain amount of base memory to be free--up to 600K (out of 640K--that's a lot if you don't remember how it was back then), and the games would NOT run if Windows was running. Half of the problems we had with people not being able to run a game were solved by having them boot into DOS rather than booting into Windows.
Compatibility was also an issue. There were so many IBM-compatible computers out there, that it was difficult to know which combinations of hardware would and wouldn't work with our games. There were also Tandy computers, which were NOT particularly IBM compatible. It was a really confusing time for consumers, and their frustration was understandable.
My best customer service story, though, was the one that prompted me to try to get a job in QA. I was the only one on the phones one day, and I got a call from an African-American gentleman who was very upset about F-117A Stealth fighter--specifically, he said that the game was racist. I calmly asked how a flight sim could be racist, and he said that there were only two times that you saw an African-American pilot in the game. When you failed a mission, an African-American pilot was seen writing "I will not crash my F-117" on a chalk board.
When you won, there was a celebration picture where the African-American pilot was in the background celebrating a white pilot's victory. I was calm, cool, and collected and tried to be as sympathetic as I could. The call went on for 45 minutes and, when the rest of the department got back--they were at a company meeting and I drew the short straw on manning the phones alone while they were gone--I had to take about half an hour away from the phones to regain my sanity. That night, I talked to the QA manager about moving from customer service to QA.
Craddock: Everyone I've spoken to who worked in the industry in the '80s and '90s spoke of wearing many different hats; since the industry was so new and small, everyone did a little bit of everything. Was this the case for you during your time in customer service?
Not at all. I started in 1992, and MicroProse was really big by then--about 120 people in Hunt Valley, as well as offices in Japan and the UK. MicroProse was everything under one roof--development, marketing, sales, QA, customer service...even the warehouse was on-site. The only people who wore multiple hats, really, were the developers who had been there for a long time--like Sid Meier, Scott Spanburg, and Andy Hollis--who were both programmers and designers. Most everyone stuck to their own thing.
Craddock: How did you get the opportunity to move to QA?
Darklands. It was MicroProse's first (and only) RPG, and it was HUGE. I started working extra hours part-time in QA after work to help test the game. That's how I heard there were going to be some full-time openings in QA. I had already proven I could test by the time I asked for a full-time position, so I was able to make the move pretty smoothly.
Craddock: Could you describe the QA work environment at MicroProse? What was the workspace like, how long did you work, etc.
QA was, for the most part, a lot of fun. We were all crammed together at tables in what was actually supposed to be a hallway. Well, it WAS a hallway, actually...and it was used as such. We just happened to work there. Eventually, we expanded to take over the back half of the employee break room (there was a dividing wall that could be closed). It was close quarters, and that meant there was lots of camaraderie. It also meant that, if one person got sick, everybody got sick. Most of the department was down with mono one time. We shared a phone. It was a regular germ-fest.
As for hours, it varied from project to project. As I said, Darklands was a huge game, so a lot of overtime was worked on that game. It was still being tested a year after I started in QA! On some games, there was always a push from some of the management (especially marketing) for us to stay late testing--even if there wasn't a new build available for testing.
When I got to be a lead tester, I always resisted this tendency--I wouldn't let my team work what I liked to call "political overtime": Working late just for appearances. But, sometimes, you didn't have a choice. One of our testers--now the sound designer at Vicious Cycle Software, where I currently work--likes to brag that he once worked a 25-hour day in QA--it was the day the clocks changed in the fall.
The awesome thing about QA at MicroProse was that, for the most part, the development teams worked closely with us and respected our opinions and ideas as well as our bug reports. We got to learn a lot about the development process in MicroProse QA. Many of the QA guys I worked with went on to become designers.
Craddock: What was the first game you tested?
Darklands (version 3.0--the original release). My first big game as a lead tester, almost a year later, was also Darklands (version 7.0--the final release).
Craddock: What are some of differences testing games from different genres?
There's a big difference. Understand, there were no automated testing systems back then. Everything was actually playing parts of a game over and over and over and over to find bugs.
The easiest games to test were the animated graphic adventures (AGAs). I worked on all three of those--Rex Nebular, Return of the Phantom, and Dragonsphere. They were long games in terms of gameplay time, but they had the advantage of being divided up into discrete rooms, and there were a finite number of actions you could perform. So, a systematic test of the game systems could be done by making a checklist of all of the rooms and all of the actions, and then having testers go room to room pushing, pulling, talking to, etc. every object with which the player could interact. That made it easy to test the functionality of the game. (The flow and the connective elements of the game still had to be tested, of course, but the controls and functionality were very straightforward.)
Sims were a lot harder to deal with. I only tested one or two sims, but those typically saw the team split up into those who were testing the simulated vehicle's performance while others tested mission flow, individual missions, and scenarios. Testing a scenario in a sim could be among the most tedious types of testing. You played the same scenario again and again, trying to come up with different ways to stress test (aka: break) it. After about 20 hours on the same scenario, you could come up with really creative things to do just out of sheer boredom.
Strategy games were the most difficult to test. Games like Civ generally had their systems tested and perfected during development, both by the developers themselves and QA testers, so when the game got to QA, most of the testing was about making sure the systems all worked together properly.
When Civ II was being developed, Bryan Reynolds sent builds every few days to a number of people who were good at Civ to get feedback on new units, new systems, and so on. By the time the game got to QA, a lot of the balance was already done--that makes it easier to deal with in terms of testing.
Craddock: How would you define the goal of QA? Is it more about tracking bugs, or is play balance an equally important (or more important) issue?
When I was in QA, the two were equally important. Since we were under the same roof as the developers, we were able to talk directly to the programmers and designers. Most of the designers and programmers took QA's balance and gameplay suggestions very seriously. We were all invested in making the game as good as it could possibly be.
Today, it's a lot different. We typically use either publisher QA departments or external groups, and they stick pretty much entirely to bug tracking for the most part.
- Was there much structure in the QA department in those days? For example, did you have bug lists and a procedure for how to root out bugs? Or was it more about putting a to-do list together and going through each item?
There weren't really specific test plans in those days, but each game had a lead tester who coordinated the testing, laid out tasks for everyone each day, and controlled the bug list. Bugs were hand-written back then. There was a master bug list program, but the lead tester was the one who entered all of the bugs into it and printed out the bug list every day. Times have changed.
Craddock: According to Mobygames.com, you wrote the "Windows help file" for Civ1. How did you get that opportunity?
One of the ways that I moved from QA to design was by grabbing every opportunity that came along. When we converted Civ to Windows 95, I suggested that, like other Windows programs, we should have a Windows help file for the game. Nobody had time to write it, so I volunteered.
I was the lead tester on Civ Mac, and assistant lead on Civ Windows. I was still pretty new to being a lead tester at that point, and these were smaller projects (simple conversions to Mac and Windows), so there were only a few testers on them. It was pretty typical for testers who were new to lead positions to be given smaller projects at first.
I loved Civ, and I still do. Civ II was my favorite of the series, and I really enjoyed Civ Revolutions.
Craddock: You wrote the Civilopedia for Civ2. What did that process entail? I can only imagine how long it must have taken to track down all the information players might need for a game that involved.
That was a pretty big project. Research was a little harder in 1995 than it is now (no Wikipedia...) so a lot of it was book research and coordinating with the design lead (Brian Reynolds) on the things that he was trying to convey with some of the Advances in the game. (I remember "Machine Tools" being a particularly hard concept to write about...) Then, we had to track down and get rights to the images we used in the Civilopedia. "Multimedia" was a buzzword in the industry at that point, so the Civilopedia had to be a "multimedia Civilopedia." Hence, photos instead of art.
I also programmed the Civilopedia using Macromedia Authorware, the scripting tool we used to add multimedia content to Fleet Defender Gold, which I also worked on. The programmers on the project had to do some pretty nifty programming tricks to get the Authorware executable to seamlessly run with the game itself.
Craddock: In writing the Civilopedia, what was your goal in terms of the writing style and presentation of information? On the one hand, many players love Civ because they can read volumes and volumes of fascinating history. On the other hand, some players just want to find the info they need and get back to playing.
I took an encyclopedic approach that I probably wouldn't take today. Back then, there WERE players who liked to read. Now, most of them can't be bothered. At any rate, the player could click past the Civilopedia without reading it. I suspect the most useful part of the Civilopedia was the interactive tech tree, which I thought was pretty neat. You could click through advances and see where they'd take you. Each was hyper-linked to the Civilopedia entries for their associated Advance, Units, Buildings, and Wonders. I'm guessing that at least some of that was interesting/useful to the player. I hope so, anyway...
Craddock: What did you enjoy most about testing Civ2?
Even though I was a designer by the time Civ II went into development, I did get to be one of Brian Reynolds' test subjects when he was in early development on the game. I was one of the "Civ experts" who had a chance to give him feedback on the units, Advances, etc. that he was adding to the game.
Craddock: Jumping ahead a bit, how did you receive the opportunity to design Civ2: Multiplayer Gold Edition?
By that time, I was a lead designer at the MicroProse studio in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Chapel Hill had done CivNet, the multiplayer version of the original Civ, for which I wrote and programmed the interactive tutorial, so they got the nod to do multiplayer Civ II. As the designer at the studio--and, as someone who was very familiar with Civ II--I got to be the designer. It was an awesome opportunity.
Craddock: Civ 1 and 2 were games that had been designed for single-player experiences. What sort of design changes were made to make Civ2 fun and interesting as a multiplayer experience?
The main thing that had to be changed was the early part of the game. Until you get your cities going and get some units out there, you don't do much in the first few centuries other than press the space bar to go to the next turn. This is fine in single player, but in multiplayer, you have 7 people just pressing space and waiting for a pretty long while before things really get going. Then, it takes a long time (especially on a larger world) to expand far enough to meet another player.
My solution to this was coming up with the idea of the Double Production option. When you selected this, every terrain square produced twice as much of what it normally produced, effectively doubling the speed of everything in the game--research, unit production, building construction, and so on. This made the earlier portion of the game (and, indeed, the entire game) go a lot faster. The only negative side effect was that players often ended up producing pollution before they had the means to deal with it. Even so, this was a minor consideration that was far outweighed by the benefits.
The one other thing I did was move the Civilopedia text to a non-multimedia version of the Civilopedia. The multimedia version was too clunky and slow for network games.
Craddock: How did you receive the opportunity to write the X-COM strategy guide?
This was another one of those opportunities that I grabbed when it became available. At that point, there was actually a writer at MicroProse whose primary job was to write strategy guides. When it came to write the X-COM UFO Defense guide, he was swamped with other work. He knew that I could write because of the Civ Windows help file and a couple of other smaller things I had written at that point, so he asked if I'd be interested.
Craddock: What was your familiarity with X-COM's development before starting on the guide?
I was pretty familiar with the game by then. The UFO Defense strategy guide actually wasn't even started until the game was finished, and it wasn't released until six months after the game came out, so the game had already been through QA at that point.
Interesting side story: X-COM UFO Defense almost didn't get released in the US. Games developed in the UK were almost always run through Hunt Valley QA before they were given the nod for US release. This was a basic gameplay evaluation rather than a complete test--basically, "Is this game something the US audience will like?" The reaction by QA management at the time was skeptical--they thought the graphics were primitive (I distinctly remember someone saying, "...not nearly as good as Darklands"), and that the gameplay didn't look like it would be fun. The testers who evaluated it, however, were wildly enthusiastic about it. As a result, the game was green-lit for US release.
Craddock: I didn't realize that developers and designers sometimes wrote strategy guides on the games their companies developed/published. What was the relationship between MicroProse and Prima for the strategy guide?
I don't know if it was the same with all companies, but Prima and MicroProse had a pretty much exclusive deal at the time. I don't know exactly when it changed but, by the time I wrote the Civ II strategy guide, I was dealing with Prima directly. While I worked at MicroProse, however, I was still contractually only able to do guides for MicroProse games.
Craddock: Can you give us a broad overview of what putting together a strategy guide for a game as complex and intricate as X-COM entails?
Looking back at it now, the UFO Defense strategy guide is half manual, half strategy guide. I remember taking the approach of teaching the basics of the game and expanding on the manual because I thought the manual wasn't nearly clear enough to properly teach the game. For the actual strategy portion, I heavily relied on talking to the Gollops, who made themselves available to me for any and all questions, and getting raw game data from them. I also talked to the US testers who played the game the most to compile their strategies. Finally, I played a lot and wrote down my own strategies.
My approach to strategy guides changed a lot after the first couple. More strategy, less instruction. But I always relied a lot on input from the designers of the games when available, and on personal experience playing the game.
Craddock: Since there are so many ways players can approach X-COM, how did you go about documenting strategies for winning the many types of ground missions; what to research first, second, and twelfth; etc.?
I don't actually think I did a very good job of that in UFO Defense guide. I went more with a raw data approach--give the players a view of how everything works under the hood and let them decide how to best craft their research to get the stuff they want the fastest.
Craddock: The guide includes lots of charts, tables, and other graphics. How did you go about compiling that data, and organizing it into a format players would find useful?
For UFO Defense, it was as easy as asking Julian and Nick Gollop for the data. They sent me a disc with everything I needed. I then put it into tables in a way that I found useful and hoped that other players would find it useful as well.
Craddock: What did you find most challenging about writing a strategy guide?
Like testing games, the type of game you're dealing with determines the difficulty of writing the guide. Real-time strategy games and shooters make for the easiest strategy guides in my experience--when you can map out levels for the player and point out the locations and compositions of encounters, that's half your guide right there. Strategy games like Civ II are a lot tougher because there are so many potential play styles and paths to victory. That means a lot more in the way of viable strategies and potential approaches to the game.
The most challenging thing by the time I stopped writing strategy guides was the deadline. On the first few guides I wrote, I had several months to research and write them. Eventually, though, the deadlines got tighter and tighter. I wrote the X-COM Interceptor strategy guide in 28 days, which wasn't too bad, since I was the game designer; I knew all the strategies. But some of the later guides I did had to be researched and written in three weeks.
That's just not enough time to play the game and develop any meaningful strategies. That's why I stopped writing strategy guides. Too hectic and stressful.
Craddock: What did you enjoy most about writing the guide?
Getting a behind the scenes look at the stats that went into the game. It was really educational in terms of learning game design. And, of course, I got to play a lot of UFO Defense. That's always a good thing.
Craddock: Looking back, what does the seminal game mean to you today?
UFO Defense is a good example of how strong gameplay can make a game interesting even two decades after its release. The game isn't much to look at these days, but it's still as fun to play now as it was then. It's a testament to how good the game is that the Firaxis XCOM game is so similar to the original in terms of core mechanics. That's the mark of a good game--it stands the test of time.
⁂
[ Andrew Luckett, QA Tester, X-COM ]
QA (quality assurance) testers can be a game creator's toughest opponent. Testers know all the strategies, all the exploits, and know them better than anyone, even the people who painted the pixels or programmed the ones and zeroes that comprise them.
Testers can also be a creator's biggest champions. After Spectrum Holobyte merged with MicroProse and saw no commercial appeal in UFO: Enemy Unknown, executives ordered the project cancelled. That didn't happen, obviously, Andrew Luckett is one reason why. Luckett tested the game extensively for work and for fun. He was one of X-COM's biggest supporters, and he opened up to me about why he loved the game, how he got started in the industry, and how he and other testers at MicroProse UK championed X-COM to release.
Craddock: What led to your interest in video games?
Andrew Luckett: From an early age my father's interest in home computers gave me exposure to games. He had a Commodore VIC20 and he used to buy the magazines where you had to type the raw game code (well basic) directly into the computer. This lead me to play and tweak these games.
Craddock: What was your first job in the industry, and how did you land it?
Growing up we used to live near a pub. In the pub we had an arcade machines, games like Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Outrun, etc. I became very good at these games as I effectively always had an arcade machine at home – this was a long time before most people had a console – someone who drank in our pub worked at MicroProse and spotted I was good at games, so invited me for an interview. The rest is history.
Craddock: Could you give us a "day in the life" overview of a game tester?
Luckett: Back in the early days before internet / email testing a game could be a frustrating business because if you received a game build with a bug that stopped game progression or was annoying the feedback loop of testing > reporting > fixing > verifying the fixes > reopening /closing the bugs could take days.
So the days started with waiting for a new build in the post (snail mail!). Then it would be a case of copying the tape or disk to give to the test team, photocopying the build notes and fixed list for the testers to work from. Usually the test team would be split by platform, so people working on a ZX spectrum version would be jealous of the Amiga build with all its colours and sounds.
The rest of the day would be set to work through verifying the fixed list and reporting new bugs. If you were a lead tester some of the day would be set aside to manage the test plan and making sure all the testers followed and reported against it, as opposed to just 'playing' the games. Also, from time to time the testers would be required to demo the games (as we knew them the best) to the press.
Craddock: What did your early, pre-MicroProse testing jobs entail?
Luckett: This was the first testing job I had. Before that I worked in local government. I was spotted by an MicroProse employee because I was seen to be good at playing arcade games.
Craddock: What was the culture and atmosphere like at MicroProse?
Luckett: It was very much work hard, play hard. Management were very accessible and did their best to empower the testers, so we felt a great sense of responsibility.
Craddock: Are there differences between testing games from different genres?
Luckett: The testing basics are the same but the test plans are completely different. A test plan for a flight sim has to account for the open plan sandbox nature of the game world, where a game like X-COM the test plan had to be deep enough to ensure the text matrixes would cover, for example, all alien AI would work in all map types.
Craddock: How would you define the goal of QA? Is it more about tracking bugs, or is play balance an equally important (or more important) issue?
Luckett: This is the single most important question. The first goal is all about tracking bugs, but later in the cycle the focus switches to gameplay. Just because the game is more accessible due to bugs that stop progression being removed.
However, the trick here is to ensure the commercial pressures about releasing the game asap aren't put above the gameplay testing. It can be very easy for senior management to ask 'how many crash bugs are left in the game?' which is a quantifiable question, when they should be asking is the game playable and fun enough to release, which is a subjective question. The latter was very hard to argue when a release date and marketing spend were in jeopardy.
Craddock: QA get treated so unfairly. A game ships with bugs, and critics and gamers cry, "How could this have slipped past QA?!" Of course, it's probably much easier for several hundred thousand people to locate bugs as opposed to a small team of 5-10 individuals. Are there instances when QA knows about a bug, yet has to let the game ship anyway due to other factors such as business constraints?
Luckett: Some games were treated as 'stocking fillers' and were identified that they wouldn't sell so we shouldn't 'waste' time, effort and money on them. For these games the instructions were clear – make it bug free and functional, make the best of the gameplay testing in the timescales allowed but assuming no show stopping bugs, and the game will be released on time! Thankfully this didn't happen too often and as the industry matured these games were canned early on, so they didn't get passed the point of no return.
Craddock: How did you come to work on the UFO/X-COM project?
Luckett: As QA supervisors and lead tester I could pick and choose to a certain extent. Even from the early test builds I could tell this game was going to be excellent and a subject matter I really enjoyed, so I made sure this was my project.
Craddock: What was the general process of testing X-COM?
Luckett: The test plans we wrote for the game ensured we could carve up the game for delegation and testing, so the testing among the whole team was very structured. This ensured that all parts of the game were tested, as opposed to playing the game to win.
Craddock: What were some of the more memorable bugs you had to track down?
Luckett: Alien AI. We had to have a debug mode put in to be able to see the aliens at all times in their move, so we could make sure they weren't doing dumb things. Some of the hardest AI bugs were down to the aliens getting stuck between the tiles. The bugs we enjoyed the most were where we could play as the aliens or where their AI would have them suicide and win the battle for us.
Craddock: Of course, we must discuss the infamous difficulty bug, where loading a save-game file would reset the difficulty to "beginner." When and how did you become aware of the bug?
Luckett: A good few weeks after release. Our theory was that it worked correctly up until one of the last builds and was therefore missed.
Craddock: The save-game bug wasn't fixed before the game's release in the UK, but it was fixed ahead of the North American launch, correct?
Luckett: When a game is released it usually doesn't mean testing and development stops. We continued working on localised builds, builds for the US, and patches. This meant by definition the US version just had more time and therefore was cleaner.
Craddock: I enjoy seeing early builds of games because it interests me to see how their look, feel, and vibe changed over the course of development. Can you recall some of the ways X-COM's look, gameplay mechanics, and themes changed along the road to its release?
Luckett: I worked very closely with the lead artist John Reitze to help enhance the feel of the game, especially in areas that felt weak when playing--simple things like bullet holds on walls in the loading screens for example.
Craddock: What were some features that ended up getting cut, and that you wish would have made the final release?
Luckett: With every game, so many features get cut. As a tester you have to learn to get over that quickly or you can dwell on these and become disconnected form the team very quickly. In other words, I cannot remember any, but not because we didn't haven't any just that we had to move on. Nine times out of 10, features get cut due to time, though sometimes ideas on paper don't work out as fun in game.
Craddock: What was your reaction when you learned that Spectrum Holobyte wanted to cancel X-COM?
Luckett: We all knew they had it wrong because it was one of the best games we'd played in a long while. We also knew our UK management team knew this and they had a certain amount of autonomy. It's fair to say that without QA being so enthusiastic for the game, management wouldn't have known this and it may well have been cancelled.
Craddock: Why did you feel so passionately about the game?
Luckett: There was a mission where I won by throwing a grenade through an open roof. At that point I knew this game had a depth that non-other had before it.
Craddock: Julian and Nick relocated to Chipping Sodbury about three months before X-COM's release, and embarked on a crunch mode to finish the game. Do you remember the state the game was in around that time?
Luckett: The game was the same as all games that close to release: So close, yet so far. The crunch did help through getting the game done and make it better, though of course without it--and any deadline--there would have been less fatigue and therefore the bug fixed to re-opened ratio would have been a lot lower. I think if we had gone on another month in crunch we would have started to take some steps backwards. Luckily we didn't.
The game was in test for around six months, and even longer with the alpha builds. For the first two months or so Julian and Nick were based in their office so we would talk on a daily basis. For the final push, so a lot of the testing and reporting was done face to face. This would help identify bugs a lot quicker but it also had the advantage of us showing them what was fun or not, which exponentially made the game more fun. Over the last few months the game got better and better in leaps and bounds.
Craddock: I imagine that, as QA, you were involved in the crunch. What was your schedule like during that period?
Luckett: The crunch was nothing more than QA, Nick, Julian and the producer, Tim Roberts. Tim kept the pizzas flowing and we all were working from around 9:30 to midnight for six or seven days a week for about three months, and generally until 9:00 p.m. the couple of months leading up to that.
Craddock: Julian mentioned that many features of the game came together during those final months. Do you remember any last-second features that ended up being integral to the gameplay experience?
Luckett: Mostly changes to the line of sight that was tweaked right up to the last minute. These were key to the game being frustrating or fun.
Craddock: What are some other anecdotes from working on X-COM that you can share?
Luckett: Each of the testers had a special solider we all kept going throughout the testing. If these soldiers died there would be screams, tears from the testers. That said, they never really went because the load save game feature was tested A LOT when that happened.
Craddock: When did you and the other QA testers feel the game was done?
Luckett: Quantifiably, it was when there was no A and few B bugs left. Subjectively, testers never feel a game is done and can always be improved and bugs always get missed.
Craddock: How did you feel about the game prior to its release?
Luckett: We always knew we were onto something special. We could see all the ducks lining up from the first days it came into test.
Craddock: Looking back, where does X-COM rank in the many games you've worked on in your career?
Luckett: Probably number one as it was a game I would play outside of work. I have worked on many other fine games but this one would have been the one I would have pre-ordered as a gamer.
⁂
[ Scott Patterson, Audio Engineer, Doom 64 ]
Doom 64 was one of the most unique titles to grace Nintendo's 64-bit platform. It played like Doom 2—same enemies, same weapons, same power-ups—but pivoted from a straight-up action shooter to a slower-paced, more chilling experience, while still retaining plenty of run-and-gun fun.
Developer Midway wanted to do something different than previous ports on consoles such as the Super NES and PlayStation, and Doom 64 fit that bill. Two programmers shouldered the responsibility of devising the soundscape that would walk in lockstep with the new lighting engine, redesigned monsters, and larger, more exploration- and puzzle-solving-driven gameplay. As the project's audio engineer, Scott Patterson worked with composer Aubrey Hodges to create earworms that would burrow deep into the minds of players and give them nightmares for decades to come.
As part of a long read on the making of Doom 64 published on Shacknews, Patterson and I discussed his background in the industry, how he zeroed in on audio engineering, and the process of creating an aural environment for Hodges' soundtrack and sound effects to come to life.
David L. Craddock: How did you get started in the games industry?
Scott Patterson: As a teenager, I was interested in audio electronics and especially the audio effects boxes you would see at a guitarist's feet or in a recording studio. I tried to build my own audio mixer in high school but really didn't know what I was doing. I liked math and physics and decided to get a degree in electrical engineering.
During university I worked at some co-op jobs that weren't related to audio, but they did teach me how to prototype hardware devices on a breadboard with wire-wrap. At university in my final year I created a device with a CPU and memory and input hardware and output hardware so you could use foot pedals to trigger sequences of music in the MIDI format to a synthesizer. That project was a great chance to work on the design of both computer hardware and computer software and demonstrate the skills I had at that time.
I lived in Maryland, and after university, a friend I knew came to work at MicroProse Software which was just north of Baltimore. My friend got a job in their hardware division (MicroProse was making arcade games at the time) and told me I should talk to them about a job in their software division. So that is what I did, and I remember brining along my MIDI device in all its prototype wire-wrapped glory to my interview there. Hopefully that helped show my level of interest in audio and something must have worked as I got the job working in their audio software group.
Audio effects were fascinating to me in the early days, but also other things such as music sequencers and synthesizers and anything related to audio. Once I started working in game development, I was exposed to more topics and details about hardware and software and the constantly evolving world of game technology. I eventually branched out into other areas like 3d content creation tools, cinematics and camera systems, streaming systems, character development, gameplay physics, and multiplayer networking architecture.
Craddock: What brought you to Midway?
There are some overlaps with the story of Doom and when I started at MicroProse. The designer Sandy Peterson worked at MicroProse when I was there, and he went to work at id Software later to work on Doom. And I remember the designer and programmer Silas Warner, the creator of the original Castle Wolfenstein, also worked at MicroProse around the time I started there. I remember that game was uniquely suspenseful. Ever since starting at MicroProse in 1990, I've been employed as a video game developer.
I moved to San Diego in 1993 to work at Leland Interactive and a few friends I knew also moved over there. Leland Interactive became Williams Entertainment when they purchased the studio. Around that time, we moved to a big brand-new building and became developers for the newest game console platforms at that time which included the Nintendo 64.
I created WESS (the Williams Entertainment Sound System) which worked on the various PC audio hardware of those times and worked on the 3DO, Sony PlayStation, and Nintendo 64. WESS was used in many games we released including Doom 64.
Craddock: In general, what goes into developing a sound system?
Scott Patterson: Quite a few things. Knowing the hardware capabilities unique to each platform, knowing how to communicate with the hardware to get the control you need, tools that convert digital audio formats, tools that convert music sequencing formats, a run-time that can take the converted formats and trigger the audio voices and effects, a run-time that is configurable based on performance and memory restrictions.
Sometimes the audio system also has to deal with streaming data into memory to bring in different sets of audio data based on the game context or deal with synchronizing the audio playback with other things like animation or video playback. Topics found in many areas of programming are also present in audio programming such as dealing with caching, compression, decompression, and optimization.
Craddock: What was it like working with the Nintendo 64 hardware?
Scott Patterson: Well at first there wasn't any Nintendo 64 console hardware to develop with. It was one of the only times in game development that I remember a computer coming into an office that was intended to fully simulate the eventual hardware. That computer was the SGI Onyx. But of course, we got hardware later and that was connected to the SGI Indy computers that then became necessary for development.
The SGI machines ran an operating system called IRIX and it was the first time I used Unix and had to learn all of the unique Unix things you had to type at the command line to get that operating system to do the things you needed. For the software development you had to build command lists. To make the Nintendo 64 run-time play audio you had to build command lists and send them off to the lower level system to be processed. Similarly, to display the graphics you also had to build command lists and send them off to the lower level system to be processed.
Before there was console hardware, the SGI Onyx could process those command lists to show you what the console hardware would eventually be doing. Once the console hardware was available it could handle the processing of these command lists with hardware custom designed to be able to process those particular command lists and therefore less expensive to manufacture.
Craddock: What was your level of familiarity with Doom prior to working on Doom 64?
Scott Patterson: I think it is safe to say most game developers in the early 90s were aware of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom because of their technical and consumer successes and id Software was the leader in how to do high performance graphics on the PC graphics hardware available in those days.
Craddock: What was your collaboration with Aubrey Hodges as he designed the game's soundtrack and sound effects?
Scott Patterson: Aubrey was one of our audio designers at the studio and I remember he was a very versatile musician. I remember the ambient soundtrack he created in Doom 64 was very dark and creepy.
Aubrey would design and play the music for the game on his own gear and then would run my tools to convert the music and audio data to play it on the Nintendo 64. Also, for Nintendo 64 audio development I created a utility that allowed you to hookup a MIDI device to the SGI Indy and it would forward on the commands to my sound system running on the Nintendo 64. So you could play things live from a keyboard or trigger them from a sequencer to see how they sounded on the console.
Craddock: What quirks or specific implementations were unique to the N64 and Doom 64 in terms of developing the sound system?
Scott Patterson: Every platform has limitations on storage devices and memory. For the Nintendo 64 cartridges I'm sure we stored things compressed and brought them in to memory and decompressed them when necessary. For music, we played sequenced tracks of audio voices and for sound effects they were played in a similar way. There wasn't room for long pre-mixed audio tracks or long videos.
Craddock: What were some of the challenges involved in creating Doom 64's sound system?
Scott Patterson: I'm not sure I had specific challenges to Doom 64 development. I built the sound system to work for many games and many platforms and probably the first Nintendo 64 game that my sound system shipped with was Crusin' USA.
Craddock: Looking back on the project, what does Doom 64 mean to you today (especially given its forthcoming re-release later this month)?
Scott Patterson: It is nice to reminisce on how unique of an experience it was to work with SGI and Nintendo and id Software to make that game at that time.
⁂
[ Aubrey Hodges, Composer, Doom 64 ]
Midway's Doom 64 took Doom in a more horror-focused direction. While still heavy on action, it boasted darker visuals, a richer lighting system, and an eerie soundtrack that starts out low and eerie, and builds dread second by second, level by level. By the time you reach Hell, you feel as tortured as the souls of the damned wailing and moaning around you.
Aubrey Hodges, one of Midway's composers, wrote the fantastic soundtrack for Doom 64. As it turned out, however, I and countless other Doom fans came to his work in reverse. Hodges composed brand-new effects and tracks for the port of Doom that came to PlayStation One. Immediately after that project, Midway moved on to Doom 64, which combined larger levels with new visuals and Hodges' soundtrack, slightly modified to take advantage of the Nintendo 64's more robust hardware.
As part of a long read on the making of Doom 64 published on Shacknews, Hodges and I talked for over an hour about the creative process, how Doom PSX's and Doom 64's soundscape was something of a happy accident, the credit Taco Bell deserves for making the rogue's gallery of Imps, Pinky demons, and other horrors even more terrifying than they were on the PC in '93, home renovation, and more.
David Craddock: I didn't realize you live in Ohio. I'm about three hours away from you. People in the industry are always surprised when they find out I'm in Ohio. Like, "Who works in games out there?"
Aubrey Hodges: (laughs)
Craddock: But I guess today, in the world of remote work, there are more people out here than you'd think.
Aubrey Hodges: Yeah. I got tired of the high cost of living (out west) and decided I wanted to retire and build a studio out here, where the cost of living is reasonable. Now I don't have to worry about retirement as much.
Craddock: Yeah. I live in the Bay Area for four years. That's where I build a Rolodex of freelance clients and did interviews for box. Once I secured some remote jobs, my wife and I decided we should just move back home.
Aubrey Hodges: My brother lives in Cincinnati; another lives in Indianapolis; and my sister lives in Washington, D.C. I'm kind of right in the middle.
Craddock: My oldest sister is about 20 minutes away. My brother lives about five minutes away. And my other sister is about four hours away. It's nice that we're all relatively close to one another.
Hodges: I'm still renovating my home. I decided to do it by hand since I have these trade skills for some reason. Life is so weird: You end up building a home, and you help do the electrical work. Then you build another home and do the framing. You get all these skills. So I said, "I could buy an old house and renovate it myself." I didn't realize how much work it was actually going to be, but hindsight is 20/20.
Craddock: Have you found that you enjoy it?
Hodges: I enjoy the puzzle-solving factor. You look at an old home and see how they built something or (installed) something. You say, "Hmm. We don't have materials like that now. What can I get that will blend in them to feel authentic, but still be structurally sound, and meet code?" That's another thing: Some things they did (to my home) were fine back in the day, but today, with modern electricity... I mean, this place was built in 1870. So me going back and redoing everything, I have to be very particular to make sure it meets code, yet still feels like it maybe could have back then.
Craddock: Have there been any renovation projects where you haven't been able to do that for any reason?
Hodges: It was too expensive to get one of the chimneys that someone had concreted in. God knows why they did that. There were a million other ways. To try to restore that would have been cost prohibitive to the point of insanity, so I didn't do that. But generally speaking, I try to do kung fu with the wind, rather than against the wind. If I see the house as needing a certain thing, I kind of roll with that.
And in some cases, I adapt my thinking. For example, dry wall is a cool substance in a lot of cases, but it creates problems: When you're one person, it's hard to install unless you're a professional and know all the tricks. I went with tiled ceilings with this old, almost Victorian-era tile that you put on one at a time. The cool thing is, if there's a problem, you just pull down one tile, look in, and say, "Oh, there's a plumbing issue here. I can fix that." Rather than having to rip your drywall ceiling apart.
It's been an adventure, but it's tiring. From seven this morning until around 11:30, I was in the attic pulling out installation that looks like it was put in, in the '20s or '30s, and putting in new installation. That was a tiring, tiring job. But the goal is to create an attic space where I can store things. I have about a billion musical instruments and need someplace to put them, other than around the kitchen floor, which is where they are now.
Craddock: (laughs) I wondered. I see lots of guitars behind you, and I thought, The cases have to be around there somewhere.
Hodges: That's a tenth of my collection. I don't know how many guitars I have. I don't need as many because with today's technology and a couple of guitars, you can sound like almost any guitar. But some of mine are now hard to get, or special to me in one way or another. The Doom (PSX and 64) theme was done on the Ibanez (guitar) back there, so I keep that around. The Madden theme was done Brian Moore. So, you know, for various reasons I keep these instruments.
Craddock: I'm really fascinated by these extracurricular activities, and I hope I'm not reaching here, but you said one aspect of home renovation you enjoy is the puzzle-solving aspect. I wonder: Is that the case with creating music, and music for games specifically? Meaning, having to create a certain sound for a certain environment, mood, character, and so forth.
Hodges: Yeah. I think one reason I've been successful in the gaming space is because I'm a gamer. Not a one-dimensional gamer where it's like, "Oh, I play deathmatch and have good twitch reflexes." No. I'm a gamer in every aspect of my life. I play D&D and 50 other tabletop games. I play MMOs. I LARP. I love figuring things out and adapting, and using strategy. That's just how my mind works, even when I write music: I love to explore unique possibilities for things.
That's sort of how the new style I created for Doom happened.
Craddock: The motif for Doom's port to PlayStation and, later, Doom 64?
Hodges: Right. I was trying to go with the old feel for Doom (Bobby Prince's soundtrack on PC), but it was difficult because of my restrictions. I was having trouble making it sound badass enough, awesome enough, to be rock and roll. It almost sounded more humorous and comical, like a parody of rock and roll. That's one criticism of some people who aren't really a fan of the original Doom's (soundscape) used to level at it: Because of MIDI music—which is not Bobby Prince's fault—
Craddock: No, no. It was 1993. What did they expect him to do?
Hodges: Because of that, Doom's soundscape sounded almost funny rather than cool. And I was hitting the same damn walls on the PlayStation that Bobby had hit earlier. So I started experimenting: "What can I do the sounds I can squeeze into memory?" As I was messing around with stuff, I discovered the symbol in kanji for the root key. I didn't have an American version of the software yet because there wasn't one, so I was having to look at the kanji symbols and figure out what they went, and write a lexicon.
When you messed with that, taking it way down into negative numbers, the sounds were crazy. It sounded like my room was going to explode. I was thinking, Man, this is creepy stuff. It's so weird. What is this? I discovered patterns where the more complex the sound was as I lowered it, it became more deliciously weird and scary. Then I developed techniques to get the results I wanted as I lowered them.
It was very cool to hear, and something I felt could really lend some of the same emotional responses while playing the game as the more frenetic music did. Instead of pumping you up by getting your adrenaline flowing, I'm pumping you up with nervousness and twitchiness, and anxiety, based on fear—the horror genre approach. It still made you feel nervous and on edge, and that was the goal.
Craddock: I learned about Doom from a friend in Sunday school, which I guess was apropos. We're sitting in class and my church friend says, "Hey, you can kill demons from Hell!" I've played it since '93, and I love Bobby Prince's soundtrack. But from the moment I played the Doom port on PlayStation, that version became my favorite—even more than the original on PC—and a huge reason for that was your soundscape. So, I suppose I should be flabbergasted that that direction was a happy accident, based on your account, but that sort of thing does happen quite often in game development.
Hodges: Yeah, kind of. I always liked the feel of synthesizers for those weird, dystopian sounds. It always puzzled me that there wasn't a lot of that in gaming. I always figured, "Well, we can't do it because we're forced to use MIDI, and it doesn't really do that." But it kind of was a bit of a happy accident: Finding that sound that the PlayStation's chip could actually do, and was tiny enough in memory.
There's a 500K area on the PlayStation for sound. Everything had to fit into that: your sound driver, your MIDI file, your samples, and the sound effects. I only got about 180K for sounds and samples, and the MIDI file; I had to leave some left over for sound effects. That amount of memory is so minuscule. I had to sample at, like, 5K to fit anything in.
The interesting thing is if you sample at that size, you start lowering the bitrate, and it starts artifacting and making strange audio defects. But when you run it through the high-end reverb (reverberation effects) processor on the PlayStation, it makes your sounds sound like "lo-fi hi-fi." You've got this crappy source going through a really high-end processor. It was like, "Wow, that sounds really purposeful and awesome." Then I started combining different reverb—I think there were eight or 10—with different kinds of sounds, seeing how they responded at different settings for those reverbs.
The hard part was, tech and approach aside, when you start writing dark, ambient music, it's a very emotional and dark evocation from you in terms of your psyche, the mindset you have to be in to write like that. I approached it almost like a method actor where I tried to get into a dark mindset. You almost need therapy every time you finish writing a song. You're letting your emotions get into it, and letting (dark ambience) permeate every part of you.
It's emotionally tiring, but it's why each piece (of Doom PSX/64's soundtrack) is so unique. I throw myself into it. It's almost a sort of therapy—composing therapy. You should write a book on that and make some money.
Craddock: I did notice a progression to the soundtrack, such as this track for level 1, this track for level 2. Those early tracks were a different type of creepy compared to, say, five to 10 levels later, as you're getting closer to Hell: You're hearing what sounds like babies crying, all this wailing and these strange noises. My mindset changed over time; I felt more and more disturbed as I pushed into the game. It really changed Doom for me. Before, I just ran around and shot everything that moved.
Hodges: The difference is that previously, the music you heard in the original Doom was clearly a soundtrack. It was music being played over a game. That gives you some nice energy, but it doesn't immerse you because it's not diegetic. You can't imagine this music actually being played in the place you're in. Who's playing it? The Imps?
What I did was combine some aspects of traditional musicality—there are riffs and motifs with strings and other instruments that weave in and out. That suggests a soundtrack somewhere out there in the ethos. But the other sounds feel like they could be there: That's what you're hearing (in the space you're exploring). Your hairs stand up because you're hearing cues like the babies crying. You're going, "What the hell? Are they torturing children somewhere?"
I tried to bring in these weird little cues that were as much sound effects and soundscape as they were score. It creates a combination of score and diegetic soundscaping that makes people like they're there; they're experiencing the Hell that is the levels as (players) progress.
Craddock: I think my first brush with your work on Doom was Doom 64. I played the PlayStation port, which shared your audio with Doom 64 much later. It was only then I realized, "Oh, Aubrey Hodges created all those sounds and tracks for this version first." Doom 64 was even darker and creepier than the PS1 port, since you all were able to establish your own art style. In some ways, did you feel Doom 64 was a better pairing for the sound you created, given that it wasn't someone else's game before it was yours?
Hodges: Not "better," but maybe more of a natural fit.
Craddock: More harmonious?
Hodges: All the lighting and that extra stuff helped (my soundscape) immerse you even deeper. The way we handled textures was smoother, so it just seemed a more high-end feel to me. What's interesting was, one of the tricks I was able to do was, because of the way memory worked on the 64, all of the sounds were basically in one giant pool, rather than having to be loaded individually as tiny packets.
I was able to make lots of different samples that could be used in all the songs, and then very carefully curate when, and which part of, a sample to use. That way it never became homogeneous; each level needed to be unique. It still let me use sound effects as musical instruments, per se, which was cool. In one instance I took the plasma gun—I can't remember which song—and (the weapon's laser-fire sound effect) is being played so low that it goes from boom-boom-boom-boom to booooooooooom, really low. I said, "Damn! That is wicked cool!" And it didn't cost any memory at all. I loved that about the Nintendo 64.
So, Doom 64 had darker theme and feel, and that let me take (my audio) even further. I would've done more if there'd been enough room, but there wasn't. Nintendo's cartridge-based system was so limited.
Craddock: I'm glad you brought that up. Part of me wondered, Since Doom 64 used the same soundtrack as Doom PSX, was implementing it into Doom 64 a matter of rearranging a few things and, presto, done? What was the process of scoping or rescoping the soundtrack for the 64?
Hodges: It was conceptually the same, but I used a different toolset. And it had different memory constraints, which were pretty heavy. I had to adapt my technique quite a bit to make it worked on the Nintendo. Even its reverb unit was different. Everything was different.
I approached it conceptually the same, and I had that in my back pocket: "Okay, I know this works. Let me see if I can make this machine do magic like the other did." It was just a more difficult process because of how the reverb worked, and having a very, very limited pool to stick everything. I think all the sounds and music, all of it, fit into one megabyte. I had to be very selective, very careful. Even the sound effects, I had to slightly shorten them all rather than gutting a few. I took the reverb tails off the sound, and used the Nintendo's built-in (reverb).
It was tedious. I just went and did all that work first so it wouldn't spoil the artistic part of (the process) when I got to it. I did all the stupid crap no one wants to do first to get it all out of the way: got the sounds to fit, got reverb working, all of that. Then I approached the songs as, "Okay, let me get one or two interesting flavors made just for this song. Then I'll add whatever's left." But I had to fit all that into memory, and how many levels there would be, and how many songs that meant I'd be able to do. That wasn't very fun.
But once the sounds were in, the instruments were loaded, and I knew what I wanted to do, I was able to just be creative with what I had. One aside to any musicians and composers who want to get into the industry: The biggest problem I see with younger composers today is to have too much at their fingertips. Too much choice. And it paralyzes them. Too much choice is a bad thing. It just absolutely cripples people. They go to work on a song, they pull up their samples, and they've got 820 different synthesizers, 50 samplers, and in each one they've got 600 base sounds and 5,000 drum sets.
Just, for fuck's sake, pick one and write. Pick one and go. Don't look over your shoulder, constantly criticizing and tweaking your work to death. Move forward, not backward. I've never doubted a damn choice I've made in my entire career. I pick one, say, "That's a nice-tasting base; I'll use that." I've got a guitar. I'll pull up a sound that sounds cool. Say, "Ooh, that's tasty. Let's write a song with that." Then I move forward. I get the song done, and then maybe on the next song I'll go, "Oh, I used my Ibanez on that song. Maybe I'll use the Brian Moore on this one. Let's see what that feels like." And I'll write a song with that.
People get so worried that there's a right choice and a wrong choice. There isn't. There's just the choice you make.
Craddock: I'm so glad you said that. As a writer, I have people say to me, "What program should I use to write?" I tell them, "That's really the least important decision to make." A lot of people love this program called Scrivener. It lets you organize your outlines and notes. But then I'll hear someone say, "I was traveling with my laptop, but I didn't install Scrivener, but I couldn't write." I'm like, seriously? A blank screen and a cursor should be all you need. Just go.
Hodges: One of my close friends is Bob Salvatore, the fantasy writer.
Craddock: I've talked with him a couple of times. I know him as well.
Hodges: Isn't that accent funny? (laughs) You never think of him with an accent. But the funny thing is, he liked to listen to me write when I was doing work on the game (Kingdoms of Amalur) for Curt Schilling. Bob liked to hear the composing process going on while he wrote on his laptop. I thought he'd have some crazy program. I went over, and he was using Notepad. (laughs)
Craddock: Exactly! And he's the perfect example. He worked in a factory before his writing took off. Bob's a guy I consider—and I mean this in the most complimentary of ways—he's what I call a blue-collar creative. He just gets in there and works. He's not waiting on a muse to show up. There is no muse. Just work. Just do it.
Hodges: Yeah, he just goes. It was fascinating that he didn't have (special software). People ask me, "What software do you use?" Honestly, almost all of them. Depends on my move. The other day I was messing around in Acid because I felt like it. They released a new version, and I wanted to see what it was like. It's not about the tool. It's about you and whatever tool you've got. I've heard some badass music come off some (cheap tools). This guy had a little keyboard with a tiny sequencer, but man, he can use that stuff.
Because I think that way, when I got my hands on the sound tools for Sony and Nintendo, I just used what I had. That's the tool I had in front of me.
Craddock: That's how the game industry worked, especially back then. A lot of the most creative solutions came from restrictions: no tools, shoestring budgets.
Hodges: Yeah, dude. I came from the era where the sound guy was the musician was the programmer was the tester. You did it all yourself. Nowadays it's like a music set: 50 guys doing this, 50 guys doing that. But the funny thing is, the worry of having to do it all made me, forced me, to be a very decisive creative. I make a decision, and I move forward. The decision's made; there's no going back. The game's got to get made, and when you look at your schedule of milestones, you're like, "Damn! That's coming up. I'd better go."
And this isn't even confidence in myself. It's confidence in understanding what's important from what isn't important. Younger composers may not understand that. You can do something incredibly intricate and amazingly detailed, but it could be the absolute worst thing for a game at the moment (your work) needs to go into the game. Maybe at that moment you need to underscore something in the game; it doesn't need to be, "Look at me! I'm a great composer!" You need to understand the emotional connection players are making at that moment in the game. What do the designers want the emotional connection to be at that moment in the gameplay? That's your responsibility is as a composer.
Craddock: You've mentioned differences in your process between Doom PSX and Doom 64. With Doom, you had a complete game to reference as you worked. For Doom 64, what assets did you reference as the game was coming together?
Hodges: On the PlayStation, I wrote music in these environments that had differing degrees of evil and twistedness to them. I classified them loosely as, "Okay, these are dark, but you're not in the bowels of Hell yet," and "These are dark, but the environment has just been ruined," like the command centers where you hear all the bleeps and bloops, but it's been fouled and ruined. Then there are places in and of themselves, like the Hell levels, that are innately evil. Those should come at you from an even more twisted place, like the crying babies and things like that.
Once I did that, I understood what music generally fit each kind of level. Then we had to do this memory exercise where we looked at how big the level we had to stream in (as players navigated through the game) was, and then how much memory we had for the reverb. The big space reverb was around 65K, which was pretty big. But the pipe reverb was around 8K. We almost had to pick which reverb (to use), and then which MIDI file to use: how long was the piece? can it fit into memory. We had to look at the level, the reverb, and the MIDI file, and then figure out which one of the six or seven pieces that were of the flavor we wanted could fit.
That's how we (matched music to levels on PlayStation. It sounds ridiculous, but it was the only way to fit all the music and get the levels to load correctly. There was a handful of cases where I might have picked a different piece, but it wouldn't fit.
Craddock: And Nintendo 64 was different, you mentioned, because of its memory specifically.
Hodges: Yeah. All the data was there at all times. That was way more fun: I could write specifically for the level.
Craddock: You obviously have a grasp on gaming hardware as a musician. I know Scott Patterson was the audio engineer on Doom 64. What did your collaboration with him entail?
Hodges: Scott was awesome. He sat two doors down from me. At the time I was the manager of the audio department, so he was writing the software that drove all this stuff on our side of things. There was the stuff Nintendo gave us, and then the stuff that needed to happen from our way of making stuff for the game and our connection to it.
Scott and I worked together all the time on making sure this all played and didn't have technical glitches. We had the same problems everyone has at first: little technical things where you get glitches in playback, missing voices. The stuff you get when you're making a brand-new system. Then there was the issue of how I interfaced with (the console hardware) and what I could and couldn't do. I wanted to make sure I had it write, because all of our instructions were in Japanese, which I didn't understand.
It was nice working with a guy who was very technical, and who also understood where I was coming from as a composer and an artist. I made sure I knew what the rules were: How much memory did I really have? There was a difference between what Nintendo, for example, says you have available, and what you can actually use once the drivers are all in and working. You don't think about that stuff, but then Scott's telling you that you do, and I'd say, "I guess I can't do what I thought I could do."
I had a good relationship with him, and with the whole team. It was a fun thing to work on, and a very meaningful project. Doom had such a big following. Everybody loved it, so we knew there were going to be a lot of eyes on (our work). And ears. (laughs) We wanted to make sure what we were doing was going to be received well, especially since I was taking it in such a different direction.
Craddock: It's interesting, because Bobby Prince sewed some seeds for that horror direction. Most of his soundtrack is action-focused, but the sixth map of episode two, for example, "Halls of the Damned," is slow and creepy. So your direction felt natural in a way. Doom is action. Doom is horror. Doom is both.
Hodges: Yeah. It's hard to say how things would've gone if I'd have gone more in the direction of (action). But there's a darkness to Doom. There are almost two aspects of the darkness to it: The Hell that wants to rise up, crush, and destroy; and the darkness of the violence you enact, a one-man wrecking crew on that Hell to smash it down. I think (Prince's) gut instinct was to push the, "You're the wrecking crew. You're a badass," rather than the Hell that's seeping in and trying to overrun everything. I wanted to blend the two and bring a darker foreboding out of it.
Craddock: Now that I think about it, the composers are this four-headed monster. You have Bobby Prince, who composed the original soundtrack. There's you, who steered into the horror direction. There's the sound team on Doom 3. Then there's Mick Gordon, who's really playing to, as you describe it, the badass Doom direction. We've reached a point where a Doom composer can say, "I know what Doom is and what it can be, so here's my interpretation."
Hodges: Yeah. I'm just happy to see people still playing it after all these years.
Craddock: On that note, Doom 64 will be re-released alongside Doom Eternal on March 20. What are your feelings on a new generation of players getting to experience your work?
Hodges: I think it's probably going to have a dual audience. On the one hand, you'll have the Doom audience who have loved (Doom 64) for years and are glad it's out again. But you'll also get a new audience, all the younger people who didn't play it back then. It's going to be interesting to see their reaction to that work. I played it not long ago just to do some comparative analysis on how the sound came out of the output (of the game) compared to my master files, to find out what I'd need to do to re-master that soundtrack. I got caught up in playing it, and realized I'm as bad as it now as I was then. It's hard!
Craddock: It is really hard. It's a different style of Doom in many ways.
Hodges: The (N64) controller was wonky. I never got used to those things. It just felt too mushy to me.
Craddock: I'd never ask you to pick a favorite song, but if there's a song that comes to mind when you think of Doom PSX or Doom 64, could you talk a little about the process of creating it?
Hodges: Some of this has to do with how I make music. At the time, I was really starting to get serious with my cello. I play a lot of different instruments, and the cello at that time was one that was inspiring me. It has a deep, rich timbre that is exciting to hear in just about any music. At the same time I was getting into that, some of the movies and music coming out, like Bram Stroker's Dracula had that deep, rich, instrumental feeling in the orchestra. I loved that tone.
Meanwhile, I'd just gotten my Ibanez. Its pickups were meaner, almost designed for heavy metal. It has this big, chunky sound, and it kind of reminded me of the cello a little bit. It had the timbre of the cello, but rock and roll. Then it was time to make (Doom PSX). I thought of all the work previous, and the dark, ambient direction was fomenting. I thought, How do I blend the darkness of this weird, textural-based (audio) with a theme?
I started thinking in terms of playing riffs that feel like they stem from that. If it's just straight orchestra, that's cool. But too much in a movie way. If it's just rock, it's cool, but too much in a heavy-metal way. Blending so I get the strings, and the low incoming (audio), and building up with a guitar so it's like, BAM! Just smacks you in the face. That was the nice blend that felt good to me. I said, "Let's blend some genres, here." I'd done that in past work, in Quest for Glory years ago. I'd blended the sort of Transylvanian, Middle Eastern stuff, with stuff from Russia and that area, with rock and roll.
That was fresh in my mind, too: The idea that you could blend these styles to make a new style, a Doom style. I would bring in hints of technology to make it feel more futuristic. That main theme set the tone for the blending of styles and the darkness of it. I think it's in C minor, which feels suitably dark.
Following that, the dark and scary stuff such as "Lamentation," which is the track that has the crying babies—that has a similar flavor where I'm swimming around in a low to mid EQ (equalization) texture, that cello, almost bass range of notes that just feel delicious, especially when you add a little reverb. Then you throw in things way over the top in the higher range. It makes the juxtaposition unnerving. Then you add real sounds in and use them almost like a musical instrument. It makes your hair stand up, and feels stylistically in the same realm as the theme.
There were so many time and sample constraints, so I couldn't make the theme as big and awesome as I wanted. But I got it close enough. I got to a point where I said, "Okay, this is really cool, but I have a deadline. I'm moving on." I did the Doom 20th anniversary soundtrack, and the Doom 64 anniversary soundtrack as well, gave me an opportunity to re-hit those things with a modern ear, and some real instruments. I used my trumpet, and of course, my cello.
Craddock: I don't want to misuse the term "Foley," because it's so often boiled down to simplistic terms: "I'm tapping a pencil on a desk." But I loved the grunts and growls of the enemies in Doom PSX and Doom 64. How did you make them?
Hodges: Those started with a Taco Bell cup. I was out with some friends from the audio department, and we went to Taco Bell, or Taco Hell, as I used to call it. They had some special, and it came with the biggest cup I'd ever seen in my life. I swear to God, the top of it was huge. I was like, "God, that is the biggest cup." So I had to have it, and I used it for Mountain Dew.
But toward the end, it was so big that as I was talking with somebody, I had it close to my mouth, and (my voice) echoed. I thought, I could do some fun stuff with this. I emptied it, and when we got back to the studio, I said, "Hey, hit the mic. Turn it up and see what I can do with this thing." I took the cup and went: (growling noises). It was like, "Wow, we can do crazy stuff with this cup."
After that stuff was recorded, I ran it through different things to make buckets of weird sounds and effects. Then I figured out which monsters they belonged to.
Craddock: Even back then, the "Doom" name carried a lot of weight. When you were coming up with new sounds for things like the shotgun, which was and still is iconic, was there any weight of expectation? Like, "This needs to be awesome because people love this gun."
Hodges: One tricky thing was I had to make sure every sound was not the original sound. Bobby (Prince had the rights to his music). I don't know much about the situation, but I like him and I like id, and I didn't want to get in the middle of it. But id made it clear to me that I had to document every single thing I did. Where did I get the sound? Did it come from a library? Did I make it? Do I have the recording to prove I went and shot guns?
I also wanted to make sure I had enough of something that felt iconic. With the shotgun, it was the chick-chick. I had to make sure that was there in a form that had the right cadence, because that's what people were used to. I just sort of looked at it like, "Okay, I'll do every sound as close as I can to the spirit of the original game, but my own take on it."
The hard part was to pick and choose which (audio) was going to be 5K, or 8K, or 11K. The size was just a nightmare. A handful—maybe about 15 sounds or so, weapons being one of the categories—had 18K or 15K. Something where you had some detail. The boom, the explosion of the shot, I couldn't afford in memory, so I had to go back down to 5K or 6K. It was an interesting combination because what it did was it accentuated certain sounds, since the detail was there, so your ear picked up on it. And it diffused other sounds.
For example, when you shoot the rocket launcher, you get the, Pssshheeeeeew, right (after firing) that feels really high-end and nice. But when the rocket hits, you get (grainy explosion sound). But that's cool because you can really go to town with that and trigger a lot of those explosions really quick; I didn't want (the sound) to be overwhelming. There were some interesting, nice things that happened because of my own limitations, and having to fit into RAM, so I tried to pick and choose which sounds needed high-end treatment, and it was mostly weapon sounds and a handful of sounds you'd hear a lot, like the door-opening (audio).
Craddock: Sounds you'd be hearing over and over, so they're not grating.
Hodges: Yeah, yeah. You hear them so much, like the little (item) pickup sound. It has to be good because you'll hear it a trillion times a map. I don't know how (Doom 64's) audio would feel now, not having those restrictions. It's the world I worked in, and I wanted to make it sound as cool as I could, and make the right tradeoffs so it was fun to play.
Craddock: Maybe that goes back to what we discussed earlier: If you were doing it today, you'd have all these choices and might stymie yourself. Whereas back then, you had restrictions, you worked within them, and you came up with something cool and creative.
Hodges: That's just it. You had what you had. Even something as simple as the guitar sound in Doom, in the theme: I had a Marshall preamp, I had a microphone... and a dream! (laughs) I just made that thing, and there it is. I didn't have any other stuff at the time.
Craddock: I mentioned Doom 64 being re-released. You talked about how long-time fans would play it again, and a new audience will experience your and Midway's interpretation of Doom. Since we've spent an hour looking back on it, what do Doom PSX and Doom 64 mean to you in the context of your career?
Hodges: It's a very, very special (project). It was humbling and very fulfilling that id and Midway believed in me, and let me be creative for them. Not just do a job for them, but let me be creative and take them in maybe a very risky direction. They were great people, and gave me a lot of freedom to explore as an artist. That always feels fantastic.
The fact that fans reacted so well to it... I mean, here we are 20-some years later and I still get emails about it. I take that seriously. If someone takes the time to email me about it, I'll respond if I can. It's just nice to know that it meant something to so many people. It was a chance for me to really be creative and try things that were maybe hadn't been done before, and have it work.
It's that nice feeling you get when you have an idea that you can do something, and you're not sure how you're going to do it. So you try, and you get some support from people who encourage you—and then it works, and it has the result you intended. People say, "Wow. This is new and different, and we like it."
It's interesting. I didn't intend this, it just happened: Because it doesn't cleanly, neatly fit into any fad or style, it's lasted all these years. It still feels great; it doesn't feel dated, because it's not trying to be (part of) a style. It exists in its own little pocket. I've had the chance to develop the full feeling of projects, but it wasn't as dangerous. Doing what I did on Doom was a very risky (decision), and I'm glad I took the risk. I'm glad I didn't always play it safe.
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[ Pete Hines, Bethesda Softworks ]
When you think Bethesda, two names likely come to mind: Todd Howard, the studio's director and executive producer; and Pete Hines, global senior vice president. In fact, you may think of Hines first. Besides juggling countless other plates, he serves as the public face of the ZeniMax-owned studio and others under its umbrella, including id Software.
While attending QuakeCon 2019 on behalf of Shacknews, I caught up with Hines to pick his brain on how Bethesda gauged id's suitability for acquisition back in 2009, why he struggles to play first-person shooters, the level of input Bethesda exercises on external projects, and how Battle Mode fragged deathmatch to be crowned the de facto multiplayer mode for Doom Eternal. You can read about the making of Doom Eternal in Hell Razer, one of my many long reads available exclusively on Shacknews.
David L. Craddock: We haven't had a chance to talk in a while, so I'll open with a question dating back 10 years.
Pete Hines: (laughs)
Craddock: What was your familiarity with id Software's games as a player prior to ZeniMax's acquisition of the studio?
Hines: I may have played Marathon (by Bungie), but otherwise I never played first-person shooters because they made me motion sick. The first time I can definitely remember trying a first-person shooter was Battlefield 1942, because they (DICE) released that demo. Todd Howard and Todd Vaughn were playing during lunch and said, "It makes me really motion-sick."
I started taking half a Dramamine half an hour before lunch so I could play with them. I got to the point where I could get by on that. I finished Rage 2, but all of the id games, to this day, makes me motion sick. I was just talking to (Marty Stratton and Hugo Martin) about how I never finished Doom 2016. I can't play it for more than 30 minutes at a time. I talked to Carmack about it a few years ago: "John, what is this about? Is it the framerate? The head bob?" We tried tinkering. Robert Duffy (id's CTO) offered some suggestions like changing certain settings. Nothing helped. It still gets to me.
As a result, I knew of id's games, but I had to say, "Yeah, I can't play your stuff." Rage might have been the first id game I finished. I'd played a little bit of Doom 3 while we were doing Doom 3: BFG Edition, but it was the same thing: 20 to 30 minutes, and then say, "Well, that's all for today."
Craddock: I also had to play Doom 3 in fits, but because it terrified me.
Hines: Yeah, I don't do great with that either. But the motion-sick thing kept me from playing most id games. Quake is just insanely fast and, for me, vomit-inducing.
Craddock: I was going to ask if maybe it was something about gaming tech in the '90s versus now, but if you couldn't finish Doom 2016...
Hines: Nope. Certain games I'm okay with. I can play Wolfenstein, but even that, depending on what's going on, like in The New Order, I'd feel queasy and have to stop. Some games bother me, and some don't.
Craddock: What I've noticed about the Bethesda catalog, and maybe this is just me, but between studios like Bethesda, Arkane, and id, you're able to put out a diverse catalog without any one game cannibalizing others.
Hines: I understand that question. We think about that a little in terms of, "Well, Doom Eternal, Rage 2, and Wolfenstein all at the same time..."
Craddock: Still spread out a little, though.
Hines: Yeah, but from a release standpoint. There's a reason why we didn't show more of Doom Eternal at E3 (2019). One was that QuakeCon made more sense. The other was, we're showing a lot on Rage 2, and announcing a new Wolfenstein. We said, "If we showed more of Doom Eternal, people might say, 'Which id first-person shooter should we...?'" It wouldn't feel like cannibalizing in terms of which one to play, but it might have in terms of gamers asking, "Which first-person shooter should we pay attention to?" Even though they are all different.
In fairness, we think about that with (most games). Like, with Doom versus Wolfenstein, one is a more grounded first-person shooter. But also, what is Arkane doing? Stuff we're doing around one game versus another, and could there be a cannibalization in terms of focus if we're speaking to what you might consider to be a Bethesda audience. That audience might say, "I like a variety of games. I'm interested in what you're doing next." Even if the release dates are different, too much at the same time could result in not getting their attention on everything.
There's enough noise in the industry already. Let's not exacerbate the problem by adding our own noise. We do think about staggering (games) in terms of: what are we teasing? what are we launching?
Craddock: How much does fan demand factor into that? For instance, at last year's E3, fans were asking, "Where's Elder Scrolls VI?" I know Todd came out and said, "Here's the logo. We're working on it." Was that just a way of saying, "It's happening, but we don't have any more to say right now?"
Hines: That one in particular, I and a number of folks on my team in marketing and communications said, "Look, in the context of showing off Fallout 76, if we don't give an update on where the studio is going, and you just talk about Fallout without anything else, people are going to leap to conclusions that aren't true, and that we aren't providing any information to counter."
Of course, it had been sniffed out that we had the trademark for Starfield. Everyone assumed it was Bethesda Game Studios (developing the game), but they didn't actually know for certain. I saw stuff like, "Oh, Snowfall! That sounds like Arkane" and "Deathloop sounds like a Shinji (Mikami game)." In the case of 2018, fans knew we were making something called Starfield. So we said, "Let's put a face on it: it's a single-player thing, a roleplaying game." That helped us avoid our player base saying, "Oh, BGS isn't making single-player stuff anymore." That's not remotely true, but if we don't say so, we're leaving them to speculate.
It was the time of year for our studio to lay out our next three projects. That addressed that, yes, we're still making single-player stuff, and give context for, "We're making this, and then this, and then Elder Scrolls VI." We still get the question of, "Where's ES6?" but at least people know that Starfield is our next game. We wanted to get ahead and be more transparent. We'd never done anything like that before, not just for BGS, but any of our studios. We wanted to lay that out and be clear on where we're headed.
Craddock: When you look at studios such as Arkane or id for potential acquisition or a partnership, do you view them in terms of, "Here's what we're doing internally at BGS. We don't do what they're doing, so this would be a good complement?" What are the factors?
Hines: No, not really. First of all, the way in which we go about acquiring a studio is never from a, "We should acquire them" (perspective). In every case, it was either someone we were already working with—like Arkane with what became Dishonored—or like with id. With id, we started those conversations not with, "We don't do as much as we'd like in the first-person-shooter space, and we'd like to acquire you." It was, "We have a lot of respect for you. We like what you make, and want to see if there's an opportunity to work together."
As those conversations went down a path of talking what that might look like, at some point somebody said, "Does it make sense for you becoming a part of us? Would we gain efficiency?" It's all about, who do we want to work with? Who makes the kind of stuff that resonates with us? It's never toward an eye with BGS, because BGS does BGS stuff. It's more, "What do they make? What are they good at? Where do they want to go, and how does that fit with us?" We don't have to acquire everybody we work with. We don't own the folks who work on (Elder Scrolls) Legends. It just depends on the fit.
Craddock: Rage 2 is interesting because that IP started as an in-house project, just like Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake. But like Wolfenstein, it's moved to external studios. How was the decision made to pass Rage 2 to another studio so id could focus on Doom and Quake?
Hines: So, id had farmed Wolfenstein out. They had done that kind of thing before. In the case of new Wolfenstein games, a core of folks had left the studio, but we'd talked to them before: "Is there something we could do together? Where are you in terms of looking for projects?" They said, "We're looking to set up another studio. We want to work on a title for you. Is anybody doing anything with Wolfenstein? Because we have ideas to do something really cool with that."
In the case of Rage 2, id was fully focused on Doom and Quake Champions. We had no solid plans for a Rage sequel anytime soon, and, again, in the process of keeping in touch with studios—what they're doing, who does what—Todd Vaughn had a conversation with Avalanche: "These folks have done open-world stuff. We have this idea to do a first-person thing, and with their open-world sensibilities, Rage 2 seems like a good fit." They had cool ideas for taking what id did (with Rage 1) and adding to it and changing it.
It was all about time, place, and talent.
Craddock: After Doom 2016, what was the level of input from Bethesda into id? Given that the game was a success, was it a matter of checking in periodically and letting id do their thing?
Hines: No, no. With all of our studios, it's more collaborative. That's not to say, "We want to sit down at the table and give you all our ideas for a Doom sequel, and you can tell us yours." It's more, "What are your thoughts? What do you have planned?" Then we'll ask lots of questions: What about this? How are you addressing that?
What our production folks and people on our team do with them is, we view our job in marketing and communications as starting before a game even gets green-lit. We start with, "How are you going to talk about what you're making? How are you making sure to be clear about what you're communicating?" That's important to work out before you go up on stages and talk about a product. For example, we might say, "Well, you're saying this, but I think what you mean is this, so you might want to say it this or that way. The other way might cause people to get confused or jump to the wrong conclusions."
We work with them up-front to learn what their ideas are, and their pitch for it. "Tell us what you want to do," and then we provide feedback and ask questions to help them shore up how they're thinking. And again, this starts years before a product comes out, knowing that everything is up for being changed. We like to know what the studio wants to do, and helping them home in and refine that.
Or be prepared for, "This is going to come up. How are you going to answer the question?" Half the time, we might say, "This is going to come up from the community or press in 2019, because we're thinking about it. So we might as well figure out how to answer: 'How are you doing this?' and 'Why are you doing this?'" That gets everyone used to explaining decisions. We're just a sounding board for the studio to help them figure out, "Oh, well it's because of this, this, and this." Then we can say, "Oh, well, you should definitely say that. This is where this idea comes from."
If you listen to Hugo (Martin) explain decisions behind design, just the way he does on stage, there's so much there that provides context for things you hadn't thought about before in terms of why designers do what they do, or the way enemies involve and why that's important. He starts to expound, and we say, "Dude, that is super-interesting. We have to find a way for you to surface that and talk about it." The basic idea might be whatever, but once you get into the specifics of why it's there, you're like, "Oh, yeah, that's really cool. I didn't get that when you mentioned it, but now I totally understand it."
Craddock: I'm sure those meetings happen several times during production, and with different goals. Do they happen more often before events like E3 and QuakeCon, where larger audiences will be tuning in and messaging is even more critical?
Hines: We do weekly stuff with them, and have for years. I have a team that's focused on Doom, and they do stuff constantly. They go down to id for team meetings, to sit in with the team and learn what's going on. They might give them an update on the marketing and comm stuff, like, "Here's an early cut of the teaser trailer" or "Here's what we're thinking for box art."
We play the builds, too. We went down sometimes last year (2018) when they had something on Battle Mode ready. It wasn't even called Battle Mode; it was, "Hey, we've got multiplayer. We want you guys to come down." They could have just sent us a build to play, but it's important to sit down and play, and ask questions with the team there and give feedback. It's a microcosm of the wider feedback they may get.
Craddock: On that note, one of the criticisms of Doom 2016's multiplayer is that deathmatch wasn't available at launch. Doom invented that mode of play, so I'm kind of surprised it won't be available as an option in Doom Eternal, either. So, as cool as Battle Mode looks, are you concerned about another Doom game missing that multiplayer staple?
Hines: No. That mode is eons old. The biggest problem we thought we had with Doom 2016—and folks can agree or disagree—was that (multiplayer) wasn't done at id, and felt really disconnected from the base game that everybody loved. That was a big thing that Marty and Hugo talked about: "Whether you're playing by yourself or with others, we want it to feel like you're all playing the same game." That's as opposed to, "I'm a badass demon slayer in single-player, but when I go over to multiplayer, there are no demons, and it's just deathmatch." I don't know what that has to do with (Doom) other than that, well, a couple of decades ago we had that, so we should just have that again.
I guess going back to my original point of working with studios: We don't want to do something just for the sake of doing it, or because something has always been a certain way. We want to make sure we're doing stuff that's interesting and that resonates. I loved the idea of what they were doing with Battle Mode. The first time I played, I was instantly hooked. I've only played as a demon, in part because as I mentioned, I get really motion-sick as the Doom Slayer. But it's super-fun to play as the Pain Elemental; I gravitate toward that demon in particular. I'm playing the game from a very different angle.
It's fun to play that multiplayer mode because at first blush, you're like, "Well, I'm just spawning demons and dropping traps. What else is there?" Actually, there's a lot. You don't want to drop demons willy-nilly because they're what the Doom Slayer uses to power up. If you're spamming that stuff, you're doing the Doom Slayer a huge favor because you're giving him or her resources. You have to think about what you're doing, when you're doing it, and how you're coordinating with the other demon player.
For the Doom Slayer, it's the same experience you know (from the campaign) with the added complexity of playing against humans who are controlling the arena and adding to the challenges you have. There's still an AI element, obviously, but what a player can come up with and throw at you can be far more interesting.
Craddock: Since you mentioned it, I'm curious: How was the decision made to develop Doom 2016's multiplayer externally?
Hines: It was decided by id. They decided in terms of the capacity of what they had to work with.
Craddock: Was Bethesda concerned about that at the time?
Hines: I just remember that when they said, "We don't have the bandwidth to do it ourselves," what can I say? "Too bad. Do it anyway?" They're the developers. They know best what they can handle and what it'll take.
Craddock: So this time, did id say, "We're doing it?"
Hines: Oh, yeah. They were 100 percent adamant: "We are doing the next game ourselves."
Craddock: The new console ports of the classic Doom games just dropped, so I haven't had a chance to try them. But I've been reading about the response to having to log in with a Bethesda ID to play the games. Not just multiplayer, but single-player as well.
Hines: Yeah, we put out a (press release) about that.
Craddock: So you are responding to it, but I'd like to go back to the initial decision to implement that system.
Hines: It should have been an option. The main reason for it is, as part of the Doom Slayer's Club, we wanted to make sure to give folks unlocks and rewards for playing the classic games. So when you play Doom Eternal, there are these cool rewards (waiting) if you played Doom, Doom 2, or Doom 2016. We're going to fix it so that it's optional as opposed to required, because that's how it should have been.
Craddock: That's the case for the iOS versions as well?
Hines: I believe so.
Craddock: I did try that one this morning, and was surprised by it.
Hines: Right. For all versions, it's supposed to be optional, unless there's a game-driven reason for it. Like, in order to do multiplayer, we need to use Bethesda.net services, so you'd have to log in. Same for other online features. Otherwise, for single-player, yes, it should be optional. (laughs)
Craddock: Since Tim Willits announced his departure as id's studio head, I wondered how you viewed the hierarchy of that studio's leadership. How do you see that shaping up?
Hines: I imagine before too long, there'll be info out there. In general, I think the studio will continue to operate as it has. Marty and Hugo are the head of the Doom team. That's the thing that id is making, so we really don't have to ask, "What do we do about new leadership?" They're already doing it for the current project.
As I said (at the press conference), Tim's a very good friend of mine. I'm going to miss him. We're all going to miss him. But the studio is going to continue to operate as it has been. I don't foresee there being huge upheaval. We survived Carmack leaving when everybody was writing id's obituary. (laughs) Turns out that might have been premature.
Craddock: Tim was very involved in the development of Quake Champions. How will his departure affect that team's structure, if at all?
Hines: Over the last year, Tim's role was almost entirely focused on Rage 2 because it had to be. That team is now rolling along. I'm sure there'll be bumps and hiccups, but otherwise we have a road map.
(Author's note: Marty Stratton succeeded Tim Willits as studio director of id Software. Stratton remains in an executive producer role on Doom Eternal and other id projects.)
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[ Holly Longdale, Writer/Producer, EverQuest ]
As a writer, I always enjoy talking to writers in game development. The requirements to succeed as a wordsmith in an industry predicated on audiovisuals have changed so much since the days of text-only adventure games. Now, you must boast a diverse skill set: familiarity with design tools, the ability to communicate with engineers and artists, and a firm understanding of what's possible within your game's engine.
Holly Longdale is a pro. She's been writing for EQ since the early 2000s as the team's resident "lore lady," and she brings to her present role as the game's executive producer a deep comprehension of the strengths and limitations of the game's narrative.
For over an hour, Holly and I discussed her first brush with EverQuest, the biggest challenge in her time writing and designing for the game, and where she sees the franchise going after 20 years. You can read about the making of EverQuest in Better Together, one of my many long reads available exclusively on Shacknews.
David L. Craddock: Part of this feature details the origins of EverQuest, and one thing I like to do with these long reads is also share the "origin story" of each developer's career in games. Yours is two-pronged, though, because you're a writer as well as a game designer. How'd you get your start in both of those fields, and how they'd intersect?
Holly Longdale: During high school and for a while after, I fancied myself an artist. Then I thought, Well, that's a road to poverty. I liked writing, so I went to journalism school. Plus, my parents said, "You have to get an education of some description." I lived in Canada and grew up there, so I went to university and when I came out, I did some freelancing.
I'm talking to someone who surely knows this: It turns out if you're not constantly (hustling), you can be poor as a writer. I ended up going into internal communications. During that, I started to play games a little bit more. My mother introduced me to, of all things, introduced me to Wolfenstein 3D. My brother, who was a techie, introduced her to Leisure Suit Larry, which was horrifying, but she loved it and got into games.
So, there'd been a number of jobs in internal communications after I moved from eastern Canada back to western Canada, back to Vancouver. I was getting bored, so I started scripting and learning how to set up database systems to do internal communications sites at companies. I was growing more technically (savvy) because I'd been interested in gaming.
My husband at the time worked at Microsoft as an engineer. I started playing Dungeon Keeper and Ultima Online. In UO, I spent most of my time as a ghost drifting across the landscape because I died constantly. PVP was not my friend, and neither was my dial-up modem because my connection was not great. Then we upgraded everything when we heard about this game called EverQuest coming out. It took me three-and-a-half hours to get out of Neriak by running around walls trying to find the door, which anyone who knows Neriak knows that's not how you get out.
At first, I didn't realize the other characters were other people. My husband at the time said, "Yeah, those are other players from all over the world." I was completely fascinated that they were in Neriak Forest and speaking in Drizzt terms, (the character by) R.A. Salvatore, using those greetings. I wasn't on a roleplaying server, but it had been established that dark elves didn't talk to other races, so I thought I'd get into trouble or kicked off the server (for interacting).
Over time, we tried traveling. I think we died a few times in Ocean of Tears, getting bonked by a cyclops several times. We eventually made it to North Karana, and that's where I had my first experience with other players. From there, I joined a guild, and ended up in a higher-end guild because I got into that chase of looking up to people in bigger guilds who are doing all the uber-stuff, fighting these big bosses. The guild I joined was Mythic Legion, on my server.
I think I spent two years with them. I became an officer, and we were planning a raid. We were on our ninth hour recovering from a wipe—as often happens—and we were all hanging out. This friend in the guild, who was a female high-elf magician, I was telling her, "I wish I could work on a game. I kind of want to move on. I'm a little bored at my job." Microsoft was amazing. I loved in there, but it was another internal communications job, and I was so invested in gaming at the time. I'd missed three days of work because I'd been camping out the last weekend jboots (Journeyman Boots) drops from Drelzna. I maintained a list of 85 people, I think, over that weekend as we camped the entire dungeon and tried to get our jboots.
So this female high-elf said, "Well, funny secret: I work on the dev team." He was an apprentice (designer) then. His name was Akil Hooper, and he said, "I know you write. We don't have a lot of writers on our team, and I know you can do some scripting. Are you cool to come in for an interview if I can set that up?" That's what happened. I was living in Seattle, came down for an interview, and got the job.
Craddock: How typical was it, based on what you know as a player and a developer, for EQ devs to reveal that sort of info?
Longdale: They kept everything secret, mostly. There was always the fear of favoritism, like if a guild was filled with devs, it was assumed they were all cheating. They kept things quiet. It turned out the chief counsel of our company, Andy Zaffron, was in the guild as well. So we had a few devs in our guild as well.
The majority of people here today started in other departments where they could get a foothold in the industry, like customer service and quality assurance, because there was no path on how to get an education in how to do those jobs. We pulled from an incredible number of fans who had those qualifications. I was sort of a rare breed in that I was in a different profession. So often in this industry, it's who you know. While there are schools—we've got a guy on the team who came out of a game development program—it's fans first, skills... well, not skills second. (laughs) But especially for a game like EverQuest, it's easier if they come to us through the game because they already have a grounding in what all the history is about.
Talk about right place, right time, right situation. I believe I'd just divorced, so I thought, Now I can go anywhere. Let's see if I can do this gaming thing. It was such a strange and amazing, magical time.
Craddock: Do you think it was the social aspect of MMOs that made you even more of a gamer compared to the earlier, solo experience you mentioned, such as Wolfenstein 3D?
Longdale: Honestly, I think it's a society of gratitude and need. Even my early experience in a newbie area, this giant, square piece of geometry, and newbies would stand around when they were getting chased by giant fire beetles. There'd usually be someone there to help, whether they were healing or (helping to attack). Time and again, every time I played, someone would help me. They'd give me a piece of loot. They'd give me money to go get all the weird stuff you needed just to survive in lower levels. That just carried on.
Another thing EverQuest does, and what we're still committed to, is we don't tell you everything. This is a game of exploration and adventure in the sense that people are in chat asking questions constantly. We don't tell you that if you pick up a giant's toe, you can do something with it. Players will say, "Hey, I found a giant's toe. What do I do with it," and others will say, "You can sell it," or "It's a quest item." That is so binding for the community, and people even build reputations around it. Server by server, there were celebrities who were like masters full of wisdom. You could ask them questions.
That, to me, has always been the driving force. At the time, it was such a friendly, open community. That's another thing for me. When I think about the EQ franchise, it's a world of hope and adventure. There's definitely bad stuff, but there's so much humor in EQ. When you see our key art of these epic characters like dragons, you forget that halflings are being ridiculous, and we've got gnomes that are hilarious.
That's the beauty of it. EverQuest is a nice place to live. Even in a roleplaying situation, like when I felt that as a dark elf, I felt I wasn't supposed to talk to other people playing different races, that's when you realize you're one big family fighting against the world. There's basic stuff that drives you. Every piece of loot at the time was so incrementally better. You're chasing an increase of one or two points in a stat.
But it felt epic to you when you got something that had a cool appearance. And I won't lie, there was a time when I wasn't in an uber-guild, and I bought a mug, a stein for $300 off eBay. I did it. (laughs) Because that was the first time in my life I had a hobby I was fully invested in. I've tried so many things and nothing stuck except gaming. It's the game and the people I love. As a kid, I loved fantasies. The original Clash of the Titans was one of my favorite movies. I used to sketch Pegasus creatures all the time as a kid. I read the Dark Elf trilogy by Bob Salvatore, so when I started, I said, "I'm going to be a dark elf because Drizzt is amazing. Hopefully someday I'll see a Pegasus."
It was during that time in North Korona when a Pegasus appeared. Somebody killed it. I was really mad.
But! Those were moments. When you think about how gaming has evolved, how things look in games now, at the time—and EQ still does this—you really felt like you were part of something special (because it was all so new). The people make it that way. I was always amazed at how selfless people were, even strangers. There's a really strong sense of community that I do believe exists today.
We're in an era now where there are trolls everywhere (online). My goal has been to get in a game and talk to people one on one. That's where people who still love the game live, and I like to check in with them to make sure we're still keeping the essence of EverQuest alive, and that it's still special to them.
Craddock: Did you and your guilds prefer to roleplay, or was that fluid?
Longdale: It was really cool because some people had personas, and other people were just themselves. Nobody really knew how this was supposed to work or who they were supposed to be. Our guild leader was a mage, and every day he had some kind of story. That was his thing: Every day he had a tale to tell. Most of the time he was just a dude, often crude, but always hilarious.
We had these two other characters, a shadow knight and a cleric, played by the same person. He didn't talk to anyone, ever, except the leaders of the guild. He would go to Plane of Fear, by himself, and clear it for us. I had a suspicion he was an engineer because engineers are the ones who can reverse-engineer how something works, but he wasn't (an EQ) dev. He was just an incredibly talented player who was always online. We knew nothing about him. He was just excellence and silence.
Then there were people who were totally doubling down on being a halfling. There was a dwarf who would type in a Scottish accent. All kinds of crazy stuff. There was no judgment.
Craddock: So, you get this interview, and you land the job. What were your initial impressions of EverQuest from the inside?
Longdale: The two sides were basically indistinguishable. I was the oldest at the time, and I was 33. We were all a bunch of super-fan kids. The optimism, the openness—it was awesome. I came in thinking, Well, I guess I can start out editing some stuff. It wasn't that at all. They said, "We're working on Lost Dungeons of Norrath." The expansion was in the early stages as they figured out how to do, with their tech, EQ's versions of instances.
We hadn't started any content. They knew the expansion's themes, so the team said, "Let's explore those areas that have been part of our legends since the beginning of EQ. We think players would really like to explore them." When I came in, they said, "What do you think of this?" I remember sitting with a bunch of the designers during the first month, whiteboarding what we should do. I wanted to have this system where you would interact with this faction, and through doing that, you were getting a library's worth of lore about what happened there. You're experiencing this story as you're progressing through the content.
They said, "Sweet. Let's do that." I was like, oh my god, I had an idea and somebody listened.
Playing in the instances, I said, "This is really awesome, but I worry about these areas feeling dry and a bit slow." I was talking to some of the designers, and said, "Could we have a system where you break open to crates and get health from it?" That was from playing Diablo where you'd find health wells or a mana well. I wanted to replicate that. They said, "Sweet, let's do that."
It was just amazing to come in and have so much respect shown. We were all pals working ridiculous hours, not because we had to, but because we always wanted to do more. Provided the lead designer was on board, there was nothing stopping us from doing anything.
Craddock: Is that how you'd come up with things like new characters, new quests, new themes?
Longdale: It wasn't the Wild West, but it was so open creatively. As players, we had a point of view on where the game should be going, and the important things we should include.
It was a magical, open time. I'd never had an experience like that. That's something that even the team today (carries on). We're all about being open; that's how we advance. Players don't often know what they want until they play it. Some of it's instinct, and then, obviously, a huge percentage of our job is listening to the audience. Are we lacking some element in the downtime side of the game, like crafting? We've always done that, and part of that is being a player.
Everyone didn't always agree, but we'd always reach a point where we knew we were doing the right thing for the game without alienating core fans. It's sad to see games losing fans by not doubling down on their special sauce. Don't go too far off that track, because it will alienate the people who love you the most. That's something we watch on a month-to-month basis.
Craddock: How would you describe the culture when you arrived?
Longdale: Engineers and producers were upstairs, and artists were downstairs. We were all in cubicles, and every day we'd go to Wings N Things and get lunch. We'd go to lunch every day, and every day, lunch was talking about gaming. After lunch, we'd go to GameStop. It was, for lack of a better term, camaraderie. Designers might be going out to lunch to talk about design things. Engineers would go out to talk about engineering. Artists, too. It would cross over.
It's all passion. It's all about creating opportunities, especially back then. Nobody knew what game development really was. It wasn't formalized. There were no answers to questions. We felt like we were on the bleeding edge, trying to figure it all out. It was a delightful time. It wasn't oppressive. The issue of constant crush wasn't... We had lives. We had time to ourselves. Socially we'd get together and have parties. It was an amazing, fun time when you felt like you were on the forefront of something special.
Craddock: Earlier, you mentioned pitching ideas not being completely "Wild West." Even so, would you say those meetings and casual conversations were how content ideas for expansions came together?
Longdale: Oh, yeah. Rich Waters was our lead designer, along with another designer named Shawn Lord. I really respected them and looked up to them. They were super-smart and had been doing this for a while. It was less about pitching, and more about being in a room. We'd have creative meetings, and they'd do their due diligence and ask questions. As a team, lots of smart people would just talk things through: "Here are some developments we might find with that process."
Everything was solution-based. At the end of the day, those two would make final decisions on the design side, which was where all decisions got made. We had a technical director, Scott, and a producer, Robert. They'd all come to agreement and work out issues, and then come to us with the result.
It was formal to the degree that somebody had to make the final call, but I don't remember a time when the team was told "No, you can't do that." The only thing I remember, oddly, is that one of the producers, Robert Pfister, didn't want us to use the color purple. No idea why. (laughs) It was just one of those rules. His goal was to never explain himself on that front. He would yell about a lot of things, but he was hilarious.
Craddock: What was some of the earliest material you wrote?
Longdale: I came in as a designer. I was told, "You're going to have to do everything, and learn." I started with designing the content system, the "lore delivery" system. I designed and implemented it, wrote all the text for five dungeons, and storylines for all five dungeons, dialogue for characters in all camps.
When the content was deep into development, that's when the system designers would start to make items and get everything together. I think I started in June, which meant we had roughly four months of development time to go. It was pretty compressed. Tech for the dungeons was just coming in when I started, so all the pieces, including NPCs, were coming together. I remember recording voice for some of the female NPCs. I went to the audio team and was recording some NPC reactions and idle audio.
I scripted some stuff, and then I remember being delirious. Alan VanCouvering, who's still on the team, was naming a thousand items. That's just for the sake of this discussion; it could have been more. All the recipe components for all the crafting. That needed to be edited because he'd reached the point of delirium. They all came with lore text, so you had to look over their descriptions, too. After maybe 500 items, it was around 10:00 at night, and I hit delirium. I remember being in tears from laughing at what he'd named some of this stuff. To this day, he defers responsibility for some of them. I think some of those names made it in, like Wayfarer's Nut Loaf.
You get to that point where everything's hilarious. You had to do some amount of research when you're naming hundreds of items, and you also need somebody to check your work, because some of those names are just bad. You'd get these moments where everybody was laughing, and you're running around the office showing people what someone had named something.
Everybody pitched in. Engineers were often helping or play-testing, because they were players too. Everybody wanted to understand the content we were making. It was all hands on deck, all the time. When (Lost Dungeons of Norrath) shipped, that was one of the proudest moments of my life. Two of my ideas got implemented in this amazing game that I'd loved for so many years.
Craddock: I'd like to delve into the lore delivery system. Around the time you joined, how would you describe the importance of lore in EverQuest? How'd you identify that system as something the game needed?
Longdale: I did feel some responsibility around being a writer, and having that voice. When I came in, I thought, I'm going to push lore and content. That was not necessary, because everyone knew (the game's story) inside and out. Some members of the dev team were working on EverQuest II, so I could go down the hallway and find out the intent of what some of the early lore had been. In some cases, there wasn't any, which left us room to develop it as we wanted.
Over time, they coined me "lore lady" and "keeper of the lore." I was starting to formalize things. I think we all did an amazing job. At the pace we were working, you never knew what was going to come out the other side. It was my job to not defend it, and to own up to it. That was around when we started doing expansions every six months. There was definitely some amount of insanity. But the lore, at that point, I was starting to build a bible for the game. We're still refining and continuing to add to that today.
Craddock: The development cycles for expansions sound... intense. How far ahead were expansions planned, on average?
Longdale: We tried so many different variations of making production work, like splitting into a live team and an expansion team. There were people to handle live content without impacting future products. That said, it was fluid. Even now, work has already started for this year's expansion. Art takes so long, so you have to start really early. I'd say late summer of the year prior is when designers figure everything out so they can plan for art assets, mapping, NPC descriptions, lore. It's a good year, year and a half prior, while working on the current expansion.
Before we'd finish a current expansion, a group was working on the next one. Before we'd ship, there was a period of supporting the current expansion: fixing bugs, finding typos, et cetera, and then everybody moved on. When we were doing them every six months, we'd have a smaller live team to manage ongoing issues; everyone else was on the expansion.
I can't even remember the order expansions were done in, because they bled into each other. Design docs, lore, dialogue, descriptions, all this stuff for the next expansion while you're implementing for the existing expansion. There were these characters called the Wayfarers Brotherhood. I invented them, and we used them as a mechanic to deliver lore for the locations we were building. I may have used them for three or four expansions, and then players were like, "Man, we hate those guys. They get to explore everything before we do. Can we kill them all?"
That became a lesson for me: Players are the explorers. Players come first. Players and their experience in the world take priority over characters who experience things before the players. You don't want to do that.
Craddock: When you want to create a character, name a region, or do anything related to lore, how'd you vet that? Or as the "lore lady," could you sort of set things in stone?
Longdale: My leads would review my stuff. It comes up now: "women in gaming." But I have to say that even back then, I never felt singled out or diminished. There was so much respect on that team, including from my managers and leads. They'd eyeball stuff and say, "Yeah, it looks good." I'd send things out to the entire team, even the weird pronunciation bible on a per-expansion basis, and people would actually read it. (laughs)
I suppose what I'm trying to get to is (making EverQuest) is a very unique type of collaboration. As a designer then, and now as a producer, as far as responsibilities, I have the last word (on lore). But during this entire time, it's the best collaboration I've had. That collaboration results in "better together." It's about sharing ideas: someone comes up with something; someone else refines it and makes it better; and engineer jumps in and says, "We could make it even better by doing this."
That collaboration has been happening since I started here. You have these insanely passionate and creative people who are solution-finders. I never dictate anything because I know that won't get the best results. It's about constant talking and constant collaboration.
I think that's why we've been successful: Egos are in check. You've been around this industry long enough to know there are people out there with enormous egos. I'm sure that works well in some studios, but here, there's so many years of specialized knowledge that you'll always find ways to make things better just by asking around.
Craddock: That seems like it would be important for developers new to the team to learn as early as possible. MMOs are living entities, so decisions can't realistically come down to one person's verdict.
Longdale: Right. Also, it's not my personality. That's not to say we haven't had some of those personalities. You need to find people capable of making the big sell for your project. I wish I was better at that. (laughs)
I can honestly say that compared to what we used to be like, we're very professional and efficient. Still creative, excessively so, but after so many years of experience, we know our limits. It's very important to me that these folks have lives outside of work. Half the time back then, you didn't know what you were getting into. I never ask these folks to do over-time, but it's the same mindset: People often work crazy hours not because I ask them to, not because it's mandated, but because they want to give the players more.
I do yell at them about it. "Go home! Take a nap! Hang out with other human beings!" They still show up, like, "I was sitting there thinking about doing this, so..." As long as people are happy... I find it unique about how happy they are for players to play the game. You'd think we're on a treadmill, but we 100 percent are not.
I'm insanely lucky, and I love these people. they're amazing. We're a little family. EQ's revenue has grown since I returned to the game in 2015, which is not to my credit. I just sat down and listened to the team, and the team was saying, "The players are all about nostalgia. They want to relive the early game as much as they can, but without the horrible stuff." We put out new servers, a progression server, to have as much of that experience as possible; that led to our progression servers in 2015.
The game's been growing ever since. When you have a group of passionate people, it's not about dollar signs or squeezing blood out of stones. It's about nurturing this social phenomenon, this amazing community. All we have to do is give them tools to support each other, and the game will continue to grow.
Craddock: Could you put me in your head on the day Lost Dungeons of Norrath, your first EQ product, shipped?
Longdale: Oh, my god. Butterflies the week prior, because you're fixing everything. We've always been a group of A-type personality perfectionists, and I think that describes a good portion of the EverQuest audience: You can't succeed in that game unless you're aware of all the things. There's this panic—and this still happens now—about perfection. Fix everything, make sure everything is golden. Then something is terrible, and you try to make a decision to handle the shame and guilt.
It was this amazing roller coaster. I'd think, I'll have my first game credit. But the pivotal moment was, we have commands to enter the game at launch, and we're hiding out just to see what people do. Seeing people rushing into your content, shouting a billion questions in chat, and to witness all the little surprises they share—getting the credit was an amazing achievement, but it's also like being a chef. When you see the enjoyment people get from your food, this is a similar experience. It's like, "I wrote that, and somebody thought it was awesome, and they posted about it."
You see your work on all the fan sites, the review sites. That's another thing about EQ: The fact that we don't give you every detail about the game. All these community websites pop up with information about how to do things. It's like community sourcing. I was in so much wonder, seeing it from the other side. I was also exhausted, but there was so much magic, especially as a kid who was a fantasy fan: read a lot of books, liked Clash of the Titans, was drawing Pegasus. And now people are excited about sand devils I made? It's really hard to describe.
Every single expansion has been the same: Complete elation. You have to admit your failures at the same time, but back in 2003, it was still such an early time in games and especially in MMOs. Everybody was rallying around us and in our corner. EQ was amazing. You felt incredibly lucky. I don't know how many hundreds of hours we worked, but then it was like, "Okay, cool. What are we working on now?" (laughs)
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[ Scott Hartsman, Designer, EverQuest ]
Everquest was created in an era when teams were small and everyone pitched in where and when needed. That necessitated hiring developers who were dynamic and flexible. Scott Hartsman was all that, plus he brought a background in the type of game that inspired Sony's MMO darling: He not only played MUDs (multi-user dungeons), he worked on some of the niche genre's most popular.
Hartsman and I talked about his experience playing and writing for MUDs, how that transitioned to a role on the EQ team, the rapid pace of development that encouraged a culture of crunch (overtime), and how arguably his most important role, opening channels of communication between EQ's developers and its community, set the stage for interaction 20 years into the future. You can read about the making of EverQuest in Better Together, one of my many long reads available exclusively on Shacknews.
David Craddock: EverQuest evolved from MUDs, and you're one of a select few on the dev team who, like Brad McQuaid and Steve Clover, played those games in their day. You also developed some. How'd you get started?
Scott Hartsman: I've been involved with online games for nearly as long as online games have existed. The first versions of online games were MUDs where players were playing with each other. It was very Dungeons & Dragons-inspired, the idea of virtual worlds where, essentially, there's a D&D game going 24 hours a day that you can play from home without having to organize friends. To those of us who grew up with D&D, it wasn't a big shock when MUDs went big. It was something all of us were dying to do.
The first game I ever worked on was a game called Scepter of Goth (also spelled Sceptre of Goth). The maximum number of players was around 32 online at a time, all text, going room by room, fighting monsters and getting loot, just roleplaying. Honestly, the thing I really fell in love with back then was you were making new friends, and they could be anywhere. You actually needed people, and you were building relationships and online communities. That was the first exposure I had to the power of that kind of thing. I decided to go into game development because of that. I've only ever worked on online games because while I am a huge gaming fan, gaming with other people is what's really interesting to me.
I was an old Apple II geek from back in the day. That was back when everybody had to be something of a programmer to even play games, because state-of-the-art wasn't comparable to what we had now. I got an Apple II when I was a kid and played games on that, and then discovered the wonderful world of owning a mode. That's how I dialed into MUDs, and the one I was playing at the time was Scepter. I was around 14 when I first played that. I got incredibly, incredibly hooked on it. I made friends, and a year or two later ended up working for them when I was 15 or 16.
Online communities were much smaller, so everybody could get to know everybody. There were many 1,000 or 2,000 lifetime users on this commercial MUD. The owners, the game masters and designers, would sit online and talk with us. I made friends with those folks, and they brought me on. They were looking for people who could help out with all kinds of things. This was back in the day when there was really only one role on text games: programmer. The roles of designer, customer service, writer—those didn't exist. Programmers built the software, and they would also create monsters, write room descriptions, create spells, and answer customer questions, run credit cards to do billing, moderate forums. I was one of those people. I started out as a writer/content creator/customer service agent/billing operator, I guess.
Craddock: Since MUDs were driven by text, what was the writing process like on those games? Did writers stake out a purview? Did everybody pitch in here and there?
Hartsman: The vast majority of writing we did was for areas. Since it didn't have any graphics, the only way you could communicate where players were and what they were saying was through words. Most of the job was writing areas. You wouldn't just design the areas in terms of layout and how they connected, what monsters went where, and what loot existed; you were describing the area in words.
There was nothing more intimidating than designing a new area, and you've suddenly got 200 new rooms, and realizing, "Holy crap, I've got to do a lot of writing." It's the blank page problem times 200, and that happened anytime we added anything new to the game.
Craddock: Did you emphasize descriptive prose, or did you come to find that less was more?
Hartsman: That's a good question. Keeping in mind that I was 15, back then it was, how much flowing text can you cram into this to give people a sense of the place? Now, I can definitely say less is more. There were seven of us in this role. We were called DMs, and we had seven people constantly filling up new worlds, adding new events and spaces all the time.
It was fun, especially because the people in charge were programmers. They didn't get into much of what we did. I would say to my boss, "Hey, Chris, I want to add an area that's a keep. Here's three sentences of the story." She'd say, "Okay. Go for it." That was the level of oversight.
Craddock: How'd you transition from Scepter to Gemstone?
Hartsman: The Gemstone project, and the company around it, formed in the later days of Scepter as that company was going out of business. That was called Interplay Protocol. For about six months to a year, we'd been running the game on a national network called Timenet before the Internet was the Internet. It was these big networks that others had made, and it was how you allowed people from different area codes to connect and pay them.
They had that service up and running for around $3.60 per hour of play. For its time, it was a big service, but it wasn't sustaining itself because a lot of that money went to the networks. Online services like CompuServe and Genie existed, and they had much larger audiences, a couple of hundred thousand people. They decided to get into games, and a company called Simutronics formed. Five of us who'd been working on Scepter came over.
A lot of Gemstone was built so people who were Scepter DMs would be able to work within it easily. That also gave us the power of a scripting language. That was my first introduction to online-game programming. Not only did we have to do the loot, items, descriptions, and drilling connections between rooms, we also had scripts. We could do things like dynamic events and exceptional behavior for creatures: We could have creatures respond to you waving at them, for example. We could do that ourselves without having to bother the programmers.
Craddock: Do you feel the core, the driving attraction of a text-based game like Scepter and Gemstone, isn't so different from what makes more sophisticated games like EverQuest appealing?
Hartsman: Oh, yeah, the core is very similar. You look at EverQuest, and that was launched by a group of people who'd been playing MUDs. They went, "We want to do this with graphics, because holy crap, wouldn't that be amazing?" And they were right.
Craddock: What did you learn from working on MUDs, these text-only games, that you were able to apply to EverQuest and other graphics-based games?
Hartsman: The importance of keeping the live game interesting. That's something we were doing as far back as the first MUDs. It wasn't just: launch a game, run it, and let it do its own thing. You are there to provide entertainment day over day, week over week, month over month, year over year.
Craddock: What brought you to Sony?
Hartsman: I fell in love with programming as a scripter in Gemstone, and I was very fortunate in that there were three programmers working on the game who were friends and extremely generous with their time. All three of them took me under their wings in different ways, and helped me become a C programmer. I kept running into limitations of what our system could do, and after months of that I realized I'd need to be a programmer if I wanted to bring even cooler things to life.
I ended up quitting that job to get an engineering degree. I worked part-time in games during college, came out of college, and ended up working in the business world for a few years. One of the interesting things I worked on was, I worked with the team who took all the court system records in LA pertaining to the O.J. Simpson case, digitizing them, and doing online electronic submission. I wrote the client that allowed that to happen. We were doing this all during the O.J. trial, so we got to see everything as it came in. Just a bit of random trivia. (laughs)
Eventually, that got boring. A friend of mine who was the project manager at Genie, which ran Gemstone, called me out of the blue and said, "I'm working at a different company called Interplay." This was Brian Fargo's Interplay. "We're doing an online games division. It's called Engage, and I kind of need your help. Would you be able to write trivia games?" I said, "Well, trivia games aren't hard. Client, server, graphics, Windows—no problem."
They contracted with me while I lived in Wisconsin to write a couple client-server games. After that, they asked if I'd consider coming out to work with them full-time because they needed more games launched. I did that, launched more games, did the Windows and Internet port for WarCraft II, which we had the license to. That was fun. We got to about 11 games up and running, and these primarily ran on AOL and our own platform. I ran that company for a while, and that phase of Internet gaming came to a close: Engage, TEN (Total Entertainment Network), and Mplayer were the big names (in online gaming) in that generation.
After that, I worked with a group of people who were pitching Sierra on doing a Lord of the Rings online game. I don't know if you know the history of those online games, but there have been three or four projects over the years. This was prior to the one Turbine launched. We worked on it for a year before Sierra spiked it. The woman in charge at the time would eventually become the Sony-side producer of EverQuest for its launch. She reached out to Smed (John Smedley) and said, "If you need a strong programmer, you should probably hire Scott.) I talked to Smed, met him, and he brought me on.
Craddock: What was your first experience playing EverQuest? Had you played it before joining the company?
Hartsman: When I worked at Engage, we were primarily a publisher of games. The only games we'd created were the ones I'd made, the trivia games. In the lobbies of the trivia games, they all had chat channels—because everything did back then—and I'd actually created them as a MUD where you could walk through different rooms. We were trying to bring the basics of MUD concepts into genres outside of MUDs.
Among the game teams at Engage, we absolutely wanted to make bigger, connected, online fantasy games, but that just wasn't what the company was about. It was primarily a publisher. I had started a company with a group of people whom I'd worked with at Engage, and one of those guys said, "Have you heard about this EverQuest game?" It had just been announced. I said, "No, but I've done my time in online fantasy games. I know what those do to me: I won't do anything but play them. I should probably stay away."
I went to E3 that year, and another friend said, "You really need to check out EverQuest. They're demoing it, and holy shit—it's the game we talked about years ago." Again, I said no. After work, another coworker, a guy I worked with at our startup, bought it for me. It was on my desk waiting for me in the morning, and I said, "Well, I guess I've got to try it now." I played it very, very hardcore. We had a group of friends playing, met new friends online, we formed a guild, figured out how to recruit good people and make friendships, made it through the game and the raids. Then I slowed down on playing and ended up working for them.
And it's so funny. If you look at players from that generation, so many of us are working in prominent positions at different companies now. One of the guys in my guild, I later hired him to be a designer on EverQuest II. He's now the executive producer of Rift at my former company, Trion, which we just sold. His brother is the exec producer of Age of Conan at Funcom. There are so many people from that generation in various parts of the games industry.
Craddock: How would you describe the EQ team's culture when you joined?
Hartsman: I came on about two years after launch. The team at that time was around 50, maybe 55 people. The engineering side was around five people. It was small. The culture was one of, "Get the job done, whatever it takes." It was my first real encounter with a crunch culture. It's something that I'm glad I had to live through because I was crazy-passionate about the game, so I didn't mind. But there were times when we'd work 12-hour days, 16-hour days, and come in on weekends also. We sustained that for quite a long time.
I'm glad I lived through it, but also glad it's in the rear-view mirror. Beyond that, I should say it was the single most passionate team I've had the pleasure of working on. Everyone was there because they loved this game. There were vastly easier jobs, even in the same company, if you wanted that, because the studio had other games going on. I threw myself into the fire because when I came in with experience doing bigger projects, they had wanted me to help get their game called Sovereign on track. That was the MMORTS they'd been making.
I was a huge EverQuest person and saw what the team was going through. We had people on Sovereign working normally to slightly longer hours, and then people on the EverQuest team getting ground to dust. I asked repeatedly if I could go help EverQuest, and they finally said, "Yeah, we could use what you do."
Craddock: I wondered about that. I remember EQ expansions popping out at a pace of, like, two a year, at least one a year. What was that like internally? Was there ever a cool-down period between those projects?
Hartsman: No, no. What would happen is, you'd get to launch, and then things would get harder. As launch stresses happened—bugs and other problems—you'd fix those, make more content to keep the live game going, and when it dials down from incredibly insane to only slightly insane, that's when you began peeling off people to start filling out the next expansion.
The only teams that had what you would call a demarcated production cycle was the art team. Art has a long lead: You have to plan it out far ahead of time. When the art is done, that's when design implementation begins. You don't have live, emergency art bugs in the same way you do coding bugs or design bugs. The artists worked crazy overtime as well, but theirs was at least somewhat more organized into something you could call a cycle.
Craddock: What did your role as technical director entail?
Hartsman: We didn't have the role of live producer back then. A live producer these days is someone who's organizing live updates, doing shipping, making sure patch notes are in order, making sure things get through QA, and so on. The team didn't have that role at the time, so I kind of took it on.
When I came in, the QA team was four people. The QA that was happening was: developers would ship a game, and the expectation was QA would play the game, send bugs, and someone would fix them. There wasn't any concept of doing pre-submits to our QA team to get passes or fails back to fix things before setting them live. I did a lot of instituting processes like that, as well as managing the engineering team and programming gameplay myself.
One of the least technical parts of that job was I started toning down some of the egotism that would happen when we'd present ourselves to the outside world. The original EverQuest slogan was, "You're in our world now." I was the first person to post a set of patch notes saying, "Thank you for making our world yours," which was a 180-degree turn from a lot of the more antagonistic (messaging). I wanted the game to feel like less of a player-versus-developer experience, which had been the case for many years, and start putting more emphasis on, "We're here with you. We're here to entertain you, and we need to earn your business every day."
In the era when I was there, we went through a management turnover. Brad (McQuaid) was gone. Other producers had left. There was a vacuum, and we needed people to step up and take on things way outside their roles. A lot of us did that.
Craddock: How did that player-versus-developer culture manifest in the game, or through communication?
Hartsman: There was an antagonist tone between the community folk at the time, and the players. It was something that grated on me, and on a lot of the developers, because they didn't want that. Not just the tone, but also, the accuracy of what was being communicated to players was not where it should be. I think that hurt the team's credibility.
For instance, the company would make statements to players about the state of certain things in the game: whether they're working, whether they're not working, and so on. Those statements ended up not being true. The people saying them thought they were true, but they would say things like, "Alchemy is working 100 percent, and you players just haven't figured it out. Maybe you should play better." Meanwhile, players were submitting reports like, "No, this system has been broken for years. You guys need to fix this." The company would come back and say, "No, it's working fine. Get good." Of course it had been broken the entire time.
That kind of thing: repeatedly, constantly, month over month. That kind of tone: "We're right, and you, mere players, are wrong." As a person who not only makes these games but plays them, it grates on me when you treat your players as less than you. I don't think that's the right approach.
Craddock: Where do you think that egotism came from?
Hartsman: Community management is a skill. It's not something just anybody can do. It takes practice, empathy, and learning your limitations. Those were early days for defining what was a community manager in the first place. The person who was doing that job at the time eventually went on to be a very good programmer, but was a horrible community person, and he'd be the first person to say that.
It's just that we as an industry didn't understand community management. Relating to human beings was a valued skill, and needed to be on those games.
Craddock: What were some other ways you tried to facilitate better player-developer interaction?
Hartsman: As a big gamer and a fan of EverQuest myself, I would read bloggers constantly. I had a roll of at least 100 MMO bloggers I was reading at the time. Generally, there wasn't a lot of credibility or credence to what some of the bloggers were saying, but some of them were incredibly smart and offering great insight into the state of the game and what we could do better.
Steve Danuser is at Blizzard now, and his alias back in the day was Moorgard. He was one of the first bloggers who made me say, "This guy is really sharp. We should listen to him." Sony ended up hiring him to work on EverQuest II as our community director. A lot of my job was finding ways for smart players to be heard. I used to hang out on guild raider forums—every guild had their own set of forums—and listen to their complaints so I could bring things that bothered them to greater visibility on our team.
I wish we'd had dozens more people so we could have got even more work done.
Craddock: Every game, especially online games, reach a peak. EverQuest is still going strong, but I wonder what you saw as the height of its popularity.
Hartsman: That's something I'm proud of: We were the team that took it to its peak. This is a fun but long and complicated answer.
One of my biggest regrets of being on that team was, we had around 50 to 60 people and constantly had to be cranking out expansions so we were always selling things. At the same time, we were working on the first international versions that were being made. This game was, as a piece of software, never meant to be localized. It was meant to be a single-language game. All the English was hard-coded into the game, so the engineering team had to spent the better part of a year making possible what our bosses were asking us to do: "Ship it in Korea, Japan, China."
The amount of time and resources that took was extreme. We should have had four to five times as many people as we did, because then we'd have had more people working on the live game.
That answer sets the stage for: We had not been paying attention to the live game as much as we should for nearly as long as I was there. We had a particularly bad month. We all saw reports every day. We knew the subscription numbers and so forth. The game was dropping off, and dropping off pretty badly. We got the OK to do stuff to make players happy: the features they've been crying out for, things we could be doing better.
We were in heaven, because that's what every single one of us wanted to be doing in the first place. That's why you get into this job, right? Not to ignore your players and go work on other projects because corporate masters demand it; to make them happy.
We did that. We fixed bugs. We added features like global chat. That update, and the events surrounding it, had almost no paid marketing. It was known about largely because of community hype: Us telling people, "We fixed this thing, we added this thing." It skyrocketed the game to its peak, around 480,000 subscribers in a given month. This was just a patch. We didn't even name it.
What made me happy about that was we finally had the ability to say: "By making players happy, we grow." But in the face of an international corporate behemoth... The people at SOE all the way up to Smed truly understood that if we wanted to grow, we needed to make players happy. The issue was further up the chain.
Players would report a bug, and if it was live, the chances of someone being able to go back and fix it was basically nil because of our shipping schedule. Just having the ability to put developer time into live issues bothering players was viewed as mana from heaven.