GameDev Stories Collection 2
Author: David L. Craddock
Date: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

GameDev Stories Collection: Volume 2

By David L. Craddock

Copyright

GameDev Stories Collection: Volume 2

Text copyright © 2024 David L. Craddock

All rights reserved. Originally published in the United States, 2024.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including, but not limited to, photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the express written permission of the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to info@theworldforge.com.

Published in the United States of America.

Most of the items and products in this book may be covered by various copyrights, trademarks, and logotypes. Their use herein is for identification purposes only. All rights are reserved by their respective owners. Several images used in this book are licensed under the Creative Common License version 2.0, 3.0, or 4.0. In accordance with CC license terms: proper attribution has been given in each instance; no images have been altered; and unabridged terms for CC licenses can be found at creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/, creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode, and creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Another Metroid 2 Remake (AM2R)

S. D. Perry – Author

Seth Mendelsohn on Virgin Interactive and Super Mario Bros.

Monkeying Around: The Making of The Lion King’s Most Infamously Difficult Level

In the Guts of Game Design with Josh Sawyer

John Staats, Designer, World of WarCraft

From the Ever-Dark Sky: The Making of Veil of Darkness

Rogue’s Co-Creators at Roguelike Celebration 2016

About the Author

Books by David L. Craddock

Introduction

Two years and several volumes of GameDev Stories later, welcome back to another collection of my favorite interviews and oral histories. GameDev Stories Collection: Volume 2 features over 100 pages of insight into how games are made, published exclusive through this month’s StoryBundle. Enjoy!

-David L. Craddock, November 1, 2024

Another Metroid 2 Remake (AM2R)

In June 2017, Nintendo announced that a remake of Metroid II: Return of Samus, released on Game Boy in 1991, was in development for its 3DS handheld and would be released later that same year. On the same day, the company revealed that Metroid Prime 4 was in development for its Switch portable console, and targeting 2018 for release. Fans rejoiced. Aside from Metroid Federation Force, a multiplayer-focused 3DS game published in 2016, the double-whammy announcement was the first Nintendo had spoken of single-player Metroid titles since 2010's poorly received Metroid: Other M for Wii.

Lifelong Metroid fan Milton Guasti, known to fans by his online handle "DoctorM64," was not content to wait for Nintendo to reunite him with bounty hunter Samus Aran. Way back in 2006, four years before Other M had rendered Metroid taboo, he began writing AM2R—short for Another Metroid 2 Remake. Guasti aimed to recapture the ominous and mysterious atmosphere of the Game Boy title, but enhanced with more weapons, items, and terrain to explore.

Working from his studio in Argentina, Guasti recruited a passionate and remote team of volunteer artists and designers such as Steve Rothlisberger to make the game even better. More than 10 years later in August 2016, Guasti uploaded AM2R for free, only for Nintendo to squelch it. The game became taboo. Undeterred, fans mirrored AM2R, determined to share it. All's well that ends well, however. A year later, Guasti's design skills were recognized when he announced that Moon Studios had hired him as a level designer on platformer Ori and the Will of the Wisps.

Before Guasti got his happy ending. I spoke to him as well as Rothlisberger to write a profile for Waypoint (formerly VICE Gaming) on AM2R shortly after the game's release. Our unabridged interviews follow, rolled into one Q-and-A style chat.

**

Craddock: What led to your interest in games?

Milton Guasti: I started with Atari 2600; I was very young. Then I had a Commodore 64. Awesome computer; I still have one working at my friend's house. It actually didn't have any games. I was able to rent them from a video store. There was a video store on the corner, so I went there every day and tried out games all the time. It was a nice experience. The only one I did buy, because I was playing it very often and getting very frustrated, was Battletoads. I got really good at the Turbo Tunnel.

Growing up in the '80s, you were interested in video games by default. Arcades. I had a friend with an NES, and some other friends with a Mega Drive. You're pretty much always going to be exposed to some sort of awesome video game at some point in your life. I happened to like them. I grew up playing what would be the Famicom, here. We didn't have the NES, the VCR-shaped console. We had the Famicom and some chipped ROMs that came from China. There were many games that were not available here on that system. One of those was actually the original Metroid, for some strange reason. I never got to play the original Metroid or any of those original Famicom carts, but I did enjoy Super Mario 1, 2, and 3, Contra, and many old games.

I also had a Commodore Amiga. Awesome computer. Very impressive. The graphics and sound were revolutionary. After that, SNES. Eventually my brother bought a PlayStation. I couldn't enjoy the N64 or the GameCube because they were very, very expensive. PlayStation games were dirt cheap. They were just bootleg copies of CDs and were extremely common. So we could buy a system that held extremely expensive cartridges, and you wouldn't know much about the games because the Internet was pretty young at that time, so they were a gamble; or you could buy this PlayStation thing that had very cheap games that were also awesome. I kind of gravitated towards that end of the spectrum.

Craddock: What were some of the other major differences that separated gaming in Argentina from the United States?

MG: We had the two biggest game companies, Sega and Nintendo, so in that way it was like the US. You actually had access to all the awesome games on the Sega that were classics. For the NES, there were games that either I was unlikely to stumble upon them, or were not available for some strange reason. The Zelda games, I never got to play them when I was young. The original Metroid, Kid Icarus—I never got to play them. There were other classics like Duck Hunt and Super Mario.

It was strange. When I saw The Wizard [film], I was seeing games I didn't know of. Those cartridges were so big; it was pretty confusing for a 12-year-old. Most of the games we had here were in Japanese. It was a nice experience to enjoy the game without needing to worry about text or story or whatever, simply because I couldn't figure out what the kanji said. It was also nice to reverse-engineer the Captain Tsubasa games, the ones that are soccer themed, pretty much RPGs. Figuring out which abilities did what on the interface was pretty fun; I actually enjoyed those games even though I couldn't tell what was going on in the story.

From the Super Nintendo and onward, it was pretty much all the same: we got to enjoy all the classics, but games were extremely expensive. You had the option to buy bootlegs for half of the price, so most of the games were Japanese or Chinese rip-offs, but they were options. I was able to enjoy classics like A Link to the Past, Star Fox, and Super Mario World, of course.

Craddock: When did you become interested in the Metroid series?

MG: At some point, I had a Super Nintendo. I was very happy to enjoy many awesome games. I discovered Super Metroid after [that]. When emulation was a big thing, I wanted to know what the big fuss was about this awesome title that was 24 megabits big. I thought to myself, Could this be as awesome as they say? I was quite surprised, and I kind of regretted not buying a cart. I played completely out of context, starting the game at a friend's house. It was nice, but it didn't pull me in right away. It was something you needed to play by yourself, at a pace the game wants you to play. I gave the game another chance all by myself and fell in love with it.

Craddock: Did you play Metroid II as a kid?

MG: I didn't mention the Game Boy at all as part of my gaming life. I did have the old white brick. I remember playing a lot of Wario Land [Super Mario Land 3]. My interest in Metroid 2 started when I finished Zero Mission. I said, "Let's see what the next chapter in the series is. How bad can it be?" Metroid 2 was. dated, to say it politely.

I was able to find a Super Game Boy very cheap and played the entire game with a printed map in one hand and a controller in the other. It was so easy to get lost in that game. It wasn't what I expected. I had already played Super Metroid, so [playing Metroid 2] felt strange. I knew that eventually Nintendo would be remaking Metroid 2, but in the meantime it felt like a good excuse to learn programming: to imagine Metroid 2 [with better graphics and controls]. My mindset was, whatever I do, it'll be better than an old black-and-white game.

Craddock: How did you transition from just playing games to making them as well?

MG: I'm pretty curious about how things are made, and I did start some development with Multimedia Fusion, a software suite used to do multimedia presentations; it was also very good for making simple games. Eventually I started making characters for the M.U.G.E.N. engine, a fighting-game engine that lets you customize characters from any franchise you can imagine.

When I discovered GameMaker, the interface seemed very simple to actually learn how to do game logic. It was an interesting process. I experimented with making some basic games, small prototypes that never went anywhere. By 2006, I believe, I was feeling confident to actually learn some proper programming. I picked up a platformer engine that another programmer made. It was supposed to be a base for Mario-type games. I started messing with it, replacing the Mario sprite with a Samus sprite from Zero Mission, and was [modifying] a platformer engine that would have these awesome power-ups and features. It was a very slow learning process, but I managed to get some sort of Metroid-y feel out of it.

Craddock: Was that the start of AM2R?

MG: It was the year of 2006. I was 26 years old; I had a lot more hair than I have now, and about 25 kilos less in weight. I was young. I was naive. I had just finished assembling a recording studio with a partner. I had established my career in sound engineering. When we were just starting out, there weren't a lot of customers, so there was a lot of dead time: just me, watching the monitor, doing backups, and cleaning up.

Eventually I installed GameMaker and experimented with stuff. One of those was a Metroid engine. I had a lot of free time during the week, so I was able to attempt to refine this engine. I had open the GameMaker window, and beside it, I was running an emulator with Zero Mission. I was comparing the behaviors in real-time. I also examined TAS [tool-assisted speedrun] videos, and tried to replicate the tricks shown. I was able to actually compare some behaviors frame by frame by analyzing the videos and applying them to my engine.

If I had to do that right now, I would be a lot more impatient. I had the ability to rip sprites, something that I got from the M.U.G.E.N. scene: you actually had to rip character sprites from other video games. It was a very solid foundation. It took me a couple of months to add shooting because I had to make the running, jumping, and all the physics feel very accurate, before moving on to add new stuff. [I played Metroid games on emulators] just for a one-to-one comparison [as I worked].

I was able to get a [prototype] up and running, and it was a nice foundation, something that was very uncommon back then. I tried other fan games, based on Metroid and Mario. It was understandable that fan games do have that fame of being unpolished games that people make in their basements, but in some cases, they can work. I wanted to do something that fared a little bit better.

Craddock: There are huge differences between AM2R and Metroid II on Game Boy, two of the most obvious being that your game is in color, and you offer much higher screen resolutions. Could you talk about those and other technical changes, and how they affected AM2R's gameplay?

MG: I had to start making changes. I had made decisions that were [impacting] the way things would proceed. The resolution, for example. I wanted to make a proper standard resolution of 320x240. Samus was looking very small compared to how she looks in the Game Boy Advance resolution. To compensate, I made her run faster, so she couldn't traverse the same amount of screens as in the Game Boy Advance. I ended up making some custom changes, including the jump distance and jump height, so it wouldn't feel limited, but instead feel more natural in the higher resolution.

Craddock: Metroid II's gated progress offered Nintendo's programmers a readymade way to partition off portions of the world so the game didn't have to load the whole map at once. Did you pinpoint gated progression as one of the game's staples that you wanted to carry over to AM2R?

MG: It was a nice way of getting things under control because it had very distinct areas. They were not interconnected, and it was not a huge maze that needed to be balanced as a whole. Just focusing on that idea was something that I valued: all the players would be experiencing it in many ways.

Craddock: Metroid has traditionally been Nintendo's most adult franchise. With few exceptions, Mario and Zelda games are appropriate for players of all ages, while Metroid's atmosphere tends to be tense and its themes more mature. Metroid II, while technically simplistic, did a good job of building on the original NES game. Did you consider that type of atmosphere to be a touchstone for AM2R? It seems fully intact from what I've played.

MG: To a certain extent, but not all the time. I wasn't aware of the atmosphere [in Metroid 2]. I tried to deconstruct why I was feeling uneasy, and determine which elements were contributing to that feeling. I did try another Metroid 2 remake—not mine; another one. There was a game that tried to remake Metroid 2; it was being developed by a group of people, some of them very talented. The game engine was a bit rough around the edges; it was still an early alpha. You had access [to the game world] from the first landing site to the first alpha Metroid. The moment that you stuck your foot into the first cave, it was already feeling claustrophobic. A couple of screens later, it was pretty much pitch black with some lighting, just enemies and some plants around Samus casting dim light effects.

It was appropriate to show the tone of your intended game by releasing a small demo, just to show how advanced your [technology] is going to be. That's fair. I did enjoy their demo, but playing the entire game in blackness got tiresome. I decided to leave that [claustrophobic] tone for specific moments later in the game and do something a little more cheerful and upbeat in the first couple of areas. I do play with that contrast. We're going to kick ass on this alien planet, so we start with upbeat music. Once you start fighting Metroids and realize how dangerous they are, things start to get a little grittier in tone and atmosphere. By the mid-game, it becomes [bleaker and more difficult]; you should be more alert as you explore caves.

What took me the most [time] was the actual Metroids. The way that some of those fights are planned out in the original game is nice. I was in a dark room with my CRT television in front of me, with the Super Game Boy in my Super Nintendo, and I knew where the Metroids were going to be. I had a map, after all. But with that tiny screen, and trying to interpret which room I was in—it felt like an adventure. You felt that uncertainty that a Metroid could pop up at any minute. Even though I knew what was going to be in each room, I still felt uneasy. I found it interesting.

Craddock: Tracking down dead scientists was a nice touch. It reminded me of the chills I experienced—and still experience—watching the opening of Super Metroid.

MG: Once you find the first couple of scientists dead, you realize you were too late. You weren't able to save these people. The entire tone of the game changes. It's not as upbeat and optimistic. You're ready to assume the worst for the rest of the game. If you decide to go back to the surface, you'll find the entire surface is now bathed in sunset. That kind of complements the musical tones. It adds some maturity to the whole concept. The perception of the mission must have changed for Samus, and changes to the environment accompany that feeling.

That inspiration comes from different places during development. During years when I wasn't able to work on the project—I had stuff going on in my life—and just thinking about stuff, being exposed to new things, gives you a lot more material to integrate into the project, many of which were those small details.

Craddock: You took great pains to modernize Metroid II, but I wonder what technical limitations you set on yourself. Were those limitations defined by your experience as you worked on the game, or what lines you felt you should not cross in order to preserve a certain level of Metroid II's look and feel?

MG: I was able to determine what my limitations were. My first game with the GameMaker [toolkit] was Breakout with Amiga-style graphics. I was able to draw that pixel art; it's not that difficult. But if I was going to make something more complex, I [knew I would] need to keep the scope of my ambitions realistic.

I knew that I was able to rip tiles and graphics from Game Boy Advance games. I knew there were many enemies in Metroid Fusion that were from the same planet where Metroid 2 takes place. Remaking the game seemed feasible. I started out with small ideas, simplifying the game. I wasn't sure what I was going to be doing with the actual Metroid because there were no 16-bit versions of those sprites. I was going to recolor the black-and-white versions into something that resembled 16-bits, and that would suffice. It wouldn't be a masterpiece of animation; it just needed to look like the Game Boy version, but in color.

That was enough for me. It was just an excuse to make a game and learn from it. Things changed when I made the project public.

Craddock: I understand you had to shut down your recording studio just as work on AM2R was really getting underway. What happened, and what impact did closing down the studio have on you, and the game?

MG: It was tough. I spent about six or seven months preparing the place. It was an old house that was almost abandoned. We rented the place and turned it into a recording studio. We did some of the construction work also, because handiwork is very expensive here. The recording studio was going nicely, but then my partner had a personal issue in his life. His divorce was taking up most of his time and money. I started working myself, alone in the studio, but still sharing earnings.

Eventually we had to split up and close the studio. Doing so after four years of awesome stories and being a successful engineer, with plenty of satisfied customers, all the effort and investment—it was very depressing.

Craddock: How did you decide to go public?

MG: I wanted to know what the Metroid community thought about my idea and how my engine was, so I did a small trailer with some of the ideas I'd done. I started to make some test rooms and put together a small demo. One thing I didn't want to do is usually, whenever you download a demo for a Metroid fan game, it's one room with all the power-ups in it: all the beams, all the missiles, whatever. In this case, I expanded my test rooms to give them continuity; scattered around some of the power-ups; and I improvised a boss fight that was very cheap, kind of embarrassing, but something different to end the demo.

It was something different, and people liked it. Then it became pretty popular. I remember reading one comment that said something like, "Dude, you got featured on Destructoid and Kotaku, and you're on the front page of GameTrailers! Here are the links!" It was a nice surprise, because that wasn't the point of my project. I didn't intend to be someone who became famous or be considered the one remaking Metroid 2 instead of Nintendo. No; I was very convinced that Metroid 2 was something Nintendo would be remaking, so it was just an excuse for me to learn programming. It was a personal project, and then people liked it. It was. nice.

Craddock: Besides positive feedback, what other events occurred due to announcing AM2R?

MG: I got offers from artists, musicians, very talented people who wanted to contribute because they liked what they had seen of the project. The first artist that showed up was Ramiro, who's also from Argentina. He did all the Metroid evolution sprites. He's a very talented young man. He was able to make each evolution a lot more unique. Having help changed the scope of the game: now I had the power to make original assets. The Metroids became more interesting, and I changed mechanics to take advantage of the extended mobility that Samus has. Areas became bigger. Things became much more detailed, and I tried out new mechanics just because I wanted to have more control of Samus.

More people started to show up. They started contributing with enemy sprites, the ship that you get to see in the intro sequence, etc. Before I knew it, the whole thing was starting to be a team. It was really nice because it was a completely different way of working. It wasn't just me. I learned how to communicate what was needed and make examples. It was a very interesting process.

Craddock: This seems about the point where you got involved, Steve.

Steve Rothlisberger: Before any of the demos were released, DoctorM64 was originally releasing tech demos for AM2R in the form of Metroid Confrontation. He made one release that had all the game files open to the public so people were able to change the sprites, the textures, and whatnot. I noticed that one fan had put together a suit that looked like a version of Samus from Super Metroid except it was scaled down. It looked really good, but I thought to myself, I bet I can do better.

I decided to make a follow-up to it and made my own version of the Varia suit. From there on, I created a re-colored [version] of the Gravity suit, and it ended up being really popular, so some people requested I redo the Power suit. That one was a little more difficult because the shape of the suit was different. I did the Power suit sprites from scratch as opposed to doing more of a retexturing. Those ones had a lot of love put into them.

As soon as I finished all those up, DoctorM64 contacted me and asked if I would be willing to let him use those sprite sets as the official sprites for Samus in AM2R. I said yes, absolutely. I told him that if he needed any other sprites, or if I could help out in any other way, to let me know. Not even a few weeks later, I ended up getting another email from him asking me for my assistance with some more sprites. Most notably with the tile set; that was how I got my start.

I actually have the very first thing that I did specifically for him on hand. I can check dates on it. The very first thing I did was there was a broken bridge in the second area, when you go past the temple. It's just destroyed. There was an earthquake and some rubble fell on top of it. He sent that to me in 2011. That was when I started working directly with Doc.

Craddock: How would you describe the state of AM2R when you joined?

SR: When I started on it, it was pretty basic. It looked like the original screenshots you've seen from way back when; Doc was more focused on getting the engine smooth and comfortable before making it pretty. Samus still had her Zero Mission sprites, and there were a lot of textures and art that were reused from previous games. To an extent, there still kind of is, but it's all been modified to be its own thing. But when I started it was all very basic. It still felt like it was in the beginning stages compared to where it's at now.

Craddock: What were some of the side effects of bringing on outside help?

SR: We've had artists come in and do different art for the project. The first area we all worked on together was the Area 2 Hydro Plant, with the water and a green facility. It turned out really well, so we started working on the next one. It kind of paled in comparison to the previous area, so we ended up redoing the whole interior: all the sprites were custom [made]. The next area was like that too: it paled in comparison to the one before it, and we knew we needed to do better.

By the time we got to some of the later areas, we would look back at the first ones and realize that we could see how much better we'd gotten at what we do.

I think what happened was some of the help that he ended up getting for the game raised the bar so much more dramatically than he had anticipated. In doing so, it gained a lot more publicity than he intended for it to get. When he started it, it was just a way for him to learn how to program. He started with something to teach him the fundamentals, and eventually it got more complicated from this small thing he could do and release to people later on. People had been wanting a Zero Mission version of Metroid 2, because Metroid 2 is the only one we haven't seen an [official] remake of yet.

Craddock: What were some of your interactions with the Doc, given that you all worked with him remotely?

SR: When I started working with him, he was very professional. He would send an email with a write-up describing something he needed from me. Basic stuff, saying, "I have a sketch for you; this is what I want. It's supposed to be a transition from this area to this one, and it needs to have this kind of feeling to it. If we could make it look like this is what happened, that would be great; try to make sure it maintains the style of the area around it so we can maintain aesthetic because that's important."

The more I worked with him, the more I realized that he had a very good idea of what actually makes a game pop out. There's millions of games out there, but only a select few stand out from the crowd. He knew what was important in order to find that. In working with him, I found a great deal of respect for his professionalism. I started to look up to him because at the age he was at, he was everything I wanted to be. I wanted to make my own games like this; I wanted to be able to have that big following by creating something that absolutely everyone loves and adores.

Craddock: How often were you able to contribute to AM2R? Did you set a schedule?

SR: It's more of a voluntary schedule. I tried to dedicate between 15 minutes to an hour after every work night that I could. There were a few times when I took vacation time from my day job so I could sit down and work on it; so we could function like a legitimate dev team. I have to admit: those were some of my favorite days that we worked on stuff, and some of the best stuff got finished during those days.

One prime example being, in the brand-new area of the game, the fifth (Power Distribution Center), where it's got metal interior above the water, there's moss and foliage all over the place. That was one area we'd worked on during a day that I had asked off. Generally those days were incredibly productive. In the time I've worked on AM2R, I've held a few different jobs. When I started, I was actually working a graveyard shift. I was working 12-hour days, but I'd get two to three days off at a time. That made it a little bit easier to spend time just working on AM2R.

Craddock: Do you specialize in certain types of art?

SR: I was definitely a Jack of all trades. We would have something in place in the game that we really needed art for, like a specific sprite. For example, when I first started he had me doing environments. I started with that broken bridge, and then I moved up to the turbines and fans in area two that push water around. From there, he had me work on some of the spike plants that you see in the breeding grounds.

After that, it kind of blew up into a few different things. There are three different versions of the area-three temple on the inside: one that's nice and pristine; one that's kind of beat up; and then one that's just trashed. I went through and cleaned all those up, did all those. The very first enemy you see in the game, not even a week before release, I ended up completely redoing that one. I wanted to make him a little less threatening. He's the first enemy you see in the game. I figure: it's a frog; it shouldn't be angry, but it jumps around and spits stuff, so it's still dangerous, but it shouldn't look threatening.

There were a few other things I did. For example, the Samus model that is on the item menu sub-screen. I did most of that; it was actually collaborative with another person who was on our forums. I ended up creating this whole big thing, but it didn't really look traditional. He threw in some elements that were from Metroid: Other M that ended up looking a lot better than mine. We ended up building on that; we created Samus's design based off of that screen. She's mostly built from Metroid 2's Samus, but she has elements from Other M and a little bit of Smash Bros, such as the gaps in her armor. People can say what they want: I thought the gaps were super cool and I wanted to integrate them.

Craddock: How much input did DoctorM have in your work?

SR: He would give me a sketch to work off of and tell me the general look or feel he was going for. I would make something that would become sort of detailed. I'd have a canvas and would make a really basic shape and form for what I had in mind, and I would send it to him. He would make suggestions based on what looked good and what didn't. Sometimes I would send it to him and he'd say, "That looks great. Keep doing that." Then sometimes I'd send something to him and he'd say something along the lines of, "Well, we're not really looking for something quite like that. Try changing a few of these things." I would do that and send him a new copy. From there we'd keep going back and forth, trying to hit on the right feel.

Most of the stuff I did was a collaborative effort with Doc. We've used Skype since the beginning. He'd give me a task, and depending on our schedules—he lives in a different time zone—sometimes he'd hop on Skype and we'd work together. If we had a couple of days off, we'd have Skype open the whole time, talking to each other back and forth while we worked. There were other times when I was working later when I wasn't able to get hold of him a lot because he was on the polar opposite schedule as me. He'd leave me with a task that he wanted a detailed sketch, and I would plow through it in a couple of days and send it back to him.

There was one particular area however that I had almost complete creative control over, that being the hidden area of GFS Thoth [interior]. I was told that this was pretty much my playground and to do with it what I saw fit. I used this as an opportunity to really push the envelope, show what my idea of a spooky Metroid area could be. The aesthetic of the area turned out really well, and I'm grateful to have had help from '1Eni1" who worked on the Bridge.

MG: Since I was part of a team, I had to be a team player. That was a nice experience that was very useful for me. It taught me a lot of project management skills, and that changed a lot of how AM2R was being developed. Before, it was just a mess of collaboration. When something was ready, I would use it; if it wasn't done, it didn't matter. I wasn't relying on other people's work because they were doing stuff in their free time. I got into a project manager mentality, and started organizing assets: what's needed where, what are priorities for production, what things do I need for the next demo, how should we focus our efforts, what are our deadlines.

That made the whole thing feel much more professional. The results became much more consistent. Being organized, and being able to not waste other people's time, making sure their work was in good hands and letting them see results come alive in the game, helps motivate people who are putting their free time and their talent into something that won't make them money. [Project management skills] didn't help me so much in my real job at first; I was used to coding alone. But being part of workflow that includes many people, and having to interact with an entire team, having my work affect the stuff that other people were doing—that was something I wasn't used to. I was just a lonely person sitting in a recording studio, completely alone, doing things by myself and at my own pace. Having people around you changes things.

The entire project escalated in scope slowly. As more people came in, the areas became more complex. There were new gimmicks, new mechanics, new stuff, and making things more interesting instead of just tunnels, walls, and enemies. That's more or less what happened.

Craddock: Steve, what are some of your favorite characters, items, and stages you've made for AM2R?

SR: It's tough to say. I've made a lot; it's kind of hard to pick a favorite. If I had to choose, I think it would be an environment. One of my favorite environments that I did was in area four. There's a power switch that I created that, when you activate it, it lights up the whole area. You see these green lights pulsing through all the tiles. That was an idea that I'd had that I wanted to relay to [Doc]. It ended up taking a lot of time, and it was a huge pain in the butt, but it was totally worth it because it looked so cool. That was one of the areas that kind of raised the bar for the ones around it. You'd go to that one and say, "Wow, that had a lot of love put into it." Then you'd go to one of the previous areas and it suddenly wouldn't look quite as good. There's definitely a little bit of inconsistency in some places, and I eventually do want to fix that.

As we were working on this, we were all getting so much better at what we were doing. If it was something we'd been able to work on full-time, all together, in the same office space, this thing would have been done a long time ago. I think it would be more consistent because we'd have had more time to get back to each other and work on little things that needed to be fixed before [release]. Trying to schedule a handful of people's free time so they could collaborate and make something consistent was one of the more difficult aspects.

Craddock: DoctorM and I talked extensively about themes and atmosphere in Metroid games. What has been your take on those elements across the franchise, and did you manifest theme in the work you created?

SR: I'm proud of the aesthetic. We tried to emulate the mood in the original [Metroid 2], which was kind of a dark loneliness. It was easily one of the spookier Metroid games out there, and still is. We wanted to recreate that atmosphere the best we could with modern assets. We're not going to make just a plain black background with [the same music track]. That's boring; it's got to have some feeling to it.

I think out of all our areas, the ones that we succeeded the most with [creating that] atmosphere was the GFS Thoth. That place is beautiful; I absolutely love it. Area three, the breeding grounds underneath the temple. I love the cave before the Metroid nest, the final area. It's just this big, beautiful, underground lake that's putting off a glow. There's the blue lights bouncing off the atmosphere, and bouncing off the temple. It's just gorgeous. Then you get inside and it's so creepy; it looks like something out of Castlevania: ancient, old, decrepit. There's a Chozo statue that's been mutilated. We don't know what it held before. In the original game, it was the Ice Beam, but that's not where the Ice Beam is anymore. From then on, you move up through the crust, and there's a Metroid lab where these Metroids were created. I'm pretty sure that's what it was in the original game. The Metroids were created by the Chozo to fight a parasite we didn't know about at this point in the timeline, which is why there's never going to be X parasites in the game.

That cave area was just a nice calm before the storm. It was very easy to look at; it was nice to listen to; it was quiet, aside from the background music, but still kind of spooky. It was a very calm, serene moment before you got into the final thick of things. I think that's one of the things I'm most proud of. For the record, I did not do that background; I am incredibly jealous of the artist who did. I did do the vast majority of the lab stuff, however. Anything with a blue glow on it, I did that, as well as nighttime sprites outside. Those were really cool, too.

Craddock: Milton, a lot of people might not realize that you worked on AM2R over 10 years. A lot can happen over a decade. We've discussed closing your studio. What were some other major life events that accelerated or impeded on AM2R's progress?

MG: At one point, I had to close my recording studio and open up some rehearsal studios closer to where I lived. I kept working on the game; more people were showing up. About six years later, after continuous work [2011-12], things changed quite suddenly: I found out I was going to be a father. At that sort of moment in your life, you have to start really considering what the future is going to be like. It affected how things developed.

I was working on my studio, and coming home at 1:00 a.m. If I were to have a proper family life, if I was going to be there for my child, I would have to change my working habits. Eventually I got into learning how to program in C#. A friend of mine recommended me to a software [company], and I started working officially as a developer. At one point, for about an entire year, I was maintaining my recording studio, working a day job, and being a father for a brief period of time before I fell asleep. It was exhausting. And in the middle of all that, besides working for customers, I was also working on AM2R. I won't do that again. I usually work at night, but that period was very tiresome. It nearly destroyed me.

By the time I knew I was going to be a father, I immediately had a job as a programmer. The first year I was staying late and was extremely tired. My little girl pretty much didn't recognize me. I was just some guy that showed up and spent some time with her before she fell asleep, and helped with the household chores.

Craddock: I'd like to dig more into the dichotomy of changes and similarities between AM2R and the original Metroid II. For example, the original game's map was large for a Game Boy title, but I'd imagine technical changes sent ripples through the game design. Did you start by studying the game's map and deciding where to add to or cut from it? And how did changes such as increased resolution affect the scale of rooms and areas in AM2R?

MG: I actually worked backwards. I started with landmarks, the places that need to feel familiar. You need to see a screenshot and recognize it as a place from the original. That was my starting point. Some things had to be scaled because the resolution of the screen was way bigger, but some places are actually on a similar scale. They had to feel about the same size as Samus in some places. Others were just completely changed. The entire map feels more horizontal because of the screen ratio. Every screen that you see in-game is actually one square on the minimap. If something was a square building in the original, in the original game the screen was actually square. So something that's square in the original is more rectangular in my remake. Compensations had to be made sometimes.

Overall, the main idea is to make the people feel like they're exploring some big place. Some of the rooms in Metroid 2 were bigger than the screen, so there was lots of scrolling. That amount of free space was respected. This also falls into my plan of, the closer to the surface you are, the more open areas you're going to be seeing; the closer you get to the bottom of the planet, the more claustrophobic the caves will be. There will be multiple passages for you to traverse and try to find your way into small labyrinths. It was subtle, but the style of the areas followed that plan. The first tunnel you see, you have huge corridors with many platforms; it's very easy to traverse, and there's not much danger besides weak enemies. Later areas start to be more functional and claustrophobic. That's kind of the whole idea.

Craddock: When we talked about Metroid II's atmosphere, we also touched on how gating the map allowed the designers to pace the player's progression. Did you want to use gated progression and other techniques to set a similar pace for AM2R? Or did many areas have to be rebuilt to accommodate technical considerations?

MG: The first area was very easy [to create] because I was following the original design, pretty much, but with better graphics. Later areas got trickier. I was a bit uncertain where things were going to be, and the player was more likely to get lost starting with the second area and onward. I was one of the most impatient testers of the game. I get bored very easily. If something fancy isn't happening, or if I don't have any clear objectives, I get bored and just play something else. I try to make sure that when the player gets to see the map, they have an idea of where they haven't gone yet. When you find a place that requires a power-up [to navigate], such as walls of spikes that require a high jump, it has to be distinct enough for players to remember. I made sure those kinds of obstacles were memorable, and to let the player know where unexplored areas can be found.

There's no such thing as a dead-end. Every corridor, every way you try to explore, leads to something, even if it's just a missile expansion. There's no filler. That was my main philosophy: I'm not going to show the player a labyrinth and just have the player come to a wall. It's very likely there's something hidden around you. If there is a corridor or passage that goes somewhere, that somewhere is going to lead to a Metroid, or a miniboss, or some power-up.

Craddock: Speedrunners love to dissect Metroid maps and find the most efficient way through. Did you design AM2R with speedrunning in mind?

MG: Everything is thought out so you can skip some parts, or you completely avoid some of the power-ups. In theory—and I do mean this in theory—you only need to pick up the bombs, the Ice Beam, the super missiles, screw attack, and the speed booster to beat the game. The entire game is beatable with only those items. If you can bomb-jump and you don't get killed, you could, in theory, complete the entire game with that. It would be insane, and I doubt many people will be able to do it.

Craddock: Did you consider minibosses such as the various Metroids players fight as they push deeper into the planet a sort of landmark?

MG: Those appeared quite late in the process. Between the beginning of [development] and the [release of] the first demo that showed actual game content, there was a release called Metroid Confrontation. It was just an extension of the small demo I'd released in the first couple of weeks. By the time I actually focused on a proper demo that showed the actual levels, there were artists working on enemy sprites and a writer giving a hand with what would eventually become the logbook. There was a beta tester who was insanely effective; he found stuff that was very obscure and did help make the entire game feel more solid.

There was some sort of team going on. Since I had more resources, I tried messing around with the idea of bosses. The only planned boss I had was Arachnus, just because he was in the original and I already had the Metroid Fusion sprites for it. Making the first Chozo guardian was a matter of repainting and editing an existing statue and animating it. It was a nice way of repurposing existing sprites. I thought that was a nice experience, having Arachnus for the second area. What can we do for the third area? I kind of like the Torizo from Super Metroid. He's one of the first bosses, and then he appears again and is extremely difficult. He seemed to be iconic enough, so people would be fighting something familiar. Then again, he adds a little bit of a twist.

Craddock: I was impressed to learn that you also composed AM2R's score in addition to doing design, programming, and art. Boasting such an array of skills harkens back to the days when one or two people built entire games on their own.

MG: Writing the music was a little bit different [than writing code]. There were a couple of songs that I was certain would be in the game. You start the game, you see the ship, and the theme music will be playing. It will be an arrangement of that classic Metroid 2 song. You go to the first area of the game. We remember that there was a strange song in the original; we can do an arrangement of that. After that, it's uncertain, because the original didn't have that much music to it.

One of the reasons why I left the soundtrack for later was at one point, I was going to do a combination of digital audio and the XM format. Depending on the situation, I was going to have four instrument channels playing at the same time (two stereo tracks), and you would be able to cross-fade within those tracks depending on the situation. So if you're going into the place with all the green plants, the XM track would cross-fading between two pairs of channels. You'd have two versions of the same song playing in parallel.

Technically speaking, that was possible. I had experience with that, making loops inside of those XM files and playing them with an extension for GameMaker. The experiment was successful, but it was a pain in the ass to actually produce. To actually loop the tracks and make the entire soundtrack like that was possible, but impractical. I decided it would be better to just have normal music looping, and that did change how I would be producing the soundtrack. It was going to be loop based, and it was just going to be a single song at a time.

One thing I made sure about was I needed to know how an area would feel gameplay-wise and aesthetically. I needed to know what the sequence was going to be, and how some places would look. The soundtrack was done in service to the aesthetics of each place instead of the other way around. That also helped me to decide which tracks from existing Metroid music to remix. For example, I was playing through the second area, and I inserted as a placeholder some Super Metroid music. I thought, This is nice; I like how the music combines with this particular place. I could do a remix of this. Most of the musical choices had to wait until I saw how the area turned out, and how the gameplay feels.

Craddock: You ended up releasing AM2R near the 30th anniversary of the original Metroid in August 2016. I know the game took over 10 years to make, but was there a point when you started eyeing the 30th anniversary and thought, You know, that seems like a good date to target?

MG: The scope kept changing. The contents of the game were very simple in the beginning. They were just the level data, the Metroids, some areas, and the suit. Then it started to grow a little bit, and I started to add more stuff. Eventually, it was going to be a month or two that I was going to dedicate to improving some asset or something in a level; I ended up dedicating that to expanding controller support.

I was able to purchase a license for Game Maker Studio. Suddenly the idea of multiple platforms actually justified the entire port from the old Game Maker version to the new studio version. That was about two and a half months that was writing and rewriting stuff that was obsolete or just didn't work in the new Game Maker. I was actually adding stuff, and things were getting more complex. I'm pretty sure I wrote many times in the blog, "The game might be finished this year."

SR: I think we decided that maybe sometime between last November and December [2015]. We were just finishing out the fifth area, and we realized that that was the biggest area that needed to be finished up. Everything else just needed minor tweaks here and there. We realized that if we really hauled ass and pushed to get this thing done, we could make the August release date. We could make the 30th anniversary and give [the Metroid community] something that everybody's been craving.

We haven't gotten a traditional Metroid game since Zero Mission. That was 12 years ago. That's all I ever see anybody clamoring for: "When are we going to get a traditional Metroid game?" The closest thing that we've gotten is Axiom Verge. Just from the small amount I've played, Thomas Happ and his team know what goes into the Metroid formula and what gives the game its feeling. That's important. During development, we try to emulate the same thing. When I was doing artwork, I would think to myself, If I was working in a big office, if I was working for Nintendo, what would they tell me to do and how would I do it?

MG: By the time I started on the 1.3 demo, when I got to the organizational stuff, I opened up a Freedcamp account. It's an online project management tool that lets you break projects into tasks that can be assigned to different users. We had the tools to collaborate. Organizing things, setting deadlines, and being able to reach them—that went a long way toward planning: how much time and effort will something take? For example, demo 1.3 showed the factory. By that time, we were getting serious about it and we set a deadline. The outline of the entire place was done, a lot of mechanics and bosses, but the entire pitch-black area wasn't done. I hadn't even made a lighting engine. I knew the place was going to be dark, but I didn't have the technology to make it dark yet.

Using that [management system] was a way of measuring how productive we as a team could be, and let you separate how much time you'd need to work on an area to actually be able to show it and make it work. It showed all of the bugs that appeared in that area. We repeated that process. I was actually going to be developing most of the content myself, and then the testing phase started. I had a rough idea of when the entire place would be functional enough to appear in the demo. By the time we finished demo 1.4 and people loved it, I was able to plan how much time we'd need for the rest of the game. The new area was something that got many changes; it was redone from scratch two times. Then the later parts, the Omega Nest and the Queen's Lair were already done; they just needed their respective Metroid fights. And music, and sound effects, and backgrounds, and special events… you get the idea.

All in all, the planning went pretty well. I did take a lot of time to make the new area, making changes along the way to a couple of new items. Once that area was roughly done—just having the collision data and the power-ups in place—I knew more or less that we'd be able to finish the game this year [2016]. I was aiming for December at first, until I found out the date of the 30th anniversary of Metroid.

Craddock: What thoughts and emotions ran through your head after releasing AM2R?

MG: It was a little bit of panic. Many fans were waiting for the game, so I was compiling and uploading things as fast as I could, making sure the build was the correct one, trying to minimize the amount of things that could go wrong. A lot of people tried to contact me on Skype, asking me how the release was going. Many things were happening at the same time. It was not easy, to say the least.

Seeing the game out there, seeing people have fun and just waiting for people to finish it, was very cool. Very satisfying. I was joining people on Twitch as they played for the first time, and it was nice to see how they reacted to the new changes and new areas. It was satisfying, you know?

SR: I was thinking, What's left to do? When it comes to me, what I'm doing needs time to be put into the game. So instead of doing any kind of art—we were past that by the last 24 hours; that all needed to be done beforehand—I thought to myself, What can I do to help Doc with PR to make this go as smoothly as possible? For the week beforehand, I made a Twitter account that was dedicated to AM2R and media related to it. Every day I released a screenshot of something people hadn't seen and talked about it and its development process.

Twelve hours later I would upload unreleased assets that weren't used in the game so we could share them, and talk about what it was originally supposed to be for or why it didn't make the cut. Everybody wants to know about the development process; I'm not different. I love seeing stuff that was on the cutting-room floor. I think that's really cool, and I feel like it generated a good amount of interest.

MG: One of the testers sent me a Discord message about half an hour before release saying he found a bug. I had uploaded everything; I'd had a blog post ready to go. So I had to fix the thing, test it, make sure it works properly, recompile it, package it, upload it again to all the hosts. I think the game was ready maybe 10 minutes before the countdown hit zero. I didn't want to disappoint gamers. If they were going to wait, I wanted to be able to get it to them.

SR: It was really cool to see: something we'd worked on so hard and diligently, to get such positive feedback, it just. I don't know. I don't know how to describe that feeling. Immense joy. A little bit of pride. On August 6, I actually held a release party at my home with some family and close friends. We played through the game a little bit and talked about it. They were all happy.

I spent the rest of the day shuffling through people's screenshots, watching streams, looking at reactions, answering questions, just interacting with the community. When I answer questions, I try to answer them in a way that doesn't tell them precisely what to do; it just pushes them in the right direction. But generally, that doesn't become as popular as the [answer] that just tells them what to do.

Craddock: Almost immediately after pushing AM2R out for release, Nintendo dropped a DMCA warning. Did you see that coming?

MG: One of the long-time fans was Mr. Ryan Barrett from Metroid Database. It's one of the biggest Metroid communities in the world, and they have plenty of material from every game. He's very professional, and a very nice guy. Before I was going to release the game, he asked, "Do you want me to host the game for people to download?" I said okay, and I sent him the game. He was able to host it. A few hours later, he messaged me and said he'd received a DMCA notice due to the hosting, and he asked me to remove the link, if possible. I had to do so.

After that, the MediaFire link was unavailable. Another link went down a couple of minutes after. Luckily I was distributing the game via torrent, also. The actual torrent file was hosted on my Google Drive, and that was taken down the day after.

SR: I didn't hear about that until it happened. I saw the tweet that Metroid Database had uploaded, about how their link had been taken down. I started looking into it, thinking, Is this legitimate? There had been an influx [of fake DMCA notices] in the past for fan games being taken down. It was someone posing as former Nintendo employee Jason Allen who was getting these games taken down with false DMCA claims. For the ones that had false claims, things ended up turning out rather well, as far as I'm aware.

MG: I was keeping an eye on all my email accounts to see if I'd get word from Nintendo, and to see if I'd actually get in trouble. The silence made everything uncertain. You get one message saying that this is illegal; people shouldn't be able to download it. But we didn't get one that said, "Stop doing what you're doing." That's all I know. I'm pretty sure that if I upload the game somewhere, it will be taken down eventually. Apparently, in the eyes of someone representing Nintendo, I'm a pirate, and I'm being treated pretty much the same as someone who had created a ROM hack or stole resources.

I'm not sure if this is some sort of automated process, or just a company that offers services to protect companies like Nintendo. No idea. So far I haven't heard from Nintendo themselves. I really don't know how I'm going to face this at the moment. I got a DMCA notification from blogger.com. Evidently they did revert some of the pages and posts to drafts so I can delete them and make them comply to the notice. Then again, there was the risk that they still see something that was copyrighted. I made a blog post explaining the situation to people regarding the future of the game.

But then again, I'm not sure if Nintendo is responsible. I don't know who's behind this. This could be something that's automatic; a bot that detects high traffic on certain Google searches involving key words. I don't know.

SR: What's important to me is that from the very beginning, we didn't want to step on Nintendo's toes. That's absolutely the last thing we wanted. If anything we were trying to pay them respect. The thing is, it's their legal obligation: they have to protect their IP. Now, we weren't expecting [AM2R] to be so popular. I think that's the biggest thing. If it hadn't blown up the way it did, I don't think they'd pay any attention to us. But the fact that it was being reported on major news sites made it a big deal, and they noticed.

I think their legal team was worried that it was going to do some damage. If anything, we wanted to do the opposite: we wanted to bring more attention to the series and get it popular again. We wanted to show people that most everybody wants [Metroid] to go back to its roots. We want traditional Metroid games again. They even announced that new Prey game, where it's a giant Metroidvania inside of a skyscraper in space. Man, that sounds awesome to me. The last thing we wanted was for them to feel like we were threatening them. The fact of the matter is, it's out there. We're going to be respectful about it; we're continuing to work on it in private. It's supposed to be a love letter and not a contest.

Craddock: Looking back on AM2R, what is your proudest accomplishment?

MG: Being able to make the game in an orderly fashion, being able to motivate people to achieve this. All the contributors have jobs; they have issues, problems, families. They have their dramas, their life stuff. Even then, they feel responsibility to jump on board this passion project made by some dude who's nobody and lives in some other country. They believe in this project. Over the years, I was able to demonstrate that I could achieve milestones in a timely manner, with actual quality. Having people believe in the project, giving me a hand—that's something I'm very proud of.

SR: For me, one of my childhood dreams was working on a Metroid game. I always wanted to go to school and learn game design so I could get hired by Nintendo and make a Metroid that kicked all the other ones out of the water because that was hands-down my favorite game as a kid. I've played through all of them more times than I can count and did everything I could to learn how they would guide the player, how they designed their aesthetics. When it came to AM2R, I tried to emulate that the best I could with the art I put into it.

Case in point: Genesis inside of the GFS Thoth. That was one of the later things that we did. That area had been in development for a couple of years, on and off. It went through three or four different designs until we finalized the one that we have. Genesis was supposed to be the culmination of that area. Right now he's kind of a pushover, but he was one of the most original things that I created. Originally I had created it from my own [design], but I realized it looked like a creature that was already in Metroid Fusion. So I decided to switch it up and change it around so we could use it in AM2R as an original boss. It ended up turning out really well as far as animation goes. That whole area came together so well. That's probably hands-down my favorite area.

MG: Hearing praise for our work is awesome. Metroid fans, and people that never played Metroid 2 are now enjoying this important chapter in the saga. Things may not have turned out exactly how I wanted, but knowing that people are enjoying a faithful Metroid experience fills me with joy. It makes every hour of dev time worth it.

S. D. Perry – Author

Most gamers loathe game-to-movie adaptations, and for good reason. Directors rarely treat source material with the reverence it deserves, resulting in movies so bad even diehard fans of the games that influenced them refuse to acknowledge the silver-screen adaptations.

Game-to-book adaptations are a different beast. Just like bookworms who squirm and sizzle when TV and movie adaptations of their favorite yarns dare to stray from the book, gamers want to see their favorite scenes and characters play out on the page exactly as they did on their consoles and PCs. Yet there's a balancing act of which many readers are not aware. Jane Jensen's novelization of the first Gabriel Knight game, penned by the game designer herself, was almost a one-to-one recreation of the game, resulting in puzzles and sequences that felt bogged down. Some things work better in one medium than another.

To fans of Resident Evil, Stephani Danelle "S. D." Perry proved herself as an author capable of determining what elements of Capcom's survival-horror series worked on the page, what needed to go, and what needed a makeover. Perry wrote seven novels in total—five that covered game stories such as Resident Evil 2, and Resident Evil – Code: Veronica, and two that came straight from the author's imagination.

As a huge fan of the novels, I was honored when S. D. Perry (do not call her Stephani!) accepted my request to answer some of my questions about her Resident Evil books, her writing career, and the trials and tribulations of adapting animated pictures to strings of words.

**

Craddock: What led you on the path to writing? Was writing full-time something you wanted to do, or did you stumble upon it by accident?

S. D. Perry: I started keeping a journal when I was 10, so I grew up feeling comfortable writing. My father is a writer, too, so I always felt like it was a job possibility. I started writing poetry and stories when I was a teen and my dad would tell me to send them out, try to sell them. So I kind of fell into it, but I also had a lot of practice and encouragement early on.

Craddock: How has your dad influenced your writing?

SDP: I don't think I would have become a writer if my father wasn't one. When I was in my early 20s, he offered to collaborate with me so I could get money for school. We did two books together and my career (such as it is) took off from there. He also taught me how to write action.

Craddock: Do you play many video games? How would you describe your level of interest in the gaming scene?

SDP: I played a lot in my 20s and 30s. At the ripe old age of 45, with two kids in the house, I usually have other stuff to do. I play apps on my phone, mostly. Boring, but easy to put down. My sons are the gamers.

Craddock: You've written several tie-in novels over the course of your career, and not just for Capcom's Resident Evil games. How did you get started in the tie-in space?

SDP: Props to my dad. He wrote tie-ins, and offered to share a byline with me on an Aliens book, for Dark Horse Comics. We did two of them, and then I started doing my own tie-ins—a couple of movie novelizations, more Aliens stuff, then into RE and Star Trek, among others.

Craddock: One assumes that tie-in novels could prove critical to helping an author gain exposure, since consumers are already very familiar with the tie-in property, such as Resident Evil and Aliens. Did you find that to be the case with your work?

SDP: I've written tie-ins/novelizations for my whole career, so my fans are usually fans of those franchises. Have I gained exposure? I wouldn't say I'm famous. Resident Evil and Aliens and Star Trek are famous. I'm just a semi-talented hack.

Craddock: Without getting into specific numbers, how well did tie-in novels pay when you wrote the Resident Evil and Aliens books? Does that market still pay about the same, or has it gotten better or worse?

SDP: I wrote all those books for a flat up-front fee and occasionally a percent of a percent of royalties; that's usually how it is when you're writing in someone else's universe. I was offered between $8,000 and $12,000 per book. So I got paid to write them, and if they did well, I sometimes saw a few hundred dollars here or there later on. The RE books definitely had the best royalties, but they dried up years ago. When the series was reissued a few years back—by a different company, which had leased the publishing rights—no one even told me.

I have no idea what the market pays now. For writers in my bracket, $8k-$12k is still pretty good, I think. That's about what I got on my last big project, a year ago. I know that the bigger franchises—Star Wars, for instance—pay a lot more.

Craddock: What do you enjoy most about writing tie-in novels? What do you enjoy least?

SDP: I most enjoy trying to capture the flavor of the property—the game, comic, script—and put it into words. I mean, the stuff I write about has fans for a reason. I consider it part of my job to find that reason and write as a fan. I like working with characters that someone else has created, trying to keep them consistent; it's a challenge, which is fun.

Least? Tight deadlines. And lack of serious royalties. But that's the nature of contract work.

Craddock: How familiar were you with Resident Evil before writing the books?

SDP: Only the first game was out when I was first contacted; the second was about to be released. I had gotten the game months after it came out, and was still in the mansion trying to kill the giant snake when I got the call.

Craddock: How did you get the opportunity to adapt the games to novels?

SDP: A bright young editor at Simon & Schuster had gotten the publishing rights for Resident Evil and was looking for someone to do a few books. He contacted my dad, first. My father was busy, but mentioned that his daughter was a fan of the game and had published tie-ins. The bright young editor—Marco Palmieri—contacted me, and I said heck yeah.

Craddock: Before you started, what guidelines did Capcom set down? For example, were you required to work with certain page counts? Did Capcom mandate that certain events take place?

SDP: Capcom had very little involvement in the books, and only ever contacted my editor. In the initial pitch, I'd done some backstory on the mansion, and they asked me to leave it out because they had their own backstory. Other than that, I don't believe they had much to say.

Craddock: In Resident Evil: City of the Dead, which follows the events of Resident Evil 2, you had Ada Wong find the heart key hidden in the statue located in the RCPD lobby, rather than have Leon or Claire search it out. How much creative control did you have in choosing which in-game events to adapt exactly as they occurred, versus which ones you had to cut (such as the "push the bookshelves around" puzzle in the library of RE2) or alter?

SDP: If I'd just novelized the games, I would have had 300 pages of the same two characters running back and forth to solve puzzles. I had to have creative license to move the story along, and give the other characters something to do. I had pretty much complete control over the decisions; my editor was happy as long as I was including the bigger puzzles and keeping it entertaining.

Craddock: Regarding creative control, how much say did you have in each book? I imagine that, when adapting one of the games, your parameters were well-defined: this is how the game starts, and this is where it ends.

SDP: I wasn't given a whole lot of direction. This was back in the mid-'90s, and videogame novelizations weren't all that big yet. So I winged it. I did it the way a fan would, the way anyone would—followed the events as they happened and told the story that went along with it. My editor added some stuff in—the mysterious Trent was his idea, for example—but I did the rest.

Craddock: Did Capcom provide any materials for you to reference while writing? For instance, you did a great job recreating many iconic environments such as the police station in RE2 and the Spencer Estate in RE1. Did you have screenshots or other documents to reference when describing those areas?

SDP: They sent me a few character shots for the second game. Other than that, the only reference materials I got were game guides, from my editor. For the first game, I just played it every time I had a question about some detail. By the time I finished the book, I could complete the whole game in less than two hours. For me, that was an achievement. I also used the VCR to record the game while I played, so I could find what I needed for a given scene.

Craddock: The second and fourth books in your series—Caliban Cove and Underworld, respectively—were unique stories never before told in the RE universe. Did Capcom supply outlines for those, or did you come up with the premise yourself?

SDP: Those were me. I pitched them to my editor and he said go for it.

Craddock: One aspect I loved about the RE books was that you took the time to flesh out non-playable characters (NPCs) such as Chief Irons and Annette Birkin from Resident Evil 2. Was it your choice to write from the perspectives of those characters, or did Capcom ask you to do that?

SDP: Capcom really wasn't involved. Like I said earlier, I had to fill pages with more than just solving puzzles, so I used the non-POV characters to move the story along. And thanks! I'm glad you liked it!

Craddock: Walk us through the process of writing one of the RE novels. Let's start with the first book, The Umbrella Conspiracy, which follows the original Resident Evil. What was the starting point? What came next? What steps followed and led up to finishing the book and seeing it appear in stores?

SDP: I agreed to write four books: two based on the first two games, two original set in the same universe. I wrote one at a time, and as I turned each one in, my editor would ask for changes. I rewrote until he was happy (or at least not unhappy!). He sent each to Capcom, they were okayed with minor corrections. Galleys were sent out for final corrections, then the book went to press, then it came out.

Craddock: In RE games, players find progressively stronger weapons, such as the shotgun and the bazooka, to even the playing field against tougher enemies. In your books, the characters tend to find fewer weapons, and are constantly in danger of running low on supplies. I really like this wrinkle; it adds tension. Was it your call to steer the characters off the videogame-y path of finding increasingly powerful weapons in order to create a tenser, more survival-driven atmosphere?

SDP: Yes, it was my call… And yes! Plus, having awesome weapons and endless ammo in real life leads to practical issues; like, who wants to run through a house of horror lugging a bazooka and 40 pounds of ammo?

Craddock: You might remember from playing Resident Evil that the game's tone and dialogue were. less than serious, one could say. One might go so far as to describe them as "cheesy." You took a much darker, more serious tone in your books. Was it your goal to intentionally steer clear of cheesiness?

SDP: Yes, and my editor agreed. The voice acting was silly, and we went into the project looking to make it seem real. I mean, obviously it's fiction, but I don't think I would have enjoyed writing tongue-in-cheek… And I don't think the fans would have dug it, either.

Craddock: Every writer practices unique techniques, disciplines, and schedules. How would you describe your approach to writing as you wrote the RE novels? Did that approach change from first draft to second, third, and so on? For example, many authors stress that the first draft is all about dumping words on paper; that's the hard part. Then you go back and rewrite, polish, rewrite, polish.

SDP: This is a bit embarrassing to admit, although anyone reading the stories closely has probably noticed… I did all of those books first draft. I got it on paper, I did one read through for typos, I sent it off. The deadlines were very tight—a month to six weeks per book—and I put off working until I had to do like 20 pages a day, so there wasn't time for extensive rewrites. Looking back, I wish I had taken more time to craft and polish, but I was young and inexperienced and I thought I could pull it off.

I was so late on each deadline that my poor editor was mostly stuck with what I sent him. I'd like to think that the books worked because I'm incredibly talented and work best under stress, but honestly, I was lucky; the material was all there, I just had to fill in the blanks. Only my editor had contact with them [Capcom]. He kind of intimated to me that Capcom didn't even like the books that much, although to be honest, I don't remember. This was all 20 years ago. My editor asked me to make changes here and there, to keep stuff entertaining. Capcom's only issue was with some stuff I'd made up about the Spencer Estate, early in the first book.

Craddock: As with the games, your Resident Evil 0 novelization came up several years after the first three games in the series. How did you get the chance to backtrack in the timeline and write the Resident Evil 0 book?

SDP: The first four books did well, and Simon & Schuster still had the rights, so I was hired to adapt the next games. I think that's when I started adding in that disclaimer at the front of books, about how the games and books were coming out at different times so probably wouldn't be consistent. Capcom didn't refer to the books when they were making their games, or give me any inside information on their future plans; I had to either come up with an explanation for the differences or just ignore timeline issues. Mostly, I just tried to adapt what was in front of me.

Craddock: I'm disappointed that we haven't seen novelizations for Resident Evil 4 or other later games. Did Capcom approach you with plans to adapt RE4 or any games that followed?

SDP: Nope. Someone else leased the publishing rights. I was contacted by a nice editor at another house about eight years ago about maybe doing more, but apparently Capcom decided to stop publishing just about then. Again, I got the impression that they weren't fans of the books, but maybe that's just me.

Craddock: Which of the Resident Evil novels was your favorite to write?

SDP: Caliban Cove, because I got to have a character bite and eat someone's face.

Craddock: Which of the RE novels gave you the most trouble?

SDP: City of the Dead, because there was just so much material.

Craddock: Which character was your favorite to write for?

SDP: Probably Rebecca [Chambers]; she was such a good girl.

Craddock: Which scenes from any of the RE books stand out to you?

SDP: Hmm… I wrote them all in such a rush, I was always late on those books; mostly I remember trying to come up with synonyms for gore. I remember the crow puzzle and the giant spiders, I remember an underwater lab and the Licker and a train crash and the Antarctic and a submarine. It all blends together; I wrote them fast, and haven't gone back to read them in a very long time.

Craddock: If you could go back, is there anything you would change about any of the RE books?

SDP: Yes. I'd get rid of a lot of clichés that I used because I was still a very young writer and I would finally correct my gun ignorance. When I wrote those, I thought "clip" and "Magazine" were interchangeable. I'm sure I made lots of mistakes.

Craddock: What are you up to these days? Any books in the works?

SDP: Let's see. An Aliens project I worked on just came out: The Weyland-Yutani Report; I have a zombie short story coming out next month in an anthology, "SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest," and a pop-up book (not for kids!) coming out in October. I just turned in a story for another anthology, and am finishing a second original novel, a haunted house book.

Oh, and I also just signed a contract for a thing I can't talk about yet, but it'll make RE fans happy—think action and guts. One of these days, I'll make a website so I can announce stuff to people.

Seth Mendelsohn on Virgin Interactive and Super Mario Bros.

Even though video games didn’t begin with Mario, the industry today has grown out of the precepts of the first Super Mario game for the NES back in 1985 (and even earlier in Japan). Those precepts arguably apply most when you’re making a platforming game of the kind Seth Mendelsohn specialized in during the early years of his career as a designer.

I never planned to write about the making of Aladdin and The Lion King, two of the best (and the latter one of the hardest) 2D platformers from the golden era of 16-bit gaming. The opportunity just sort of happened. I was interviewing developers for an upcoming book about the history of real-time strategy games, and one developer who worked on Command & Conquer also worked on The Lion King. So did Louis Castle, co-founder of Westwood Studios, the house of C&C. One thing led to another, and when I asked about Lion King’s infamous second level, Seth Mendelsohn came up.

Don’t hold level two against him. Seth is an excellent designer with a firm background in what makes a great platforming game. In fact, there’s an urban legend surrounding why level two was so difficult. But that’s a story for another chapter—the next chapter, in fact. Here, I included my conversation with Seth about everything up to Aladdin and The Lion King. We talked about how he got his start in the industry, the decades-long debate between Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World, good platforming design, and more.

**

David L. Craddock: How did you get started in the video game industry?

Seth Mendelsohn: I was working at a Babbage's. Do you remember Babbage's?

Craddock: I do. I worked at a Waldenbooks in my local mall through college, and Babbage's was just down the corridor.

Mendelsohn: Okay, so Babbage's had just opened up in South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa, California. I applied and got a job and helped open the store and hired all my buddies, and a whole slew of us ended up working at Virgin as well. Early on, a couple of guys walked into the store. And they were like, “Hey, do you have Monopoly for the PC?” I'm like, “No, I don't think it's come in yet.” They laughed and said, “Yeah, because we haven't finished making it yet.” It turned out that those two guys were Graeme Devine and Dan Chang. I asked them where they worked and got to know them. I called them every day for a year and would say, “Here's what games came in today. Do you have any jobs?” About a year or so later, they said, “Hey, we’re finally doing some stuff where we need another QA person. Do you want a job?”

Craddock: I’ve spoken with Graeme before, about Quake III. He’s a super-nice guy.

Mendelsohn: They were so funny. They would come in and tell stories. I remember they brought their Atari Lynx systems in when that came out. It took me a year of literally asking every day if they had jobs. I was a hardcore gamer. Started with Atari, Intellivision, Commodore 64, arcades, and all that stuff, just playing a ton of games.

Craddock: How would you describe the culture at the company when you started?

Mendelsohn: Young. Everybody did everything. Virgin had just become Virgin Mastertronic. There was a whiteboard with little magnets, and the newest person was at the bottom. There were probably 25 people there, and my name was at the bottom. It moved up as time went on. We were primarily working with a lot of external developers doing publishing. There were a few internal projects starting up, but it was mostly external development. There were some programmers, a couple artists, a lot of sales folk. The other guy who came in with me was David Lumen. He ended up doing a lot of stuff with Microsoft and is still making games. He was more of a PC gamer, where I was more of a console gamer. We both kind of made this agreement that he would take on all the PC stuff and I would take on all the cartridge stuff.

But in the beginning, we would do a lot of everything. I would write notes for stuff, we would help do whatever was needed in the building. It was a small group, right? As far as console stuff, I would burn the ROMs when builds came in. When we had to submit to Nintendo, I would fill out the forms. I would record video, because you had to send in VHS tapes of everything. We were shifting from this small team. As we took on more console stuff, everything changed.

Craddock: You’re someone who started out selling games and transitioned to making them. What was one of the first things behind that curtain that surprised you?

Mendelsohn: Oh, that's a good question. I think it was really seeing the pieces of how games were made. Seeing artwork being made on a desk somewhere, and then somebody else coding, and seeing everything come together. It was all these different pieces. Especially console games: I didn’t understand how you made a cartridge game. Like, oh, you use a computer for it? The other thing was that games were made by such small teams. We’d have one artist who would be working on a game with one programmer, and the two of them did everything. I remember early Game Boy games where I’d see someone drawing pixels, and then suddenly you'd see them in the game on a cartridge. To see it go from nothing to somewhat was… I mean, wow.

I had read all the magazines at the time. Electronic Games was my favorite back in the day, so I’d seen pictures of how it worked, but seeing all the components come together was different. One of the first things I remember is I was helping with one of the Game Boy games. I walked in there and said I was going to be a producer, kind of a helper. And they looked at me like, why the hell do we need you? They had a guy doing art and another doing programming, so what was I doing there? But it was a small place and everyone was nice. You could ask about anything, and they would tell you about it.

Craddock: One thing I found surprising was when I was talking to the programmer of the Genesis port of Mortal Kombat, and he said he had a few months and no source code to work with. He had to play the arcade game and work with an artist to duplicate it as closely as possible. That surprised me. I figured he’d have had everything he needed since MK was a big deal, but his turnaround and resources were tight.

Mendelsohn: It’s funny you talk about ports. I think we were working with Gremlin, who’d done a port of Outrun. We asked them, “How did you guys do the port? Did you get all the code everything?” They said, “Nope. We went to the arcade and filmed it, and then we went back and copied it.” That stuff amazed me, too. But it's funny talking about things that surprise us. It’s more that today, games take so much longer. There used to be a cycle where if it was a PC game, you’d do games in six to eight months, whatever it was, and it would come out. For console games, the window was it had to be finished and in stores by Thanksgiving. If your product wasn’t on shelves prior to early to mid-November, you missed the holidays. The turnaround time for cartridges being approved, to manufacturing, to on shelves was three months. So, when you think about it, if you weren’t done by August, you missed Christmas.

That cycle and turnaround was the impetus for what you cut from games. For bigger titles, it was Christmas or bust. At Virgin, they were still doing Commodore Amiga stuff when I got there. I think there was an Apple II port going. They got their start making budget software [for computers]. We had to cover everything, and some teams we were worked were very fast at getting stuff turned around.

Craddock: As a kid, I loved sitting down with magazines and comparing and contrasting versions of the same game, just to see how they were different. I did that with Aladdin for Genesis and Super Nintendo, and I know you worked on that, so we’ll talk about that. In the meantime, I love Prince of Persia, and I know you worked on the Game Boy version. What do you remember from that project?

Mendelsohn: Prince of Persia and Karateka were games that were made on the Apple II. We’d seen Prince of Persia, and I thought it was going to be really difficult to port over, but so much of that game came down to getting the animations of the main character right. Everything else about the game is pretty simple: the backgrounds, the floors, everything like that. The critical point was that the character look correct; if we got that, the rest of the game would flow. I think the Game Boy version looks better than the NES port. There’s something about the Game Boy and the way the colors are and the animations, and I just think it looks better. That might be because most of those Apple II games were on green screens, so the Game Boy version looks almost perfect.

Craddock: Even though games are bigger, do you think that—finding the beating heart of a game and focusing on that—is still what’s most important?

Mendelsohn: For sure. If you look at any game, ask yourself what is the driving force of what makes it good and fun? There are so many games you can dissect and they won’t hold up well. But part of that is we're using today's eyes to examine something from back in the day. The Apple II had joysticks, and I looked at them and was like, these joysticks are so springy. Games wouldn’t feel right to me, but so much of how people played those games was with those joysticks or on a keyboard, even if you had a joystick. A lot of those games had to do so much with so little to make it work. They didn’t have cutscenes or other things we have today; what made them fun was a clever game mechanic.

Lode Runner is still a fun game on its own. There were a lot of Kong clones like the one from EA, Hard Hat Mack on Apple II—there was something that made them fun [and it was a good mechanic]. It’s hard to see that with today’s eyes. The best example now might be PlayStation One. There are a lot of great PS1 games, but it’s hard to go back. They just announced a remaster of Tomb Raider; look at that and then go look at Tomb Raider on PlayStation. Those 3D games don’t hold up as well as 2D games, which is why you see so much of that stuff. On the same side, the Atari 2600, it’s hard for me to play those games today.

Craddock: Yeah. Super NES is my sweet spot. I loved the NES, but I have trouble playing most of those games, too.

Mendelsohn: You know, a lot of that is because of collision boxes. That’s something I learned. Collision boxes went from being a giant [rectangular] area to contours around players. That’s the deciding point for why 2600 and NES games feel different from Super NES and beyond. Your characters can be different shapes, but the collision box moves with them. Before that, it was an area, and that's the difference. It sounds silly, but you go back and you play these games and you get hit, and you're like, “Wait—that didn't hit me.” It’s the big collision box.

The collision box in The Lion King was tough because you’re playing a quadruped, so the box was long [instead of tall]. Unfair things happen to you in those games today, and your brain gets frustrated [because it’s used to newer styles and systems]. So, for me, collision boxes is the shift. Also, controls are tighter. Any time I would start a new project with a team, I would do Bad Games Day. I would pull out a bunch of bad games and say, “What’s bad about this?” Part of design is understanding what is wrong with this thing, and so much of it comes down to controls. And control is hard because some of it is personal in terms of what you expect, but that’s really what it comes down to. A really good example if you’re a Genesis or Super Nintendo fan: Find five or six platform games—go from Mario to Awesome Possum, Sparkster—and just walk left and right, and jump.

We’ve got to a point where Mario is the standard of how moving and jumping should feel, and it’s amazing how different those early games [other than Mario] felt. Things feel really heavy, or too floaty. That’s where you notice it the most because you’re like, these all do the same thing, but you can feel the difference. That’s the starting point of where frustration comes from.

Craddock: This might be a hot take, but I’ve always had the floatiness issue with Sonic the Hedgehog. I’ve never enjoyed playing those games because the best parts are when you’re not playing. You rev Sonic up and watch him go fast. When you have to platform, he’s so floaty.

Mendelsohn: It's funny you say that. One of my closest friends is Jared Brinkley, who worked on games with me. We talked about Sonic a lot. I'm a huge Sega fan, but to me, Sonic doesn’t hold up today. It was fun back in the day. But I don't want to go back and replay it because it's about “run really fast and hit something.” That’s what it is. I think it looked great and was fun, but most other platform games were about precision. If someone said to you, “What is Mario?” The game mechanic of Mario is jumping. That’s what you do: You jump on or avoid stuff. In Sonic, you blaze through stuff. I think it’s a great game, but I don't have any interest in going back to it.

Part of the problem there is Sega keeps trying to bring Sonic back by making the same thing. All these versions coming out are more of the same. I think Sonic had its moment. I can go back and play Mario 3 and Mario 4. That game, Mario 4, is in my top three games of all time.

Craddock: Same.

Mendelsohn: I could play it all the time. I still remember all 96 of the exits. Everything. But Sonic, I have no interest. I put it on, I play it for a few minutes, and I go, “Okay, I’m good.”

Craddock: To your point, you can play Mario 3, Super Mario World, and New Super Mario Bros. They all feel similar, but they still do different things.

Mendelsohn: Miyamoto is one of my gaming heroes. One thing that influenced me that I’d read is that he built the levels using Post-It notes. He would draw on these notes and move them around. Every single jump in those first few games was calculated to go with the next one, to the next one, to the next one. That’s how they built a lot of levels. That stuck with me, how everything is where it is for a purpose.

Mario 3 and 4 especially. Every platform is there to lead you somewhere else. Everything is just off-screen for the hardest jumps and is kind of multiple choice so you can seed everything. It’s purposefully built, and you can tell. That’s why those games were better than all the zillion other sidescroller platformers that came out, and they’re still good. The controls are perfect. You play some other games, you see a jump, and you don’t know if you can make it. If you can see a platform in Mario, you know you can make that jump. The game design is so great.

Craddock: Okay, I have to get your opinion. I prefer Super Mario 4 to Mario 3. You said Mario 4 is in your top three games of all time. Why do you think it’s better than 3?

Mendelsohn: Oh, okay, that's an easy one. I like the fact that you can go back and play through levels again, and that the levels have hidden secrets you can do again. The fact that there are 96 exits and you have to find them just makes me play it over and over again. It gives you reason not to just run through the game, and you can collect the five dragon coins on every level. In Mario 3, you just have to get to the end and you’re done. In Mario 4, you can do so much: find the coins, find the exits, hit the block switches. And game saves, too. Don’t forget that because it’s huge.

Craddock: I also love that the world maps in Mario 4 weren’t just grids of levels. They connect, and you open them up by finding exits.

Mendelsohn: The multiple ways you can get places! Like, those ghost houses: You knew there were multiple ways [out of them]. It’s such a great game. It’s perfect.

Craddock: I also felt like Mario 3 had a lot of great stages, but they’re all so short. It felt like they were just ramping up and then they were over.

Mendelsohn: Yeah. Mario 4 is an amazing game, and the fact that it came out at launch? Even more amazing. It’s a perfect game. There’s nothing wrong with it.

Monkeying Around: The Making of The Lion King’s Most Infamously Difficult Level

If you were a Disney kid in the 1980s or ‘90s, odds are good you have strong memories of three things: binging cartoons on Saturday mornings, playing Disney-licensed games on 8- and 16-bit consoles, and the white-text-on-bright-red-background Virgin Interactive logo. The Disney Afternoon series of video games for NES made by Capcom were based on hot properties like DuckTales and Darkwing Duck, but as great as they were, the 16-bit era run of Jungle Book, Aladdin, and The Lion King is arguably where the loose franchise hit its stride.

Virgin Interactive started in 1983 as a British developer, and experienced massive growth after acquiring Mastertronic, a budget label of video games that sold thousands of units. The company continued to prosper, eventually opening a studio in Irvine, California, and attracting widespread interest from young developers looking to make their mark in the industry. And, with Seth Mendelsohn, players who thought transitioning from owning game consoles to developing for them was a pipe dream.

Mendelsohn was working as a clerk at Babbage’s, a line of video game stores that was eventually acquired by GameStop, when developers from Virgin’s U.S. location wandered in asking if they had Virgin’s latest game in stock. The guys became friends, and Mendelsohn placed daily calls asking if there were any openings at the Irvine studio. When a QA (quality assurance) position opened up, he leaped at the opportunity.

SETH MENDELSOHN [designer, Virgin Interactive]:

We were young. Everybody did everything. Virgin had just become Virgin Mastertronic. There was a whiteboard with little magnets, and the newest person was at the bottom. There were probably 25 people there, and my name was at the bottom. It moved up as time went on. We were primarily working with a lot of external developers doing publishing. There were a few internal projects starting up, but it was mostly external development. There were some programmers, a couple artists, a lot of sales folk. The other guy who came in with me was David Luehmann. He ended up doing a lot of stuff with Microsoft and is still making games. He was more of a PC gamer, where I was more of a console gamer. We both kind of made this agreement that he would take on all the PC stuff and I would take on all the cartridge stuff.

But in the beginning, we would do a lot of everything. I would write notes for stuff, and we would help do whatever was needed in the building. It was a small group, right? As far as console stuff, I would burn the ROMs when builds came in. When we had to submit to Nintendo, I would fill out the forms. I would record video, because you had to send in VHS tapes of everything. We were shifting from this small team. As we took on more console stuff, everything changed.

Virgin Games was going through a transition of trying to become an A-level developer. The company had published a lot of stuff in Europe and had come to America, and Martin Alper [designer/former president of Virgin Interactive] had brought this team over. We were doing a lot of publishing. Little by little, we started making content in-house. We had, there was a handful of us—me, Eric Yeo, Lyle Hall—that were producers. We would work on stuff and find great developers we liked, and we would try to bring them over. We got a lot of guys from Probe. David Perry had worked on Terminator, and we had kind of stolen him and a couple of the art folks. Dave Perry's engine, I guess, came with him. The engine was solid and had been used for Aliens 3 and Terminator on the Genesis. In parallel, there was a tool called TUME, for The Ultimate Map Editor, that was made by a couple of the guys at the company. They'd made this tool and could kind of keep it and sell it, a map editor for tiles. You'd build the tiles in DPaint, and TUME would let you plop them into the world and spit it out into a file for the game.

This is important because it's the pipeline for how the rest of these games came to be. You go from The Terminator, Global Gladiators, to Cool Spot. There was another game called M.C. Kids. I got $50 for naming that game and I apologize to this day for the hip hop [pun]. So, we have this engine and pipeline.

We were all huge Disney fans at Virgin. To the point that when I first got there, every couple of weeks, we would all go to Disneyland for lunch. Graeme Devine would be like, “I feel like going on Star Tours. Who wants to have lunch at Disneyland?” That's how big of Disney fans we were. All the movies and everything. We wanted to work on Disney projects, and you look at the Capcom stuff: DuckTales is amazing, Chip and Dale: Rescue Rangers, and stuff on the Sega side like Castle of Illusion. These were the “A” licenses. Working with Disney was a big deal.

Disney was in the market for development studios. It wanted to capitalize on the success of its 8-bit platforming games by releasing titles for 16-bit consoles based on classic and upcoming animated films. One of those was the Jungle Book, an older movie that would lead to new opportunities for Virgin U.S.

SETH MENDELSOH:

As part of the vetting process, we were showing them who everyone at the studio was; you had to sell yourself. We showed them a demo of something, a proof of concept we’d been working with, of some dinosaurs on rollerblades. It was called Dino Blades, and they were drawn and animated by hand by a gentleman named Andy Locky and somebody else—I apologize, I don't remember his name. We'd put them into the Genesis, and they were skating around and everything. It was a quick demo, and we showed it to them as a way of saying, “We’re forward thinking.”

We get The Jungle Book, and it’s kind of a “B” license. It's not the hottest thing you know, it's not new or anything, but the team starts working on it, among other things. The team went from Global Gladiators and then Cool Spot, and then they were working on Jungle Book, building the Sega and Super Nintendo versions side by side.

We knew Sega was the publisher for Disney stuff on the Sega side, and Capcom was the publisher on Nintendo’s side. They [Disney] had hired a development team in San Diego called Blue Sky interactive to make the Aladdin game for them. What we heard later—we got bits and pieces— was they were not happy with what was delivered to them. Blue Sky was also working on the Jurassic Park game, and they thought that was the bigger thing they needed to be focused on.

Somewhere is an Aladdin game in some state. Disney doesn't want to publish it. In fact, they're unhappy and don’t want to do a game at all. But by this point, the movie has come out and is a mega hit. Disney is panicked because this is their biggest movie they've had in years. And if you look, it's also a movie that's perfect for video games. Beauty & The Beast came before, and that was a lot harder [to convert into a game]. The producer on the Disney side, Patrick Gilmore, had remembered we had done a demo where we had showed some animation. Patrick was smart guy and knew games. I think they came together and thought, is it possible that we could use Virgin to make the game, but we could help them by supplying animation? Would that help?

The call came in: Disney wanted to know if Virgin could turn around Aladdin for Sega Genesis by Christmas to coincide with the film’s upcoming VHS release. Disney animators would assist, and they could use songs from the upcoming soundtrack. Virgin committed, and work began immediately.

SETH MENDELSOHN:

A phone call and a meeting happened, and a proposal was made: Do we think it'd be possible to make a game in a tight timeline so that it can be made in time for the holidays and the VHS release of the movie? Martin Alper brought in David Bishop, who was the head of game design, and said, “You can have whatever resources you want, but you’ve got to be really quiet about this. Find who you want to work with and make a game design, propose it to Disney, and see if we can do this.” I was very lucky he picked me. I had been doing some other stuff, marketing and PR I gotten. We had a week or so to come up with the pitch and the high-level GDD [game design document] and not tell anybody or not bring in anybody else. We would do our day job, and every night for a week and a half, we worked from six until, like, one a.m. We put something together and presented it to Patrick Gilmore and the Disney. We gave some feedback to them and made it feel past the first hurdle, the second hurdle. As we moved along, we were allowed to bring more people into it.

From the Virgin side, you didn’t want to the team to know there was this other really cool, bigger project that could happen or might not happen. They didn't want the Jungle Book team to be sidetracked or disappointed this other thing didn't happen. The two of us wrote the game design, and then we brought in two other people: David Perry, to make sure that it was doable within the engine; and Mike Dietz, one of the key animators. We got the blessing from Disney and from our coding and art departments. A deal was struck to do the game and time was ticking. At this point in time, I think we had just over four months, and in that period, to have a demo that could be shown to the public at CES. That was the start of it.

Although Virgin knew Capcom was developing Aladdin for Super NES, neither team knew much, if anything, about the other’s design. Headed up by future Resident Evil producer Shinji Mikami, the Super NES version was more of a platformer, with lots of running, swinging, and jumping, and attacking by throwing apples.

SETH MENDELSOHN:

We knew at the beginning. Patrick was not going to share anything with us. He wanted to keep them separate. The first time we saw it was at CES when we showed our game as well. The Super NES version is a great game. It's a Prince of Persia game. It looks great and it plays great. I know Capcom was frustrated it didn’t get to have a sword. I know that they'd said that. We didn't have any back and forth with them at all. No knowledge, no sharing of anything; they were built as two separate universes and two products.

Virgin’s take on Genesis was more of an action platformer. Aladdin carried a sword in addition to throwing apples, and combat with guards and other enemies was a focal point to make use of the weapon. Levels were based on scenes from the movie such as the Agrabah marketplace and the Cave of Wonders, and Virgin rose to the challenge of expanding each area from a brief movie scene to a full-fledged platforming challenge for players.

SETH MENDELSOHN:

For me, it always starts with, what are the levels? What are the parts of the world. We started by listing natural places where levels could take place. Agrabah, the desert, the Genie’s lamp. We came up with some number of levels. Then we went into, what are the actions players can take? We had assumed it would be a jumping game. At the very first meeting with Patrick, he's like, “No, no, he should have a sword.” We're like, “We can have a sword!?” and he said, “Yeah.” Oh, awesome. That’s why Aladdin also throws apples. Originally, we were going to have him jump on enemies and throw stuff at them. So, we had levels and core motions, and natural places for storytelling and bosses. From there: Okay, what are the enemies? What are other things that should be in the game? Well, we need a magic carpet. There has to be a Cave of Wonders. You want a level where he’s running away [from the lava filling the cave].

So much of it came naturally from the movie. When we were working on The Lion King, that movie wasn’t finished. Aladdin was done; you could go see it in theaters. We knew exactly what the movie was and all the best parts. You don't have to make any assumptions. There’s that moment where Aladdin grabs the lamp and the cave crumbles around him.

One of the most unique levels was the dungeon. Aladdin and Abu spend a few minutes imprisoned in the movie; for the game, Virgin U.S. would need to stretch that into a full level filled with guards, traps, and secrets.

SETH MENDELSOHN:

A lot of video game stuff comes from asking, what is the flavor of the world, and how do you use those elements? We said, okay, it's a prison, so what would be in a prison? There’d be this look and feel. We were given some other artwork [from the movie team], so we had these other pieces. If you saw the movie and stopped it, you could see all these elements that the animators drew in, and you would just say, let's expand those. Those backgrounds by Disney’s animators are beautiful. There was some neat parallaxing, so we said, “We’ve got to have some of that in here.”

The whole game was such a crazy cycle that we split up how it was made. There were pairs of designer-artists. Bill Anderson and Christian Laursen did the Agrabah levels, the desert levels, and that prison level. Tom Tanaka and Steve Crow did the Genie’s lamp and the Cave of Wonders before and after [Aladdin stole the lamp]. I worked with Nick Bruty and we did the levels for the Sultan's castle, the good and the bad versions; the magic carpet, and the two bosses. Each of us worked with our art partner on how to build the levels. It was all done on graph paper. I still have all my maps. How it would work was David Perry would come into the office and work until six p.m. on all the general stuff. Bill got six to eight p.m. with David Perry, I got eight to 10 with him, and Tom got 10 to 12 with him. We worked with him on our levels specifically, on the elements we needed for them.

We were all kind of working together that way. Somebody would come up with a mechanic and build it. So, the balls going in and out of the screen was like, “Oh, you've already built them. I'll reuse them my level” or “I want this; can you put it in there?” That way, we all had more bits in the toolbox to put in. We bought all the books about Aladdin that came out and all this other stuff. You'd look at stuff and just see how to expand the story. To the original question, we looked and said, well, what else would be in a prison? What else looks cool? The other thing was trying to squeeze in little Disney touches everywhere. I think Sebastian the crowd is in there somewhere. We were Disney fans and wanted to squeeze that stuff in.

With Aladdin a hit, a group of developers prepared to start on the next big project, an interactive adaptation of Disney’s The Lion King.

SETH MENDELSOHN:

This is the aftermath of Aladdin. That game comes out and no one is surprised it’s successful. We’d seen good feedback from CES. In this aftermath, David Perry started his studio, Shiny Entertainment. He takes everyone from the Aladdin team except the designers with him. All the artists, all the engineers, and they all and they all join him. Kind of in parallel, the Genesis version of The Jungle Book gets handed off to Eurocom, who finishes it, and the Super Nintendo version gets finished by one of our internal team. We’re left saying, “What do we do?” Disney wants Virgin to do The Lion King, and they looked at who they have available from the Aladdin group. There’s also a team at Westwood available, but they have no console experience.

ERIK YEO [designer, Virgin Interactive]:

I was at Virgin doing console design with several other guys there. We had acquired Westwood Studios fairly recently, and they were a very well-known PC developer. They wanted to get into console; Lou Castle in particular, I think, was kind of was bullish on building console games because it was a good direction. They didn't have any full-time designers. Westwood was primarily design by committee with a smaller group, and it had worked really well for them for several years, but they didn't have any designers and they didn't have any console experience.

So, one other designer from Virgin [Seth Mendelsohn] and I were on loan to Westwood to do Lion King. We flew out there every Monday and flew home every Saturday or every Friday. They had a little apartment there for us we stayed in through the week.

SETH MENDELSOHN:

The deal was that if we would go to their offices and design the game, we could do it. After a very brief bit of time off, it was go-go-go.

ERIK YEO [designer]:

We worked primarily on the Sega Genesis version first just as the [lead] development platform and then reworked the art and audio and things like that for the SNES version.

Unlike Aladdin, there was parity between The Lion King for Super NES and Sega Genesis. Other than technical differences such as graphical and audio capabilities, both versions featured the same levels, same soundtrack, and frills such as voice clips from the movie. It was a platformer in the purest sense. Simba got around by running, jumping, and climbing, and he could roar (or, as a cub, mewl) at enemies to startle them, often causing them to flip onto their backs and expose their bellies.

The Lion King felt like two games in one. Players start the adventure controlling Simba as a cub, guiding him through scenes from the movie such as exploring Pride Rock, frolicking in the safari during the “Can’t Wait to Be King” musical number, and meeting Timone and Pumbaa. Approximately halfway through, they grow up into adult Simba. His roar was much louder and more potent than it had been as a cub, and he gained the ability to swipe and slash at enemies, whereas cub Simba had to stomp on, growl at, or avoid them.

ERIK YEO:

It was actually kind of fun, but it was problematic because cartridges were small, and now you're talking about two different main characters with all these animations. And it's Disney—they want it badly to be super-smooth with great animation. We would say, okay, we need Simba to run to the right. To us, that was enough. To a Disney animator, they’re like, “Okay, well, is he running to something, or from something? Is he scared, or is he happy?” They had lots of questions because they had all this nuance in a character’s face, all these things we hadn't really come to grips with in game development yet because we didn't have the pixels for it. We were scanning in their hand-drawn stuff because it was important to them, and we had to figure all that out.

We were giving them big descriptions about how the animations had to be, and we would get these 120-frame runs, which was out of the question because of storage and memory issues. We’d have to chop that down to, like, 16 frames. And of course, they were unhappy because we mangled their art. That was an interesting conversation. It was also a lot of work on our side because we had to figure out, okay, which frames are we keeping, and how do we communicate with these traditional artists and explain to them how digital artworks and how memory limitations impact everything?

Essentially offering players two games in a single cartridge affected gameplay design, too.

SETH MENDELSOHN:

Jumping was different in terms of making it feel like it had weight. Adult Simba is heavier and doesn’t float as much. And in retrospect, I really believe that changing the controls on a player is not fair. You don't want to change the way a character plays. In some ways, it’s crummy that we went from getting you used to Simba moving in a certain way, and then you [feel like another character]. But it was critical to the movie’s story: You had to grow up. We thought briefly about whether he should feel the same, and decided no, he shouldn’t because he’s not the same character. He was floatier when he was little; as an adult, he’s heavier. As an adult, the gameplay was more about the slashing than it was about the jumping. There’s still jumping, but there’s more combat. It was an evolution of who you were in the beginning. The problem is, it just kind of stops. It's like, you’re this little guy, and then boom, now you’re the big guy. We had to think about what adult Simba’s level layouts would be like, and you started off with more combat just to get you used to the new controls.

It’s a hard thing, and today, there are more games where you switch characters. You play Diablo as a magic user and as a fighter. They’re different ways of playing, but you’re not switching in the middle of the game.

One of Erik Yeo’s proudest accomplishments on the game is its sixth level, set to the “Hakuna Matata” sound as cub Simba jumps on falling logs to climb a waterfall. It was a challenging but joyous level, colorful in both graphics, soundtrack, and gameplay possibilities.

ERIK YEO:

Those were fun times trying to figure things out.

LOUIS CASTLE [co-founder, Westwood Studios]:

That soundtrack was made by Frank Klepacki. We got a letter from Hans Zimmer Studios saying we did a wonderful job on the audio. That was really pleasant.

ERIK YEO:

I suppose one of your questions is going to be, “Why was the game so difficult?”

For decades, The Lion King has been at the center of what many believe to be an urban legend—that being the myth that video game publishers demanded their developers make games longer and tougher so that players couldn’t rent them from Blockbuster, finish them in a weekend, and return the game without having to go to the store and buy a copy.

LOUIS CASTLE:

That’s partially true. All games at the time were difficult because Blockbuster was renting games and you had to have them be long and relatively hard. If somebody could finish the game in an evening, they wouldn't buy it, and that hurt your sales. But it wasn’t just us. All games were more difficult, much more than they would be today. The Lion King was a particularly deep game. One half of the game you’re a cub, and the other you’re an adult. The learning curve was uneven in the sense that it was it ratcheted up as the cub, dropped off a little bit on the last level as a cub toward the end of the level, and then you hit a really hard ramp where you had to learn how to play as the adult lion, and it was difficult again.

ERIK YEO:

I don't know whether it was because of the rental pressure, or just because this was when people were trying to figure out what made a good game. EA had lots of rules about what makes a good game in terms of duration. Unless you can prove that it was a 40-hour entertainment package, it raised a lot of questions. So, there were a lot of suppositions around how long a game had to last in order to be successful, whether you rented it or otherwise.

LOUIS CASTLE:

We had designed the game to be played about halfway through such that there was no way you’d finish it in a night. You’d get to the adult levels and there was no way you’d be able to learn what felt like a whole new game. Hopefully that [point in the game] would be exactly where people would get because they'd be excited and they’d want to go buy the game, like, “How much more is there?” It turned out there was another half of the game.

The reason Lion King is brought up with this myth, which Louis Castle has gone on record here and in other interviews as saying it’s true, is its second level. The stage begins on a blue-sky day on the Savannah. Move Simba to the right, and the key explodes in golden colors, just like when Simba begins singing “Can’t Wait to Be King” in the motion picture. There are two objectives you must complete to finish this stage. The first is using monkeys hanging from tree limbs to throw you to the right, allowing you to progress to the next area.

It's much (much, much) more difficult than it sounds. Pink monkeys flip directions when you growl at them. The idea is to growl at some of these monkeys until you’ve arranged them in such a way that Simba will be thrown from one monkey to the next, to the next, to the next—all the way to the next part of the level. If you fail, you’ll end up back where you started and will have to keep “monkeying around” with directions until you progress.

The longstanding rumor is that Disney insisted this stage, as well as some others, be made longer and more challenging so that players would have to spend extra time completing it. This is where some of The Lion King’s developers either disagree or possibly misremember.

SETH MENDELSOHN:

It is true to a point, although that was not why that level was hard. Yes, it's important you don't blow through the game. And I saw an interview with Louis Castle where Disney came and asked for it to be hard, but I don’t believe that's true. I don't think that ever happened.

ERIK YEO:

This may have been Louis Castle shielding us from all the information because he was very good at keeping us safe from all the turmoil outside of the game itself. All we were told was, “It needs to take longer, and this part is very interesting, but super short. Can you make it harder to make the game take longer?”

LOUIS CASTLE:

This is a true story. Disney did a focus group. They said, “You're getting too far into the game in the first 48 hours. We need to have you make the first levels harder.” We were really close to launch at this point. They were doing they were doing pre-launch [marketing]. This was a mandate, so we had no choice. Seth, Erik, and I were sitting there scratching our heads going, “I don't know how to make this thing harder.” We were looking at the levels. The levels were well designed; there wasn't a lot of fat anywhere. We said, well, the one thing we could do is we could make the monkey puzzle longer and harder.

So, we made that puzzle and the Can't Wait to be King [level] longer and harder just so that it took longer to [finish the level]. People could still get past the level, but they wouldn’t get so far that they failed Disney’s focus test.

ERIK YEO:

Fortunately, that was not one level I designed. It's not burned into my memory as much as probably my friend Seth’s; he was the one who built that one. I'm sure it's nightmarish for him. I'm sure he wakes up screaming in the night thinking about it. It was cool. It was clever. It was different. But it then became much harder because that was one of the ones that Disney was like, “Oh, this is a really fun, cutesy level. Let's make it take the longest.” Then it became harder and harder. It went from one or two instances of monkeys tossing you around to this insanely complex, 10-to-12-monkey chain you have to figure out.

SETH MENDELSOHN:

It’s possible. I have the maps for all this stuff, and the completed level is drawn out as it is. It was drawn out from the beginning. As anyone will tell you, it’s really easy to make things hard, but it’s hard to make things easier. I can make games a lot harder by making unfair jumps. I can be really cruel and evil, but not with that level. Some of it is the length, and part of it is as a kid, your memory is good: jump here, jump there, turn that monkey around. If you want the ultimate example of longer and harder and more miserable, that’s Battletoads’ motorbike level. There was one time when I said, “Oh! I’ve almost finished!” One day I watched a playthrough on the internet and realized I wasn’t even close. I was maybe seven percent done. But Lion King’s second level is just one of those things. Everyone I talk to is like, “Man, whoever made that level…”

It’s all on me. It’s my fault. I stand by the concept being cute and clever, but we just didn’t execute it. That’s all there is to it.

There were other, more mechanical reasons for level 2’s frustrating difficulty.

SETH MENDELSOHN:

The second level is hard because we didn't quite get the controls and everything perfect. It's as simple as that. I have this idea that a Rube Goldberg machine would be cool. Like, you're going through this [series of monkeys] and you're flying around and flipping switches, and you’re riding on animals. In my head, it totally made sense. I thought it felt fun and made sense in the level’s environment. But we struggled with the catching part and the jumping parts. We worked on them until the bitter end, trying to tune them and make it better. QA testers and game designers can get good at all that, but we struggled until the very end.

LOUIS CASTLE:

It was unfair in the sense that you had to play and fail the puzzle multiple times to know the right path. Speaking generally about the game design, we never did that to you elsewhere in the game. It was hard, but fair. You’d know the mechanic and be interested in it before a puzzle was presented, and if you were very observant and very careful, you could get it the first time. But not the monkey puzzle. There was no way to know what you were going into. You had to play it multiple times to figure out what to do.

SETH MENDELSOHN:

Those poor programmers, Rob Povey and Barry Green, worked until the last second, but we all just couldn’t get it right. There are two parts to this. The level is probably longer than it should be. That’s on me. It just felt like it needed to be longer. But some of it was we’d get notes from people who played through Aladdin quickly, and you don’t want the game to end so quickly. You buy a $40 to $50 game, and that’s a lot of money; you’d be bummed if you just blew through them. We all know games that are too short.

The second part of the level, arguably more frustrating than the Rube Goldberg-like series of monkey throws, is called an autoscroller, a segment of a level that moves for you. After solving a long and grueling monkey puzzle, Simba lands on the back of an ostrich. To proceed, you must jump or crouch to avoid bird nests sitting in trees as the ostrich charges forward. The problem is that some trees force you to double jump, hopping over a low nest before vaulting over a higher one, only the collision boxes for the nests seem absurdly large, much larger than the nests themselves.

SETH MENDELSOHN:

From the very beginning of the product, the longer characters was the first thing we worked on. When we worked on Aladdin for Genesis, we would make our changes to the world, and the game would have to be compiled and burnt to a ROM and put on a cartridge so you could see it. You’d be playing and something wouldn’t feel right, so you’d go through the cycle: Fix it, ask the programmer to please compile it, and then we’d burn it on a chip. If you had a development system, you didn't have to do that. You could just play it [like you could on a console], but we didn't have a lot of development systems. They were expensive, and you couldn't get them. Somebody at Westwood was super-clever and figured out that we could use Magicoms. They had disk drives so you could insert a cartridge and it would just suck the cartridge contents out and let you play it. They were cheap; you'd buy them from Japanese import stores. We used magicoms. Someone figured out that we could build a pipeline where it could send the level right to the Genesis and we could play it on the spot.

ERIK YEO:

We did a bunch of weird things. We couldn't get enough development kits, so we bought a bunch of those magic drives out of Japan, the ones that could copy cartridges to three-and-a-half-inch floppies. We’d hook those up to our computers through a parallel port so we could make changes to the game and then load it quickly to the magic drive to see what we had done and play it without having to burn EEPROMs or anything else like that. Our build process was well ahead of its time and was very clever. Whoever came up with that was very smart.

SETH MENDELSOHN:

The programmers made me a tool where I built the stuff on graph paper, and then I stuck it into the computer. I built all the levels out of squares and boxes and jumped using a cursor. The very first thing we did was jumping with a large cursor to make it feel like the weight of the lion. It felt right, and it feels better playing as young Simba as opposed to grown-up Simba. He was really long, but we struggled with the collision on [both Simbas] because he’s long and he’s running. I’m sure that’s why you’d get hit [jumping off the ostrich and over nests in branches]. At the end, we went back and forth so much. The other thing that happens is you come up with a game’s mechanics, and a lot of times designers are bad about making a mechanic and never reusing it. Like the roaring in The Lion King. It should do more. Roaring was the thing we thought would be cooler than it was, and it didn’t end up doing as much. You use the roar to flip the monkeys, and then you don’t use it as much. That’s kind of a long-winded way of saying it’s all on me. I'm not defensive about it. I agree with you that that part is rough. That part of that level is the downer to what otherwise was interesting stuff in the game.

Despite all its challenge and frustration, The Lion King is rightly remembered as one of the best platformers of the 16-bit era. The animation, handled once again by the ace artists at Disney, Westwood, and Virgin, is fluid and looks like it could have come straight out of the film. The soundtrack is catchy, and the controls are mostly spot on.

Still, many players will always experience gamer PTSD when it’s brought up. Seth Mendelsohn good-naturedly takes full blame.

SETH MENDELSOHN

As for the game’s difficulty, it really was meant to ramp up, and aside from that level, it feels like it gets a little harder and a little harder as it goes. But it wasn’t meant to be the rental buster level. It’s not meant to be harder than it is, and it already is too hard, and that’s because the controls just aren’t precise. are not precise. It doesn’t do what you think it does. You get thrown, and you’re sure you’re going to be grabbed by the next monkey, but you didn’t. It literally just didn’t get tuned correctly, and not for lack of trying. This isn’t blaming anyone. Those poor programmers tried and tried, but for whatever we did, it never got done perfectly.

ERIK YEO:

From a designer’s standpoint, it was not the desired outcome, but altruistic creativity only goes so far. The people who write the checks say, “It’s got to be this,” and that’s what you gotta do.

In the Guts of Game Design with Josh Sawyer

Josh Sawyer’s roots go deep.

Entering the industry as a web designer, Sawyer got his feet wet—and cold—designing snowy settings and dungeons for Icewind Dale before captaining the team assigned to Icewind Dale 2. As project director at Obsidian Entertainment, Sawyer has spearheaded the design of beloved computer RPGs from Fallout: New Vegas to 2018's Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire.

Sawyer’s tool of choice is not Photoshop or a C++ compiler, but a set of dice. Tabletop RPGs were his first love, and the trappings of games like Dungeons & Dragons can be seen throughout his work. There's a good reason for that. The Dungeons & Dragons license made possible the likes of Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale, two poster games of the Infinity Engine era.

I spoke with Sawyer about his foundation in pen-and-paper gaming, how he hopes the RPG genre moves forward, game systems that tend to confuse players, and other design topics.

**

David Craddock: I think one of the reasons you've been so successful at making the Pillars-style of RPG is your familiarity with tabletop RPGs. How did you develop that interest?

Josh Sawyer: I've loved playing games since I was a kid. I first got into tabletop roleplaying games with the red-book Basic Dungeons & Dragons with a couple of friends. Actually, at first it was just one friend; it was kind of hard to play Dungeons & Dragons with one person being the dungeon master and the other being the player, but we did it. After that, we played blue book, or Expert D&D. We had a few friends we played with, so we had a proper group, although we were all pretty young.

I met a kid at a public library who was playing a game on a Commodore 64, and I was just blown away by it. The graphics looked so cool, and the sound effects were so awesome. I was used to playing games on an Apple IIe, so the Commodore 64 looked amazing to me. The game he was playing was Bard's Tale I, and I just thought it was so cool. This older guy—he was older than me; he was in high school—his name was Tony. Tony introduced me to his friends, and they would get together at the library and would play Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, and I got into that. It went on from there. I played a lot of computer roleplaying games and tabletop roleplaying games.

David Craddock: When did you start experimenting with game design?

Sawyer: I think it was in high school when I started modifying games, modifying the rules. I was playing D&D so much that I was running into what I felt were friction points: "Well, these rules are kind of obnoxious and none of us seem to enjoy using them, so I'm going to start changing them." Once I started changing them, I realized I could do whatever I wanted to do. I felt liberated. I would look at a rule, and whenever I thought there was something that I, or more importantly, the groups I played with, thought would be enjoyable, I'd just modify it. In college, I started designing my own tabletop roleplaying systems. Luckily I had a pretty big group of people to play with and get feedback from.

I didn't really expect that I would get into making video games, even though I'd been playing them throughout this whole period. This might sound kind of strange, but because I grew up in Wisconsin, and at the time, TSR was there, I had some idea of what it was like to get into the tabletop industry. But I really had no idea about getting into video games. I had this understanding that there were companies in California that did that, but otherwise had no idea how one got into that stuff.

David Craddock: Since you were just starting out, did you have any goals as a designer? Or were you just tinkering?

Sawyer: I wasn't trying to recreate D&D. I did continue playing D&D, but there were other things I wanted to do based on ideas I'd seen in other games. I looked at a lot more tabletop roleplaying games, whether it was things like GURPS, or Stormbringer, or all sorts of cool, more niche RPGs from the '80s and the '90s. A lot of my focus—and I don't think this is an uncommon tendency among young designers—was, "I'm going to make a more realistic RPG. I'm going to make something that's gritty." That was a lot of my focus: Making things that I thought were realistic or natural.

It was a lot of fun. I got a ton of feedback, and I iterated on it a bunch. I also had a classmate, Jeremy Stranburg, who was working on his own roleplaying game that was kind of like Shadowrun in terms of setting, but mechanically different in a bunch of ways. It was cool. We were trying out all sorts of things, and we were playing all sorts of TRPGs. It was exciting: We'd play GURPS, we'd play Legend of the Five Rings, we'd play Shadowrun, and then we'd run our own stuff.

It was a pretty cool time. I wasn't really going to class that much. There were times in college when I was in four tabletop campaigns a week. It was a little extreme. I wouldn't necessarily recommend that to people, but I did get a ton of exposure. Not only exposure to different roleplaying games, but in testing my own games, I got a ton of great feedback, and I got used to that feedback loop, and tried to take criticism to heart, in a good way and a productive way to work toward a goal that made players excited about playing with the mechanics.

David Craddock: In your experience, what are some elements of tabletop games that have not, or cannot, carry over to computer and video games?

Sawyer: My imagination. It seems so naive, but one of the first things I did was start designing unique items. I've always loved unique, magic items, and there's tons of cool Forgotten Realms modules and source books that had these really neat items with these long histories. If you look in The Magister's Element in the Forgotten Realms, it's full of all these really crazy, unique items that have these page-long histories with all these weird powers. [During development of Icewind Dale] I was like, "I want to do this, and I want to do this!" And the programmers were like, "Uh... how about none of that? Or how about a quarter of that?"

It took me a while to realize, oh, there are things the engine does, and there are things the engine doesn't do, and then there are things the engine sort of does, and maybe those could be extended. I had to very quickly understand that an engine contains a set of rules and capabilities, and you have to work within those as much as you can. Or, if you want to extend them, that's a cost. That's a burden on other people that you have to consider.

Another thing was I very quickly realized that the environment of making and playing a CRPG is not quite the same as tabletop, which I'd already intuited, but there are things in tabletop that don't work in CRPG environments, just because of the nature of the medium.

David Craddock: Icewind Dale was the first game you worked on as a designer. What was it like working at Black Isle Studios during that time?

Sawyer: I don't remember there being a formal process. I think we would just talk to each other. Steve Bokkes, who had also worked on Torment, was in my office. He would give me feedback on my areas, and I would give him feedback on his areas. We would all give each other feedback on stuff, and Chris Avellone would give us feedback on writing. It was less formal and more ad hoc.

I feel like we all played the game a pretty healthy amount. Because there were only a handful of people really working on the game--half a dozen designers, maybe a few more—we were all in the guts of the project. It was pretty easy for us to talk with each other, give feedback, and then turn that around.

David Craddock: You were on a panel at this year's Develop conference with a few other developers, and one of your quotes made headlines. You said something to the effect of fans are resistant to change in RPGs, and that you'd like to see developers be more "radical" in their approach to RPG design. Could you contextualize that? I found your remarks interesting because, of course, over the past few years you and the Pillars of Eternity team have been heralded for, essentially, making games that hearken back to old-school concepts.

Sawyer: People should understand that that quote was in the context of a panel specifically about advancing the genres we're working in. It's funny because I was one of four people, and we were all talking about ways in which to advance our genre, and I was a little annoyed that I was singled out. [laughs] I know, I know. Certainly much more prominent people than me were talking about it, too. But I think in part it's because roleplaying games tend to be pretty traditional, and I make pretty traditional roleplaying games, so I'm part of that.

I wasn't trying to say that traditional-style roleplaying games shouldn't be made. Obviously, if I thought that, I wouldn't have made Pillars 1 and 2. But I believe there are a lot of cool and interesting tabletop and computer roleplaying games that aren't necessarily fantasy or sci fi; they don't necessarily have classes; they don't necessarily have ability scores or things like that; or they might be different in a bunch of other ways. All I was trying to say was I think there are a lot of interesting ideas, especially coming out of indie developers, and I think it would probably be good for the RPG community to give them more of a chance, and to not be quick to gate-keep what is or is not a roleplaying game based on preconceived notions.

I ran into that when I started working on the Aliens roleplaying game [at Obsidian]. I remember lots of threads where people were saying, "I don't even see how that's possible," just the very idea that you could have a roleplaying game in the Aliens universe was just, no, you can't do that. I think some players are more accepting than others, and I don't want to paint the community with too broad of a brush, but it is a genre that has a lot of very honored traditions that have been carried forward for a long time. I don't think we need to get rid of them, but I do think we should welcome people who want to experiment with formulas.

David Craddock: Experimentation and innovation seem like hard-and-a-hard-place spots for developers. Take Nintendo, for instance: Fans complain that all Mario or Zelda games are the same, but when Nintendo dares to shake up the formula in games like Super Mario Sunshine and Majora's Mask, fans complain that those games don't follow the formula.

Sawyer: Yeah, I think that's true, and it's something that came up when Julian Gollop, who made the original X-COM—he was on the same panel, right beside me, and he was talking about the recent Mario/Rabbids crossover. It's sort of X-COM-like, and he said, "That's such a strange game, but it's a very cool game that did a lot of really interesting things." That's the sort of stuff where I think that, if people are open-minded about games in general, you can see a lot of really interesting things even from big studios.

Craddock: What have you found to be one thing that most players fail to grasp about game mechanics? Something that you find needs to be explained, or should be explained, regardless of genre?

Sawyer: I don't know. It's weird. I feel like roleplaying games are in a weird space because there really is so much about them that's built around tradition. I guess a thing that needs to be taught, really, are basic dice-rolling mechanics. When people come to a roleplaying game like Pillars of Eternity, or like the Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale games, if they haven't played a tabletop roleplaying game, the role of dice and randomness is something that I don't think comes easily to people, especially for players who play more contemporary games such as action-RPGs and first-person RPGs.

Those mechanics are things that people often either don't get at all, or they misunderstand. Because these games are so complex, and a lot of those dice mechanics are really tricky, it's a very difficult balance: We want people to be able to just jump into a game and play without inundating them with tutorials, but if we don't try our best to educate them, it can be very difficult for players to understand why they're succeeding or failing.

That's one of the reasons why, in Pillars of Eternity, for example, we [show] percentages to hit over the heads of enemies when you target them to attack. At the very least, players will say, "Oh, I have this much of a chance to hit," but that might be another step for them to understand the reason why that percentage is what it is: It has to do with their accuracy versus a specific defense. Some players don't get that, like, "Oh, I only a twenty-six percent chance to hit this guy. Why even attack him?" Well, you're attacking his fortitude, and his fortitude is 120 and his reflexes are 70, so you should attack him with reflex-based attacks.

Actually, I would say probability in general [is difficult to teach]. It's something the XCOM devs deal with a lot: People have a very difficult time understanding how probability works. This is true in general; it's not specific to games. There are people who will see, for example, a ninety to ninety-five percent chance of success, and if they [fail], it blows their mind because in their mind, ninety to ninety-five means one hundred.

Probability is very difficult to communicate. There have been so many instances of that. I remember one while making Icewind Dale 2. Third-Edition D&D switched over Rogue characters: They no longer have backstab damage, they have sneak attack. Every few levels, a Rogue got another die. So, you'd start with 2d6, and then three [d6], four, and five, all the way up to fifteen d6. That's fifteen, six-sided dice. The actual maximum you could get is ninety points of damage, and I got a bug from QA at Black Isle saying, "Why do I never see ninety points of damage?" I was like, "Well, it's fifteen, six-sided dice being rolled." And they said, "Yeah, so I should see it sometimes." I'm like, "No, dude, that's not how probability works. There's a really, really steep Bell curve in operation, here."

They wouldn't believe me. They refused to believe me. I showed them a chart of distribution, and they still wouldn't believe me until I took fifteen dice into a room with them, and I rolled, in front of them, fifteen d6 twenty times, and I added them up and charted them on a piece of graph paper. I said, "Do you see how this falls inside the Bell curve?" Finally they kind of grumbled and accept it.

Probability is a thing that's very important in tabletop games because many RPGs try to emulate a tabletop experience, or borrow heavily from that, and it can be really, really hard for people who don't understand what's going on underneath the hood.

Craddock: I'm working on a book with Julian Gollop, and he said the same thing: Any time players see a probability of around eighty or above, and they fail, they assume the game cheated them, or there was a glitch, or something.

Sawyer: I saw Julian demo Phoenix Point at Reboot in Dubrovnik, and really thought it was very cool, the way it shows you chance to hit. It doesn't show a percentage, it just shows a circle around the target that is being fired at. So you can see, oh, about this much of the enemy is inside the circle. It's a visualization, so people can see there's a little spot off to the side where a bullet could [go astray]. Because there's no percentage, when you miss, it's way easier to understand because you saw that your bullet spread included gaps where you could miss. I actually think that Julian's way of approaching [probability] is much more intuitive for more people.

Craddock: Do you think that visual systems would benefit orthographic RPGs like Pillars of Eternity, or do you think dispensing with traditions like showing percentages and dice rolls would alienate long-time players who want to simulate that D&D dice-rolling experience?

Sawyer: I do think there's a risk of alienation, there. One thing that I think solved the problem somewhat is we included a graze range, which I think did help a lot. Graze was a mechanic we introduced in the first Pillars. We initially got rid of it in Pillars 2 because some traditional players didn't like it. What graze did was, let's say you have a fifty percent chance to hit. That meant there was a fifty percent chance of hitting, straight up, but beneath that fifty percent, there was a small margin—I think in Pillars 1 it was thirty-five percentage, which was pretty big—that you would graze. A graze only did half damage, and status effects [as a result of hitting an enemy] would only have half their duration, but you still made contact. You still did something.

For example, if there was a thirty-five percent chance [of grazing], if you saw sixty-five percent chance to hit, what that really meant was that there was a one hundred percent chance that you were going to land something: thirty-five percent chance it would be a graze, and a sixty-five percent chance to land a hit or better. That really helped because when you got into those high percentages, even if you didn't land a capital-H hit, you landed something. That, I think, avoided that feeling of, This is fucking bullshit.

We got rid of it in our Pillars 2 backer beta, and people went, "Oh my god, I hate this. It feels so [loose]" because it had gone back to feeling exactly how it was in D&D. So, we added the graze range back in, although it's only twenty-five percent. It does make a big difference, though, because that means if you see a seventy-five percent chance to hit, that really means that you have a twenty-five percent to graze, a fifty percent chance to hit, and a twenty-five percent chance to crit [land a critical attack], meaning you're never going to miss in that circumstance. That really helped a lot.

Craddock: How do you go about designing a tutorial that doesn't feel like a tutorial? No walls of text, no constant cutscenes, that sort of thing.

Sawyer: It's hard. One thing that we did in Deadfire is... Well, there are a couple of things. One is that we talked about game concepts and how we introduced them. We tried to be very careful in our content to not introduce mechanics before they're absolutely necessary. For example, when you're on the first island in the game, there are certain things that made me say, "Don't put afflictions on characters early, because then we'll have to talk about afflictions, and right now that's an advanced concept that players don't need to know. Right now players need to understand movement, and accuracy, and armor, and things like that."

There were certain things like afflictions, inspirations—all these other things, including the ship system, [that we made a point of explaining later]. I said, "The ship system is really complicated, so push that until way later until players have the basics of combat down. So, pacing is a big part of it.

Another thing that we do is now, when our tutorials come up, they come up on the side [of the screen], like, "Hey, do you want to look at this?" If not, it'll stay in a stack if you need it, or you don't have to look at it if you don't want to. For tutorials themselves, we tried to make sure that each tutorial has a lot of text in it, but we split that text up over multiple pages, and that the dominant feature of each tutorial page is either, say, a skill image that illustrates exactly what we're talking about, or a movie that shows exactly what we're talking about.

For example, Empowered is a new system in Deadfire that a lot of people weren't picking up that it was there. We kept increasing the size of the icon, and we animated it, making it all swirly and glowing, but people still missed it. Now, when we [wrote a tutorial] for Empowered, we actually show the mouse cursor going over to it, clicking Empower, clicking on an ability, clicking on an enemy, just showing what it does. We show that over three pages, each with its own movie, and a short paragraph of text, so they were much easier for players to digest.

Finally, we have a tutorial section in our journal. So if you say, "I shouldn't have skipped that one tutorial," or, "I remember that tutorial, but there was something in there about vision cones that I missed," you can just go back in and look at them whenever you want.

Craddock: How do you design a complex system, such as the ship system in Pillars 2, that needs to be easy to use?

Sawyer: It's hard, especially for the ship system. Our stretch goal for the ship system was actually for crews. It was difficult to conceive of mechanics that would make use of the full ship through outside of ship-to-ship combat without creating a whole bunch of new content. It was something we experimented with. We actually had two versions of it that we went through, getting the level of detail necessary for it to be interesting.

I had to go back and say, "Okay, what are the essential things that, if we have ship-to-ship combat," what are crew positions that are important, and which ones feel superfluous?" Because it's such a complex system, I knew we'd need to pare it down as much as we could while still keeping it rich. And then, "What are some roles on the ship, such as cook and navigator, that are important for a ship, but aren't necessary for combat?"

The important thing in designing any system is asking, "What are you trying to do?" With the ship, the goal was to make you feel like a captain. To make you feel like you're responsible for assigning these people to their jobs, for taking care of them, for keeping their morale up, and making sure that the ship succeeds. That's one of the reason why, in ship-to-ship combat, all of the commands you give are shown in quotation marks. We want you to feel like your character is yelling to the crew. When we you to feel like you're the captain, and you're the one making those calls.

With that in mind, we said, "We have to have a system that has enough salient elements to it that really captures the feeling of you being on a ship and ordering people around." When it came to the nature of the mechanics of ship-to-ship combat, we said, "What feels important?" Hang feels important; distance feels important; the types of cannons you have. There can be crazy events that happen on your ship, like your sails catching on fire. You can get cargo that comes loose and knocks around, injuring people below deck. These are things you have to command your crew to deal with.

Accessibility was something we worked on after we had accomplished the main goal, which was to make you feel like a ship captain. There were a number of ways we tried to simplify that. We had talked about more complex mechanics to layer on top, but we decided not to pursue those because the system was already complicated enough. We had different cannon types that required different ammo, and found that confusing, so instead we changed cannons to you can choose what ammo you fire, which makes that more intuitive. It also tells you what each ammo type targets. For example, if you shoot cannonballs, you're targeting the hull and sails of a ship. If you fire a grapeshot, you're trying to injure their crew.

Those were things where we tried to, as much as possible, make systems more approachable. In the end, though, we did realize that there were some players who were not going to dig the [ship] system one way or another. Either they just don't want to do it, or they don't like our implementation of it, which is why we have close to board. Very late in development, we implemented a cam called close to board, so at the beginning of [ship-to-ship] combat, so you can say, "You know what? I just want to do the part where I jump on their deck and start killing everybody with my crew." You can do that, you just automatically pay a penalty and taking a bunch of damage, and some of your crew members get injured, but if you don't like that system you can skip straight to deck fighting. That's perfectly okay.

Craddock: When I talked to the guys who made FTL, they said, "X-WING was a big influence on us, but we had trouble designing a game around that, and once we zeroed in on what we wanted to do"—make the player feel like a captain—"we were able to filter all our systems through that metaphor." Do you find that as a designer, once you hit on a metaphor, does that simplify design for you?

Sawyer: It does help simplify it, that's certainly true. I think one of the struggles is that the ship system sits on top of a whole other game, whereas I think FTL feels more focused because ship-to-ship play is the core of the game. Then there are these cool strategic choices you have to make, jumping from system to system. In Pillars, the greater difficulty is, we have a whole game about exploring a world, walking around cities with a party of adventurers, with a ton of equipment, going into dungeons to do quests. Also, when you get on your ship, you have a whole crew, you have cannons, sails, different ships you can upgrade to, and you can engage in ship-to-ship combat all over the sea.

I think that if our game was just focused on the ship part, it would be much easier to design. I can't say our ship-to-ship combat holds a candle to FTL's, because theirs is really good. But I do think that when we hit on that key idea of, "Yeah, we want you to feel like a captain," it does help refine design in general so you can at the very least refine it down to stuff that's essential for achieving a goal.

Craddock: Who are game designers you respect, and who have influenced your career?

Sawyer: I would say one big one is Arnold Hendrick. He designed the Darklands roleplaying game, which is front 1992. It's a MicroProse game. He was a historian, and I'll say that Dark Lands was one of the things—because it's historical fantasy—that got me really interested in history, and ultimately was one of the reasons why I ended up picking a history degree.

I thought that his approach—and Sandy Petersen's, who was also one of the designers of Call of Cthulhu—I felt that their approach to making an RPG was extremely fresh. It was the first roleplaying game I remember playing that didn't have classes. It didn't have levels, it didn't have alignment. Characters didn't really get more health as they advanced; in fact some of them lost health because they would age. Priests called upon saints for aid. They didn't cast spells. Alchemists weren't wizards. They made potions, and would throw potions to achieve magical effects. These were all things where I was like, "Wow, this is really different."

It had a life path system, and I had seen some games that had life path systems, like Traveler, but to see it in a computer roleplaying game, and presented in this really cool, historical-fantasy perspective, made me say, "Wow, this is so cool." I recognized that there were problems with it. Even though I had seen different tabletop games, [Dark Lance] made me say, "You know, computer roleplaying games can be lots of different things. They don't have to be like D&D." Which is, I know, I'm the guy making Pillars of Eternity, which is very much like D&D. [Hendrix] was very influential on me.

Tim Cain is another. A lot of what I do with freedom of player expression and choice, and how players can move through a story, I look to Fallout 1, especially. The structure of Fallout: NV, that idea that you can go straight to Benny [an antagonist] as soon as you wake up in Good Springs. You can just head to New Vegas and find Benny. You don't technically have to do anything else. That comes from Fallout 1. You can go straight to the Necropolis in that game. There are big inspirations that I took from Fallout and Darklands especially.

Craddock: A lot of creators talk about needing to be passionate about the project they're working on. You know, make the game you want to play, write the book you want to read. You've talked to me about making objective decisions because you're ultimately designing for an audience, and games have to make money. How do you balance designing for yourself with designing for an audience? Maybe there's a feature you really want, but you're not sure if it will take off.

Sawyer: It's difficult. When it comes to my personal tastes in roleplaying games, whether it's tabletop or CRPG, I generally don't play class-based games. I prefer classless games that are a little more organic. Designing a class-based game, especially with a lot of classes, playable races, sub classes, and all that stuff, is very hard. There's a lot of stuff to make, and a lot to track and balance. The goal is, no matter what anyone plays, every combination [of abilities and choices] must be viable. That's a challenge. It's also challenging to make sure combinations aren't so ridiculously overpowered that they make the game trivial.

For example, I knew that people would really dig sub classes and multi classing. I knew that in doing that, it would open up a lot of balance issues that I wasn't super comfortable with. But I also knew that ultimately, people would be very excited about it. That was a time when I said, "You know, I think this is something people will really enjoy."

On the other hand, there's a change we made that was very unpopular, at least at first. I know some people are still mad about it, but when went from six party members in Pillars 1, to five in Deadfire. That was based on a variety of concerns. The concern was not, "Six party members is too many," but there was a larger concern of keeping track of everyone. The clarity of combat could be very hard to follow. There are a number of things we did to make the pacing of combat better, to make it easier for you to use all of your party members. One of those decisions was to go from six to five party members.

There are quite a few players angry about this, but I'm seeing more people saying, "Wow, combat is so much easier to follow." The visual effects are less overwhelming. We dim the visual effects when we pause the game, so if there's a big fireball being breathed on your party, you can see what's going on when you pause. We have combat speed sliders so you can take the combat speed way down if you want. And the overall pace of combat, the base speed, went down as well. So, when I see people realizing, "Oh, all of this does actually make combat easier to follow," I'm not doing these things to aggravate people who want six party members, but sometimes I need to take a risk because I think the game could be very great.

As another example, there was a [debate]. People hoard consumable items, like potions and scrolls, in these games. One of the things I wanted to do on this project was, I proposed converting all potions and scrolls to encounter or rest-use items. So, instead of being stacks of consumable items that some players would burn through and earn a massive bonus, and other players would never use because they're always afraid they're going to run out of them—which is a very common concern with consumable items—they would have these things where it's like, "You have a potion. If you use it, you can use it once per combat, and then next combat you can use it again." If you get a scroll, you can do the same thing.

So, it more becomes more about your options and opportunity cost than, do you use your consumables or not? If you're not using consumables, you're not saving anything. Bobby Null, who's our lead designer, he's much more traditional than I am when it comes to roleplaying games, especially D&D-like roleplaying games, and he said, "I think people aren't going to like that." It was an area where I was like, "You know what? If people don't use potions, it's not the end of the world. I would prefer people use potions more often, but we're already changing so many other things; why push this particular button?"

It was something I felt we could move forward with, but, again, with something like this, there are only so many things you can change before people say, "This really doesn't feel at all like it's in the spirit of what I wanted."

Craddock: I'm sure this varies from project to project, but do you have tools of the trade you use, in some form, no matter what game you're making?

Sawyer: I always use Word, I always use Photoshop. Those are some basic tools. I document things, but outside of that, we have our Obsidian tool set, and that, thankfully, is something I'm able to carry from project to project. The core features of that are really the dialogue and quest editors. At Obsidian, we have a way of writing quests and dialogue that has been developed over fifteen years, and then before that at Black Isle. That tool set is very particular to the way we work. It has tons of incredible features in it. I shudder to think of trying to write dialogue and quests without that tool.

I'm sure other companies that specialize in RPGs probably have similar tools. For example, Telltale has their own branching-narrative tool. That's a thing that, because Obsidian tends to bounce around technology wise, whether we're using Unity or Unreal or the Cry engine for Armored Warfare, being able to work in the Obsidian tool set is both comfortable and a constancy for our development environment.

Craddock: In our discussions, you've explained that the first Pillars of Eternity was pitched to backers on Kickstarter as a spiritual successor to Infinity Engine games, but that Pillars of Eternity 2 was more about designing within the parameters of Pillars 1 rather than Infinity Engine games. Do you feel that a spiritual successor would be better served evoking rather than replicating?

Sawyer: That's a hard question to answer. Better served to whom? That's the question, I think. Better served for a different audience? Yeah. Or, you know, for some segment of the audience that backed it, but maybe a big chunk of them not enjoying it? Sure. I think it's a dangerous game to play. Without the people who are super passionate about the games that inspired this, we wouldn't have been able to make [Pillars] at all.

Now, I can say that I think there's this mythological, objectively better game that does a lot of different things. Maybe it's not class based. Maybe it's turn based. Any range of other things. And I can say that I would make a game that more people generally might like, or that I personally might enjoy more, but I don't think it would be responsible of me to just throw all of that to the wind. When Feargus pitched me on the idea of doing the pen-and-paper game, I said, "I will do that if I can tell everyone up front that I'm going to do whatever I want; that it is not going to be class based; that it is not going to have a d20 base; that it is not going to be compatible with DND; and that I will listen to people, but I am absolutely not going to bend over backward to make it fit their vision of what the game should be. He said, "That's fine."

So, I told people that, and then I started showing people the pen-and-paper rules, and some of them started getting really bent out of shape. I said, "Sorry you don't like it. I'm not changing it." Because that was the expectation: I said from the beginning that I was going to do whatever the hell I wanted. If we were to do a new game where we said, "We're going to make a roleplaying game that's going to be kind of like this [model of game], but ultimately we're going to change a bunch of stuff if we think it's going to make the game much better," then that would be a different conversation.

I don't think that with Pillars 1 or 2, [deviating far from IE games] would have been fair.

Craddock: You might not be ready to talk about this since Deadfire is recent as of this interview, but one thing we've talked about is where you'd like to CRPGs go. I'd like to revisit that. Where would you like to see this style of CRPG go, or how would you like to see it evolve, post-Deadfire?

Sawyer: I don't know. I don't know that this style of RPG needs to evolve that much. I think this is the traditional RPG. Any sort of modifications... I guess the thing is, if someone wanted to make a game that was isometric and turn based, like a game similar to [Pillars of Eternity] and has real-time with pause, it doesn't have to be class based. Tyranny had a system that wasn't class based. I think that's totally viable and cool. You can experiment more with the number of parameters, and you can also look at making mechanics that revolve around cycling companions in and out of a party.

One thing that's an ongoing struggle that we have to deal with is inns and camping. They're things that feel very appropriate for D&D, but it's difficult to incorporate those mechanics into a CRPG that doesn't resort to save scumming, or necessitate things like repopulating enemies after you rest; otherwise resting can feel pointless. We've tried two different revisions: Pillars 1, and Pillars 2. I still don't think we're all the way there in terms of making a tight cycle out of [resting in camps and inns].

If you look at a game like the tabletop RPG Torchbearer, they have an extremely, extremely tight time economy where resting is precious and dangerous, to the point of really being anxiety inducing. Also, Darkest Dungeon: These are games where the whole game cycle is built on this downward grind that you have to close yourself out of by retreating and resting. But the thing is, that kind of feels like it's in conflict with the nature of the Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and Pillars games, where they're open-world, you're exploring and can come and go as you please. It's not the same as delving into a dungeon where you're on this tether.

So, it's a tricky balancing act. Dungeons & Dragons, as the name implies, pioneered this dungeon-diving mentality where you're trying to survive and scrape by, which is really something Torchbearer tries to [capture]. But RPGs are in a difficult position because some of them feel like mechanics are in conflict with the way in which a world is laid out. These are things I think should be either integrated—like if someone makes a game that isn't Pillars of Eternity, that's not trying to emulate this mix of somewhat-in-conflict mechanics... Because that's the thing. There are a lot of things in old D&D [rule sets] that are in conflict, and my job as a designer is to try to keep that spirit alive while making games not obnoxious.

If someone wants to, they can make an isometric game that's entirely focused on dungeon delving, even more so than Icewind Dale, and really focuses on this tethering-survival concept that makes resting a core mechanic. Or they can make a game where resting isn't really a part of it. It's not what the game is about. That would be a really different feeling, but you can do it, and it could still be a roleplaying game with choice and consequence, including certain classes and races. You would just think about your economy of time and resources differently because you don't have a rest move. Stuff like that.

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.

From the Ever-Dark Sky: The Making of Veil of Darkness

I've spent much of my career writing about video games recounting how blockbusters like Doom, Diablo, and Mortal Kombat were made, but I'm just as interested in recounting the making of games you may not have heard of, or perhaps have not thought of in decades. Veil of Darkness is one of those, and one of my favorite games. It was made by Event Horizon Software and published by Strategic Simulations, Inc. (SSI), a publisher known more for strategy titles like Panzer General II and the creatively named Twenty Wargame Classics.

I discovered Veil of Darkness in the bargain bin of a K*B Toys and was intrigued by the vampire and his bloody fangs on the cover. At home, I installed the three-disk program and settled in for one of my favorite gaming experiences of the 1990s. Part adventure, part action, Veil plays from an isometric perspective, like Diablo would three years later. You're stuck in a valley trapped in the 1800s, and the only way to leave is to kill the vampire, Kairn, who rules the region with his minions—wolves, will-o-wisps, a banshee, and lots of skeletons, zombies, and bats. Stock horror creatures, but the devil is in the details. You make your way to Kairn by completing a prophecy, each line of which is a riddle you must figure out how to solve.

Veil's story is simple but effective. A lengthy prologue was published in the game manual, and the strategy guide's prose was written as a narrative, a gimmick I loved as a kid. When I couldn't play the game, I could read the strategy guide like a novel! (Rusel DeMaria wrote his strategy guide for Prince of Persia and Prince of Persia 2 the same way, and I read it as many times.)

Years ago, I made contact with several of the developers who worked on Veil of Darkness and asked them to help me tell the story. I've woven their transcripts into an oral history I hope to expand on one day.

**

Part I: A Family Story

Very few classic games are the product of a developer's first attempt. Or their second, or their third. First comes influence and inspiration. For Veil of Darkness's future team, that inspiration came from childhoods playing board and tabletop games, and being drawn to creative arts.

SCOT NOEL, WRITER: My nephew is Christopher Straka, one of the three owners who founded Event Horizon, later known as Dreamforge Intertainment. One decade younger than me, when we were growing up Chris was more like my kid brother than my nephew. He was always wanted to play games, and at first that meant toy soldiers on the table with the two of us making shooting noises at one another. For me, especially at first, this was just the chore of keeping the kid happy and giving the adults a chance to take a nap, but I could only take making machine gun noises through my teeth for so long.

CHRISTOPHER STRAKA, DESIGNER: I’ve been around games as long as I can remember. Our family and friends all played games; we were a gaming family. Some of my earliest memories are of playing with my uncle Scot, creating or own war games with plastic army men, string, rules, and quarter flips. My first computer gaming experiences were Pong and an early armored combat game of some sort my uncle purchased for the TV. Curiously, I never played Chess or Checkers.

Scot and I were huge Avalon Hill Board Game fanatics, starting with Alexander the Great. I never managed to beat my uncle because I could never maintain the morale of my armies. That still irks me to this day. Alexander was designed by Gary Gygax, who later went on to co-create Dungeons and Dragons.

We grew up in the days of the game rooms and arcade games; if you did well you were like a rock star with a crowd gathering behind you to watch. Over the years, I’ve owned every single game console, form Atari and Coleco to the new PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

SCOT NOEL: As soon as Chris matured enough to deal with it, I started adding rules. “Look, you want your guys to take out my guys, I’ll flip a coin, you call it.” This quickly advanced to “OK, this string is the range a sharpshooter can fire accurately. This other string is for machine guns. And hey, foot soldiers can only move two inches at a time, I’ll let the tanks go six.”

Chris loved this. He found lots of ways to cheat, but he loved it. He started complexifying the rules himself, adding reinforcement and terrain rules. Then we found the old Avalon Hill board game Alexander the Great by Gary Gygax. For both Chris and myself, a life-long love of true gaming had begun.

Event Horizon, Veil of Darkness's publisher, came many years after Chris and Scot bonded over games. First, there was Paragon, and with Paragon came one of the uncle-nephew duo's most powerful artistic forces.

JANE NOEL, ARTIST: I’ve always loved games. With two brothers and two sisters close in age, we played cards and board games constantly. I remember as kids when we first got Pong that you could play on a TV. There were four variations and we played for hours.

I had never really considered a “career” in games. In the 80s that wasn’t really a career track you’d ever heard of – especially in Western PA. I just knew I wanted to do computer art. I saw an ad in the paper for a part time computer artist. I sent my resume and samples and got the job at Paragon.

Paragon Software is not in any way related to Event Horizon and Dreamforge. Starting at the beginning—or from what I know as the beginning—Paragon Software, located in Greensburg, PA, was founded by Mark Seremet and FJ Lennon in either 1985 or 1986. They created Master Ninja for DOS before I was hired. Chris Straka, a founder of Event Horizon, was hired because of his martial arts expertise. I don’t recall how they did it, but Chris modeled for the ninja poses. Tom Holmes, another Event Horizon founder, was the lead programmer.

CHRISTOPHER STRAKA: I met Jim and Tom at Paragon Software. Tom and I were employees; Jim was a subcontractor hired to port Paragon titles to the Atari ST. I was initially hired as a martial arts consultant and did all the choreography for the DOS game Master Ninja: Shadow Warrior of Death. That was in 1986.

The owners of Paragon at the time approached me because the first product they wanted to do was a martial arts product. I knew Paragon owner Mark Seremet from high school and we had trained at the same martial arts school. I started training at age of 13 at a small school in Greensburg, PA. I trained mostly in Tae Kwon Do and Judo. The game we were trying to beat was Karateka, a Broderbund title that was available across several early computers, including PCs, Atari, and Amiga.

Although Master Ninja is a “ninja” game, the moves are all Tae Kwon Do and Judo, techniques no real ninja would be likely to perform. Beyond the choreography, I designed how the various martial arts moves would interact with one another and I contributed some puzzle-solving elements. It was kind of rock-paper-scissors at that point. We did break up the action occasionally with an adventure game arcade sequence. I remember they filmed all the moves that were required for the game. This was before the days of green screen and motion capture; still they were able to transfer the film into data.

I liked the environment and they liked me enough to keep me on in data entry and customer service after my Master Ninja tasks were complete.

JANE NOEL: At that time, they’d already released Master Ninja for DOS with an outline character. With CGA and even EGA graphics, there wasn’t much you could do to show detail. When I started, they were just beginning work on a new game, Wizard Wars, and needed to do Commodore 64 and Amiga versions of Master Ninja. Initially, most of my time was spent on the two versions of Master Ninja. I remember the programmers would port the art from one format to another and you’d have a basic outline or shape, but would need to detail it.

I remember working on a Koala Tablet on the C64, a very early drawing tablet with a stylus. It was an experience. The C64 had some weird graphic restriction that you could only have 4 colors inside a certain grid of maybe 16 pixels. If you accidentally dropped a 5th color into the grid, it would randomly change the work you’d already done. By comparison, working on the Amiga in Deluxe Paint was a dream! It would let you pick 32 colors. (DOS EGA would let you use 16 – always the same 16 and they weren’t great colors to start with). I remember Tom Holmes wrote a program that we used for Wizard Wars – it would load the EGA art and it would show a couple different versions of the art in CGA so you could pick the best one.

I worked on artwork for various versions of Master Ninja, Wizard Wars, Guardians of Infinity, Spiderman & Captain America, Mega Traveller. Several of those were uncredited. Most of these Paragon games were done on DOS, Amiga, Atari ST, and C64. Much of the art would have started on the Amiga and ported to the other versions.

Several years ago, I found some old Amiga disks and got them transferred so I could see the art. When I opened them in Photoshop, they looked about the size of a postage stamp. I don’t recall the resolution of the Amiga, but I’m guessing 320x200. I remember working for days, pixel by pixel, on one background.

Every RPG developer dreamed of working on Dungeons & Dragons, but TSR—and later Wizards of the Coast—didn't give their license to just anyone. With Advanced D&D off the table, Paragon's developers worked with another popular tabletop license, one that found them before they could even think of looking for it.

CHRISTOPHER STRAKA: Believe it or not, we were contacted by a gentleman by the name of Paul Will. He was local and he had a great many contacts in the pen-and-paper gaming industry. Paragon did have interest in AD&D, but those guys were busy talking to bigger players than Paragon. The MegaTraveller license was more accessible and fell into a range of mutual benefit for Paragon and MegaTraveller, so we came to an agreement. Paul Will helped make the connection.

Design at Paragon was a group effort and in that environment where everyone was contributing, my talents at design were first recognized and given some play. Design was far simpler and development could involve only a few people; it was a whole different world. The designer was responsible for creating the premise of the game, all of the conceptual elements of game play, working with the writer to structure dialog trees, working with the programmers to communicate how the game design was to be implemented.

A big part of my job was working to maintain the integrity of the design within the given budget. One thing that is the same today as it was then is how easy it is to build way beyond your budget. We tried to designing into each game a level of flexibility that allowed us to make changes when needed without losing game play or blowing our budget. And finally, it was the designer’s job to play the game again and again and again, not so much from a bug-testing standpoint, but from a game play standpoint. Was the game coming together as a fun experience that matched our vision?

JANE NOEL: At the time Paragon didn’t really have any full time designers. FJ Lennon, a Paragon founder did most of the design on Wizard Wars and Guardians of Infinity. Chris was a good story teller and had a great sense of games, but I don’t think they respected him as a designer.

I know I’d played a bit of Traveller years before and I expect Chris may have too. So we probably knew more than Mark Seremet and FJ. We both have a love of science fiction and were excited by the project. I loved the process of bringing ideas to life. I understood mechanics and balance, though not as well as Chris. Traveller was such a rich environment that we spent a lot of time learning the universe just so we could pare it down into a manageable game.

Chris was the one with vision. On all projects, whether I was credited designer or not, my strength was always editing and improving on ideas from the team. I’m sure that’s a good part of what I did here too. I was more involved in “making lists” on this project than some of the others.

CHRISTOPHER STRAKA: The best thing about working on MegaTraveller was that it taught me that I wanted to move on and do different types of games and better games. With AD&D not being an option, MegaTraveller was still a fairly popular gaming system and one based on science fiction. To tell the truth, the game represents my first design blunder. MegaTraveller was a party based system (with more than one character in your group), and the combat mechanics are actually pretty complicated. I was leaning toward designing real-time combat that had more of an action feel. Needless to say, that doesn’t work well with five people in your party and a complicated combat system to begin with.

JANE NOEL:  Chris and I always got along well. He’s a lot less process oriented than I am. I’m an intuitive thinker, but Chris is much more of a “by the seat of his pants” person than I am. I know we worked together for most aspects. I think he probably did more of the story where I would have had more control of the visual design. I’d even done an airbrush painting that we wanted to use for the box, but MicroProse wouldn’t go for it.

I did a lot of the art – from designing the interface to weapons and backgrounds. Some of the art design happened while we were designing. I don’t remember for sure, but I expect Chris continued on with design details as I moved to producing art. I remember Chris working hard to balance the combat system.

CHRISTOPHER STRAKA: In my defense, we did try the option of allowing the player to control one character at a time or all five characters simultaneously, or a second option of controlling one character while the computer controlled the other four. In the end, it just didn’t work out. The combat experiences just became too difficult to control. My bad.

However, the real-time arcade style of combat would carry over to all the products that I designed for Event Horizon and Dreamforge, which is why a lot of those games were single-character games.

JANE NOEL: I loved, loved, loved the character generation system in Traveller. It was fun on pen and paper. I really loved it on the computer (one of my favorite parts of the game.) You really got to build out the character and skills in wonderful depth. I remember how cool it was to generate characters in our game. One of our goals was to make the system so accurate that you could make pen and paper characters on our character generator. I also remember working with Mark Miller, the creator of Traveller. He was wonderful to talk to.

Few game developers are content to work on other people's ideas for ever. Inevitably, Chris and his friend shared a growing passion to strike out on their own.

CHRISTOPHER STRAKA: Tom and I worked together at Paragon for a while, and then there came a point where Paragon was not making the types of games we wanted to make, and we also thought we could do a better job. These were the days that you could start a gaming company out of your garage, or in our case, from Tom’s apartment. When Jim Namestka realized we were interested in forming our own company, he was excited to join us and offered his own skills in management and salesmanship.

I wrote the business plan and the product proposals and submitted them to many possible publishers. As our working relationship solidified, work divided out with Tom as programmer, me as designer, and Jim, as president, handling the contact with publishers.

Part II: Moving Up

The games industry is cyclical. You get your foot in the door, you work for another company, and then you make a go of it on your own, but not in an office space. Your first office chair is your sofa; your first conference table is your coffee table; and your first office is your cramped home or apartment living room.

CHRISTOPHER STRAKA: We built our first game in Tom’s apartment. That was Darkspyre. Jim and I were working various day jobs and we did most of the game building after hours in Tom’s apartment. No desks, no phones. We sat on couches and Tom programmed at his kitchen table. We also worked out of Jim’s home from time to time.

Darkspyre and the start of Event Horizon also wouldn’t have happened without Jane Yeager Noel, then just Jane Yeager. She did all of the game art single-handedly in her spare time. She was working for Paragon too and liked the idea of what we doing enough to help us. Later she would become our first employee.

JANE NOEL: Most of the guide for Event Horizon was frankly to do everything different from Paragon. The idea of laying people off was something that these guys never wanted to do, and didn’t until the end. I would work on art and levels from my home. By then I had a 286 PC clone. Tom and Chris would work from Tom’s apartment. Jim was more involved in setting up the business and getting connections.

There was another artist involved initially, but he proved undependable and I believe he did the cover art and the character generation screen. I think I did all of the game art and animations for Darksypre, and quite a few of the levels.

CHRISTOPHER STRAKA: My uncle Scot, at the time working as Director of Operations at a local transit company, wrote Darkspyre's instruction manual along with a novella to help set the scene for the game.

SCOT NOEL: Chris and I were growing up. Me first, with college, first jobs, and a nine-year career in public transportation. Along the way one of the things that happened was my winning a second-place prize and publication of a short story in L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future, Volume VI. That was almost $2,000 in 1990 money, a trip to Las Vegas, a week-long writing seminar with Algis Budrys, and a big release party. Prior to that I had some small press publications in fiction, but my primary writing experience was in Tourism and Transportation, including news releases, brochures, instructional pieces, etc.

In this same time frame, Chris was busy contributing to some very early computer games at Paragon Software and shortly after founding Event Horizon with his friends Tom Holmes and Jim Namestka. As their company grew, they began hiring, and one day they said to Chris, “We need a writer. Didn’t your uncle win some award or something?” Of course, it wasn’t as simple as that. I was in what I thought was the middle of a career in transportation, and we were automating with computers and that was exciting and new. I was learning a lot and had the impressive title of Director of Operations and Planning. Nevertheless, I agreed to help out with the writing needs of my nephew’s cool little startup. It sounded like fun.

CHRISTOPHER STRAKA: At the time, there was a really popular game for the Atari ST and Amiga called Dungeon Master, an early grid-based 3D real-time action role-playing game. Our initial intent was to try to do a port of this game to the PC. We thought the PC would be a large and brand new market for the game. That idea never worked out.

As a group, we simply liked fantasy more than science fiction. I’ve already mentioned that we were big AD&D players. When the port work for Dungeon Master didn’t work out, we decided that our first game (at Event Horizon) would be an original fantasy game. One that focused on the same core elements that made Dungeon Master so popular. We were focused on creating a game with strong game play elements. We would have liked to have integrated a stronger story element, but at the time technology just wasn’t up to the level of where our vision wanted to take us. We tried to do as much as we could outside of game play by providing the novella in the manual and the text in the game. One area where we got into story was with the character generation system, which added an element of story to the game.

SCOT NOEL: I don’t believe I was ever a direct employee of Event Horizon. By the time they actually hired me they had already become DreamForge Intertainment. For the games at Event Horizon, I was an independent contractor, writing stories and game manuals on my Tandy, green screen, model: 1110 FD. Yes, I believe the FD was for “floppy disk,” ‘cause there weren’t no hard drive!

CHRISTOPHER STRAKA: DarkSpyre was a blend of both types of levels, static and randomly generated. Some were pre-created maps and others were randomly generated. The static levels were there to allow for game play specific puzzles and goals we wanted the player to achieve.

DarkSpyre had all the makings of an RPG classic except for one glaring omission: An option to save anywhere, anytime.

CHRISTOPHER STRAKA: That might be the second biggest design blunder of my career. It didn’t go over well with the gamers, but I thought it was vital to maintaining player progression throughout the game and providing a consequence for failure. I believe if we let the player save at any point they desired, it would have compromised the fun of the game. In the end, reviews proved me wrong, because that was the one biggest criticism of the game.

Our most exciting day early on was the very first call we received from a publisher. It was from Infocom, a software company in Massachusetts that was interested in Darkspyre. We didn’t expect it when it came. We were in Tom’s apartment, and when I first got on the phone, I was nervous as hell. It was the first time I talked to a publisher, and the first time any interest came our way. In the end, Darkspyre ended up with Electronic Zoo, an up-and-coming publisher of PC games.

All work and no play makes dull developers and an uncoordinated team. When they weren't pushing pixels or writing code—and, sometimes, even when they were—DarkSpyre's developers found common ground in and out of work.

CHRISTOPHER STRAKA: After our second game, Dusk of the Gods, we had the resources to move into office space in Jeannette, PA and to officially start hiring people.

JANE NOEL: Jeannette is an old, somewhat depressed glass manufacturing town. Pennsylvania had enterprise zones and would offer tax breaks to companies that would start a business in the enterprise zones like Jeannette. The building was owned by a construction company and we had half of the first floor. Chris, Tom, and Jim each had an office and we had one larger area for the artists that doubled as a kitchen. We had no real meeting space, but we were small enough and in constant communication that it wasn’t much of an issue.

Sometime during the production of Veil of Darkness, we expanded to have a second floor. Tom and Jim’s offices were moved upstairs. I seem to remember that the 2nd floor remodel wasn’t even complete yet, but we needed the room. Eventually, we had an open space with cubical walls for the artists and programmers. We even had a conference room. When we expanded one of the offices was transformed into a sound room and we got a sound-proof booth for recording.

CHRISTOPHER STRAKA: Mostly we played games and went out for a few beers after work. Games we played included PC games, Atari, and Amiga titles. There was no online gaming, and it was a day when games on the PC were in their infancy. We played a lot of pen and paper Dungeons and Dragons, and Gamma World, a science fantasy role-playing game.

JANE NOEL: As you might expect, we all played games a good bit. By that time we were mostly playing DOS games, though I remember really liking a handful of Amiga games. Archipelago and a puzzle game with bombs and balloons—it might have been called Prospector—on the Amiga, Gauntlet and Dungeon Master on the Atari ST. I also remember Chip’s Challenge, Tetris and Fool’s Errand on the PC. King's Quest, the Ultima series, and later the LucasArts games.

We all played D&D, especially as the company grew and we had more people. We had a couple different long running D&D groups over the years. Most of us read a good bit too. I remember having in depth conversations about books with both Tom and Chris. Fantasy, some horror, some science-fiction. I hadn’t thought about that in a long time. We would have great book discussions!

SCOT NOEL: We’re talking young entrepreneurs, artists, and programmers, most dealing with the first serious jobs of their lives in an industry that was being re-invented every day. Some were quiet, studious and eminently professional. Others were of the “eat pizza, drink beer, and act stupid” persuasion. Beyond that everyone was focused with a passion on the creation and perfection of the product. If you wanted to be a part of something special, that was the time and place to do it. By the time the company grew to between 50 and 60 people, much of the sense of “family” was lost and was replaced by an HR department.

JANE NOEL: One of the most interesting features was the circular staircase. To save on space and probably for ease of construction, a metal circular staircase was our connection between floors.

SCOT NOEL: Chris fell down the spiral staircase once and it became the stuff of office legend. A black-belt in Tae Kwon Do, Chris has a flair for the physically dramatic, and if he was going to fall he turned it into a movie stunt before he hit bottom.

JANE NOEL: I remember how hard it was to carry computers and monitors up and down that staircase.

SCOT NOEL: One of my first experiences with the Event Horizon Team was on a snowy winter day when I was visiting the offices in Jeannette, PA. My car got stuck in the lot and I went back inside to see if I could call someone. With immediate spontaneity the guys within earshot got up from their desks, put on their coats and said “we’ve got this.”

That’s what Event Horizon and later DreamForge Intertainment was for all too brief a time, a Camelot camaraderie and creativity doing great things on small budgets for nearly a decade. Unfortunately in the late 1990s the growth was too quick and with it came personality clashes, bad hires, bad decisions, and a spiral to dissolution. You know you’re in trouble when you pass employees in the hall and you don’t even know their names.

JANE NOEL: Out of the office, in 1992, my sister and I bought a house—this was before I even knew Scot—and spent every waking moment remodeling it. I was also a volunteer for the Literacy Council that teaches adult non-readers. If I remember right Tom got married in around that time. I don’t really remember what the other guys were up to then. I don’t really remember socializing much outside of work, though we all got along well.

Part III: Making It

DarkSpyre had put Chris Straka and his scrappy team on the map. An industry-wide aversion to computer roleplaying games threatened to wipe them from it.

CHRISTOPHER STRAKA: Our directives in game development became a single-player experience; deep focus on action oriented game play; and integration of story into the game play experience. We never focused on the story so much that we let it get in the way of game play.

I am a huge mythology fan, and Dusk of the Gods was pretty much all mine, my project to champion. When it comes to mythology, nothing compares to Norse mythology. We started creating it with the hopes of finding a publisher as development progressed. If Dusk did well, the goal was to create a mythological role playing series.

Unfortunately for us and the game, we signed with a small publisher, Interstel Corporation, and for various reasons the game was never a commercial success. CRPGs were stagnating. I think they had saturated their market and originality suffered. A lot of the games simply looked and played too much alike. We tried to blend a lot of adventure game elements into the CRPG environment to make the games accessible to players that wouldn’t otherwise necessarily play simple CRPGs.

The publishers still felt there was a market for the types of games we wanted to make, as they kept working with us. In 1992 Origin Systems came out with a free scrolling dungeon game called Ultima Underworld, which re-invigorated the genre. Then came Baldur’s Gate, Diablo, and others.

SCOT NOEL: The whole field was so new, it was a pioneering experience. Today, it’s easy to imagine young people growing up with an aspiration to join the gaming industry. In those days we were making it up as we went along. A few people crammed into one apartment could drink a lot of caffeine, make a game and build a company. It was fun, it was cool, it was different, and to a large degree it was innocent.

CHRISTOPHER STRAKA: Roleplaying games were we enjoyed and that’s what we were good at. It’s even possible that later in the life of our company, when we became DreamForge Intertainment, one of our biggest problems was getting away from what we were good at.

The technology and capacity of the computers at the time had increased, allowing us to do more. More colors, high resolution graphics, more computing power, more hard drive space. Additionally, our budgets had increased, giving us more flexibility to do more.

SCOT NOEL: Chris Straka was always thinking about game play and the experience of the user in that regard. On the programming side, Tom Holmes was working to make the engine competitive and state-of-the-art if possible. Jim Namestka was looking at the big business picture and where was the company, as a company, going to go from there. The team was pushing to do their jobs to the best of their ability. There was a definite love of RPGs at the company and we thought we did them well. Part of that was the idea of story; the game and game play was important, yet the game as a vehicle for conveying story was a foundational concept.

All of that is to say, I’m not sure we cared what the rest of the world thought of the state of CRPGs, we knew there would always be room for the best and that was our job.

A sequel to DarkSpyre with more robust gameplay options, characters, and storytelling seemed the next logical step. With it came a tightening of their philosophy, and how it acted as a guiding light for their work.

CHRISTOPHER STRAKA: We had an opportunity to develop a game for SSI, and we decided to revisit the DarkSpyre universe because we knew it well. We also thought we could expand on that universe successfully, and that effort became The Summoning.

SCOT NOEL: Chris Straka provided the vision for the games at that point, but the interaction between design and writing was a collaborative one. So, for example when it comes to the story An Enemy of Dreams as presented in the game manual, Chris would have worked out the world he wanted in general terms and game play in more specific terms. He turned over that general world to me to craft a story around. Other than touchstones from the world Chris had in mind, I made up everything else for the short story. What I came back with as a tale would feed a kind of back-story into the game, providing emotional and historic detail to set the scene for game-play.

It's one of my favorite inventions from The Summoning, and I believe from Darkspyre before it was the name Chesschantra. I don’t know why it tickles me so. I have since used variations of it in stories and in an as yet unpublished novel I just completed (Sovereign Ice), where the name is presented as Chess-chan-tra.

CHRISTOPHER STRAKA: The single location was an intentional design choice, to allow us to use our resources to the best possible effect. Computers were getting better, but they weren’t like today’s machines. We had to play within what would be considered severe limitations by today’s technological standards. It would still take a while before open-world, non-linear game play design would be able to take off.

JANE NOEL: It was easy to set The Summoning apart from DarkSpyre visually. Graphics cards had improved considerably in that two years' time and memory too. By then we could work in 256 colors. I’m not sure why, but we did something similar to how we had with Dusk. Portions of the palette were set colors and portions were devoted to images, characters, faces, and walls. Puzzles were still a vital part, but it was more about the story and characters.

CHRISTOPHER STRAKA: Most of what we did to set The Summoning apart is really based on the evolution of technology and what we could do a few years after DarkSpyre. The only thing we really used from DarkSpyre was the basic premise and mythology of the world. An example would be the gesture-based magic system you bring up in your next question. I also believe The Summoning was also our first opportunity to add simple cinematic scenes as a reward for achieving major goals in the game.

I was really proud of the gesture-based magic system, and to this day, I think it was one of my best ideas. It really made the use of magic an integral part and highly interactive aspect of game play. Looking back, it reminds me of the button combinations that are so popular in today’s console games for achieving certain moves and results.

JANE NOEL: Frank Schurter joined us while we were working on The Summoning. Both Frank and Don Wuenschel were ex-Paragon alumni. Chris, Tom, and I had worked with Don at Paragon. He started because of his expertise on the C64. (He’s an amazing programmer…Don and Tom were the best programmers I’ve ever worked with.)

Frank worked at Paragon, but only after I’d left. Funny thing was I had interviewed Frank at Paragon. His portfolio was impressive, but we hired someone else instead. We had hired Steve Suhy, another tremendously talented artist. He worked at Paragon for a number of years after I left. He’s gone on to have a long career in gaming with time at EA, Microsoft, and I think he’s now at Amazon.

I remember him doing voice work too. He tried to coach me to do a female voice for the game. I think it was for the opening as none of the character had voice. Frank has acting and voice acting talent. (He later did the main character voice for Sanitarium.) It didn’t take long to find I had no voice acting ability.

SCOT NOEL: The Summoning was crafted in such a way that its existence as a sequel to DarkSpyre was immaterial to any appreciation of the game or its background story. Nevertheless, the unity existed in our minds and for anyone who looked closely enough.

I was working full time in Transportation during the production of The Summoning and I didn’t even have a computer that could play the games at that point. I only managed to finagle a bit of game play here and there when I was able to swing by the Event Horizon offices.

CHRISTOPHER STRAKA: The Summoning was the first game that we developed from our offices, and we had a few more people. There were at least five of us, maybe seven. This was the first product where I felt we had finally “made it.” We had a great working relationship with our publisher, SSI. The budget and the resources were there, and we had the flexibility to make a game the way we wanted to make.

Part IV: Pawn of Prophecy

After years of working on other licenses and designing bespoke RPGs, Chris and his team had the AD&D license in their grasp. When it slips through their fingers, they pivot to another custom creation—Veil of Darkness, an action-adventure set in a valley where everyone and everything is trapped in time.

CHRISTOPHER STRAKA: We had just finished The Summoning, and SSI had the AD&D license. We really wanted to make a Ravenloft game. At the time, it didn’t work out, so we took the engine used for The Summoning, enhanced it, and used it to make our own horror CPRG adventure game. The irony was that we went on to develop two Ravenloft games for SSI.

SCOT NOEL: Much as with Darkspyre and The Summoning, Chris would come to me with a global concept of what was happening. Before I wrote anything I knew there was a plane crash and a guy in stuck in a mysterious valley along with a general idea of how gameplay would proceed.

Lost valleys are cool. The idea of a lost world is deep in our psyche and popular culture. What’s not to love?

CHRISTOPHER STRAKA: The primary idea of the story goes back to the isolation concept, keeping things in one place where we could control the environment to a level that computers of the day could handle. The story itself was developed to support the game play. We were developing a gaming engine, and the story fit well within the capabilities of that engine, and from a design standpoint, it allowed us to develop environmental parameters that were believable.

JANE NOEL: We were excited to work on something with a strong look and mood. The trapped in a valley concept gave us a somewhat restricted environment to flesh out. Horror was a nice change of pace. Darkspyre and The Summoning were both “indoor” games. While Dusk had some outdoor areas, it was a totally different feel than what we were doing with Veil of Darkness. We were really trying to enhance the mood. The color palette was a true 256 color palette and it was somewhat darker and less saturated than TS or the earlier games.

CHRISTOPHER STRAKA: The AD&D Ravenloft world was the main inspiration for Veil. TSR had a huge book publishing business, so a lot of the books were based on their different worlds, and a number of those were based on the Ravenloft system, starting with I Strahd.

For Veil of Darkness, we thought somewhere in eastern Europe would fit the bill. From my perspective it was pure fantasy. Conceptually, I created all the locations and all of the elements of the locations. I had to make sure that location design and each element of the location supported the overall design structure that I had created. Other than that, the artists had complete freedom, artistically, to create the art in the way they thought best fit the environment.

Of course, when Scot wrote the novella, he went to the library and did research to make it sound somewhat authentic.

Veil of Darkness's most memorable character is its antagonist: Kairn, the vampire lord who rules over the valley with a pale iron fist. Much thought went into developing his character; the game's prophecy-driven quest system and every character inhabiting the game's valley is connected to Kairn, and Kairn to them.

CHRISTOPHER STRAKA: I have a tendency to design by outline. First is the game’s premise, which leads into the creation of protagonist and antagonist. From there the story builds, and characters, locations, and certain themes are created. Parallel to that, the actual game play elements are designed, and it’s a constant struggle between game play elements and story elements to bring the game together as a working whole. The parts evolve together.

Kairn started out as a tragic hero. Like everyone else, in his mind, he’s doing all the right things for the right reasons, even though he’s a bad guy. As a character, he drove most of the story.

SCOT NOEL: I wanted to breathe a soul into the game. My job was to bring Kairn to life, and so I started thinking of him not as a Vampire Lord but as a young man at odds with his brothers and father over a forbidden love affair. Then I made his world crash down around him and condemned him to an emotional hell from which he could never recover, at least not as the caring human he had been before.

The challenge posed to me was kind of “OK, how did we get here?” It wasn’t a question of where the guy in the plane came from, but rather a challenge to build the world foundation that could be seen as having resulted in the gameplay situation.

CHRISTOPHER STRAKA: Hardly any direction was needed. Scot followed the project as it was developed, asked the right questions, and went off to write the story. I wanted you to feel sorry when you finished Kairn off. I mean he’s an evil vampire lord who holds an entire valley of innocent people in his sway, and you kill him and feel sorry. That’s great!

SCOT NOEL: Tragic figure? Absolutely. Feel sorry for him? I wouldn’t. What happens to us doesn’t make us who we are. The choices we make after challenges and tragedy make us who we are.

The idea of expecting players to read game manuals is anathema in 2022. That's because game manuals are less manuals and more thin printouts that provide you with a control layout, a warranty, and not much else. In the 1990s and earlier, game manuals, especially PC game manuals, were as important as the game itself. Veil of Darkness's included a lengthy backstory shedding light on Kairn's character.

SCOT NOEL: You could think of it as providing back-story for the Vampire Lord Kairn, but anyone who has read my tale The Forge of the Evil Heart knows it introduces the reader to a world rich in character and tragedy that makes Kairn much more than the head bad guy on the hardest level.

CHRISTOPHER STRAKA: In Veil’s day, players read the manuals more than they do today. A lot of the games required some reading of the manual. However, I don’t believe you needed to read a single page of Veil’s manual to actually get into and play the game. If they did take a look at the manual, we wanted it to be a richer experience than most.

SCOT NOEL: The game had to stand on its own, and you can’t force players to read the manual. We always crafted our art for the highest level gamer who could appreciate it, with the theory that there would be plenty of enjoyment for casual gamers too.

To this day I still get occasional compliments on that story. Perhaps I put some of the emotional turmoil I was going through with my first marriage onto the page. Fortunately, I avoided Kairn’s fate.

Any good RPG lives and dies by its characters. Veil of Darkness was in the unique position to be an RPG in name only. It was part RPG, part action game, part adventure. Still, characters were important. They provided the impetus for players to explore the valley's damned locations and hunt down its overlord. The first of these was the nameless player-character.

CHRISTOPHER STRAKA: Maintaining as much control as possible over the look and circumstances of the character gave us greater control of the story, whereas naming the character gave the player a modest level of customization and buy-in. That’s the adventure game creeping in on the CRPG.

Veil of Darkness's NPCs run the gamut from Sophia, a sultry red herring who wiles away her days and nights—one and the same, since the valley is stuck in perpetual gloom—at the Severed Head in; Kirill, a wealthy industrialist who has his own reasons for crossing his fingers that you'll fulfill the prophecy and free the valley from Kairn's curse; and Deirdre, your love interest.

CHRISTOPHER STRAKA: The first thing we did was create a one or two sentence premise for the game overall, then we decided where the game opened and where the game ended. After that we went through and plotted the story between the beginning and end. Then I looked at my game play requirements, and they dictated what NPCs I needed to create to fulfill the story. There were changes to NPCs during development, with some added and some dropped depending on experience during the actual game build. It was a collaborative, somewhat evolutionary process that was constrained only by the need to start and end as designed.

At the very end of the process, if we thought certain parts of the game were too text heavy and slowed down the pace of the game, we would eliminate text or relocate certain NPCs. It was always a balance of action-oriented game play and time spent interacting with NPCs.

True to CRPGs of the 1990s (and most of today's RPGs, if we're being honest), Veil's characters had their feet nailed to the floor. But that was fine. It allowed Event Horizon's team to match their personalities to their locations. The minstrel played in the Severed Head Inn and tavern because where else would a minstrel play? Monks inhabit a monastery, Boris the farmer and his wife, who's bigger and meatier than he is, hang out at their farm. Everyone is right where you expect to find them, eliminating guesswork of finding the right characters to talk to when you figure out a line of the prophecy and feel ready to solve it.

JANE NOEL:  I did all the art for all the backgrounds – indoor and out. As I said before, this was the sort of thing I particularly enjoyed. It was more challenging than the fantasy games before – we needed to create a more familiar, realistic environment with homes and stores and taverns. The first thing we needed to do was to work out the new angles and the dropped front walls. It wasn’t as top down as the other games. We wanted walls that were taller, so we made front walls that disappeared for easy viewing.

We did want many of the interiors to appear somewhat normal. We wanted it to appear like a happy little world to contrast with what you were learning while playing the game. The interiors were also brighter and more colorful than most of the valley – maybe with the exception of the gypsy camp.

CHRISTOPHER STRAKA: Other than Kairn and our protagonist, most of the NPCs are like secondary roles in a movie; they were devices to progress the story and fill in background and create mood. They changed as game development progressed. Since game play was the primary focus, NPCs simply did whatever they needed to do to support that. We tried to make them have a bit of character, but they were, after all, just NPCs.

Blizzard North's and Blizzard Entertainment's Diablo popularized isometric graphics when the hack-and-slash game released in late 1996, but other games used the camera angle to great effect before it. One of those was Veil of Darkness.

JANE NOEL: I think the 256-color palette lent for a more unified look throughout the game. We also had all the colors available for all the pieces of artwork. I remember when working on TS, Jim Namestka wasn’t happy with the faces and he was trying to scan and draw photos to show what he wanted. He was working in 256 colors and I kept trying to explain that we only had 16 colors plus our default colors.

By the time we go to Veil of Darkness, having more colors available, the faces had a better, more realistic look, and it didn't hurt that we had Frank to work on those. The other technique we were able to use was the scanner. Many of the backgrounds – like the village, the crash site, and some of the others were drawn with markers and color pencil, scanned, and then worked on pixel by pixel. Once that was done we’d have to mark coordinates for walk areas and clip out anything that the character could walk behind.

I remember working with Tom to work out the new angles and view and walls. I would expect he had to do work with the editor to allow for the decorations too. In the previous games, we would have had several straight wall pieces, each with a decoration like a torch or crack. In this game we needed to be able to place furniture, beds, shelves, rugs, etc. Everything was based on grids. If I remember right, there were 32x32, 16x16, and 8x8 type pieces. I know a “wall file” would have included all of the pieces to make each possible wall and angle lined up block after block.

By the time we were working on Veil of Darkness, we had the ideas down pretty good – and we had two experienced artists. Since it was largely the same engine, we knew the way the animation would work – the frames needed and the angle. We just needed to get the “look” right. I would think that we did the main character first, then creatures.

The interior locations would have started with figuring out the technical ideas of the walls. Once we had that down, then while Tom would have created the editor that would let me put pieces together. I would keep making pieces and he’d add them to the editor.

I don’t remember the Veil of Darkness editor very well. I don’t think it was as polished as the DS editor. But I’m sure I would have put the rooms together, working with Chris on the design aspects and with Tom on the technical aspects and special case stuff. On example of that would have been the movable book case with a blood smear in front of it. (I only remember that because I saw it on YouTube.) But the smear was a design thing (essentially a “rug”) and the movable book case was special case programming.

The outdoor stuff was a little different. We created large graphics and used coordinates for where the character could walk. I think this is a little different than we’d done in any game previously.

By the time Jane Noel worked on Veil of Darkness, she had a good idea of how to take art from conception to in-game assets. Constructing that art pipeline was a result of many years of trial and error to learn what worked.

JANE NOEL: It varied a lot from the early games to the later games. Early on where there were one or two artists working with the programmer, your task could change daily depending on what the programmer needed. In any game, early on, you need to decide how colors were used and the general feel. We would also talk about the technologies we wanted to use that might be different from what we’d done before. Event Horizon/Dreamforge was pretty good at reusing engine technology and building on it again and again. The same basic engine was used for Darkspyre, Dusk of the Gods, The Summoning, and Veil of Darkness. Each time we’d add or improve features. This made it pretty easy to build on existing knowledge.

I don’t really remember now, but we must have had a good art flow at that time. You’d have to make enough rough art or pieces to get the programming started. For example, we’d need a character with all the walking frames to get that started. But once you had one creature done, it could “stand in” for all the other creatures until they were completed. Chris would come up with lists – lists of creatures, objects, locations, characters. Or he’d have a design and story and we needed to create lists from that. Once the basics are worked out, you start pumping out the rest.

I really enjoyed working with Tom Holmes on the early games to figure out what we could do. He’s a very creative programmer and easy to work with. I’ve always enjoyed the technical aspects of the art and some of the initial planning is quite technical – early on, we were always concerned about memory and disk loading – and that factored into how we’d plan the art. Sometimes the programmers would need placeholder art and would make “programmer art” – roughly the equivalent of stick figures. But sometimes that was needed to figure out what kind of art was required, then the artist could take the programmer art and turn it into real art!

Later, with more people, more complex art and longer schedules, flow was much harder to plan and control. We’d have spreadsheet, gant charts, lists and lists and lists of artwork that was needed. Tracking all those assets was part of the art lead or art director’s job.

Prophecy is at the heart of Veil of Darkness. The game opens with your character flying a plane across a valley when a bat splatters against your windshield. You crash and lose consciousness, and awaken in the bed of Deidre, daughter of Kirill, the village's magistrate. You're smitten with Deirdre, and the feeling seems mutual, but the real attraction is an errand Kirill asks you to run—fetch a hammer from a man named Eduard. When you find Eduard murdered and a bloody hammer next to him, Kirill gives you a prophecy that spells out exactly what you must do to break Kairn's curse on the valley and escape. What it doesn't spell out is how, exactly, you go about doing those things.

CHRISTOPHER STRAKA: In all the games that I’ve designed, I’ve always felt there needs to be a design element that allows the player to track his progress in the game. That’s the prophecy’s goal. The more lines of the prophecy that are fulfilled, the player knows he is making progress through the game. It defines the start and finish of the game.

In a nutshell, the first thing we did was plot the story from beginning to end. With the game play elements in mind, we created all the individual locations. Each location had a primary goal which started with an open question; we wanted the player to start thinking about what he had to do. In achieving that goal, we wanted to create a new question for one of the other locations. So, the locations were like chapters in a book. You started out with a mystery, then in solving that mystery, you transitioned to the next chapter and the next mystery.

In general, there was one line of the prophecy associated with each location, and of course the NPCs and their role was to facilitate the goal of an individual location. All of the locations together completed the whole. I know this is going to sound simple, because it’s not a major element of game play, but I loved the prophecy as a progression device. That was my favorite feature.

The prophecy made Veil of Darkness a nonlinear game. With few exceptions, you were free to wander around, talk to characters, explore new locations, and solve the riddles within the prophecy as you saw fit.

CHRISTOPHER STRAKA: Veil was the first game that I worked on that was not completely linear. Players were not forced to play through locations in a specific order. That led to parts of the prophecy being completed “out of order.” And yes, it was intended to create the feel of a more open experience.

SCOT NOEL: I do think it is cool that we were a precursor to the non-linear, open gaming environments prevalent today. As I recall, you could wander around freely and explore an area, but you couldn’t progress through the game until you had completed specific actions or located certain items.

The prophecy's riddles were taken straight from adventure games, which used puzzles as their core gameplay conceit. Every line or two of the prophecy required you to perform several actions, and you could only figure out how to perform those actions by talking with everyone you met.

CHRISTOPHER STRAKA: That was always a dilemma with adventure game elements. What you, as the designer, think may be obvious isn’t always obvious to the player. You try to place enough clues throughout the locations and in NPC text to give the player the information he needs to solve the puzzle, but it doesn’t always work out.

Determining interactive dialog was a very difficult aspect of creating the dialog. We dealt with most of that during the actual game testing stage. The game went through an intense testing process that gave us insight into adjusting the dialog trees. Building in a well-paced learning curve without losing the player’s engagement in game play was always one of our biggest concerns. I think this goes back to our goal of having the player be able to jump into game play without reading the manual.

One line of the prophecy charged you with finding a slaying a "hound" that hunts the night—a werewolf. This mystery was one of Veil of Darkness's most memorable quest lines, and showed off the game's robust dialogue system. Most conversations revealed words underlined in red that you could click on to discuss that topic. Some keywords were not revealed; it was up to you to pay attention to conversations and ask NPCs about keywords to see what response they triggered, if any. To solve the mystery of the werewolf's identity, you typed "werewolf." Seeing every character's reaction was fun, until you ran it by the farmer's wife, and she transformed into a werewolf and charged at you.

CHRISTOPHER STRAKA: The werewolf's identity was something we knew from the beginning. I really wanted this to be deceiving. We thought there were a number of NPCs that the player would think of as a possible werewolf, with the farmer’s wife the least likely suspect.

Kairn's influence bleeds through every area of the valley. It's most evident in the perpetual night under which the valley is trapped, but it manifests in other ways, too—vampires haunting the corridors of caverns, bats and wolves hunting you down in wooded areas, and finding NPCs loyal to Kairn and willing to waylay you if it means keeping their dark master safe.

CHRISTOPHER STRAKA: The challenge was good story telling, good design. To me this idea seems natural; we used a lot of mirroring and foreshadowing, and tried to make sure there was a part of Kairn designed into all the locations and NPC text. We wanted the NPC text to bring them to life as living characters in the world we had created, and through them, bring Karin to life. I took care of the design elements, and Scot did a wonderful job with the actual writing of the text.

Another mystery in Veil of Darkness was Kairn's name, which randomly changed every time you played.

CHRISTOPHER STRAKA: With Darkspyre and The Summoning, one of our primary goals was to offer re-playability. That wasn’t the case with Veil of Darkness. Personally, I didn’t think that very many people would replay the game. At the time, publishers were always pressuring us for a certain number of hours of game play, and that was always difficult to judge, so we tried to design enough content in Veil for a satisfying and memorable game experience.

On a minor level, randomizing Kairn's name had some replay value. On a larger scale, it was to keep other players from spoiling the end of the game. You had to play the game to get the random name and win. A lot of people, to my surprise, played Veil more than once, so they weren’t doing it for the re-playability, but for the satisfying game experience.

Veil of Darkness's hedge maze, encountered approximately halfway through the game, was memorable for all the wrong reasons. Every grass-carpeted, hedge-walled path looked the same, making it easy to get turned around, and there was no music. Finding your way out should have been a thrill, but was tedious instead.

CHRISTOPHER STRAKA: We had no idea how long it would take for an individual player to get through the maze. Some might be quick, others might be lost. At the time, the music we could add would have been a simple, droning theme, and who wants to listen to something annoying for a long time?

Veil of Darkness's combat evinced its in action and adventure, but it retained elements of CRPGs as well. The game still rolls virtual dice to determine things like damage inflicted and whether you or enemies hit or miss, but attacking is done in real-time rather than according to turns. Some weapons are meant to be thrown, and there's a cooldown between attacks that increases if you're weighed down by your inventory. It was a novel system, and made every encounter tense, especially ones where you blundered into a new region and were surrounded by enemies.

CHRISTOPHER STRAKA: Even though Veil had the feel of an action oriented game, we never wanted players reflexes to play a part in how well they handled the combat in the game, so we tried to make it feel action oriented, but underneath is a simple, stat driven, random die result oriented process.

Part V: Prophecy Fulfilled

Before Veil of Darkness was finished, everyone on the team could feel the difference between it and the projects they had worked on prior to it. Much like Kairn's prophecy, Veil of Darkness seemed destined to be made, and they seemed destined to make it.

CHRISTOPHER STRAKA: The development of Veil went very smoothly; it was one game we worked on from start to finish without any crisis moments. I certainly wish some of the games we did afterward had gone as smoothly as Veil.

SCOT NOEL: Veil is meant to be an entertainment experience with every part supporting the whole, and I believe it works well in those terms.

CHRISTOPHER STRAKA: Veil’s mix of adventure game and RPG elements attracted players that wouldn’t necessarily have picked up The Summoning at first, but after Veil they wanted to see what else we had done. It probably worked the other way too, with players of The Summoning trying Veil to see what else we had to offer.

As to cold hard facts, I don’t believe Veil sold as well as The Summoning, for reasons as previously stated – it was between two genres. That said, it has enjoyed huge critical success and longevity, kind of like a cult movie.

SCOT NOEL: People are posting video plays of Veil on YouTube to this day. We must have done something right to be getting any kind of attention all these years later.

JANE NOEL: We usually got there around 8am and would have worked till at least 5. I’m sure there would have been overtime, but I don’t remember it being as bad as it was later. I lived just a couple miles away and I expect I would have gone in on some Saturdays too. Because I was so close, I usually went home for lunch. I expect we played games a good bit. When something new would come out, Chris would get it and we’d all gather around to check it out.

We usually we had to do a demo earlier in the process. In the early 90s there wasn’t as formal a process for alpha and betas, but there would have been milestones, even if less formal than they were a few years later.

It was just plain fun. That was a point in the industry when games were being made by gamers for gamers. The big money players hadn’t really gained much interest yet. We were also getting some critical notice by then too.

SCOT NOEL: Game making is hard work. Someone once compared it to building a 747 aircraft on a tight deadline without plans, a prototype, or having invented flight yet. If the development team at Event Horizon had heard that description in the days of Veil or The Summoning, they would have smiled, shrugged, and gone back to work.

Event Horizon received acclaim for Veil of Darkness. Most of the team basked in the glow of positive reviews, especially Computer Gaming World's nomination for RPG of the year. Apart from outside praise, Veil meant something different to everyone on the team.

JANE NOEL: Almost game has something special about it that you remember either fondly or not, but I'd rank Veil near the top.

CHRISTOPHER STRAKA: My favorite three games were Veil of Darkness, Anvil of Dawn, and Sanitarium. I can’t rank them in any order; all three hold the same high place in my heart.

With every game that I designed, I created a binder full of magazine reviews, advertisements, printed copies of customer responses, and each one of those binders is signed by every individual on the team. Creating games was the greatest experience ever. I got to work with extremely talented people, and when the final product shipped there was always a huge sense of pride. I’ll never forget that.

Veil of Darkness ends with your character beheading Kairn in a brilliantly brutal cutscene and sailing into the sunset with Deirdre. It's a satisfying conclusion to a hard-fought victory, but it's not the most memorable love story in Event Horizon's history.

JANE NOEL: We’d been working together since about 1994 or so. It’s hard to remember dates. I’d met Scot here and there as he wrote on other games. I know Chris was excited about getting Scot on the team. We were at the beginning of Ravenloft and it was apparent that we needed someone with some management skills. Working on Veil of Darkness, there was Chris, Tom, Don, Frank and I. Easy to coordinate and plan. By the time we were working on Dungeon Hack and Ravenloft, we had maybe seven artists—five inexperienced—and three programmers. Scot came with management and scheduling skills – as well as being the writer.

We got along well. He and his then wife, Heather, would come to my home to play Magic. And we were all part of the same D&D group. So I knew Heather well too. I was aware they had problems, but was still somewhat surprised that Heather decided to leave him and move to Montana. I know that was hard on Scot – he was working incredibly long hours at that point.

SCOT NOEL: It’s a sad, tragic, and then sweet story. I had already been married for a number of years before I met Jane. My first wife, Heather, was a wonderful girl and for many years we had a good life together. Unfortunately, Heather developed bi-polar disorder, which often only manifests in a person’s 30’s. She may also have had Münchausen syndrome, where those afflicted feign illnesses for sympathy and attention, though they are not necessarily conscious of doing so.

That is all in retrospect. No wonderful doctor stepped in to offer an enlightened diagnosis and set us on a path to recovery. Instead we endured endless trips to multiple hospitals, a fragmenting marriage, and a slide to near bankruptcy. We split up without knowing much of what was happening other than that it was too painful to stay together and we no longer had the resources to do so any way. I lived with my sister for a while and Heather moved to Montana to be with some friends.

The separation turned into divorce, and even then it would be years before we understood some of the medical underpinnings of what was happening. Though after divorcing we remained friends and supportive of one another, there never was a happy ending. Heather died in Montana in 2003 of a medication overdose. She had been having pronounced hallucinations at the time.

All of this would have been happening after the Veil of Darkness and The Summoning days, later when I was a full-time employee of Dreamforge Intertainment, with things coming to a head around 1994-95 while we were working on Chronomaster and Anvil of Dawn.

I was Associate Producer on both games simultaneously, as well as doing voice direction, writing rulebooks, and writing game and interaction text on Anvil of Dawn. I was working endless hours and weekends and going through enormous emotional stress with the breakup of my marriage.

Jane Yeager was one among several staffers who demonstrated concern for my well-being and stepped up to make sure I was OK. They would encourage me to eat, sleep, shave, get out of the office for brief periods, and join them in games of Magic to break the stress, etc. Jane was very supportive in all the simple human ways that people can be, a credit that reflects back on her wonderful parents, whose capacity for compassion is exemplary.

So I fell in love.

JANE NOEL: We talked often and it eventually became more serious. He left love letters on my desk – getting very serious very fast. I was concerned about having any sort of a relationship at work. We started dating in October of 1996 (as WarWind was winding down). We kept it from everyone at work except Chris and Tom…and maybe Jim for at least a year.

By mid 1997, when his divorce was final, he started proposing. I kept telling him I wasn’t ever getting married. I had just never pictured myself married.

SCOT NOEL: Jane took my falling in love in stride as an emotional backlash of mine, a reaction to all I was going through at the time. It would be years before she would experience any of the same emotions for me. Nevertheless, over time, little by little, our friendship deepened. I was not shy about saying “I love you,” whereupon she would smile and respond “You’re crazy.”

I transformed that exchange into an imaginative and epic love poem. In time I proposed marriage and was turned down, but the friendship continued unaffected, as did my inclination to propose. By 1998 and after 9 proposals of marriage (the last one engraved on a plaque), Jane accepted and we have been inseparable partners in life and business ever since.

JANE NOEL: He kept asking and asking – even getting my grandmother on his side. By January 1998, a few weeks after the engraved proposal, I surprised him by saying yes. It makes for a good story. My only regret is that I made him ask that many times. I can’t imagine what my life would be like now if he’d have given up and went away.

Rogue’s Co-Creators at Roguelike Celebration 2016

You hear about these things, but you never think they’ll happen to you. Or more accurately, you never think you’ll get to attend one.

In my research and interviews for Dungeon Hacks and One-Week Dungeons over 2012 through 2015, several people mentioned roguelike gatherings to me. Like the formative games themselves, they always seemed privy to a select few. Likeminded coders, hackers, and players would gather at a pub, or a restaurant, or someone’s house, to talk and play roguelikes. It sounded like a good time, but I’d never heard of one near me in northeast Ohio.

Then, in the summer of 2016, while I was in Los Angeles covering E3 as a freelancer, I received an email from someone named Noah Swartz inviting me to something called the Roguelike Celebration that summer. It wouldn’t be held in Ohio, but it would be held in the Bay Area, my old stomping grounds from 2007 through 2011.

Noah went one better. Not only did he invite me, he pitched me to be the keynote speaker for the inaugural conference on the basis of the popularity of Dungeon Hacks, released over a year earlier. I was honored—doubly so when Rogue co-creator Glenn Wichman wrote later to ask if I would moderate a panel with himself and fellow co-designers Michael Toy and Ken Arnold.

I was exponentially more excited about moderating the panel than I was about giving a keynote. Addressing a room of more than 250 people was daunting to the extreme. But this was it: My chance to meet Mike, Glenn, and Ken in person.

When I lived in the Bay Area, I had the privilege of driving around for face-to-face interviews with several developers who had worked on my favorite games. Relocating to northeast Ohio saved me money, but, well, it’s not exactly the Mecca of game development. (Although I love it. It’s home.) So the prospect of getting to meet three brilliant and funny guys, who had left an indelible mark on my life and career, of putting faces to Skype handles, was too good to pass up.

The Roguelike Celebration was an all-day event held on September 17, 2016. I kicked things off with a 23-minute keynote—according to YouTube—and immediately afterwards invited Mike, Glenn, and Ken onto the stage to ask them some questions I’d prepared before turning it over to a roomful of starstruck attendees, people whose experience with Rogue had opened a gateway to a neverending series of dungeons, treasure, and fun.

The transcript of my panel with Rogue’s co-creators follows. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed getting to sit and talk with them again.

**

David Craddock: Well, I’ll jump right into this. Glenn asked me to moderate the first half of this, which is a Q-and-A. And since I had bugged all of these guys to talk to me, I didn’t really see how I could turn him down. What I want to do is my thing, which is setting foundations: I’ll ask them about their parts [in creating the game], and what they think about roguelike DNA and culture, and then we’ll take some questions. Michael, before you began writing Rogue, you played a lot of adventure games, mainly Colossal Cave. I wonder if you could tell me how those text adventures led you to create a game so unlike those other games, which were puzzle-driven.

Michael Toy: Well, the first time I played [Colossal Cave] Adventure, it was like the universe had changed, right? Suddenly stories are talking to you, and it’s like you can be in a story. It was like, “This is the greatest thing ever! I’m gonna write me one of these!” And you write an adventure game, and go, “Oh. This is really boring to play, because [I know] there’s a troll here, and if I have the bottle of poison, he won’t attack me.”

So I said, “Okay, that was a blast. But as an author, if I’m going to write games I’ll play, that can’t be the path. How do I write a game that has a sense of wonder, but also be the author?”

Craddock: Glenn, how did you and Mike meet? And what was your experience of creating games before then?

Glenn Wichman: We were both at UC [University of California] Santa Cruz. This was 1978. There were computer labs, so it was a small room with terminals that had wires going to a computer that was off somewhere. I was trying to teach myself BASIC, so I was creating a text-adventure game. Suddenly, looming behind me, was this large man saying, “What are you doing?” I said, “Well, have you ever played Adventure?” And he explained to me that he had beaten Adventure. So I said, “I’m trying to make a game like that.”

That was how we met. He just started looking at the game that I was making, and we started trading ideas. He started telling me how to program, because I really didn’t know. I was just teaching myself.

Craddock: And you’ve been in the games industry almost since then.

Wichman: Yeah. I took a 20-year break from the games industry, but I’m in the games industry now. I became a professional game developer through that experience.

Craddock: Before we jump to Ken, I wanted to ask Mike and Glenn: How did discovering Ken’s curses library help you kickstart Rogue? How important was that in the development of Rogue?

Toy: There would not be Rogue without curses. We’re in a computer lab using a PDP-11/70. Our terminal has a graphical-addressable cursor; it’s 24x80. We had Ataris and Apples, but the thing that we had access to was a dumb ASCII terminal, so we were trying to get as close to the graphical richness—quotes around “richness”—of an Apple II—

Wichman: Colors! [laughs]

Toy: —on the computer we had access to. It was just this weird dichotomy. The computers with color graphics were slow, and the computers that were fast had no graphics. Curses let us think graphically, visually, and come close to presenting an interactive experience.

Wichman: I think initially, the first things we made with curses were games like Snipe. So there was a while when we were just doing very simple things with it before we asked each other, “Could we do a graphical adventure game with this?” That was the big epiphany that started it off.

Craddock: Ken, could you talk about what led you to make curses? Because I think the idea of being able to position your cursor on a screen today is a given [to most people].

Ken Arnold: Yeah, I find it hard to describe to people what it enabled because there’s no world without that capability. It was really quite simple. There were these cursor-addressable terminals. People around me, we were hacking things for entertainment. We wrote various programs that were interesting. There was one I wrote that had a constant list of who was on and off the 11/70 [computer], we had, which had about 70 terminals on it, so you could see if any of your friends were around.

Then we brought in a second cursor-addressable terminal that could hold a whole different set of sequences. I didn’t want to this a third time, a fourth time, and a fifth time, porting [programs] to each one of these terminals. At that point, luckily, Bill Joy had already written vi and had the underlying database of capabilities for me to draw on. I said, “I am not writing this [multiple times]. I’m going to do this once.” I wanted [compatible code] so that everything could work that way: Everything could be cursor-addressable without needing to be rewritten for all these terminals?

So I said, “What’s the right extraction?” and just figured out some way to do this.

Toy: That’s awesome. So curses is the very first, cross-platform, graphics API. [laughs]

Arnold: [laughs] Yeah, I guess that’s true… to the extent you can call curses “graphics.” [laughs] To the extend that a character matrix is graphics, yes. Bill Joy had done this for vi, but only vi could use it, basically. I was having none of that.

Craddock: What I found interesting, Ken, is that when we spoke, you’d heard of Rogue because a lot of people came up to you and said, “Oh, you’re the guy who wrote curses for Rogue!”

[Audience laughs]

Arnold: [laughs] Yeah, people believed that curses was written for Rogue because it was almost everyone’s first experience with [curses]. It was before curses had been used in 10 programs around Berkeley. Who else [but Rogue players] would have seen it? It wasn’t surprising, but it wasn’t the origin.

When Michael transferred up to Berkeley—and left Glenn behind—I came to him because he’d been using curses. I said, “You’ve been doing this cool thing with my package!” I just wanted to talk with him about it.

Toy: Michael, this might be a long shot, but you’ve said you wanted to write Rogue because you wanted to be surprised by a game you’d written. I wondered if you had any memories of surprising things that happened to you down in the Dungeons of Doom.

Toy: Thirty years ago?

Craddock: Yup.

Toy: No, sorry, I can’t help you there.

Craddock: That was one of the fun things about playing this game: These games are hard to test because you very rarely can recreate a perfect storm, the same set of circumstances.

Wichman: Rather than give an anecdote, I will say that one of the things that we had, that I had no idea what a great thing it was, was we had a community of game testers available to us all the time.

Craddock: Ah. Those poor college students, just trying to pass their classes.

Wichman: Yeah! We would add some new feature to the game, and immediately, all of our friends in what we called the stat lab—

Toy: Who were definitely studying statistics. That’s all they were doing.

Wichman: [laughs] Yeah. We were, yes! What were the odds of getting killed by a troll? So, I do definitely have memories of 10 to 15 people… The stat lab, when we started writing [the game] had three terminals. The following year, it was in a bigger room with 20 terminals around. There would be 10 people, and they would all be playing Rogue. You’d hear somebody scream. You’d turn around to see, and they’d have been started because a ‘T’ had appeared on the screen.

[Audience laughs]

Wichman: That was something that really hit me, just how this very simple, representational game—the ‘T’ didn’t look any scarier than a ‘B,’ but you played it for a while, and it was [scary]. You saw a ‘T’ on the screen, and you did see a troll. That was pretty amazing to see.

Arnold: You asked about surprises in gameplay. About half the reason I got really engaged in the development was being surprised by the users, their reactions to things. Both clever things they figured out how to do—we introduced starvation because people had figured out how to take advantage of putting a shoe on the spacebar, going and having lunch, then coming back, and you had fainted, but who cared? So we had to have starvation.

But also, it was this kind of thing, people’s psychological reactions to [the game]. The kinds of ways that people would personify [creature] algorithms. People would come up and say, “Oh, you must have this algorithm saying, ‘This round is going to be a scroll-heavy game.’” No, not even slightly. But that’s the human perception of it. I learned a lot about how human beings perceived the world and built the world around them, and how, in some sense, the things we see around us is also a construct. I was much more often surprised by the gameplay, where I just died a lot.

[Audience laughs]

Craddock: Sure, sure.

Toy: I just want to echo that. When we sat down to make this thing, we had this grand vision for the game: Every monster would have its own way of living; maybe they’d build their own dungeons. So it was, “Okay, let’s get some rooms up on the screen, and we’ll put letters in, give them stats, connect the rooms.”

Only by the time we did that, it was done. All the things we were imagining, people were creating in their minds. It was completely unnecessary [for us to explicitly add those features]. You just had to kind of get out of people’s way, and they would inhabit the world rather than us saying, “We need to create this space or they don’t know what they’re doing.” No, they’re doing it without us creating it for them. It was really awesome. That was one of the amazing thing.

Craddock: As you all worked on the game, did you have a particular aspect of it that you gravitated to, or wanted to hone in particular?

Arnold: When I first started getting involved, I was talking with Michael about ways he was using curses that I thought could be done more effectively. I’d been playing over a 300-baud dial-up [modem]. 300 baud means 30 characters a second—sorry, I have to translate that—and addressing the cursor from one place to another takes four [bytes]. So when you talk about 30 characters a second, this was not a high-speed interaction modality.

[Rogue] used to be that you would hit inventory, and it would clear the screen and do the inventory, then it would redraw the screen. I made it so [the cursor] would go to the upper-righthand corner—upper-righthand because you can clear to the end of the line, and that takes just two characters—and put the inventory in a little window there. Then you’d only have to redraw that little part of the screen.

So it started out with me saying, “How do I make this smoother? How do I make this fewer keystrokes so I don’t have to hit space as often when I [drink] a potion?” After that, it was more quirky things. I don’t know how many people here have heard of Rog-O-Matic [bot developed by four grad students to beat Rogue]? Are any of the authors here? Oh. Damn. I’ve still never met any of them. They’re these people… I can’t remember the school… They wrote an AI to play Rogue. They called it “Experiments of User Intelligence in a Hostile Environment,” something like that.

I made it my rule that every release of Rogue would break Rog-O-Matic so they’d have to go back and do something differently. It was just a subtle thing. Hallucination, for example. I liked little things that made [the game] more unpredictable and quirky without changing the gameplay.

Wichman: I think one of the things that I liked best—and again, the code we’re talking about here, I didn’t really write any of—when Michael went to Berkeley and he and Ken started working on the game, if there’d been such a thing as forking the codebase, I was working on my own fork. But that just meant I was sort of orphaned out there in Santa Cruz. But I did work on the code, but all the code you all [played] was the Berkeley distribution; I didn’t write any of that.

But the things that I liked working on, I think, were how the monsters would pursue you. Like, okay, you leave the room, then the monster needs to stop following you and figure out where the door is instead, because he’s got to get to the door, then get to you. And especially specialized things monsters can do. Later on, when I did the Atari ST version, I added centaurs having the ability that after they hit you, they could curse your weapon.

So the Atari ST is the only version where that happens. Stuff like that, I think I liked working on.

Toy: I don’t have a [good single] answer to this question. It was just a blast to do. The procedural generation of Rogue was… I was a dumb kid who didn’t know anything about computer science, so I’m really actually embarrassed by how poor the procedural generation of Rogue is. It’s just a tic-tac-toe board with a room placed in each square, because the idea of picking random rooms and then connecting them, making sure the graph was completely connected—I hadn’t taken that class, computer science, yet. I had no idea such a thing was possible.

Craddock: [laughs] Right. You described those early experiments to me as just loading paint into a gun and spraying the wall, just to see how it would come out. I think we’ve about wrapped up our 15 minutes. Thank you, guys, for answering my questions again. Let’s open the floor.

Toy: While that’s going on, I just wanted to say thanks for having us up here. You guys are awesome. It’s an honor.

[Audience applauds]

Toy: We made Rogue, but you guys all made roguelikes, so thank you for letting us be here.

Attendee: This is more for Glenn since you’re back in the games industry, but it’s really for any of you. Clearly this is a genre that has legs. It’s been around for a long time. But also, why isn’t it bigger? Why isn’t it more popular? We still see new roguelikes: We’ve got The Binding of Isaac and Dwarf Fortress, but it’s coming out of indie developers. Why is it that major publishers don’t want to touch it?

Wichman: Um… they’re fools. [Audience laughs] No, that’s my joke answer. I think it’s big. I think it’s plenty big. I think that the bits and pieces of roguelikes, the checklist of, “This is what makes something a roguelike,” you’re going to see some of those in every game. The game I work on now is Words with Friends, and I had someone joke that it’s a roguelike because it uses ASCII characters. [Audience laughs] It’s randomly generated and has perma-death. [Audience laughs]

But I feel like even the hardcore roguelikes have a very vibrant community. I think because it’s not twitchy, it’s more of a niche [genre] for people who wanted to think hard. I can’t play roguelikes. They’re all way too hard. We created a pretty simple game mostly because of limitations. I think Michael would have made it much more complicated.

Toy: Well, we ran out of instruction space.

Wichman: We did, we did. We made as complicated a game as we could make with the technology we had. But that’s where I liked it. I don’t like games more complicated than that.

Toy: The other thing that’s weird is, in America, if something isn’t the biggest thing ever, then it’s crap. That’s just not true. You can make something that has quality, that’s beautiful and doesn’t appeal to everybody, but that doesn’t make it crap. Roguelikes are a great thing. We tried to sell Rogue. There was a time when you could sell Rogue. You could buy it in a box from a computer store. Everybody had a chance to make it the biggest thing in the world, and it just wasn’t interesting to the mass market.

So we can say that ship has sailed. There’s been a number of people who have made that attempt. Even the Diablo people are like, “Yeah, whatever. Five percent of our people like playing it [with perma-death].” Okay. Well, yay for that five percent in this room. Thank you, all.

Attendee: Hey, it’s cool to see you guys. When I was 10, my dad would babysit me by taking me into Techtronics and dumping me in front of a dumb terminal. They had Hunt the Wumpus, and Rogue, and a few other games, so I was good for hours. I was curious, given that experience—there wasn’t some Internet I was using at that point, the early ‘80s—so I was curious, what was your sense of your user base, your community? Was it just that the game was out there and you talked about it with people you knew at college, or did you have a sense of who was out there playing the game?

Toy: That was actually kind of a surprise. Glenn and I, instead of attending class at UC Santa Cruz, we wrote this thing, and we discovered that somehow a binary of Rogue had made it to Bell Labs, where the Unix developers were. They had renamed it Under Bell Labs, which was, I guess, an homage to Beneath Apple Manor. So a bunch of people at Bell Labs played this game called UBL, which was basically the binary of Rogue.

It was like, “People outside the stat lab are playing Rogue? How did that happen?” It was a shock that anybody would want to do that. It just became a thing.

Arnold: By the time it came to Berkeley, we were node 10 in the ARPANET, and it did start to get around. Certainly by the end, we were very aware of it. We’d make a change, and it would bust people’s save files because of the way we did saves. We knew we had players. [Audience laughs]

But also, it changed the way I thought of it. There was a shared score file. I didn’t care if you cheated if that was entertaining to you and you had a fun time. But if you were competing against other people? That was a whole other thing entirely, and it was unfair. So that made us try to keep it as clean as we could, which was not bad considering neither of us really understood security, if I can speak for you [Toy] there.

I remember once, we had save files, and they were secured in certain ways, one of which was by understanding a bit of how they were stored in the [mainframe’s] file system. Speaking of Bell Labs, I once heard that [C language co-creator] Ken Thompson was cheating by saving the save file, and putting it on a mounted disk. Then he would replay it, and he would clone the disk so he could replay the same game over and over again. He could defeat us because he was Ken Thompson. I threw up my hands at that time.

But our user community, by the time we [Toy and I] were done with it, we absolutely knew that there were a ton of people out there.

Wichman: We knew it was being played in Italy, at Olivetti [typewriter manufacturer]. It was a strange thing. What happened was, and these guys know this part of the story better than me, it became part of the 4.2 Berkeley distribution [of Unix], which meant that if you got Unix, the operating system, you got the game. If you can get that kind of distribution, if you have that opportunity for your game, I would say take it. [Audience laughs]

Toy: We were the Minesweeper of Unix.

Wichman: [laughs] Exactly. So we knew it was all over the world, and we knew, anecdotally, it was being played all over the world. We said it was the most popular game on college campuses in the early ‘80s. I don’t know how you would substantiate that, but I don’t think there are any competitors who would challenge it.

It was a strange thing. It was being played everywhere, but nobody was sending us money. [laughs] There weren’t sales charts of those kinds of statistics, DAU measurements or any of those kinds of things we take for granted today.

Toy: What’s a DAU?

Wichman: Oh. Daily Active User. Sorry. Industry in-term. [laughs] We had a lot of DAUs, but we had no way to measure it. And by today’s standards, the whole industry was so much smaller than it is now. It’s hard to compare. But we knew it was very popular, and I think we all felt very gratified. And I think we thought it would be, because we knew we had something very cool. I thought people would love it.

Toy: Yeah, I definitely thought that once it was in a box, it would be a thing that would be in everyone’s living room. It was a little bit disappointing to learn that, no, no, you have to be int his narrow [demographic] to know about it. The things that make Rogue unique to you are kind of shocking.

My favorite story is, I met Dennis Ritchie, who’s one of the people who created the C programming language, and Unix, and a god of everything we were doing. I was like, “Oh my gosh! The Dennis Ritchie!” And he says, “You’re the Michael Toy!” And I thought, Okay, I can die now. [Audience laughs] That was maybe the best moment related to Rogue in my whole life.

Attendee: Hey, fellas. Thanks for coming out, and thanks for your cool game. This is for all of you, whoever wants to answer first. If you still follow roguelikes today, or if you see where the genre is going, is there anything any of you wish one of us would do? Things you think about.

Arnold: No. [Audience laughs] I mean, I’m totally amazed all the time. Every time I see a new one, I think, Wow, I wish I would have thought of that.

Wichman: I think I’ll echo the “No.” I think what people have done with roguelikes so far surpasses anything I ever thought of. I think you’re all doing way cooler stuff than I was imagining. A couple of things I would have done, if I’d have kept working on them: I wanted to have neural networks, and monsters that got smarter as you fought them; and I really don’t follow it as closely as all of you do, so it’s a little embarrassing, sorry, but I think No Man’s Sky, having an entire world, was another thing.

Toy: Rogue for us was, “Here’s the rules for video games. Those rules aren’t satisfying, so we’re going to break them and do something different.” That’s continuing: “I’m bored with what exists, and I’m going to change the rules.” People are doing that, and I really enjoy all the people who say, “Oh, roguelike? That’s kind of a good idea, but what about a roguelike on a ship in space?” Oh, wow, that’s a great idea! You guys are all my heroes for all the ways you’ve done this thing.

Attendee: Not counting your own, what is your favorite roguelike?

Toy: This is just a question of doom, because I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings.

Arnold: Yeah, like, “If I wasn’t married to you…” [Audience laughs]

Toy: In the early Mac days, there was a roguelike called Mission Thunderbolt that I played ‘til the end. Of all the roguelikes, that was probably my favorite that wasn’t Rogue.

Wichman: I’m gonna say Ananias [by Santiago Zapata of Slashware Interactive], because my friend wrote it. I really don’t play a lot of roguelikes, so, honestly, I’m not a good judge of them. I like more casual games.

Arnold: As a way of not answering your question that would get me into trouble, my son has a Rogue tattoo on his chest. [Audience laughs]

Toy: Glenn, can you talk about permadeath? Because I think you really put permadeath in a good context.

Wichman: You mean about…?

Toy: The thing you posted.

Wichman: Oh, yeah. I posted on Facebook yesterday that we need a different name than “permadeath.” There’s this idea that, when people talk about permadeath, they talk about us three being mean. Like, “They wanted to make it extra hard, so they threw in perma-death.”

Toy: And only people with lots of testosterone play games with permadeath.

Wichman: Yeah, yeah. The thing is, I didn’t… That’s not what we came up with. Permadeath is an example of consequence persistence. The way it came out was, with Rogue, we’ve got mystery items, and we’ve got procedural generation. From that, if you find an item, do you use it or not? Do I use this scroll? Do I drink this potion? I don’t know. It might be good, it might be bad. If I can save the game, and I drink the potion and it’s bad, then I restore the game. That entire game mechanic just goes away.

That was a reason that, once you’ve made a decision and consequences happen, there’s no way to go back and undo it. Permadeath is not the right name for that. That’s my homework to all of you: Come up with a better name.

Toy: Yeah. We were trying to make it more immersive by making things matter, not to make it more painful. It was really meant to make things more fun. Like, “This thing matters. I’m really going to think about it.”

Wichman: The good stuff is just as permanent as the bad stuff.

Arnold: So, if I can beg an indulgence, a few years ago, somebody sent me a version of the Rogue source code, which has essentially vanished from the world. They stole it off of a backup system at UC San Francisco when I worked there. It’s up on Sourceforge under the project “Rogue.” It’s just post-5.3 [version] because they stole it during development. If anybody wants to pick that up and debug it, we’d have the real Rogue source code running. It’s not something I’ve had time to get back to.

Wichman: And I just want to quickly say that this is the first time in 30 years that we’ve all been in the same room, so you guys are witnessing something pretty cool.

[Audience applauds]

About the Author

David L. Craddock lives in Canton, Ohio, with his wife, Amie Kline–Craddock. He is the author of dozens of books including the bestselling Stay Awhile and Listen trilogy, Arcade Perfect, and the critically acclaimed Gairden Chronicles series of epic fantasy novels for young adults. Follow David online at davidlcraddock.com and @davidlcraddock on Twitter.

Read FREE samples from David L. Craddock's books about video games in Waypoints, a digital collection of chapters. Download for free at https://tinyurl.com/yur7z2y9.

Books by David L. Craddock

Fiction

The Dumpster Club

Heritage: Book One of the Gairden Chronicles

Point of Fate: Book Two of the Gairden Chronicles

Firebug: War of the Elementalists

Nonfiction

Long Live Mortal Kombat: Round 1 – The Fatalities and Fandom of the Arcade Era

Kool Stuff: Bonus Interviews From Long Live Mortal Kombat (2023)

Stay Awhile and Listen: Book I – How Two Blizzards Unleashed Diablo and Forged a Video-Game Empire

Stay Awhile and Listen: Book II – Heaven, Hell, and Secret Cow Levels

Arcade Perfect: How Pac-Man, Mortal Kombat, and Other Coin-Op Classics Invaded the Living Room

Monsters in the Dark: The Making of X-COM: UFO Defense

Monsters in the Dark: The Making of X-COM: UFO Defense – Special Edition

Beneath a Starless Sky: Pillars of Eternity and the Infinity Engine Era of RPGs

Rocket Jump: Quake and the Golden Age of First-Person Shooters

Break Out: How the Apple II Launched the PC Gaming Revolution

Dungeon Hacks: How NetHack, Angband, and Other Roguelikes Changed the Course of Video Games

Shovel Knight (Boss Fight Books)

Bottomless Pit: Running and Jumping Through Platform Games - Volume 1

GameDev Stories: Interviews About Game Development and Culture

GameDev Stories: Volume 2 – More Interviews About Game Development and Culture

Once Upon a Point and Click: The Tale of King’s Quest, Gabriel Knight, and the Queens of Adventure Games

One-Week Dungeons: Diaries of a Seven-Day Roguelike Challenge

Making Fun: Stories of Game Development - Volume 1

Angels, Devils, and Boomsticks: The Making of Demons with Shotguns

Anything But Sports: The Making of FTL

Red to Black: The Making of Rogue Legacy

Everybody Shake! The Making of Spaceteam

Dialogue Box: Oral Histories of Video Games (TBD)

Bet on Black: How Microsoft and the Xbox Changed Pop Culture (TBD)

Better Together: Stories of EverQuest (TBD)

Ascendant: The Fall of Tomb Raider and the Rise of Lara Croft (TBD)

Stairway to Badass: The Making and Remaking of Doom (TBD)

Table of Contents

- Introduction
- Another Metroid 2 Remake (AM2R)
- S. D. Perry – Author

- Seth Mendelsohn on Virgin Interactive and Super Mario Bros.

- Monkeying Around: The Making of The Lion King’s Most Infamously Difficult Level

- In the Guts of Game Design with Josh Sawyer

- John Staats, Designer, World of WarCraft

- From the Ever-Dark Sky: The Making of Veil of Darkness

- Part I: A Family Story
- Part II: Moving Up
- Part III: Making It
- Part IV: Pawn of Prophecy
- Part V: Prophecy Fulfilled

- Rogue’s Co-Creators at Roguelike Celebration 2016

- About the Author

- Books by David L. Craddock