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[whirring]
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[gun shots]
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[gun shots]
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[gun shots]
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[gun shots]
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[gun shots]
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[gun shots]
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[gun shots]
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[gun shots]
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[gun shots]
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[gun shots]
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It all started back when I was in high school.
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I grew up in the San Francisco Bay area.
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I really enjoyed electronics and I was lucky enough
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To get involved in a program at NASA Ames Research Centre
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in Mountain View
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Three of us from local high schools got involved.
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What was coming out at the time were
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early vector drawing computer graphic systems called IMLACs.
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Well, it’s a really clunky looking thing, but it really does look a lot like a PC
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It’s got a keyboard, it’s got a mouse
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Steve Colley, Howard Palmer, and myself were given free rein of
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all of this fancy computer graphics
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We were given the challenge to figure out what you could do with an IMLAC
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Could an IMLAC really visualize a 3D world?
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So, Steve Colley started by
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creating a program that could do
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hidden line removal dynamically and visualize a cube rotating.
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It was one of those things where you, you look at it, and you’re just sort of
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bowled over at how cool it was.
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So, the next thing was, what if you had multiple cubes and instead
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Generated a perspective of being inside this rays of blocks or cubes
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That essentially becomes a maze
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The first thing that I remember seeing was an environment that you were in
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and I, you know, was like, ‘Woah!’
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So, we were able to create a visualization from first person
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looking down a maze and it was kind of a maze game as far as
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‘Well, can you find the exit?’
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That then continued on as to,
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‘What if we had two IMLACs and we had them talk to each other?’
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♪♪♪
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When Greg Thompson came to MIT from Ames, he brought
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a whole bunch of usable programs, but the one that he brought that was really the coolest
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Was this thing that they called, ‘Maze,’ and sometimes ‘Maze War.’
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Dave wrote the program that, when you type to start up Maze,
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it would download into your IMLAC the Maze game
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and then acted as the communication hub
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to exchange messages between all of the IMLACs at Project MAC that were playing the game.
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When you moved, a little message went out to everybody,
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and the updating part was handled in the mainframe program
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because it had a vision of where each player was.
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If he could see you, if you were in his view
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it would draw a representation of yourself.
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All we had there, really, was we could draw the person’s name.
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That was good. Well what if we could turn it more into a game and shoot each other?
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Now, you didn’t actually…You couldn’t really draw a gun but, from the first person perspective,
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we would draw a representation of a bullet going down the hallway.
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and so, if he is in the square that the bullet reached at that point in time,
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it would declare that other player’s dead,
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and the other player would get a message that you’re dead, and it would create a visualization
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of explosions, essentially, on the screen
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along with your name. Up to eight players, we would have
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two numbers of hits and shots, so you could kind of track the score.
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We had enough IMLACs, we could get some pretty good games going.
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The researches are spending late nights inviting their friends to
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get into Project MAC to play this game at late hours as opposed to doing the problem set
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they were probably supposed to be doing in their dorm rooms.
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People would come in from all over the lab which was, you know,
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this large building with about five floors of it.
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J.C.R Licklider himself, we’re seeing playing the game sometimes
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and people would sit around and cheer
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cheer their favorite players on.
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It was kind of like eSports. I guess it’s kind of like eSports.
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Very primitive eSports.
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It would download into your IMLAC, the Maze Game,
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and then acted as the communication hub.
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That basically enabled it to be played over the Internet.
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You could just come in, start up an instance of being a player in the game, and off you went
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You could shoot, you could chase each other around,
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you could have a lot of fun.
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We pioneered online gaming.
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It was shocking. It’s totally shocking.
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The concept, first person shooter, didn’t exist.
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It was one of those many things that was kind of retrofitted.
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Maze itself appeared in late 1973.
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Years went by, and the hardware for playing games
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improved more and more and more, and
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one of the first things that people wanted to write for anything that had graphics
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was a version of Maze.
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Once the PCs came out, billions and billions of knock offs
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And, you know, you can trace the lineage to things like Doom.
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I could see that it would catch on,
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and I was happy to have happened in to be
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one of the contributors in getting it started.
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These days, people see, like, Fortnite, and they assume harbor rendering has always been.
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No, we came from very, very humble beginnings,
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beginnings of games like Battlezone in which it was just vector lines.
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Battlezone was a brilliant application
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It was so compelling to me, and
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I just got totally hooked.
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The first time you saw that, everything you needed to know about a first person shooter was already defined.
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The first person shooter is the closest thing you can be to
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being in an environment in reality
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because first person means, by definition
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That it’s from your sight, and that was Battlezone.
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[explosion]
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I remember, as a kid, you put your face through the gunner mechanism, and then you could turn
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and then I felt like I was there. I felt like I was in, like, that tank.
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It was so immersive. You’re brought into that world,
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and it was so powerful, and I was thinking,
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‘This is the way everything’s going to work in the future.’
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Battlezone is a masterful game and, if you haven’t played it
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On a vector arcade stand up arcade version, you’d need to.
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Use the joysticks, play it like it was meant to be played,
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because that experience is extraordinary.
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I just played and played, and I got so good that I got to the point where
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I would not lose.
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[explosion]
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There are things in Battlezone that Carmack and Romero had to learn
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like being shot at from behind, being able to see the enemy
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and the importance of a radar and auto radar.
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Ed Rotberg figured them out for the very first time and mastered them, right?
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I tried playing it recently, and I’m still pretty good.
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I still have that feel for the game which is so weird
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It’s been 30-something years.
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It’s beautiful. It’s like a poem. It’s fantastic.
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I can’t overstate its importance enough.
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There’s games out there that basically prove something
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That would otherwise be thought to be impossible.
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It sort of set a bar in a number of different dimensions
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that really forced me to rethink about what these immersive experiences would really mean.
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You don’t think, ‘Oh, I could do that,’ until you see somebody else do it.
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So, I wanted to build a game, and I started out working on Apple II’s.
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I was really obsessed. The Apple II had some games that were images,
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and you can, like, click on something, you go to another image and, you get about 10-20 images,
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you fill up a floppy. I thought,
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‘There must be a way to create a world that’s more alive.’
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I came to 3D as a compression technology
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to generate the world and have a very, very, very tiny file that does it,
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and I heard that Apple was going to be putting out a new computer.
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[explosion]
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On January 24, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh.
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I put money down on it. Soon after, the store gives me a call and says, ‘Your Mac is here.’
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Every store only got one Mac.
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So, they were giving me their demonstration computer
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before they even opened it up. I thought that was really classy of them.
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It was, to me, the future of computing,
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and I saw what the game I was building as the future of gaming.
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I invented at least half of mouselook, if you will.
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You take the mouse, and you move left and right, you’d turn left and right.
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Since I couldn’t look up and down, what I did is, move the mouse up, you’d go forward
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and move the mouse down, you’d go backwards, and that proved to be a very, very smooth interface.
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[whoosh]
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I learned something very interesting. As soon as I added
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sound to the game, like running into a wall,
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the perception of the speed of the game doubled.
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[lasers firing]
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There’s sort of a real close link between your auditory system and your visual system
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And, when they match up, there’s certainly a heightened sense of realism
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The Colony shipped on two discs: one was the game, and the full game.
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The other was just the sounds.
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Basically, I did all the sounds.
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[toilet flush]
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recording whatever, whatever I get my hands on. That was a lot of fun.
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[music intro]
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[Alert]
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I had built the very, very first corridor.
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I could see down, at the end of it, was this turn.
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I was very, very surprised at how compelling it was.
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You’re pulled into the world, and you can’t stop.
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You can’t look away. It was quite something.
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Colony had a number of different pieces. You start on the ship.
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The ship was a safe place where you could actually learn the interfaces.
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and, actually, it turned out the hardest puzzle in the game was figuring out how to get off the ship.
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I put an airlock there, and I figured,
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‘Everybody knows how an airlock works.’
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Now, everybody goes in the airlock, opens the door,
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they go on in, they open the second door, die.
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[whoosh]
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So, what happens when you finally do get outside,
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you’re in a Battlezone-like world.
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It was Battlezone. I replaced the tanks with these creatures,
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but it felt good.
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This is a family colony that had been set up,
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all the adults were killed, you’re in a world that’s very, very dangerous.
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You go through the colony, and you build up the story.
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‘What happened here?’ One room had a slideshow, even talks about all the different creatures.
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The world had it feel continuous,
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but every environment, every piece of it had to have a little bit of a difference to it.
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You know, the top three levels were living quarters.
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As you get deeper into the colony, these creatures that have taken over would attack.
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There was like an infinite corridor, because it looped back to where you started.
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And you could actually figure that out by dropping some things.
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I’m sure people probably spent hours hoping to get to the other end.
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[Ahh!]
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I had no idea what a game like that
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should be, no, nor did anyone else
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There were a few things in there that were pure sadism.
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One of the first things you see on the ship is a cigarette
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but, if you pick up the cigarette, which you could do,
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it says, ‘Cigarettes are hazardous to your health. You’ve died’
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and you’re dead.
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I was told by a number of people I had caused their divorce
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because they kind of got a little too immersed in the game.
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But, yeah, it was hard. But, on the other side,
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there was a lot of…People had a lot of fun.
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A favorite id game?
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gosh
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[guitar riff]
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Uh
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[Heavy metal music]
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Um
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[funky guitar]
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This is gonna sound absurd.
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The original games that I played of theirs were the side-scrollers
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[beeping]
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I went to Softdisk in March of 1989
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and I immediately met Tom Hall.
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I interviewed with IBM and Gould and lots of other companies
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and I kind of thought about it and go,
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‘No, this is boring. I want to make games.’
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I wanted to start a gaming disk, Gamer’s Edge,
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and I needed to have a team of people to help me with it.
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So, I hired John Carmack.
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When I was growing up, I really was the only one that was
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into computers at the level that I was.
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Like, I could tell just from, like, running tennis that this was a really good programmer.
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John Romero and Lane Roathe were the first two programmers
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that I had ever met that I really felt like,
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‘Wow, they’re doing awesome things, and I’ve got so much that I can learn from them.’
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And then, I needed an artist, so I just looked around the room,
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and I saw this long-haired guy on a computer.
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I was like, ‘Oh, he probably listens to metal. He’ll totally fit in.’
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When I was in college, my professor,
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he told me there was a position opening up at a company called Softdisk
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‘You’re making video games.’
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And I remember saying, ‘Video games?’
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We had a game, you know, room with metal blasting out of it
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and all the lights are off in there, and that’s kind of how we started
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00:16:07,925 --> 00:16:10,886
So, we made a whole lot of games for SoftDisk.
241
00:16:10,928 --> 00:16:14,932
We were working on two games at a time. We made twelve games that year.
242
00:16:15,015 --> 00:16:17,184
Romero had done this game, Dangerous Dave,
243
00:16:17,267 --> 00:16:20,729
and it was extremely popular all over the world to this day.
244
00:16:24,983 --> 00:16:28,237
But, there was nobody that had figured out how to do, like,
245
00:16:28,237 --> 00:16:32,866
fine pixel scrolling and really a smooth movement that we were used to on consoles,
246
00:16:32,908 --> 00:16:34,952
Where is that on the PC?
247
00:16:34,952 --> 00:16:37,454
Carmack, he came up with a little prototype,
248
00:16:37,538 --> 00:16:40,040
a little Dave character bouncing around on the screen,
249
00:16:40,040 --> 00:16:43,043
but it could do the smooth scrolling. The thought came to me,
250
00:16:43,127 --> 00:16:46,130
‘You know, hey, wouldn’t it be funny if we made
251
00:16:46,171 --> 00:16:50,718
the first level of Super Mario 3 with Dangerous Dave tonight?
252
00:16:52,970 --> 00:16:55,389
Dangerous Dave in “Copyright Infringement.”
253
00:16:57,599 --> 00:16:58,600
Yeah!
254
00:16:59,601 --> 00:17:01,979
Tom copied it onto a disc and just put it on my desk.
255
00:17:02,062 --> 00:17:05,607
I came in and I was like, ‘Ooh, some kind of cool demo,’
256
00:17:05,858 --> 00:17:09,653
and the screen comes up, the screen scrolled, and I almost have a heart attack.
257
00:17:09,778 --> 00:17:14,116
‘Are you serious? Like, this is insane.
258
00:17:14,491 --> 00:17:16,326
This doesn’t exist on a PC.
259
00:17:17,327 --> 00:17:22,082
We got in late, and Romero just closes the door and says,
260
00:17:22,166 --> 00:17:26,336
‘This changes everything. We need to start a company now.’
261
00:17:36,221 --> 00:17:40,058
I was making these games called that was sort of rogue-style games
262
00:17:40,058 --> 00:17:42,644
but more arcade-y.
263
00:17:43,187 --> 00:17:46,774
I decided to break them down into episodes,
264
00:17:46,857 --> 00:17:50,152
release just the first episode as a free Shareware game
265
00:17:50,235 --> 00:17:53,530
and, at the end of that episode, I would have a splash screen pop up saying,
266
00:17:53,614 --> 00:17:56,283
‘Hey, if you liked this, there’s two more episodes you can buy.
267
00:17:56,408 --> 00:17:59,036
Send me $30, I’ll send you the games.’
268
00:17:59,036 --> 00:18:01,955
And it turned out, that first year, I made over a hundred thousand dollars.
269
00:18:02,748 --> 00:18:07,711
So, I quit my daytime job as a computer consultant and started up Apogee.
270
00:18:09,922 --> 00:18:11,298
[sinister laugh]
271
00:18:11,548 --> 00:18:15,260
I had gotten letters over probably a month.
272
00:18:15,427 --> 00:18:18,388
They all had different names, and I thought I had some fans
273
00:18:18,388 --> 00:18:21,433
and I was reading PC Games magazine.
274
00:18:21,558 --> 00:18:24,603
and there was an article about a guy named Scott Miller.
275
00:18:24,603 --> 00:18:28,482
I get to the very end, and it has his name, and his address. I’m like,
276
00:18:28,607 --> 00:18:31,985
‘I know that address. How do I know that address?’
277
00:18:32,069 --> 00:18:35,697
And I just, like, look over at the wall. I’m like, ‘No way.’
278
00:18:35,697 --> 00:18:39,076
I came across John Romero’s game, and I had to write him, like,
279
00:18:39,159 --> 00:18:42,788
I think, three letters total, and I was using different names
280
00:18:42,788 --> 00:18:45,666
so that he wouldn’t think it’s the same person writing him the whole time.
281
00:18:45,707 --> 00:18:49,795
And he finally figured out that all these three different letters were coming from the same address,
282
00:18:49,795 --> 00:18:51,964
and he wrote me back a very nasty letter saying,
283
00:18:51,964 --> 00:18:56,510
‘Are you crazy? You know, are you some sort of weird fan?’ You know, ‘What’s going on here?’
284
00:18:56,552 --> 00:18:58,846
We got on the phone, and he’s like,
285
00:18:58,846 --> 00:19:02,891
‘Oh, this is so great. You know, the reason why I wrote all those, those letter under different names
286
00:19:02,891 --> 00:19:06,812
because I’m looking for programmers, and they look at the mail at Softdisk
287
00:19:06,812 --> 00:19:10,440
and, if I’m trying to steal people, they won’t even give you the letters.’
288
00:19:10,566 --> 00:19:11,358
[laughing]
289
00:19:11,525 --> 00:19:15,487
That was right after we finished the Mario demo. I sent it to him,
290
00:19:15,571 --> 00:19:17,739
and he was just mind blown.
291
00:19:17,823 --> 00:19:20,701
I said, ‘Look, you guys are onto something here.
292
00:19:20,701 --> 00:19:24,830
Is there any way I can fund the development of a game that we can then release in Shareware?
293
00:19:24,872 --> 00:19:28,417
We were brainstorming a bunch of stuff, and I went back to my office for 15 minutes,
294
00:19:28,417 --> 00:19:33,505
and just typed it into Apple Writer, and I came back, and I read it in a Walter Winchell voice,
295
00:19:33,630 --> 00:19:36,425
like ‘Commander Keen, Defender of Justice!’
296
00:19:36,466 --> 00:19:39,136
and that’s how Commander Keen was born.
297
00:19:39,177 --> 00:19:42,055
Well, the Commander Keen games really sort of blew open the doors
298
00:19:42,139 --> 00:19:44,975
for both companies to grow at that point.
299
00:19:46,143 --> 00:19:49,438
It just really coalesced them as a team.
300
00:19:49,688 --> 00:19:54,234
It proved that these guys could bring a compelling Nintendo-like
301
00:19:54,234 --> 00:19:58,572
experience to a personal computer which was absolutely revolutionary.
302
00:19:58,697 --> 00:20:02,034
In January of 1991, John wanted to make a 3D game,
303
00:20:02,117 --> 00:20:04,411
and we’re like, ‘Are you sure? Because
304
00:20:04,578 --> 00:20:07,080
that’s going to be hard to do in two months.
305
00:20:07,080 --> 00:20:11,501
We had all played games like Wizardry and, like, Ultima III and IV,
306
00:20:11,627 --> 00:20:14,880
Bard’s Tale and stuff, and those were our first instances
307
00:20:15,130 --> 00:20:17,382
of 3D experiences.
308
00:20:17,466 --> 00:20:22,387
It was really cool, because I had not seen that perspective on a computer monitor before.
309
00:20:22,638 --> 00:20:27,559
I had one important book on 3D graphics that I had gotten when I was
310
00:20:27,643 --> 00:20:30,562
maybe 18 from a university bookstore.
311
00:20:30,604 --> 00:20:33,398
It was a big fat book, and that was my Bible for years.
312
00:20:33,523 --> 00:20:37,235
John Carmack wrote a rotating cube demo
313
00:20:37,402 --> 00:20:40,197
in EGA, and it was really cool.
314
00:20:40,322 --> 00:20:44,201
There were a lot of, like, to be, to make that cube rotate.
315
00:20:44,284 --> 00:20:48,580
The trick was figuring out, ‘What’s the first thing that we can do that has a fun factor to it
316
00:20:48,747 --> 00:20:52,709
while still taking a step forward into a new technical level?’
317
00:20:52,793 --> 00:20:58,090
In 1982, a guy named Paul Edelstein made a game called Wayout for Sirius Software,
318
00:20:58,090 --> 00:21:02,469
and you could move on any pixel and rotate at any point,
319
00:21:02,636 --> 00:21:06,181
and that was really impressive, but nobody followed that up.
320
00:21:06,264 --> 00:21:10,060
But, when we did Hovertank One, you could kind of move on any pixel.
321
00:21:18,944 --> 00:21:21,363
It’s the first game I’d ever seen where you could actually just
322
00:21:21,488 --> 00:21:24,241
freely move around a room.
323
00:21:24,616 --> 00:21:28,245
The simple Dungeons and Ultima ones were just colored
324
00:21:28,412 --> 00:21:32,749
lines drawing the hallways. It wasn’t free-moving like Hovertank, but
325
00:21:32,916 --> 00:21:35,085
that’s the simplest way you can do it is
326
00:21:35,252 --> 00:21:40,215
just to palace colors on the walls, the two shades of it create depth.
327
00:21:40,340 --> 00:21:44,803
You know, there are large characters. You say it’s very low detail
328
00:21:46,263 --> 00:21:48,598
but, back then, it was pretty impressive.
329
00:21:48,682 --> 00:21:52,269
So, I made up a silly story about you rescuing people in this maze
330
00:21:52,394 --> 00:21:55,731
and, if you rescued enough of them, if the monsters didn’t get them,
331
00:21:55,731 --> 00:21:58,150
then the guy’s all happy and giving you money.
332
00:21:58,233 --> 00:22:01,153
It was a very new experience,
333
00:22:01,236 --> 00:22:04,114
and I remember pushing hard through it.
334
00:22:04,239 --> 00:22:06,742
He was up all the time like, if he was awake, he was
335
00:22:06,825 --> 00:22:08,785
he was, you know, coding and eating.
336
00:22:08,827 --> 00:22:11,455
Things were still glitchy, and things were not quite working
337
00:22:11,538 --> 00:22:14,416
as well as they should, going a little over time budget.
338
00:22:14,499 --> 00:22:17,419
One important thing to understand, I think, about John Carmack,
339
00:22:17,461 --> 00:22:21,298
he was always interesting in creating
340
00:22:21,339 --> 00:22:26,595
a virtual world. Hovertank was a first step in that direction.
341
00:22:26,720 --> 00:22:29,222
It was our first 3D game, and
342
00:22:29,264 --> 00:22:32,601
and we knew that there was going to be more. You know, he wanted to get better at it.
343
00:22:32,726 --> 00:22:37,105
Romero had talked to a friend of his, Paul Neurath at Looking Glass.
344
00:22:37,189 --> 00:22:40,192
He said, ‘We’re working on a really cool game,
345
00:22:40,192 --> 00:22:43,820
and we’re using a really cool new technique called texture mapping,
346
00:22:43,862 --> 00:22:45,322
and I’m like, ‘What is that?’
347
00:22:45,405 --> 00:22:48,575
After he got off the phone, he turns around and looks at John Carmack.
348
00:22:48,658 --> 00:22:53,288
‘Can you do that?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I can do that.’
349
00:22:53,705 --> 00:22:56,666
And Hovertank, the walls were still solid, flat, shaded.
350
00:22:56,750 --> 00:23:01,129
You know, I honestly still hadn’t worked out some of the issues with perspective texture mapping.
351
00:23:01,254 --> 00:23:05,008
That was obviously the next thing that I wanted to do with Catacombs 3D.
352
00:23:08,345 --> 00:23:13,517
So, they were still making Ultima Underworld for a whole year while we did nothing about texture mapping.
353
00:23:13,683 --> 00:23:16,978
And then, we made Catacomb 3D
354
00:23:16,978 --> 00:23:21,274
with texture mapping half a year before they released Ultima Underworld,
355
00:23:21,399 --> 00:23:25,654
because John Carmack’s first game that he wrote at SoftDisk
356
00:23:25,695 --> 00:23:28,281
was Catacombs, we knew what the levels looked like and everything.
357
00:23:28,323 --> 00:23:31,284
We just had to make textures and just do it all in 3D.
358
00:23:38,375 --> 00:23:43,713
From an artist’s perspective, it was really cool, because you could do larger pieces of artwork
359
00:23:43,880 --> 00:23:50,178
I really liked the hand, which is actually my hand,
my own hand model.
360
00:23:50,387 --> 00:23:54,307
Having the hand present, it serves dual purposes. It’s both an indicator
361
00:23:54,307 --> 00:23:59,229
of what your current weapon is, and it’s at least showing you the center of the screen as a partial aiming help.
362
00:23:59,354 --> 00:24:02,149
You know, it took us a while to get, have the debates about whether you have
363
00:24:02,190 --> 00:24:06,194
an actual aiming dot or reticle on there, and there were arguments about
364
00:24:06,319 --> 00:24:10,949
‘Is it more realistic if you don’t have that? Even if though it's more frustrating for people to aim.’
365
00:24:11,324 --> 00:24:14,035
Some of those debates continue to rage to this day.
366
00:24:14,077 --> 00:24:17,038
Because it really is as though you’re reaching into this space, right?
367
00:24:17,164 --> 00:24:19,666
And there’s a part of you that’s in that world.
368
00:24:19,749 --> 00:24:24,004
And I also like the game mechanics of it where you hold down your mouse button
369
00:24:24,045 --> 00:24:26,631
for more power. It was actually a pretty fun game.
370
00:24:26,715 --> 00:24:32,053
You know, in both cases, neither one of those games got to the absolute sort of rock solid perfection
371
00:24:32,137 --> 00:24:35,182
that I was very proud of in, in our later games.
372
00:24:35,223 --> 00:24:39,102
But, you know, we still got them out under the gun with really high time pressure
373
00:24:39,227 --> 00:24:41,438
and they were fun.
374
00:25:04,961 --> 00:25:09,216
There are a lucky few who get to play at work and make it pay.
375
00:25:09,299 --> 00:25:12,552
Now, a similar story may be unfolding near Dallas.
376
00:25:13,470 --> 00:25:17,307
At the beginning of 1992, we had just come back from Christmas vacation,
377
00:25:17,307 --> 00:25:20,852
and we started working on Commander Keen 7.
378
00:25:22,479 --> 00:25:24,648
We spent six months
379
00:25:24,731 --> 00:25:29,277
last year in 1991, we spent six months making three Commander Keen games
380
00:25:29,319 --> 00:25:31,988
and now we’re going to, what, spend another year or something? I was like,
381
00:25:32,113 --> 00:25:35,951
‘I can’t. I can’t do it. I am just sick of making Keen.’
382
00:25:38,119 --> 00:25:41,706
I was like, ‘We should make another 3D gun; this time, with guns in it.’
383
00:25:41,748 --> 00:25:43,333
[gun shots]
384
00:25:43,375 --> 00:25:46,711
I said, ‘Why don’t we just make a 3D version of Castle Wolfenstein?’
385
00:25:46,795 --> 00:25:51,132
And they’re like, ‘Oh my god, that’s exactly the right idea.’
386
00:25:57,889 --> 00:26:02,143
All of us had very fond memories of Castle Wolfenstein on the Apple II.
387
00:26:02,227 --> 00:26:04,896
Castle Wolfenstein was super unique.
388
00:26:04,938 --> 00:26:09,526
There weren’t any other games, even on the Apple II, that were set in the Nazi dungeon.
389
00:26:09,567 --> 00:26:14,364
It was the first stealth game. You’re trying to see if you can hold up guards without them making noise,
390
00:26:14,406 --> 00:26:17,659
shoot ‘em, search ‘em, put on their bulletproof vest.
391
00:26:17,701 --> 00:26:22,706
Or you could drag bodies around corners, and guards could site on corpses and go into alert states.
392
00:26:22,789 --> 00:26:25,834
But, it was so obviously more fun to
393
00:26:25,834 --> 00:26:29,045
whip around a corner and just unload the machine gun.
394
00:26:29,170 --> 00:26:33,967
While we’re making a game, we’re playing the game hundreds of times a day, like it is nonstop.
395
00:26:33,967 --> 00:26:36,845
You’re, like, running it to see how it feels and,
396
00:26:36,970 --> 00:26:40,015
‘Did this thing that I just made look good in the game?’
397
00:26:40,098 --> 00:26:43,101
So, like, we’re used to the basic core loop,
398
00:26:43,184 --> 00:26:46,396
just shooting people and making ‘em lay down and
399
00:26:46,438 --> 00:26:50,025
opening doors and just, like, running through the thing
400
00:26:50,025 --> 00:26:54,446
Designing something truly elegant is one of the hardest things to do.
401
00:26:54,612 --> 00:26:57,324
Once you pare things down to only what needs to be there,
402
00:26:57,407 --> 00:27:01,077
it becomes something much purer and more enjoyable.
403
00:27:01,161 --> 00:27:06,124
Wolfenstein 3D presented a first person perspective with a very fast action.
404
00:27:06,207 --> 00:27:08,918
John had programmed the engine so well that
405
00:27:08,918 --> 00:27:12,172
on a CRT monitor with a VGA card,
406
00:27:12,339 --> 00:27:15,216
it went 70 frames a second.
407
00:27:15,342 --> 00:27:18,928
It was super fast, and then we put mouse movement in there
408
00:27:19,137 --> 00:27:22,891
and, holding the second mouse button, you could strafe unbelievable fast
409
00:27:22,974 --> 00:27:26,603
faster than in any game. Still, it was insane.
410
00:27:26,603 --> 00:27:30,607
An idea that you were running around shooting Nazies, that there were guard dogs,
411
00:27:30,690 --> 00:27:34,861
you know, eating and bowls of food and, like, all of this stuff
412
00:27:34,903 --> 00:27:38,031
that nobody had really ever seen before in a game.
413
00:27:38,114 --> 00:27:41,826
You know, actually being able to record sounds was exciting.
414
00:27:41,910 --> 00:27:44,954
The German death screams
[Aieee!]
415
00:27:45,038 --> 00:27:47,374
or alert screams of the people coming at you.
416
00:27:47,624 --> 00:27:49,042
[shooting]
417
00:27:49,542 --> 00:27:55,465
Castle Wolfenstein on the Apple II was one of the first things that had any kind of voice output on the game.
418
00:27:55,924 --> 00:27:56,800
[Achtung!]
419
00:27:56,966 --> 00:27:59,552
Those scratchy, awful Nazi voices
420
00:28:00,887 --> 00:28:01,805
[Ahhh!]
421
00:28:02,305 --> 00:28:05,392
But, it still made a difference, and it’s stuck in everyone's memory.
422
00:28:05,517 --> 00:28:07,685
And then, very much with Wolfenstein 3D,
423
00:28:07,727 --> 00:28:11,815
having the German voices which was largely Tom and John
424
00:28:11,898 --> 00:28:14,734
just kind of saying things into the microphone.
425
00:28:15,068 --> 00:28:16,528
[gunshots]
Mein Leben!
426
00:28:16,611 --> 00:28:20,323
Here’s the sad story: I had a Webster’s dictionary.
427
00:28:20,490 --> 00:28:24,327
college dictionary. In the back of it were, like, really thin
428
00:28:24,536 --> 00:28:26,704
language translation dictionaries.
429
00:28:26,746 --> 00:28:29,749
So, there’s one for Spanish, you know, Italian, and one for German.
430
00:28:29,874 --> 00:28:33,086
My sister took German in high school, so I’d heard some of it.
431
00:28:33,169 --> 00:28:36,339
That’s about all the German knowledge we had in the team.
432
00:28:36,381 --> 00:28:39,968
So, I just went through that whole dictionary, and I just found all the interjections.
433
00:28:40,009 --> 00:28:43,179
‘My life!’ Okay, ‘Mein Leben!' ‘Okay, they’ll use that one.’
434
00:28:43,263 --> 00:28:46,224
And I just wrote all the interjections down, and we just recorded those.
435
00:28:46,349 --> 00:28:47,892
[gunshots]
Mein Leben!
436
00:28:47,976 --> 00:28:51,479
What really stood out was, instead of just showing just a conventional
437
00:28:51,521 --> 00:28:53,731
energy meter at the bottom to show your health,
438
00:28:53,940 --> 00:28:58,111
you’d actually see the character’s face starting to bleed and cause damage.
439
00:28:59,070 --> 00:29:01,990
He just popped into my head like Keen popped into my head.
440
00:29:02,157 --> 00:29:06,327
It was just like, ‘His name’s, bleep, B.J. Blazkowicz’ and now, okay, ‘He’s probably William Joseph,
441
00:29:06,578 --> 00:29:09,622
Blazkowicz sounded blasty,’ you know?
442
00:29:09,706 --> 00:29:13,626
It was fine to bloody up a bunch of Nazis. That was
443
00:29:13,877 --> 00:29:15,920
That was kind of cool.
444
00:29:16,129 --> 00:29:20,175
Those zombie guys with the gun in their chest was pretty silly.
445
00:29:20,300 --> 00:29:21,426
[barking]
446
00:29:21,509 --> 00:29:24,971
The hardest thing was the German Shepherds. I love German Shepherds,
447
00:29:25,138 --> 00:29:27,682
so that was really tough for me,
448
00:29:27,724 --> 00:29:32,020
drawing the German Shepherd getting shot and dying. Well, that sucks.
449
00:29:32,729 --> 00:29:35,398
I only have to draw that once
450
00:29:35,648 --> 00:29:38,902
With Hitler, we wanted to have a multi-stage character.
451
00:29:38,902 --> 00:29:43,156
We wanted him to be, like, tougher than just one of the other guards in the game.
452
00:29:43,239 --> 00:29:47,160
So, ‘Well, why don’t we put him in a mech suit? Like he’ll be gunning you down with
453
00:29:47,202 --> 00:29:50,830
two Gatling guns at the same time, and now you’re going to be hiding most of the time.
454
00:29:50,872 --> 00:29:54,125
And then we thought, ‘You know what? Let’s add another layer to this.
455
00:29:54,167 --> 00:29:58,087
Let’s make ghostly Hitlers that you see beforehand.’
456
00:29:58,087 --> 00:30:02,467
So, you’re trying to shoot these other Hitlers that you see kind of floating above the ground with the robes on,
457
00:30:02,509 --> 00:30:07,555
and, when you shoot them, it’s like Obi Wan Kenobi just falling into a pile of nothing,
458
00:30:07,597 --> 00:30:08,765
right? He disappears.
459
00:30:08,932 --> 00:30:09,849
[ghostly laughter]
460
00:30:09,974 --> 00:30:14,187
And so, you’re basically destroying all of these ghost Hitlers that are around
461
00:30:14,229 --> 00:30:17,524
until you finally see, you know, ‘Die, Allied Schweinehund!’
462
00:30:17,607 --> 00:30:19,484
Die, Allied Schweinehund!
463
00:30:19,526 --> 00:30:22,820
At the very end. And then, when you shoot all the mech stuff off of him,
464
00:30:22,904 --> 00:30:26,574
now, he’s running, shooting at you, you know, because his suit just
465
00:30:26,616 --> 00:30:29,285
you know, just came apart, and then you finally kill him there,
466
00:30:29,327 --> 00:30:32,288
and he just dissolves in a pile of gore.
467
00:30:32,413 --> 00:30:33,373
[gunshots]
468
00:30:33,414 --> 00:30:34,332
Auf wiedersehen
469
00:30:35,166 --> 00:30:38,419
I decided, ‘Alright, I’m just gonna turn Hitler into this
470
00:30:38,461 --> 00:30:39,879
disgusting pile of goo.
471
00:30:40,046 --> 00:30:42,048
You know, intestines and everything just pfft.
472
00:30:42,215 --> 00:30:44,175
Auf wiedersehen.
473
00:30:44,342 --> 00:30:47,971
And we thought it was a really good ending and, plus, you’re like, ‘Yeah!’
474
00:30:48,179 --> 00:30:48,930
Yeah!
475
00:30:49,013 --> 00:30:50,598
Yeah, that was good.
476
00:30:50,640 --> 00:30:54,102
When we were making the levels for Wolfenstein, and we’re blowing stuff up and, like,
477
00:30:54,102 --> 00:30:57,814
‘Okay, well, guess what? We removed all this stuff to make this game really fun
478
00:30:57,855 --> 00:31:01,359
and to focus on the core but, now, it’s missing something.
479
00:31:01,568 --> 00:31:04,529
And, when we had made all these Commander Keen games,
480
00:31:04,571 --> 00:31:08,783
These games had Easter eggs in them. They had secrets, and it was missing that.
481
00:31:08,866 --> 00:31:12,161
What I really most in those guys was the fun and the,
482
00:31:12,203 --> 00:31:16,332
the kind of games within the games like, for example, about the push walls.
483
00:31:16,374 --> 00:31:19,627
You know, this little Easter egg that you could walk up to a wall and,
484
00:31:19,669 --> 00:31:24,424
if you pushed in the right spot, it would reveal a secret room.
485
00:31:24,549 --> 00:31:28,636
So, he told John, like, ‘Is there any way that we could push the wall
486
00:31:28,678 --> 00:31:31,472
and it reveals a secret area? That would be really cool.’
487
00:31:31,514 --> 00:31:35,893
John didn’t want to do it because, the way that he had written the rendering engine, was, like,
488
00:31:35,977 --> 00:31:39,397
very clean, and to do that would be a hack.
489
00:31:39,439 --> 00:31:41,733
They wouldn’t work well with the code that he wrote.
490
00:31:41,816 --> 00:31:45,028
One of the most valuable and hardest things for a
491
00:31:45,069 --> 00:31:49,240
systems architect level programmer to do is say no to features
492
00:31:49,365 --> 00:31:54,078
In the end, it’s not about having a clean code base or having high frames per second.
493
00:31:54,162 --> 00:31:56,331
It’s about delivering value to the users.
494
00:31:56,414 --> 00:31:59,876
I’m willing to go make a mess in the code if it’s gonna really pay off.
495
00:32:00,043 --> 00:32:04,422
The secret rooms in Wolfenstein were, in hindsight,
496
00:32:04,547 --> 00:32:08,926
way more important than we thought they were gonna be before the game was released.
497
00:32:09,052 --> 00:32:11,137
You know, they added a ton of replayability.
498
00:32:11,262 --> 00:32:15,433
You know, this gave you the sense that there was more of a world out there to explore.
499
00:32:15,600 --> 00:32:19,854
People now totally expect all FPS games to have secret areas,
500
00:32:19,979 --> 00:32:21,856
and it all started with Wolfenstein.
501
00:32:24,776 --> 00:32:27,153
We really felt like we had a major hit on our hand.
502
00:32:27,236 --> 00:32:29,864
We had, literally, the big bags full of fan mail.
503
00:32:29,947 --> 00:32:32,325
Three episodes, we sold for, like, $35.
504
00:32:32,408 --> 00:32:35,161
Six episodes, it would be a $50 package.
505
00:32:35,244 --> 00:32:38,539
95% of our sales was for the full six episodes.
506
00:32:38,581 --> 00:32:41,834
To pay for the games, people had to write checks, and they had to mail them.
507
00:32:41,918 --> 00:32:44,796
Commander Keen sold really well. He got our first check.
508
00:32:44,837 --> 00:32:47,173
It’s $10,000. ‘We can live on that!’
509
00:32:47,215 --> 00:32:51,511
It’s sort of, like, ‘We’ll buy a bar together!’ And Wolfenstein sold ten times more than that.
510
00:32:51,552 --> 00:32:53,513
What!?
511
00:32:54,681 --> 00:32:57,934
A quarter million bucks the first month on a Shareware game?
512
00:32:58,935 --> 00:33:00,144
Um, [laughs].
513
00:33:01,521 --> 00:33:05,149
I dropped out of college to make video games, and everybody thought I was
514
00:33:05,316 --> 00:33:07,443
absolutely fucking insane.
515
00:33:07,610 --> 00:33:11,197
‘You’re moving a thousand miles away to play video games?’
516
00:33:11,322 --> 00:33:14,367
‘No to make them.’ ‘That’s dumb too!’
517
00:33:14,659 --> 00:33:16,828
Ahh!
518
00:33:17,120 --> 00:33:21,249
It absolutely blew my mind seeing fully textured environments and to,
519
00:33:21,332 --> 00:33:23,835
to see down the barrel of the gun.
520
00:33:23,960 --> 00:33:28,798
The intensity of the experience of fighting the Nazis and, of course, their dogs and then, later on, Mecha Hitler
521
00:33:28,840 --> 00:33:32,176
just completely changed me, and I think it completely changed an entire generation.
522
00:33:32,343 --> 00:33:36,597
I’d never seen a PC game like this that was in 3D where you moved with the walls
523
00:33:36,681 --> 00:33:41,561
and guys came at you and shouted in German, and it 100% changed my life.
524
00:33:41,644 --> 00:33:47,358
Before Wolfenstein 3D, I would’ve branded myself as only interested in, like, role playing games.
525
00:33:47,442 --> 00:33:51,279
I became a big fan of shooters after Wolf 3D.
526
00:33:59,287 --> 00:34:01,205
[Music builds]
527
00:34:03,624 --> 00:34:06,252
[gun shots]
528
00:34:09,047 --> 00:34:12,633
My all time favorite FPS is Doom. That’s easy.
529
00:34:12,967 --> 00:34:15,303
Doom just hit like a freight train.
530
00:34:15,344 --> 00:34:17,889
When I played it, I just remember thinking, ‘Wow!’
531
00:34:17,930 --> 00:34:20,641
Playing that networked was just mind blowing.
532
00:34:20,975 --> 00:34:25,313
It’s fast, it’s violent, it’s kinetic.
533
00:34:25,563 --> 00:34:29,192
Doom was such a statement that, ‘This is something different.’
534
00:34:29,400 --> 00:34:32,779
It is the foundational DNA from which everything descends.
535
00:34:32,904 --> 00:34:35,698
I still think people will be playing it 20, 30 years from now.
536
00:34:35,740 --> 00:34:38,242
Great game design never goes out of style.
537
00:34:38,451 --> 00:34:42,079
This is Doom. No, this is the renaissance.
538
00:34:42,413 --> 00:34:46,918
This is the renaissance, and I just kept saying it over and over like a madman.
539
00:34:46,959 --> 00:34:48,669
Doom is eternal
540
00:34:56,094 --> 00:34:57,970
[keyboard clicks]
541
00:35:01,516 --> 00:35:02,308
Wooahh!
542
00:35:02,683 --> 00:35:05,269
We put out this press release in January
543
00:35:05,311 --> 00:35:08,314
before we even started programming the thing saying,
544
00:35:08,397 --> 00:35:11,484
‘This is gonna be the biggest PC breakthrough ever,
545
00:35:11,567 --> 00:35:14,487
this game, when it comes out.’ And we didn’t even know when it was gonna come out.
546
00:35:14,570 --> 00:35:17,031
Unbelievable, like no one would ever do that now.
547
00:35:18,574 --> 00:35:24,580
John Carmack spent several months with a post-Wolfenstein technology that he had developed,
548
00:35:24,747 --> 00:35:29,585
and he decided, like, ‘We can’t use a 2D matrix to make a next gen, really cool looking game.
549
00:35:29,752 --> 00:35:31,504
It’ll be too Wolfenstein-like.
550
00:35:31,671 --> 00:35:35,550
I remember, as a teenager, when Steve Jobs had left Apple
551
00:35:35,633 --> 00:35:39,262
and, of course, Jobs and Wozniak were superheroes to me in my youth,
552
00:35:39,345 --> 00:35:43,933
being an Apple II fanboy and all this and seeing the, the drama of Steve Jobs
553
00:35:43,975 --> 00:35:47,103
being kicked out of Apple and going to found a new company
554
00:35:47,228 --> 00:35:50,398
building this absolutely state-of-the-art system.
555
00:35:50,523 --> 00:35:54,402
In the spring of 1985, he lost the power struggle inside Apple
556
00:35:54,527 --> 00:35:56,904
and left the company that he had created.
557
00:35:56,988 --> 00:35:59,699
He spent the summer considering his next move.
558
00:35:59,866 --> 00:36:02,869
In 1988, we have developed supercomputers
559
00:36:02,994 --> 00:36:07,290
that are capable of performing two billion calculations per second.
560
00:36:07,832 --> 00:36:18,050
♪♪♪
561
00:36:18,259 --> 00:36:21,429
But it was $10,000 plus.
562
00:36:21,512 --> 00:36:24,765
At that time, I couldn’t even $300 for a hard drive.
563
00:36:25,641 --> 00:36:29,312
But, once we got to the point where Commander Keen was doing quite well,
564
00:36:29,353 --> 00:36:34,025
Wolfenstein 3D was ready to go out, it looked like we had traction,
565
00:36:34,108 --> 00:36:38,738
we were heading towards success, I had $15,000 or something.
566
00:36:38,863 --> 00:36:44,035
available to me, and I went, and I bought one of the next computers.
567
00:36:45,077 --> 00:36:48,164
Two billion calculations per second, second, second.
568
00:36:48,331 --> 00:36:52,460
It was a great example of just being excited about technology
569
00:36:52,543 --> 00:36:56,881
leading us to some tools that helped us make significantly better products
570
00:36:56,923 --> 00:36:58,799
for a couple generations after.
571
00:36:58,841 --> 00:37:03,512
I immediately knew, when Doom came out, that I needed to get into the gaming industry.
572
00:37:03,554 --> 00:37:07,516
The advances just in one year that they did, they had the ceilings and floors,
573
00:37:07,558 --> 00:37:10,353
the steps you could go up and down. It’s just amazing.
574
00:37:10,436 --> 00:37:14,941
I had been working on the Doom editor for a while making little pieces of levels
575
00:37:14,982 --> 00:37:19,070
and, really, Tom Hall, full on making stuff, like making levels.
576
00:37:19,153 --> 00:37:22,865
Not even full levels but just like, you know, trying to make something that was cool
577
00:37:23,032 --> 00:37:26,035
and, because we had never seen anything
578
00:37:26,118 --> 00:37:30,706
other than 90 degree wall mazes with fixed height ceilings,
579
00:37:30,748 --> 00:37:34,418
John said, ‘Why don’t you get books on military construction
580
00:37:34,460 --> 00:37:37,797
and use that as a guide to figure out the spaces?’
581
00:37:37,880 --> 00:37:41,676
So, Tom did that, even though it wasn’t what he really loved.
582
00:37:41,759 --> 00:37:44,762
My vision for the whole arc of the game was
583
00:37:44,845 --> 00:37:48,724
you are in sort of science base on a moon, and then
584
00:37:48,849 --> 00:37:52,979
you go through a portal for the second episode, and you’re in hell.
585
00:37:53,062 --> 00:37:56,190
I might add, like, realistic kind of senses of place like,
586
00:37:56,232 --> 00:38:00,820
‘Oh now, I’m in, you know, the control room’ or, you know, ‘I’m here, and so I can get my bearings.’
587
00:38:00,945 --> 00:38:05,866
Tom was going through these military books and starting to make some levels like that.
588
00:38:05,908 --> 00:38:09,412
Nothing interesting. Nothing that, when you go through, it goes, ‘Wow, this is amazing!’
589
00:38:09,495 --> 00:38:13,249
And so, I told Tom, ‘I’m gonna try and figure out if I can, like,
590
00:38:13,290 --> 00:38:16,252
come up with the look, like, ‘What is it that we’re doing?
591
00:38:16,335 --> 00:38:19,046
If a room could have been made in Wolfenstein, we failed.
592
00:38:19,088 --> 00:38:21,632
So, we need to just, like, change everything.
593
00:38:21,674 --> 00:38:24,427
What’s gonna really stand out?’ To me, it felt like
594
00:38:24,510 --> 00:38:27,555
it was gonna contrast: contrast in light,
595
00:38:27,763 --> 00:38:31,100
contrast in space, and contrast in gameplay.
596
00:38:31,267 --> 00:38:34,520
I started to make a room that had scale
597
00:38:34,603 --> 00:38:37,606
that was, like, ‘Forget that ceiling that we were using for Wolfenstein.’
598
00:38:37,690 --> 00:38:41,902
So, I made a room that was really high, side areas that were really high up
599
00:38:41,986 --> 00:38:45,239
that have light in them and really bright, so the room’s dark,
600
00:38:45,281 --> 00:38:49,702
these really high, bright areas have monsters up there throwing fireballs
601
00:38:49,744 --> 00:38:53,247
down at you, so we’re not on the same plane being attacked.
602
00:38:53,289 --> 00:38:56,667
But, I needed the player to see it, ‘cause it would look really cool to see something that high up.
603
00:38:56,667 --> 00:38:59,795
I had the light going and the monsters and the scale,
604
00:38:59,837 --> 00:39:04,508
angled walls, all these things that, like, this room could not exist in Wolfenstein.
605
00:39:04,592 --> 00:39:07,845
So, I was very happy that I was able to make something that was both
606
00:39:07,887 --> 00:39:12,141
faster and, in some ways, higher quality by making a slightly different set of trade-offs
607
00:39:12,224 --> 00:39:15,311
while still getting all this new flexibility with the angled walls
608
00:39:15,352 --> 00:39:18,272
which really defined the Doom map-making space.
609
00:39:18,355 --> 00:39:23,486
So, the artist came in, and Tom came in, and they’re just like, ‘Yeah, that’s what we’re talking about.’
610
00:39:23,527 --> 00:39:26,238
And, like, ‘That’s how we need to make this game.’
611
00:39:26,364 --> 00:39:29,492
Doom is as much of a horror game as it is an action game.
612
00:39:29,533 --> 00:39:33,079
It scared me. It, it actually had moments in it that would make you jump.
613
00:39:33,120 --> 00:39:37,291
We always talked about how the two cinematic influences for Doom was
614
00:39:37,291 --> 00:39:40,044
Aliens and Evil Dead II.
615
00:39:40,169 --> 00:39:44,924
They were about these moments where the lights are flickering, you can’t see what’s going on,
616
00:39:45,007 --> 00:39:47,551
something’s coming out of the darkness at you.
617
00:39:47,635 --> 00:39:49,553
[screaming]
618
00:39:49,804 --> 00:39:52,765
And that was what we, we really wanted to capture.
619
00:39:52,973 --> 00:39:55,226
When I was coming up with a style,
620
00:39:55,351 --> 00:39:59,605
I wanted something that was different from what you generally saw in video games,
621
00:39:59,688 --> 00:40:02,733
at the time, which was pretty clean, bright colors
622
00:40:02,817 --> 00:40:05,945
and I wanted something dark and grungy.
623
00:40:06,070 --> 00:40:10,866
That was the grunge era: music, the clothes, everything.
624
00:40:11,033 --> 00:40:14,829
I want to hear the monsters, not just hear the doors. I want to hear them looking for us.
625
00:40:14,912 --> 00:40:18,666
I want the player to be terrified. This is a dark game that needs to be suspense
626
00:40:18,749 --> 00:40:23,212
with diminished lighting going from bright to dark automatically in the distance,
627
00:40:23,295 --> 00:40:25,548
It’s, like, automatic scary engine.
628
00:40:25,714 --> 00:40:30,219
You’d be going around the corner, and then you hear, like, some monster breathing or something, and you,
629
00:40:30,302 --> 00:40:35,182
you know, it gets to you. You’re very alert. You’re very on edge the whole time you’re playing.
630
00:40:35,349 --> 00:40:37,601
So, when I was making E1M3,
631
00:40:37,643 --> 00:40:40,896
I got all the way to the very end. I’m like, ‘What am I gonna do at the very end?’
632
00:40:40,938 --> 00:40:44,275
Like, ‘Put the exit there? No?’
633
00:40:44,442 --> 00:40:48,946
So, ‘I think we should make the player go back through the whole level.’
634
00:40:49,113 --> 00:40:53,200
When they see the key card, it would be boring if you go up to it, and you pick it up.
635
00:40:53,242 --> 00:40:57,121
Everything’s dead all the way all the way back through the level. Everything’s already been killed.
636
00:40:57,121 --> 00:41:00,749
So, it’s like, ‘How do I, like, terrify the player right then?’
637
00:41:00,833 --> 00:41:05,546
Lighting was a super critical aspect of the technical evolution of our products
638
00:41:05,588 --> 00:41:09,800
from Wolfenstein where everything was all kind of fully lit.
639
00:41:09,842 --> 00:41:13,762
For Doom, what was really critical is we could change the lighting dynamically.
640
00:41:13,804 --> 00:41:18,017
So, all of the things that people still resonate with, like the flickering lights going on,
641
00:41:18,142 --> 00:41:19,810
those were very, very powerful.
642
00:41:19,852 --> 00:41:24,190
I thought, ‘Why don’t I hide a bunch of demons in a room and turn the lights out
643
00:41:24,231 --> 00:41:27,818
when they go to pick up the card and, when they pick up the card, it opens the door.
644
00:41:29,361 --> 00:41:32,698
People played it, they were just like, ‘What?’ You know?
645
00:41:33,032 --> 00:41:34,658
[gunshots]
646
00:41:34,783 --> 00:41:37,786
You don’t have to have a deep story to a game,
647
00:41:37,995 --> 00:41:42,208
but you can frame the action with just a couple sentences, right?
648
00:41:42,249 --> 00:41:47,421
Something messed up happened so, now as you’re going through all the jump scares and crazy action,
649
00:41:47,588 --> 00:41:51,175
you have a reason you’re going there, and you’re getting more and more
650
00:41:51,300 --> 00:41:54,470
dread as you go there.
651
00:41:54,470 --> 00:41:59,516
The environmental effects were great. Sometimes, you’re in a brightly lit room and then, all of a sudden,
652
00:41:59,516 --> 00:42:04,480
you’re just walking into darkness. It’s just scary as hell. It’s great at making people jump.
653
00:42:06,106 --> 00:42:10,152
Running around this massive sprawling, hellish environment
654
00:42:10,236 --> 00:42:14,156
and so, the lights were part of that. I mean, that was essential to
655
00:42:14,156 --> 00:42:15,950
a lot of what made it so scary.
656
00:42:16,033 --> 00:42:21,121
Those were some of the moments in Doom that, you know, made people’s guts clench and really made a difference.
657
00:42:21,288 --> 00:42:25,376
The boss level of the first episode, E1M8,
658
00:42:25,417 --> 00:42:27,002
that was made by Sandy.
659
00:42:27,127 --> 00:42:30,714
A lot of the things that I put into my levels were things to make you scared.
660
00:42:30,798 --> 00:42:35,010
So, we’re like, ‘Let’s make two bosses and make a baron of hell
661
00:42:35,094 --> 00:42:38,305
that has a ton of hit points, like they need to be a tank.’
662
00:42:38,347 --> 00:42:41,767
You’re many hours into the game, you’ve got your instincts ready,
663
00:42:41,850 --> 00:42:44,895
and then, to hear that sort of T. rex roar,
664
00:42:45,062 --> 00:42:45,813
[roars]
665
00:42:45,938 --> 00:42:47,690
‘Oh, shit. I’m in for it now.’
666
00:42:47,773 --> 00:42:51,777
And you hit them with rockets, and they’re just coming towards you. They just keep coming.
667
00:42:54,571 --> 00:42:56,657
When you get to E2M8,
668
00:42:56,740 --> 00:43:01,912
you are seeing barons of hell just destroyed, hanging on the wall
669
00:43:02,121 --> 00:43:04,540
and you’re like, ‘What did that?’
670
00:43:05,124 --> 00:43:09,586
Of course, when you walk into the back area, suddenly you hear the cyber demon roar.
671
00:43:09,753 --> 00:43:10,421
[roars]
672
00:43:10,587 --> 00:43:14,591
That sound, that machine sound, it’s stomping around.
673
00:43:14,633 --> 00:43:15,968
‘Oh, shit.’
674
00:43:16,093 --> 00:43:17,386
[stomping]
[woosh]
675
00:43:17,678 --> 00:43:19,722
Then you know you’re in for it.
676
00:43:19,972 --> 00:43:22,808
We like scary games. We like having something that
677
00:43:22,975 --> 00:43:25,102
makes you jump, makes you feel alive.
678
00:43:25,185 --> 00:43:28,772
Even if you’re out of ammo and you’re down to nothing but brass knuckles,
679
00:43:28,814 --> 00:43:32,609
you’re gonna punch those demons in the face. You’re gonna do anything you can.
680
00:43:32,693 --> 00:43:35,612
I mean, who goes around punching demons in the face? Well, I’ll never forget that.
681
00:43:39,199 --> 00:43:40,576
[explosion]
682
00:43:41,160 --> 00:43:43,037
For me, I love the shotgun.
683
00:43:43,162 --> 00:43:44,204
[reload sound]
Boom!
684
00:43:44,413 --> 00:43:47,833
Fires at 187 beats per minute, I clocked it with a metronome once.
685
00:43:47,916 --> 00:43:51,962
When you shoot a shotgun, then you have the animation of it going up and cocking like this
686
00:43:52,046 --> 00:43:55,674
and you feel really manly, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, because that’s a manly thing to do.
687
00:43:55,841 --> 00:43:59,136
[gunshots and gun reloading]
688
00:43:59,803 --> 00:44:03,307
Kevin created all the weapons, and John had this video camera
689
00:44:03,390 --> 00:44:07,686
and we used props. You just hold a gun up in front of the camera and get that perspective.
690
00:44:07,770 --> 00:44:10,564
I would say the chainsaw is pretty fun.
691
00:44:11,482 --> 00:44:12,608
[buzzing]
692
00:44:13,525 --> 00:44:14,735
He doesn’t like that.
693
00:44:14,860 --> 00:44:17,237
♪♪♪
694
00:44:17,321 --> 00:44:20,407
Ladies and gentlemen, the Doom chainsaw.
695
00:44:20,574 --> 00:44:23,994
This was the actual chainsaw that we digitized for the game.
696
00:44:24,161 --> 00:44:25,621
♪♪♪
697
00:44:25,829 --> 00:44:29,500
I felt like I should keep the grunge on it that it had back in the day.
698
00:44:29,708 --> 00:44:34,171
So, it’s just got that, you know, nasty look to it, and here it is.
699
00:44:34,380 --> 00:44:36,340
[loud buzzing]
700
00:44:36,673 --> 00:44:39,718
I just remember the first time I heard about the BFG,
701
00:44:39,843 --> 00:44:42,846
my friend’s dad who installed it on his computer.
702
00:44:42,888 --> 00:44:46,183
Then, he said, ‘Oh, there’s this gun in the game that just obliterates everything.
703
00:44:46,225 --> 00:44:50,396
It’s called the BFG.’ And then, the dad goes, ‘You know what that stands for?’
704
00:44:50,396 --> 00:44:51,730
And we’re like, ‘What?’
705
00:44:51,772 --> 00:44:52,856
Big fucking gun.
706
00:44:52,898 --> 00:44:55,692
And we’re like, ‘Oh shit, your dad’s cool!’
707
00:45:00,781 --> 00:45:05,035
I remember the BFG. We’re trying to decide what it’s gonna shoot.
708
00:45:05,911 --> 00:45:11,417
So, John Romero set it up where it shot every sprite in the game.
709
00:45:11,583 --> 00:45:13,502
[explosions]
710
00:45:13,669 --> 00:45:16,880
Like just these balls of colorfulness going everywhere. It’s like,
711
00:45:16,922 --> 00:45:18,924
‘Oh my god, it’s vomiting Christmas.’
712
00:45:19,049 --> 00:45:20,801
♪♪♪
713
00:45:20,926 --> 00:45:23,721
So then, Kevin just sat down and drew a nice
714
00:45:23,762 --> 00:45:27,057
green fireball that you see now.
715
00:45:27,307 --> 00:45:31,395
What really made Doom was the whole game.
716
00:45:31,728 --> 00:45:35,274
The fact that it had those really awesome levels,
717
00:45:35,357 --> 00:45:38,944
great gameplay and, of course, how well the net play worked.
718
00:45:42,448 --> 00:45:43,782
[gun blast]
719
00:45:44,032 --> 00:45:45,200
[screaming]
720
00:45:45,451 --> 00:45:50,706
Um, ‘Oh shit, it’s October, and we don’t have multiplayer like we said in that press release.’
721
00:45:50,831 --> 00:45:54,877
I was like, ‘Alright, well, now we’re starting on multiplayer,’ you know, ‘in October.’
722
00:45:55,085 --> 00:46:00,215
I do clearly remember the early days of getting multiplayer working at all in Doom.
723
00:46:00,340 --> 00:46:02,885
This game’s already great, but that’s, like, the next level.
724
00:46:02,968 --> 00:46:06,263
I remember the magic of that moment of just, like,
725
00:46:06,346 --> 00:46:09,433
pressing the arrow keys on one computer, it moving forward,
726
00:46:09,516 --> 00:46:14,563
and then, on the other computer, watching the victor’s feet run back and forth
727
00:46:14,605 --> 00:46:19,067
in front of you there. This is just deeply, fundamentally cool.
728
00:46:19,151 --> 00:46:23,447
Seeing that for the first time on a screen, I was just like, ‘This is so good.’
729
00:46:23,572 --> 00:46:26,950
I would play Romero, and he’d get so damn mad at me,
730
00:46:27,034 --> 00:46:30,454
because he would run around and collect all the damn weapons,
731
00:46:30,537 --> 00:46:34,291
and then, I’d just run forward with the rocket launcher and just get in his face
732
00:46:34,374 --> 00:46:36,960
and just kill us both.
-[laughing]
733
00:46:37,085 --> 00:46:40,839
I’m the reason you get a negative frag if you go up and kill yourself.
734
00:46:40,923 --> 00:46:43,592
Stupid shit. Watch him die, he’s dead.
735
00:46:43,592 --> 00:46:46,094
It’s one of my biggest contributions to the gameplay.
736
00:46:46,220 --> 00:46:48,639
[gunshots]
737
00:46:48,889 --> 00:46:52,267
Oh, bit. Oh, give me that shotgun, boy.
738
00:46:52,601 --> 00:46:56,980
We want this to be, like, a thing that, you know, you go to this number, and you win
739
00:46:57,147 --> 00:47:00,275
or you go to this time, and whoever has the biggest score wins. That kind of thing.
740
00:47:00,400 --> 00:47:03,028
So, I came up with those parameters immediately, and then I was like,
741
00:47:03,070 --> 00:47:07,658
‘What am I gonna have on the screen?’ We’re doing so much new stuff in this game that ‘kills’ would be a stupid word to use.
742
00:47:07,699 --> 00:47:09,535
But, I went into the art room, and I said,
743
00:47:09,618 --> 00:47:13,455
‘So, I named this mode Deathmatch and, every time we kill each other,
744
00:47:13,580 --> 00:47:16,458
you get a point. What do you think would be a good name for that?
745
00:47:16,542 --> 00:47:18,418
‘cause I don’t want to use ‘kills, ‘cause that’s lame.’
746
00:47:18,502 --> 00:47:21,755
Kevin thought for a second, and he’s just like, ‘Why not use Frag?’
747
00:47:22,756 --> 00:47:27,302
Year, I’ve never actually beaten Doom in single player mode. It was exclusively multiplayer.
748
00:47:27,511 --> 00:47:30,889
I guess there’s people that dropped out of college for it too, so I feel bad about that.
749
00:47:30,973 --> 00:47:33,976
Early on, even when we were doing the Commander Keen games,
750
00:47:34,017 --> 00:47:37,980
it was clear we were small fry but, by the time we got to Doom,
751
00:47:38,021 --> 00:47:40,857
it was clear that we were defining the state of the art.
752
00:47:40,899 --> 00:47:43,610
We were doing something like nobody had ever seen before,
753
00:47:43,694 --> 00:47:45,862
and we knew it was gonna be a big deal.
754
00:47:45,946 --> 00:47:49,825
The very end of Doom, we had worked 30 hours straight,
755
00:47:49,866 --> 00:47:53,161
we were at the end, Sandy was asleep under his desk,
756
00:47:53,203 --> 00:47:57,541
it was about 2:00 in the afternoon, Jay is in his office in the biz, the biz room.
757
00:47:57,666 --> 00:48:00,586
He’s on the University of Wisconsin’s FTP server,
758
00:48:00,627 --> 00:48:04,089
and people are sitting there waiting in that directory, and they’re creating files
759
00:48:04,089 --> 00:48:07,801
that are, like, questions. ‘When is Doom gonna be here? I want Doom.’
760
00:48:07,968 --> 00:48:11,221
Jay went to, to basically upload the game,
761
00:48:11,263 --> 00:48:14,683
and then more people flooded in because they saw, like, it was happening
762
00:48:14,725 --> 00:48:17,603
and the server just basically blew up and stopped working.
763
00:48:17,644 --> 00:48:21,481
And so the, the upload stops, and Jay gets on the phone, he calls them up,
764
00:48:21,523 --> 00:48:24,318
and the guy’s name is David Data, which is funny,
765
00:48:24,526 --> 00:48:28,322
calls up David there, and he’s just like, ‘Um, the server went down,
766
00:48:28,405 --> 00:48:31,700
like, there’s too many people on it, and, and David’s like,
767
00:48:31,742 --> 00:48:34,036
‘Okay, let me see if I can fix it. I’m gonna clear everybody out.’
768
00:48:34,077 --> 00:48:38,123
So, he clears people out, and we start uploading, and then everyone rushes back in,
769
00:48:38,206 --> 00:48:41,877
and it blows up again. And so, we’re just like, ‘Oh my god.’
770
00:48:43,462 --> 00:48:47,758
I think Doom is, you know, clearly one of the best games ever made.
771
00:48:47,924 --> 00:48:50,886
Doom is popular for two things:
772
00:48:50,969 --> 00:48:55,057
one is the primal nature of taking a gun and shooting demons,
773
00:48:55,140 --> 00:48:58,018
which is obviously super fun. The other is that
774
00:48:58,060 --> 00:49:01,188
Doom hasn’t added any other storyline or anything on it.
775
00:49:01,229 --> 00:49:06,360
It is pretty much just taking your gun and shooting demons and solving simple puzzles.
776
00:49:06,485 --> 00:49:09,863
Here was a game that had blood and had heavy metal
777
00:49:09,905 --> 00:49:13,533
and had, you know, these monsters and dark humor.
778
00:49:13,575 --> 00:49:17,037
So, when you start to put your life to that to such a degree,
779
00:49:17,037 --> 00:49:19,998
and you start finding other people who are into it,
780
00:49:19,998 --> 00:49:22,959
it becomes a part of a growing up experience.
781
00:49:22,959 --> 00:49:26,421
Microsoft had done a study that showed that more computers at the time
782
00:49:26,421 --> 00:49:29,591
had Doom installed on them than the latest version of Windows.
783
00:49:29,716 --> 00:49:31,718
[Startup chime]
784
00:49:32,886 --> 00:49:34,763
[explosion]
785
00:49:34,930 --> 00:49:38,225
The community has kept Doom alive this whole time.
786
00:49:38,308 --> 00:49:42,104
There are yearly awards given out to people for the best levels
787
00:49:42,229 --> 00:49:47,484
and the best content released by DOOMWorld.com which has been around for 20 some years.
788
00:49:47,651 --> 00:49:49,861
Doom started speed running, and it
789
00:49:49,986 --> 00:49:55,784
it created high speed multiplayer co-op and Deathmatch and free distribution with Shareware,
790
00:49:55,867 --> 00:49:58,745
modding an open game that everybody can modify,
791
00:49:58,829 --> 00:50:01,832
and you can actually make levels and sell them and make money off them,
792
00:50:01,957 --> 00:50:05,085
and it was just, at its core, a really fun, solid game.
793
00:50:07,379 --> 00:50:09,005
[gunshots]
794
00:50:17,180 --> 00:50:19,933
You really can’t talk about FPSs and,
795
00:50:20,016 --> 00:50:23,603
and the history and legacy of FPSs without talking about mods.
796
00:50:25,772 --> 00:50:29,317
They’ve kind of been inseparable since the very beginning.
797
00:50:29,401 --> 00:50:32,404
To me, mods really spring out of the Shareware culture
798
00:50:32,404 --> 00:50:37,033
of, you know, early Doom and that whole kind of spirit of just sharing in general.
799
00:50:37,993 --> 00:50:43,081
At the company I was at, a friend came in with a thing called the DEU which is the Doom Editing Utility,
800
00:50:43,165 --> 00:50:47,043
but this was actually a full-powered level editor,
801
00:50:47,127 --> 00:50:50,797
and I took the floppy, not believing that this is gonna work, ‘It’s too good to be true.’
802
00:50:50,839 --> 00:50:54,634
And then grabbed the first level from Doom One, E1M1,
803
00:50:54,718 --> 00:50:58,138
and loaded it up. I don’t know if everyone remembers that first level, but you,
804
00:50:58,180 --> 00:51:01,808
you start, and you come out, and you turn to the left, and there’s the very first stairway,
805
00:51:01,892 --> 00:51:05,437
and then, there was this window that it was too narrow for you to get through,
806
00:51:05,645 --> 00:51:10,192
but I went ahead and pushed the, the one part down and pushed the other, other part up,
807
00:51:10,275 --> 00:51:12,652
went in to do with this, and there’s…
808
00:51:12,694 --> 00:51:17,783
The opening has changed, and outside the window was this outside area with
809
00:51:17,949 --> 00:51:20,285
you know, just a place you were never supposed to be.
810
00:51:20,368 --> 00:51:23,455
I’m just out here like, like, like I just couldn’t believe.
811
00:51:23,580 --> 00:51:27,042
I still remember that day and, from that moment on, every free moment I had,
812
00:51:27,209 --> 00:51:30,670
I was making Doom levels and putting them up on AOL and CompuServe,
813
00:51:30,796 --> 00:51:34,216
and they were received quite well. They, they got a lot of hits.
814
00:51:35,967 --> 00:51:38,595
The first thing that you do when you start modding Doom
815
00:51:38,762 --> 00:51:42,641
is you create a level, which is a room. It’s a box, four sides,
816
00:51:42,682 --> 00:51:47,646
and then you load it in Doom and, in fact, you’ve made a cavern that’s half a kilometer long.
817
00:51:47,729 --> 00:51:50,982
But, it’s your room, and you made it, and now you’re inside it
818
00:51:51,066 --> 00:51:54,736
and, just being able to do that, this was the first time
819
00:51:54,820 --> 00:51:56,655
that anybody could do that.
820
00:51:56,780 --> 00:51:59,574
This was something that you can make into your own if you,
821
00:51:59,616 --> 00:52:01,827
if you had the wherewithal, and they were cool with it.
822
00:52:01,868 --> 00:52:05,997
They weren’t gonna come after you and sue you which was also wild.
823
00:52:06,164 --> 00:52:07,999
Ed knew all about it and from
824
00:52:08,041 --> 00:52:12,879
I remember hearing that they actually helped by sharing with the data formats of a lot of this stuff.
825
00:52:12,963 --> 00:52:15,590
You had to download them on, again, a crappy
826
00:52:15,632 --> 00:52:18,718
56K dial-up connection. You didn’t know what you were downloading.
827
00:52:18,760 --> 00:52:22,681
I remember downloading, like, the Aliens mod for Doom back in the day.
828
00:52:22,722 --> 00:52:25,684
Yeah, the moment that I heard that you could change this game,
829
00:52:25,725 --> 00:52:29,145
I started thinking of making an Aliens modification for it.
830
00:52:31,147 --> 00:52:34,359
I watched the movie so many times
831
00:52:34,442 --> 00:52:37,362
for reference, because this was the ‘90s.
832
00:52:37,404 --> 00:52:41,199
You, you couldn’t go online and, and look up images.
833
00:52:41,324 --> 00:52:45,495
If I wanted to see what the Weyland-Yutani looked like,
834
00:52:45,579 --> 00:52:50,292
I had to stick a VHS in the machine and fast forward to where I thought I’d seen it.
835
00:52:50,333 --> 00:52:54,754
But, you can’t just fast forward through Aliens. You gotta watch it.
836
00:52:54,838 --> 00:52:56,131
Fucking, hey.
837
00:52:58,008 --> 00:53:00,135
The whole first level has no enemies, and you’re like,
838
00:53:00,135 --> 00:53:02,888
‘Have I installed this correctly?’ ‘Cause there’s nothing on the screen.
839
00:53:02,971 --> 00:53:06,558
I was quite uncertain about how that would be received,
840
00:53:06,683 --> 00:53:11,730
because, people could just think, 'well the first level is a waste of time'.
841
00:53:11,938 --> 00:53:17,694
There is a lot of tension at the beginning of the movie and, they are searching for the aliens.
842
00:53:18,028 --> 00:53:20,572
So I, I thought, ‘Well, can I…
843
00:53:20,697 --> 00:53:25,035
Can I just have you hunting for them, and they’re not actually there in the first level?’
844
00:53:25,076 --> 00:53:28,705
But, it worked out the way I hoped it would. The tension would amp up,
845
00:53:28,788 --> 00:53:33,460
and you’d be on edge and not knowing what’s gonna happen.
846
00:53:35,629 --> 00:53:36,713
[Ahhh!]
[flames woosh]
847
00:53:36,880 --> 00:53:39,925
It's coming out of the wall!
It’s coming out of the god damn wall!
848
00:53:40,091 --> 00:53:43,637
I was trying to use Doom to make a different kind of game that
849
00:53:43,678 --> 00:53:45,889
it still had all the appeal of Doom.
850
00:53:45,931 --> 00:53:49,643
I called it Aliens TC, TC standing for Total Conversion
851
00:53:49,726 --> 00:53:54,522
as a way to try and communicate that I was trying to do something a little bit different
852
00:53:54,606 --> 00:53:58,234
which was to convert Doom into a, a new game.
853
00:53:58,443 --> 00:54:01,863
It was a lot more popular than I anticipated,
854
00:54:01,988 --> 00:54:05,033
and that sort of changed the trajectory of my life.
855
00:54:05,033 --> 00:54:08,578
Carmack said to me at the time, he’s like, ‘You know, it’s almost like a
856
00:54:08,620 --> 00:54:10,914
Doom mod is becoming a resume.
857
00:54:10,956 --> 00:54:15,210
Breaking into the game industry back in the ‘90s was pretty difficult,
858
00:54:15,418 --> 00:54:18,171
and it opened up opportunities for me.
859
00:54:18,296 --> 00:54:21,299
So, you had the FPS community out there,
860
00:54:21,341 --> 00:54:24,552
they were rolling up their sleeves, they were creating their own mods,
861
00:54:24,636 --> 00:54:29,349
and then, this led to them using these engines to put out their own games.
862
00:54:33,728 --> 00:54:37,273
In the years, the decades of mods
863
00:54:37,399 --> 00:54:41,319
that people have put out there with levels and Brutal Doom
864
00:54:41,319 --> 00:54:45,323
and, like, you name it, all the stuff people have done has created something
865
00:54:45,365 --> 00:54:48,952
that new gamers, when they discover Doom and it’s like,
866
00:54:49,077 --> 00:54:53,081
‘A universe has happened before me before I was alive’
867
00:54:53,164 --> 00:54:55,542
And it’s so easy to be creative in it,
868
00:54:55,667 --> 00:54:59,170
because the engine is so simple, and people have put out so many tools
869
00:54:59,254 --> 00:55:03,174
that are so good to make in, that the community has made Doom.
870
00:55:03,258 --> 00:55:08,138
Like they, they own Doom, you know, it is…It’s their game, and they have kept it alive.
871
00:55:08,179 --> 00:55:10,140
Yeah, it was really great.
872
00:55:10,306 --> 00:55:11,266
[Ay yeah yer]
873
00:55:11,349 --> 00:55:13,393
I have the power of God!
874
00:55:23,194 --> 00:55:28,116
I was playing computer games obsessively, especially the Ultima games that Richard Garriott made.
875
00:55:28,199 --> 00:55:32,829
Just out of sheer luck, I got a call from a friend who was working
876
00:55:32,912 --> 00:55:37,917
at Origin at that point saying they were looking for an associate producer.
877
00:55:37,959 --> 00:55:41,296
And so, I went down there and got the job
878
00:55:41,421 --> 00:55:45,925
One of the first things I got to do was work with Paul Neurath on Space Rogue,
879
00:55:46,009 --> 00:55:48,178
his genre mashup of
880
00:55:48,219 --> 00:55:51,848
space combat, role playing, and arcade game.
881
00:55:51,973 --> 00:55:56,936
When he came to Origin with his first person perspective tech demo,
882
00:55:57,103 --> 00:55:59,647
I, I went to my boss and said,
883
00:55:59,773 --> 00:56:02,525
‘I must work on this’ which, at that point, was
884
00:56:02,567 --> 00:56:05,153
going to be called Ultima Underworld.
885
00:56:12,368 --> 00:56:16,081
A game very similar to Doom in the sense that you’re walking through these
886
00:56:16,164 --> 00:56:19,084
sort of very low resolution environments that were texture mapped.
887
00:56:19,125 --> 00:56:21,878
We had the idea that you should be able to look all around
888
00:56:21,920 --> 00:56:24,380
and it was an adventure game, so it was very complicated.
889
00:56:24,506 --> 00:56:29,928
I was there trying to recreate the feeling I had the first time I played Dungeons and Dragons
890
00:56:29,928 --> 00:56:33,515
where I, I got to tell stories with my friends
891
00:56:33,515 --> 00:56:35,934
and empowered to do whatever I want.
892
00:56:35,934 --> 00:56:40,355
That was, uh, a real possibility in a first person perspective game.
893
00:56:40,355 --> 00:56:45,318
It wasn’t true 3D, but it let players decide
894
00:56:45,318 --> 00:56:48,738
what was right and wrong in the world. I find that much more interesting than,
895
00:56:48,738 --> 00:56:51,908
‘Hey, let’s grab the biggest gun and kill everything that moves.’
896
00:56:51,991 --> 00:56:55,078
And so, System Shock was really the
897
00:56:55,078 --> 00:56:59,374
chance that we had with some understanding what the medium behaved like
898
00:56:59,457 --> 00:57:01,668
to make some on purpose decisions
899
00:57:01,709 --> 00:57:04,796
about how to change gameplay in response to what the technology was good at.
900
00:57:16,391 --> 00:57:20,436
I was sick to death of fantasy games and, at the same time,
901
00:57:20,436 --> 00:57:24,149
Doug Church, secret master of gaming who should be
902
00:57:24,149 --> 00:57:26,401
world renowned and famous,
903
00:57:26,484 --> 00:57:30,029
he was also tired of working on fantasy games.
904
00:57:30,196 --> 00:57:33,116
He was in my office one day, and he was talking about the
905
00:57:33,116 --> 00:57:36,369
the game that he wanted to make, and we just looked at each other and said,
906
00:57:36,411 --> 00:57:39,164
‘We should make this.’ You know? Paul Neurath was
907
00:57:39,247 --> 00:57:42,292
intimately involved in that too. He was running Looking Glass,
908
00:57:42,417 --> 00:57:46,254
and we decided, ‘Let’s, let’s do this.’
909
00:57:46,379 --> 00:57:49,215
Everybody on the team is a science fiction fan,
910
00:57:49,215 --> 00:57:53,344
and there were all these ideas in science fiction about what it meant to have
911
00:57:53,344 --> 00:57:55,889
pervasive computers everywhere because, remember,
912
00:57:55,889 --> 00:58:00,476
System Shock and Underworld were written at a time where the idea of a computer on every desk
913
00:58:00,476 --> 00:58:04,689
was still strange, and so what it meant to have pervasive computers around was powerful.
914
00:58:04,689 --> 00:58:06,900
It was interesting, like, ‘What’s it gonna be like?
915
00:58:06,900 --> 00:58:11,279
Are people gonna have computers in their minds? What does that mean?’ You know, ‘What happens if AI wakes up?’
916
00:58:11,571 --> 00:58:13,531
[AI] You are not welcomed here.
917
00:58:13,656 --> 00:58:16,618
There’s a reason why the character has no name.
918
00:58:16,826 --> 00:58:18,995
He’s just ‘Hacker.’
919
00:58:19,204 --> 00:58:21,206
A lot of the early game is spent
920
00:58:21,289 --> 00:58:24,292
creeping around and avoiding conflict as much as possible,
921
00:58:24,292 --> 00:58:27,378
because the Hacker wasn’t a space Marine.
922
00:58:27,378 --> 00:58:29,214
You know, he, he wasn’t some warrior.
923
00:58:29,214 --> 00:58:32,967
He could be a woman, actually. There’s no identity, there’s no name.
924
00:58:32,967 --> 00:58:35,220
There’s no backstory, per se.
925
00:58:35,220 --> 00:58:39,224
But, we allowed players to inhabit that character, make it their own.
926
00:58:39,224 --> 00:58:44,729
And, instead of doing what we told them to do and feeling what we wanted them to feel,
927
00:58:44,729 --> 00:58:47,232
we said, ‘Feel how you want to feel.’
928
00:58:48,566 --> 00:58:51,736
System Shock was clearly a cyberpunk game
929
00:58:51,861 --> 00:58:56,324
and, at the time, everybody was all about cyberpunk.
930
00:58:56,324 --> 00:58:58,493
including the System Shock team.
931
00:58:58,493 --> 00:59:02,497
The freedom of movement in cyberspace was pretty compelling, I thought.
932
00:59:02,497 --> 00:59:06,751
‘You’re alone underpowered in corridors that are oppressive.’
933
00:59:06,751 --> 00:59:09,879
I think that, that was the heart of the game, really, in cyberspace.
934
00:59:09,879 --> 00:59:14,300
System Shock 2 was probably one of the first horror games that I had played,
935
00:59:14,300 --> 00:59:18,054
and I think I went into it, it’s like it was a standard FPS.
936
00:59:18,054 --> 00:59:21,057
But, as the story started to unfold, and I learned the
937
00:59:21,057 --> 00:59:24,519
full weight of the situation and discovered that
938
00:59:24,519 --> 00:59:30,108
the only other person who I thought was alive was just being used as a puppet by Shodan,
939
00:59:30,108 --> 00:59:33,278
I mean, that’s the kind of thing that still gives me chills just thinking about it.
940
00:59:33,278 --> 00:59:36,572
Looking back at the story of System Shock, you know, it holds up.
941
00:59:36,698 --> 00:59:40,493
It’s, it’s the kind of thing that could still happen. It’s still a very dangerous concept.
942
00:59:40,535 --> 00:59:44,539
[AI] Who are you? Who are you? My cameras and probes scan your body,
943
00:59:44,539 --> 00:59:47,542
but you do not match any employee file.
944
00:59:47,625 --> 00:59:50,712
I think getting to witness Shodan’s growth as a character was
945
00:59:50,712 --> 00:59:53,256
one of the most memorable aspects.
946
00:59:53,256 --> 00:59:57,552
She starts off as kind of this childlike creature
947
00:59:57,552 --> 01:00:00,888
with curiosity to, to begin experimenting
948
01:00:00,888 --> 01:00:03,182
on things she sees as lesser.
949
01:00:03,349 --> 01:00:06,811
[AI] I have complete control of this entire level.
950
01:00:06,978 --> 01:00:10,064
And, to see her slowly grow into a character
951
01:00:10,064 --> 01:00:12,734
where she’s more omnipotent.
952
01:00:12,859 --> 01:00:17,113
When my cyborgs bring you to an electrified interrogation bench,
953
01:00:17,238 --> 01:00:18,948
I will have your secret.
954
01:00:19,115 --> 01:00:22,577
She’s still beloved and still comes up as one of the
955
01:00:22,660 --> 01:00:25,997
great computer game villains of all time.
956
01:00:26,164 --> 01:00:30,168
If you imagine a world where you’re seeing 3D games for the very first time,
957
01:00:30,209 --> 01:00:32,920
you see emergent stuff happen because, first, it’s bugs.
958
01:00:32,920 --> 01:00:35,423
You’re like, ‘Okay, well, I’m gonna put this here and this here and the table here,’
959
01:00:35,423 --> 01:00:38,051
And then, ‘Oh, I can’t get by the table, ‘cause the chair’s in the way.
960
01:00:38,051 --> 01:00:40,178
Okay, what if I make it so you can push the chair in?’
961
01:00:40,345 --> 01:00:44,390
You have to think about the qualities of the things you’re,
962
01:00:44,474 --> 01:00:46,392
here are the air quotes, ‘simulating’’
963
01:00:46,476 --> 01:00:49,854
and then figure out how those characteristics
964
01:00:49,937 --> 01:00:53,149
interact with other things in the environment.
965
01:00:53,274 --> 01:00:58,654
Now, the nature of the 3D world has dictated a new type of gameplay,
966
01:00:58,696 --> 01:01:01,449
and we would continuously have this experience where the thing
967
01:01:01,532 --> 01:01:04,035
that would happen in the real world happened in our game.
968
01:01:04,202 --> 01:01:07,622
There was a huge amount of emergent gameplay just from physics like bouncing.
969
01:01:07,622 --> 01:01:11,584
I remember people started to bounce grenades around corners,
970
01:01:11,667 --> 01:01:15,004
and that felt crazy because, in the past, games were about,
971
01:01:15,046 --> 01:01:17,256
‘I’m in this room, and I can shoot the stuff in this room.’
972
01:01:17,340 --> 01:01:21,219
And, now suddenly, I can throw a grenade around the corner to a place that’s not being rendered,
973
01:01:21,260 --> 01:01:24,389
and I can’t see. Is the AI even awake there?
974
01:01:24,430 --> 01:01:27,141
That was a story that hadn’t been told by the game designer.
975
01:01:27,183 --> 01:01:31,187
That was a story that was being told by the player to themselves, and that was really exciting.
976
01:01:31,270 --> 01:01:33,606
It has been a little while since I’ve played
977
01:01:33,648 --> 01:01:36,692
System Shock 2 or the original, because we’ve been
978
01:01:36,734 --> 01:01:38,945
playing the remake almost daily,
979
01:01:39,070 --> 01:01:43,449
and I can say that, in the remake, there is some emergent gameplay
980
01:01:43,449 --> 01:01:45,076
that wasn’t in the original.
981
01:01:45,118 --> 01:01:47,954
We were watching somebody playtest the game just recently,
982
01:01:48,079 --> 01:01:52,250
and they threw a grenade, and it went off, and it blew up a corpse
983
01:01:52,542 --> 01:01:57,463
that hit a monitor hanging up above that fell off and decapitated an enemy.
984
01:01:57,547 --> 01:02:00,425
It was one of those moments where it was like, ‘Oh my god,’ like,
985
01:02:00,550 --> 01:02:02,552
‘I can’t believe that just happened.’
986
01:02:02,635 --> 01:02:06,055
These things sound really dumb and, you know, really
987
01:02:06,139 --> 01:02:09,183
just pedantic now, but it was the first time.
988
01:02:09,183 --> 01:02:12,687
Man, it was, like, so cool and, and there were so many things in games
989
01:02:12,687 --> 01:02:16,232
that probably happened for the first time ever in Cambridge, Mass in our offices
990
01:02:16,274 --> 01:02:19,777
or, you know, in Mesquite with John and John
991
01:02:19,819 --> 01:02:24,449
where there was some emergent behavior of a 3D world that, now, we don’t even think about.
992
01:02:24,490 --> 01:02:27,160
But, that was the first time. We’re like, ‘Wow, we should…
993
01:02:27,201 --> 01:02:28,578
That should be gameplay.’
994
01:02:29,412 --> 01:02:33,249
At that time, we had to describe to people
995
01:02:33,332 --> 01:02:35,293
that it was a 3D game,
996
01:02:35,418 --> 01:02:38,004
and what 3D rendering was and that, you know,
997
01:02:38,087 --> 01:02:40,965
a lot of people still looked at 3D games and were, like, ‘Where am I?
998
01:02:41,048 --> 01:02:43,801
Where’s the character?’ Well, ‘No, no, but you’re in your own head. You’re…
999
01:02:43,885 --> 01:02:46,304
It’s as if you’re looking through your own eyes.
1000
01:02:46,345 --> 01:02:49,724
We actually thought it was a good idea to use every key on the keyboard.
1001
01:02:49,807 --> 01:02:53,227
So, you have two hands, one’s on the left, one’s on the right.
1002
01:02:53,519 --> 01:02:56,898
‘Hey, let’s…Let’s use the keys on the left and the keys on the right.’
1003
01:02:56,981 --> 01:02:59,525
I, I don’t know what we were thinking.
1004
01:02:59,609 --> 01:03:04,530
There was a, a Terminator game that came out that used mouselook,
1005
01:03:04,614 --> 01:03:08,784
and I’ll never forget. I, I looked over one of my team member’s shoulders,
1006
01:03:08,868 --> 01:03:13,915
and I just said, ‘No one’s ever gonna use a mouse to look around in a game.’
1007
01:03:14,165 --> 01:03:17,627
I was just a little bit wrong about that.
1008
01:03:17,668 --> 01:03:19,670
You know, we were overthinking things.
1009
01:03:19,879 --> 01:03:22,632
We were making this very complicated game with 3D rendering
1010
01:03:22,757 --> 01:03:26,928
with, you know, NPCs and inventories and this big physics engine
1011
01:03:26,969 --> 01:03:28,971
and we were making the game that we wanted to play.
1012
01:03:29,013 --> 01:03:33,226
The most exciting thing that can happen in a game at any time
1013
01:03:33,351 --> 01:03:35,353
in any way is when
1014
01:03:35,561 --> 01:03:38,648
players do things that surprise themselves,
1015
01:03:38,689 --> 01:03:42,777
and even better is when they surprise the people who made the game.
1016
01:03:42,902 --> 01:03:46,614
That’s magic. That is what games can do that no other medium
1017
01:03:46,656 --> 01:03:49,617
in the history of humankind has ever been able to do.
1018
01:04:00,002 --> 01:04:03,589
There was a first person shooter game that, uh, I didn’t play back then
1019
01:04:03,673 --> 01:04:06,634
but, uh, while I was doing the nerd episodes,
1020
01:04:06,717 --> 01:04:10,805
I played this Super Nintendo game called Super Noah’s Ark 3D.
1021
01:04:18,729 --> 01:04:22,233
How many Super Nintendo games came out not licensed by Nintendo?
1022
01:04:22,233 --> 01:04:24,819
Just one, and it found the way.
1023
01:04:24,819 --> 01:04:28,281
By plugging an official Super Nintendo game into the top of it,
1024
01:04:28,281 --> 01:04:31,200
it overrides the lockout chip, and you can play it.
1025
01:04:31,450 --> 01:04:35,162
I had very, very little involvement in that project. My involvement was,
1026
01:04:35,162 --> 01:04:39,375
‘Hey, can you send a disc with the source code of Wolf 3D for the Super Nintendo
1027
01:04:39,458 --> 01:04:41,502
to these guys?’ And I said, ‘Sure!’
1028
01:04:41,586 --> 01:04:44,630
It’s the only game where you can play as Noah going around
1029
01:04:44,672 --> 01:04:47,049
fucking up a bunch of goats.
1030
01:04:47,508 --> 01:04:51,721
I mean, he’s just slingshotting all the animals because, I guess, like the plot of the game:
1031
01:04:51,887 --> 01:04:55,850
the animals in the ark are getting out of control or whatever.
1032
01:04:55,933 --> 01:04:58,352
So, Noah’s got to, like, put them in their place.
1033
01:05:00,271 --> 01:05:02,315
It’s, it’s hilarious.
1034
01:05:03,899 --> 01:05:07,194
Super Noah’s Ark really struck me as just being weird,
1035
01:05:07,320 --> 01:05:11,282
because it was sponsored by a company that wanted to promote Christian values.
1036
01:05:11,490 --> 01:05:16,662
But, for me, the one that really made me just roll my eyes was a game called Chex Quest.
1037
01:05:24,503 --> 01:05:26,714
Chex are fun, chex are high.
1038
01:05:26,714 --> 01:05:30,426
Now, you can get a free CD-ROM game inside boxes of Chex cereal.
1039
01:05:30,468 --> 01:05:33,638
Chex Quest, a game that came in a cereal box.
1040
01:05:36,015 --> 01:05:37,350
One green!
1041
01:05:37,433 --> 01:05:40,478
How is that supposed to be any good? But, it was.
1042
01:05:40,603 --> 01:05:42,813
It was actually a pretty good game, you know,
1043
01:05:42,938 --> 01:05:46,150
for something that was based on a cereal and came in a cereal.
1044
01:05:46,275 --> 01:05:49,528
Chex Quest, a game that used the Doom engine
1045
01:05:49,612 --> 01:05:54,617
to make a game where you’re supposed to be putting spoons inside of cereal
1046
01:05:54,909 --> 01:05:58,621
It’s a family friendly first person shooter, an FFFPS.
1047
01:05:58,913 --> 01:06:02,583
You use, uh, zorchers which are these remote control things
1048
01:06:02,750 --> 01:06:05,503
to zap these booger guys.
1049
01:06:05,753 --> 01:06:07,254
[zapping]
1050
01:06:07,672 --> 01:06:09,548
[zapping]
1051
01:06:10,716 --> 01:06:13,260
And it’s, it’s crazy ‘cause my dream game
1052
01:06:13,344 --> 01:06:16,389
which was, like, really stupid was Chex Quest.
1053
01:06:16,597 --> 01:06:20,351
The Flemoid menace is back and threatening to turn our
1054
01:06:20,434 --> 01:06:23,979
snacktacular way of life into total chaos.
1055
01:06:24,105 --> 01:06:26,315
I always thought it would never happen because it’s like,
1056
01:06:26,440 --> 01:06:29,944
‘How would I possibly get General Mills, a cereal company,
1057
01:06:30,069 --> 01:06:34,532
to say yes to letting us re-release a free packing cereal game from 1997?’
1058
01:06:34,615 --> 01:06:37,159
Join now and learn to zorch things
1059
01:06:37,243 --> 01:06:39,578
and then zorch bigger things.
1060
01:06:39,704 --> 01:06:43,499
And then, it just so happened that they wanted to revive it anyway for ‘90s nostalgia,
1061
01:06:43,582 --> 01:06:46,377
and it was just like, ‘Okay, the stars aligned and made it happen.’
1062
01:06:47,086 --> 01:06:50,589
Chex Quest, still free, now in HD.
1063
01:06:50,756 --> 01:06:54,218
Join the Chex Mix Squadron today.
1064
01:06:57,138 --> 01:07:01,100
What I remember best about it was there was a Brutal Doom mod.
1065
01:07:01,350 --> 01:07:04,770
which enhances the gore and the violence.
1066
01:07:05,521 --> 01:07:06,731
[gunshots]
1067
01:07:07,398 --> 01:07:09,650
Fuck!
1068
01:07:10,025 --> 01:07:12,778
How this takes the family friendly aspect out of it.
1069
01:07:13,279 --> 01:07:17,032
[screaming]
1070
01:07:17,366 --> 01:07:20,536
When you have a game as brutal, as Brutal Chex Quest,
1071
01:07:20,619 --> 01:07:23,330
you gotta have a brutal cereal to go with it.
1072
01:07:23,497 --> 01:07:26,083
So, we did this skit at the end of the episode.
1073
01:07:26,625 --> 01:07:30,838
Brutal Chex! It’s Chex on steroids,
1074
01:07:31,172 --> 01:07:33,507
illegal steroids
1075
01:07:33,632 --> 01:07:36,635
made from broken glass, rusty fucking nails,
1076
01:07:36,719 --> 01:07:38,679
and whole grain rice.
1077
01:07:38,721 --> 01:07:41,182
This cereal will start your day,
1078
01:07:41,223 --> 01:07:42,933
if it doesn’t end your life.
1079
01:07:43,017 --> 01:07:46,687
‘Have some Chex!’ ‘Okay, okay.’
1080
01:07:47,480 --> 01:07:48,564
[laughs]
1081
01:07:48,731 --> 01:07:52,651
Brutal Chex turns your milk red from your own blood
1082
01:07:52,777 --> 01:07:56,947
pouring out of your fucking screaming mouth!
1083
01:07:57,072 --> 01:07:59,867
50 free hours of America Online included.
1084
01:08:15,966 --> 01:08:21,597
Michael Abrash and John Carmack are doing Quake, and so it’s left to me and, uh,
1085
01:08:21,722 --> 01:08:25,267
John Romero and, later on, American McGee to do all the levels
1086
01:08:25,351 --> 01:08:29,063
and the idea was, ‘Well, we’ll just do a million billion levels that are fun to play
1087
01:08:29,104 --> 01:08:31,565
and then, we’ll sell this, and it’ll be fun.’
1088
01:08:31,649 --> 01:08:34,652
At that time, you know, I was 18, 19 years old,
1089
01:08:34,693 --> 01:08:37,488
and, a few doors down from me, there was a guy who was driving
1090
01:08:37,530 --> 01:08:39,865
to and from work in a, in a Ferrari
1091
01:08:39,907 --> 01:08:43,744
His license plate said, ‘ID TECH,’ and that was John Carmack.
1092
01:08:43,869 --> 01:08:47,289
He let on that, ‘Hey, I’m actually the boss at this,
1093
01:08:47,331 --> 01:08:50,417
this game company down the road here. Would you like to come and beta test
1094
01:08:50,459 --> 01:08:52,336
some of our games in the office?’
1095
01:08:52,419 --> 01:08:56,257
And he took me out to dinner one night and said, ‘Would you like to come work full time?’
1096
01:08:56,423 --> 01:08:58,467
We kind of could do whatever we wanted,
1097
01:08:58,551 --> 01:09:00,511
so everything was very experimental.
1098
01:09:00,636 --> 01:09:05,724
I’d say that the genesis of the outdoor levels came from E3M6
1099
01:09:06,058 --> 01:09:07,601
in the original Doom.
1100
01:09:07,768 --> 01:09:11,355
Interestingly, that was the first level to have a rocket jump in it.
1101
01:09:11,689 --> 01:09:12,314
[blast]
1102
01:09:12,523 --> 01:09:15,860
But, that was a really, very unique level where you were,
1103
01:09:16,026 --> 01:09:19,572
you started outdoors and going into buildings.
1104
01:09:19,655 --> 01:09:21,907
It was really cool. I love that.
1105
01:09:21,991 --> 01:09:25,202
And so, when we were starting to make levels like 15,
1106
01:09:25,202 --> 01:09:29,456
it was a huge, huge outdoor area. It was the biggest, probably, I’d say.
1107
01:09:29,540 --> 01:09:31,667
And then, like The Citadel, MAP18,
1108
01:09:31,709 --> 01:09:34,587
Sandy had a lot of really cool outdoor stuff in the center there.
1109
01:09:34,587 --> 01:09:36,881
So, yeah, it was really fun making those levels.
1110
01:09:36,881 --> 01:09:39,091
It was really different, and it was us
1111
01:09:39,091 --> 01:09:42,553
exploring, ‘What else could we do with this game to make it different?’
1112
01:09:42,553 --> 01:09:45,848
Well, I did the Doom level Downtown
1113
01:09:45,848 --> 01:09:47,600
which I, I know a lot of people hate, but that’s the one…
1114
01:09:47,600 --> 01:09:50,144
That’s the first level ever done that was a big, open city.
1115
01:09:50,144 --> 01:09:53,731
The way that Sandy made that level, it felt mysterious.
1116
01:09:53,731 --> 01:09:56,609
It felt like, ‘Do I even know the whole level?’
1117
01:09:56,609 --> 01:10:01,822
There are so many secret teleports and all kinds of crazy stuff going on
1118
01:10:01,822 --> 01:10:08,412
Downtown is like apartment buildings and skyscrapers, and there was, like, a docks at one end
and, uh, John Romero liked that level so much
1119
01:10:08,412 --> 01:10:11,832
that, then, he did his city level which was even better.
1120
01:10:11,832 --> 01:10:14,418
So, we were doing a lot of playing off each other.
1121
01:10:14,418 --> 01:10:18,797
You know, we had American McGee making his little tight levels where everything went in circles around.
1122
01:10:21,383 --> 01:10:25,012
You know, I was 20 years old at the time. ‘Hey kid, go and
1123
01:10:25,012 --> 01:10:27,848
start building levels for these games that are hugely popular.
1124
01:10:27,848 --> 01:10:31,644
I, I felt a fair amount of pressure to do a good job.
1125
01:10:31,644 --> 01:10:35,147
You’ll see a lot of my maps have a sort of central premise
1126
01:10:35,147 --> 01:10:38,317
that’s built into something larger, and it’s because
1127
01:10:38,317 --> 01:10:41,237
I felt, ‘Alright, I’ve got enough of a core here
1128
01:10:41,362 --> 01:10:44,365
to make that the theme for a larger story
1129
01:10:44,365 --> 01:10:46,825
that is this whole map.’
1130
01:10:47,201 --> 01:10:50,454
People are always asking me about the crusher and it’s funny, you know,
1131
01:10:50,579 --> 01:10:52,331
for maps like that,
1132
01:10:52,331 --> 01:10:56,293
there, again, were a lot of little experimental rooms that were created.
1133
01:10:56,293 --> 01:11:00,798
It was a bit of a challenge sometimes to design a map around the experiments.
1134
01:11:03,884 --> 01:11:07,680
Basically, I had a bunch of ideas for little set pieces that I hadn’t
1135
01:11:07,680 --> 01:11:10,015
found a space for in the other levels.
1136
01:11:10,015 --> 01:11:12,017
I think I actually had six ideas.
1137
01:11:12,017 --> 01:11:15,437
So but, of course, the level has eight sides, ‘cause it’s an octagon.
1138
01:11:15,437 --> 01:11:17,273
So, I had to make up two new ones.
1139
01:11:17,273 --> 01:11:19,692
Another level that was super fun to do was Barrels O’Fun
1140
01:11:19,692 --> 01:11:23,696
I decided I was gonna have a level where I was gonna have a million billion barrels
1141
01:11:23,696 --> 01:11:27,491
and just let the players go nuts with barrels, and so that’s where that came from.
1142
01:11:27,491 --> 01:11:30,869
We did not think about more weapons.
1143
01:11:30,869 --> 01:11:33,831
We knew we needed to have a, a cooler shotgun
1144
01:11:33,831 --> 01:11:37,334
for closeup stuff, because we just knew, in Deathmatch, this was gonna be so deadly.
1145
01:11:37,334 --> 01:11:40,337
There were seven bullets that were fired by the old shotgun.
1146
01:11:40,337 --> 01:11:43,382
There was 20 in the new one, so you could really blast something.
1147
01:11:44,383 --> 01:11:47,720
Doom is all about timing, like reloading your gun, reloading that shotgun,
1148
01:11:47,720 --> 01:11:50,389
you know, like it was really important that you got the timing down
1149
01:11:50,389 --> 01:11:53,976
because, if you’re alternating shots with an enemy, and you’re not dodging
1150
01:11:53,976 --> 01:11:56,937
behind a wall or whatever, you’re gonna take it in the face,
1151
01:11:56,937 --> 01:12:00,107
and it’s, like, classic. Everybody’s used to that.
1152
01:12:00,399 --> 01:12:05,904
The icon of sin, that was basically the name of the final boss in the game.
1153
01:12:07,072 --> 01:12:11,326
So, I went to Adrian Carmack and said, ‘Give me the biggest most impressive demon face you can get,
1154
01:12:11,326 --> 01:12:13,495
and we’ll put it on the wall.’
1155
01:12:13,495 --> 01:12:18,083
And the idea was: I was basing it off the, the legend of Baphomet and the Knight Templars,
1156
01:12:18,083 --> 01:12:22,504
and we’ll have to shoot it to kill it. Meanwhile, other monsters are gonna spawn and try to kill you.
1157
01:12:22,504 --> 01:12:24,757
We could have a really great sound
1158
01:12:24,757 --> 01:12:28,260
that you just dread when you hear that cube come out,
1159
01:12:28,469 --> 01:12:30,262
[Fireball sound]
1160
01:12:30,512 --> 01:12:34,224
And the sound is…It’s called Fireball. It’s a really unique sound
1161
01:12:34,349 --> 01:12:38,395
that, like now, you can hear in everything, this [whoosh] sound
1162
01:12:38,520 --> 01:12:40,856
and it comes from the movie Backdraft.
1163
01:12:43,442 --> 01:12:44,568
[whooshing]
1164
01:12:44,610 --> 01:12:47,613
Some entity has to take damage from the rocket launcher.
1165
01:12:47,696 --> 01:12:50,199
Usually, an entity always looks like something,
1166
01:12:50,199 --> 01:12:54,495
but this is something you’re never gonna see, ‘cause you can’t see where the brain thing is.
1167
01:12:54,495 --> 01:12:59,208
It’s in the back. It didn’t matter what it looked like. It just needed to be an entity taking up space
1168
01:12:59,208 --> 01:13:03,087
that had a certain number of hit points and, when it dies, then the game’s over, right?
1169
01:13:03,087 --> 01:13:05,547
So, we had a little blue thing.
1170
01:13:05,547 --> 01:13:09,968
Well, it was getting really close to the game shipping. We were almost done with the game,
1171
01:13:09,968 --> 01:13:14,139
like it’s about to ship, and this is the time where you would stick
1172
01:13:14,139 --> 01:13:17,643
hidden shit in the game that no one else is gonna find.
1173
01:13:17,643 --> 01:13:21,772
Kevin came up with that idea of John’s head on a pike
1174
01:13:21,772 --> 01:13:25,526
that was gonna be something just hidden in there from Romero,
1175
01:13:25,526 --> 01:13:29,404
and he wasn’t gonna find it until long after the game’s released.
1176
01:13:29,404 --> 01:13:32,366
It’s probably 11:00 at night or midnight or something,
1177
01:13:32,366 --> 01:13:35,369
and I am, you know, no clipping through the wall because,
1178
01:13:35,369 --> 01:13:38,580
‘Why would I try and play the game to just kill the boss?
1179
01:13:38,580 --> 01:13:41,041
I’m just gonna cheat to where the circle is.’
1180
01:13:41,125 --> 01:13:43,043
So, I go, I’m getting closer to it.
1181
01:13:43,043 --> 01:13:46,380
‘Wait a second. Is that, did I see my face in there?’
1182
01:13:46,630 --> 01:13:50,551
And so, I go into where the circle is, and there’s not a circle there.
1183
01:13:50,634 --> 01:13:54,555
There’s my head on a stake, and I’m like, ‘No way.’
1184
01:13:57,224 --> 01:14:00,811
I just went to Bobby Prince, uh, he’s in the, he was in the conference room,
1185
01:14:00,811 --> 01:14:03,230
he was still making music and sound effects, all this stuff,
1186
01:14:03,230 --> 01:14:06,984
and I told him the story really quick and ‘This is what I need’
1187
01:14:06,984 --> 01:14:08,777
You need to record me saying this.
1188
01:14:08,986 --> 01:14:14,032
To win the game, you must kill me, John Romero.
1189
01:14:14,074 --> 01:14:16,743
‘And then, you need to pitch shift it, reverse it and, like, make it sound evil.’
1190
01:14:17,035 --> 01:14:22,166
[evil sounding reversed effect]
1191
01:14:22,416 --> 01:14:27,171
So, when the icon of sin sees you, it’s like: me, the icon of sin.
1192
01:14:27,171 --> 01:14:30,716
And I’m like, ‘This is so great. It’s like a two-layer Easter egg,’ you know?
1193
01:14:30,716 --> 01:14:33,427
Like, ‘This is gonna be great when it comes out,’ and they can go, ‘Haha,’
1194
01:14:33,427 --> 01:14:36,638
and I go, ‘Haha?’ You know?
1195
01:14:36,638 --> 01:14:38,640
As soon as American McGee comes in the office,
1196
01:14:38,640 --> 01:14:42,603
he runs the game, he’s like, ‘Ooh, scary evil background thing, backwards thing.’
1197
01:14:42,728 --> 01:14:45,606
He reverses it and plays it, and he tells everybody.
1198
01:14:45,606 --> 01:14:48,192
And so, the secret was instantly
1199
01:14:48,192 --> 01:14:50,861
out the day right after putting this Easter egg in,
1200
01:14:50,861 --> 01:14:54,364
but everybody left it in, ‘cause it was just hilarious.
1201
01:14:54,489 --> 01:15:00,579
To win the game, you must kill me, John Romero.
1202
01:15:11,548 --> 01:15:16,220
Tom Hall came to us during Doom’s development. He ended up parting ways with his software.
1203
01:15:16,261 --> 01:15:19,264
They were very, very excited to have Tom, ‘cause Tom was amazing.
1204
01:15:19,306 --> 01:15:22,601
And what they wanted Tom to do was, like, make another FPS but, like, ‘Make it your way.
1205
01:15:22,643 --> 01:15:25,687
Do whatever you want,’ you know? And so, Tom’s just like,
1206
01:15:25,729 --> 01:15:27,105
‘Okay, what would I do?’
1207
01:15:32,611 --> 01:15:36,698
Rise of the Triad is the most violent video game ever created.
1208
01:15:36,990 --> 01:15:42,246
♪♪♪
1209
01:15:42,496 --> 01:15:45,165
[gunshots]
[dogs barking]
1210
01:15:45,374 --> 01:15:47,834
Rise of the Triad was originally meant to be
1211
01:15:47,918 --> 01:15:51,338
an Apogee-developed sequel to Wolfenstein 3D.
1212
01:15:51,713 --> 01:15:55,050
Apogee wanted, obviously, to continue to,
1213
01:15:55,092 --> 01:15:56,927
to build on the franchise that had
1214
01:15:56,969 --> 01:15:58,637
you know, made them a lot of money.
1215
01:15:58,637 --> 01:16:02,933
But, I don’t think ID software liked some of the directional calls that were being made.
1216
01:16:03,016 --> 01:16:05,644
Yeah, we wouldn’t go in that direction with Wolfenstein.
1217
01:16:05,769 --> 01:16:08,105
So, call it whatever you want, and you have a new IP.
1218
01:16:08,105 --> 01:16:09,731
So, that’s what they did.
1219
01:16:09,898 --> 01:16:12,234
We had all these assets already made for the game,
1220
01:16:12,276 --> 01:16:15,779
and so we just dropped the Wolfstein part and just called it Rise of the Triad
1221
01:16:16,071 --> 01:16:18,240
and kind of reformulated the story.
1222
01:16:19,783 --> 01:16:24,079
The story was that Hitler wasn’t actually the master running the show.
1223
01:16:24,413 --> 01:16:26,832
There was a triad, three new bosses.
1224
01:16:26,999 --> 01:16:28,875
that BJ would have to deal with
1225
01:16:28,959 --> 01:16:31,795
We had, like, a sort of a, a more junior team,
1226
01:16:31,920 --> 01:16:36,258
but we had a lot of cool ideas, and we had gone to a bazaar.
1227
01:16:36,341 --> 01:16:40,470
This one guy had a booth of World War II memorabilia.
1228
01:16:40,679 --> 01:16:43,640
So, we got people from Apogee, you know,
1229
01:16:43,724 --> 01:16:47,102
and then 3D realms to wear the suits.
1230
01:16:47,144 --> 01:16:50,105
We would take digitized pictures of them facing the camera,
1231
01:16:50,147 --> 01:16:53,608
and then we would rotate the board 45 degrees,
1232
01:16:53,775 --> 01:16:56,862
take more pictures of them, rotate it a full 90 degrees, and
1233
01:16:56,903 --> 01:17:00,365
and so, we would get eight rotations, you know, at each of the 45 degree marks.
1234
01:17:00,615 --> 01:17:04,453
It would take literally a couple weeks just to do one character,
1235
01:17:04,661 --> 01:17:06,997
and, um you know, the game had over
1236
01:17:07,372 --> 01:17:09,374
probably two dozen characters in total,
1237
01:17:09,583 --> 01:17:13,712
and what Tom Hall brings, he, he’s got a lot of humor that he likes to inject in games.
1238
01:17:13,879 --> 01:17:17,424
So, almost all the humorous elements in Rise of the Triad were probably
1239
01:17:17,466 --> 01:17:19,426
from the mind of Tom Hall.
1240
01:17:19,593 --> 01:17:22,721
‘What’s, what’s this game’s thing? What can make this stand out?’
1241
01:17:22,804 --> 01:17:25,640
You know, like, ‘What if we just make this thing really violent?’
1242
01:17:25,724 --> 01:17:29,019
And I was just like, ‘Well, if we’re gonna make it really violent, I’m gonna go nuts.’
1243
01:17:29,102 --> 01:17:30,145
[ding ding ding]
1244
01:17:30,228 --> 01:17:32,814
It has to be preposterous as the rest of the game.
1245
01:17:33,565 --> 01:17:35,067
[Ahhh!]
1246
01:17:35,275 --> 01:17:39,571
I think the fact that it was funny, it was campy, it was different, it didn’t take itself seriously.
1247
01:17:39,780 --> 01:17:42,574
You know, stuff like the Excalibat, dog mode,
1248
01:17:42,783 --> 01:17:45,410
the gibs flying at the screen, ludicrous gibs.
1249
01:17:45,535 --> 01:17:49,206
When everybody else was playing, you know, Duke and Quake
1250
01:17:49,331 --> 01:17:50,957
I was playing Rise of the Triad.
1251
01:17:51,083 --> 01:17:53,460
I had the idea that you could, like,
1252
01:17:53,543 --> 01:17:56,505
have different characters that could actually have different stats
1253
01:17:56,588 --> 01:17:58,256
that kind of affected your gameplay.
1254
01:17:58,298 --> 01:18:00,842
‘Do you want to run faster? You want to cause more damage?
1255
01:18:00,926 --> 01:18:02,803
Do you have more hit points?’ You know, that kind of thing
1256
01:18:02,844 --> 01:18:06,890
Rise of the Triad is one of the earliest games to have
1257
01:18:07,057 --> 01:18:10,685
different representation of other cultures and people of color
1258
01:18:10,811 --> 01:18:13,105
like you can sort of choose yourself,
1259
01:18:13,188 --> 01:18:14,606
and that’s, that’s pretty cool.
1260
01:18:14,689 --> 01:18:17,234
Everyone at Apogee was really proud of Rise of the Triad.
1261
01:18:17,317 --> 01:18:20,070
It was, um, our first internal game.
1262
01:18:20,112 --> 01:18:22,572
It had a lot of firsts in it, like mouselook,
1263
01:18:22,614 --> 01:18:25,117
I think it had 11-player land play
1264
01:18:25,325 --> 01:18:27,744
The first FPS to actually
1265
01:18:27,869 --> 01:18:31,123
have specific maps made for Deathmatch,
1266
01:18:31,164 --> 01:18:34,668
and it opened up new frontiers for how we could design maps.
1267
01:18:34,668 --> 01:18:39,589
People had been playing Deathmatch only maps for a while just from community homegrown stuff.
1268
01:18:39,673 --> 01:18:43,885
But December 21st at the end of 1994 is when the first
1269
01:18:44,094 --> 01:18:46,471
commercially-made Deathmatch-only maps
1270
01:18:46,513 --> 01:18:49,099
came out in Marathon and Rise of the Triad.
1271
01:18:49,266 --> 01:18:52,811
Really interesting design choices, really over the top weapons,
1272
01:18:52,936 --> 01:18:54,604
it had jump pads.
1273
01:18:54,813 --> 01:18:58,150
We modified the engine to, like, have very tall walls.
1274
01:18:58,233 --> 01:19:00,235
So, I invented jump pads.
1275
01:19:01,236 --> 01:19:05,198
It’s something that made multiplayer in the original Rise of the Triad so
1276
01:19:05,365 --> 01:19:07,701
so crazy and fun, because it was just
1277
01:19:07,784 --> 01:19:10,579
you could bounce around on bounce pads, amazing rocket launchers.
1278
01:19:10,662 --> 01:19:14,458
We played so many hours of Rise of the Triad. It was amazing.
1279
01:19:14,541 --> 01:19:18,587
The weapon choice, you know, the drunken missiles and the staff.
1280
01:19:18,712 --> 01:19:22,549
Flame walls, and nothing that’s on the floor can escape you.
1281
01:19:22,632 --> 01:19:26,678
Turn yourself into a dog, like all kind of just wacky stuff, like
1282
01:19:26,720 --> 01:19:28,805
the types of things you wouldn’t expect.
1283
01:19:28,930 --> 01:19:31,725
It was a spectacle you could watch as a player.
1284
01:19:31,766 --> 01:19:34,227
When we were making Wolfenstein,
1285
01:19:34,352 --> 01:19:36,938
we put in a noclip mode so we could get through.
1286
01:19:37,022 --> 01:19:39,608
We didn’t have to use keys, so we could just test rooms and stuff.
1287
01:19:39,691 --> 01:19:42,486
John and I were going through the rooms as if we were,
1288
01:19:42,569 --> 01:19:46,198
you know, immortal creatures and, ‘Ooh,
1289
01:19:46,281 --> 01:19:48,825
I look down on these poor beings,’ you know?
1290
01:19:48,950 --> 01:19:52,621
And so, that kind of inside joke, I turned into God Mode.
1291
01:19:53,079 --> 01:19:54,581
[zapping]
[Oooh!]
1292
01:19:54,748 --> 01:19:57,959
It was a blast to see the enemies run
1293
01:19:58,001 --> 01:20:01,421
when they realized that you had the hand of God out.
1294
01:20:01,546 --> 01:20:04,633
About like, ‘Well, if we have God mode, what’s the opposite of that?
1295
01:20:04,716 --> 01:20:07,135
Dog mode!’ So, dog mode,
1296
01:20:07,177 --> 01:20:09,763
where you go down, and you just bite people to death and so on.
1297
01:20:09,804 --> 01:20:13,141
It’s so much fun! Yeah, Rise of the Triad was
1298
01:20:13,225 --> 01:20:15,393
it just took it to another level for me.
1299
01:20:15,477 --> 01:20:18,855
I got the opportunity to work on Rise of the Triad 20 years later.
1300
01:20:18,939 --> 01:20:22,817
It was, it was a little kid’s dream come true, and I’m still working on Rise of the Triad.
1301
01:20:22,859 --> 01:20:24,653
I love ROT. ROT forever, man.
1302
01:20:24,778 --> 01:20:28,281
The characters were iconic, the weapons were iconic,
1303
01:20:28,365 --> 01:20:30,951
and it was just a lot of fun.
1304
01:20:30,992 --> 01:20:34,204
All those things, that was all Tom, you know, and it was great.
1305
01:20:34,287 --> 01:20:38,792
I love how crazy it is, and it’s just, it is a nuts, nuts game.
1306
01:20:39,125 --> 01:20:43,922
Tons of people write me every week just like, ‘Oh, yeah I played Rise of the Triad again,’
1307
01:20:43,964 --> 01:20:46,341
and my nephew loves it, so that’s all that really matters.
1308
01:20:46,466 --> 01:20:49,177
[laughing]
1309
01:20:49,302 --> 01:20:56,977
♪♪♪
1310
01:21:03,942 --> 01:21:08,697
The first FPS we played, oh, that was back, uh, it must’ve been Marathon.
1311
01:21:08,947 --> 01:21:14,119
[uplifting music]
1312
01:21:14,452 --> 01:21:17,831
A lot of people who grew up with a Macintosh in the household
1313
01:21:17,914 --> 01:21:21,835
rather than a PC, Marathon was a game that ended up on a lot of Mac computers.
1314
01:21:21,918 --> 01:21:26,423
When they were doing the Macs, they were wanting to first push it as exclusively a business computer.
1315
01:21:26,506 --> 01:21:30,885
If you thought a really powerful business computer was way out of your reach,
1316
01:21:33,263 --> 01:21:34,514
we’ve got news for you.
1317
01:21:34,556 --> 01:21:37,809
Then, as years went on, people were always playing games on their PCs.
1318
01:21:37,851 --> 01:21:39,894
Apple was like realizing,
1319
01:21:39,936 --> 01:21:41,938
‘We need to change our image.’
1320
01:21:43,189 --> 01:21:46,568
There wasn’t a lot to choose. Some, there was some really obscure stuff
1321
01:21:46,651 --> 01:21:49,904
that I wish I could find again, games like Damage Incorporated,
1322
01:21:50,030 --> 01:21:52,824
"..reporting. Check the friendly fire!"
1323
01:21:53,033 --> 01:21:55,952
Damage Incorporated actually ran on the Marathon engine
1324
01:21:55,994 --> 01:21:59,497
‘cause it was one of the only first person shooter engines on Mac at the time.
1325
01:21:59,539 --> 01:22:03,376
So, Bungie was known basically for being insane,
1326
01:22:03,418 --> 01:22:06,630
because nobody owned a Mac, like nobody wanted to play games on a Mac.
1327
01:22:06,671 --> 01:22:09,382
People who had bought a Mac because they were like,
1328
01:22:09,382 --> 01:22:12,510
you know, cool sound design people or art authors or something
1329
01:22:12,552 --> 01:22:14,888
weren’t typically the guys we sold games to.
1330
01:22:14,929 --> 01:22:19,517
I was in the graphic design industry for about 10 years prior to even getting into games.
1331
01:22:19,559 --> 01:22:22,103
Marathon was the only game
1332
01:22:22,145 --> 01:22:25,857
available on the Mac platform that was any fun to play.
1333
01:22:25,899 --> 01:22:28,068
And so, we would get together all the time
1334
01:22:28,109 --> 01:22:31,154
after work and play that for hours and hours.
1335
01:22:31,196 --> 01:22:34,157
Marathon was the one that I got hooked on,
1336
01:22:34,199 --> 01:22:36,701
because I was in an office,
1337
01:22:36,993 --> 01:22:39,371
somebody installed it and, uh,
1338
01:22:39,454 --> 01:22:41,456
that’s when we started Deathmatching.
1339
01:22:41,581 --> 01:22:45,168
It was so visceral and addictive and, just this feeling that
1340
01:22:45,251 --> 01:22:50,298
you’re chasing down this person in your office on the computer screen.
1341
01:22:50,507 --> 01:22:52,926
And they let you rocket jump which was really cool.
1342
01:22:52,926 --> 01:22:56,763
People ask, ‘Which was the first game to invent dual wielding?’ And I go, ‘Well, it was Rise of the Triad
1343
01:22:56,846 --> 01:22:58,515
but it was also Marathon,
1344
01:22:58,640 --> 01:23:02,769
because they came out on the exact same day.
1345
01:23:02,936 --> 01:23:04,979
[gunshots]
1346
01:23:05,146 --> 01:23:07,941
I loved it. I mean, they made their own Doom engine
1347
01:23:07,982 --> 01:23:10,944
and they made it for the Mac, and it was exclusive for the Mac,
1348
01:23:11,069 --> 01:23:12,487
and it had a story.
1349
01:23:12,654 --> 01:23:15,949
I thought Marathon was, first of all, gorgeous.
1350
01:23:15,990 --> 01:23:18,952
It also set a bar of what should be expected.
1351
01:23:19,119 --> 01:23:21,246
I got very deeply immersed in it.
1352
01:23:21,287 --> 01:23:25,542
It was an important sideways way of thinking about some of these things that,
1353
01:23:25,709 --> 01:23:28,378
uh, were extraordinarily influential.
1354
01:23:28,586 --> 01:23:30,797
Marathon was all about the story,
1355
01:23:30,839 --> 01:23:35,760
even though it used 2D sprites and really simplistic 3D interiors to
1356
01:23:35,844 --> 01:23:38,555
drive your characters around, there was so much
1357
01:23:38,596 --> 01:23:40,890
lore and so much history
1358
01:23:41,182 --> 01:23:44,561
that that small team at Bungie had put together
1359
01:23:44,644 --> 01:23:48,022
for this very simple but very effective
1360
01:23:48,064 --> 01:23:49,441
first person shooter.
1361
01:23:49,524 --> 01:23:52,068
There would be no Halo without the Marathon games.
1362
01:23:52,110 --> 01:23:54,821
There’s a ton of DNA there for sure.
1363
01:23:54,946 --> 01:23:57,157
It’s interesting to see where Bungie is now
1364
01:23:57,198 --> 01:24:00,201
as, you know, where they came from. Maybe one day, they’ll go back to making
1365
01:24:00,243 --> 01:24:02,996
those kind of shooters, but I doubt it. I think they’re,
1366
01:24:03,079 --> 01:24:05,832
they’re probably just gonna be working on Destiny forever.
1367
01:24:06,583 --> 01:24:14,841
[dramatic music]
1368
01:24:15,133 --> 01:24:17,427
I mean, you think about the legacy of Doom, and it’s enormous.
1369
01:24:17,469 --> 01:24:20,472
I mean, everything in the genre emanates from Doom.
1370
01:24:20,597 --> 01:24:23,892
I remember, when we first formed Logicware in 1995,
1371
01:24:23,975 --> 01:24:28,271
we would be working for a while and, every now and then, we would just all fire up Doom.
1372
01:24:28,354 --> 01:24:31,065
So, it felt like all of us who grew up with Wolfenstein,
1373
01:24:31,149 --> 01:24:33,902
oh, then we all got Doom. Now, we are all up to speed
1374
01:24:33,943 --> 01:24:35,361
Now, we’re all good at Doom.
1375
01:24:35,403 --> 01:24:37,697
Now, everyone gets Quake. Everyone is good at Quake.
1376
01:24:37,739 --> 01:24:39,574
I recently read a book called Hit Makers
1377
01:24:39,574 --> 01:24:41,868
which basically was talking about how to succeed in the era
1378
01:24:41,951 --> 01:24:43,578
where there’s so many different forms of entertainment,
1379
01:24:43,620 --> 01:24:45,413
so many different gaming options, right?
1380
01:24:45,538 --> 01:24:49,250
And, basically, the formula that they made was to take something that feels
1381
01:24:49,250 --> 01:24:53,671
familiar yet different, right? You know, you look at Star Wars as a film and as a franchise.
1382
01:24:53,713 --> 01:24:58,051
Star Wars was old school, you know, Western vibe but taken to sci-fi.
1383
01:24:58,092 --> 01:25:02,806
So, take something that, you know, feels kind of like a familiar formula and apply it to something new.
1384
01:25:02,847 --> 01:25:06,267
My dad had gotten a new, like, Packard Bell that had a CD-ROM drive and everything,
1385
01:25:06,309 --> 01:25:10,647
and I managed to convince him to let me get a game for it, and I picked
1386
01:25:10,730 --> 01:25:14,609
[ Star Wars theme]
1387
01:25:14,734 --> 01:25:16,402
Star Wars Dark Forces.
1388
01:25:16,611 --> 01:25:20,490
[ Star Wars theme]
1389
01:25:24,661 --> 01:25:27,872
I remember thinking like, ‘Wow, someone’s finally built, like, the Star Wars game.’
1390
01:25:34,003 --> 01:25:35,588
[whooshing]
1391
01:25:35,713 --> 01:25:37,340
There is a magic to
1392
01:25:37,340 --> 01:25:41,177
being in the world of Star Wars. These are things that you just only dreamed about.
1393
01:25:41,302 --> 01:25:44,931
It blew my mind that I actually got to be there, like, at eye level
1394
01:25:44,973 --> 01:25:48,518
in a Star Wars game and walked through, you know, this imperial base.
1395
01:25:48,601 --> 01:25:51,396
It just kind of pulled me into the world of Star Wars
1396
01:25:51,437 --> 01:25:53,565
like I’d never been pulled into before.
1397
01:25:53,815 --> 01:25:56,484
Dark Forces was a very nicely done game.
1398
01:25:56,693 --> 01:26:00,238
I remember Dark Forces having a pretty fast frame rate.
1399
01:26:00,321 --> 01:26:04,200
and so, I was impressed with that, and I thought their collision detection was pretty nice as well.
1400
01:26:04,450 --> 01:26:06,327
You would glide smoothly along the walls.
1401
01:26:06,411 --> 01:26:08,246
[Stormtrooper] You there!
[Blaster fire]
1402
01:26:08,413 --> 01:26:10,498
You actually had something that you were trying to do,
1403
01:26:10,540 --> 01:26:13,710
and you were gonna accomplish something, and you’re enmeshed in a world
1404
01:26:13,751 --> 01:26:15,753
where you weren’t just killing everything.
1405
01:26:16,629 --> 01:26:20,633
I just became obsessed with it, even though I was really bad at this level
1406
01:26:20,717 --> 01:26:22,135
where you go into the sewers.
1407
01:26:22,176 --> 01:26:24,512
I had no idea how to play that, but I would play that first level,
1408
01:26:24,596 --> 01:26:28,099
stealing the Death Star plans over and over and over again,
1409
01:26:28,182 --> 01:26:31,936
like I probably spent 30 hours just playing that level as a kid.
1410
01:26:32,395 --> 01:26:35,773
And that was kind of a formative experience for me and really
1411
01:26:35,815 --> 01:26:37,525
got me into the genre.
1412
01:26:37,567 --> 01:26:39,986
I had loved it so much that I, every time I went into a store,
1413
01:26:40,111 --> 01:26:42,155
if I saw Dark Forces, I bought it.
1414
01:26:42,196 --> 01:26:45,199
I ended up with a massive stack of Dark Forces.
1415
01:26:45,491 --> 01:26:48,119
At this point in time, we have worked on
1416
01:26:48,202 --> 01:26:50,330
over a thousand different games,
1417
01:26:50,371 --> 01:26:54,334
stuff like Doom, Quake, Turok, uh, System Shock.
1418
01:26:54,375 --> 01:26:58,796
I’ve gotten to do Star Wars games which is kind of unbelievable to me as a kid who,
1419
01:26:58,963 --> 01:27:01,215
you know, really loved Star Wars.
1420
01:27:01,424 --> 01:27:03,259
[star wars music]
[blaster fire]
1421
01:27:03,384 --> 01:27:05,470
Innovation only comes
1422
01:27:05,553 --> 01:27:07,513
from when people decide
1423
01:27:07,680 --> 01:27:10,224
‘I wanna make a game for myself,
1424
01:27:10,767 --> 01:27:12,352
I don’t care about your opinion,’
1425
01:27:12,435 --> 01:27:14,979
and then present something that’s brand new
1426
01:27:15,021 --> 01:27:17,398
and who knows? You might create a new genre
1427
01:27:20,068 --> 01:27:24,155
[Vader] Very impressive, General. The Emperor will be most pleased.
1428
01:27:28,910 --> 01:27:31,037
I was friends with Paul Neurath who
1429
01:27:31,079 --> 01:27:33,331
renamed Blue Sky Software to Looking Glass,
1430
01:27:33,373 --> 01:27:36,042
and Matt Toschlog and Mike Kulas were programmers there.
1431
01:27:36,376 --> 01:27:38,670
They wanted to start a game company.
1432
01:27:38,711 --> 01:27:41,214
They had some technology that they think would be really cool,
1433
01:27:41,297 --> 01:27:43,424
and so we’re like, ‘Hey, keep, keep me posted,’
1434
01:27:43,466 --> 01:27:46,094
you know, on whatever you make, and we'll, we’ll check it out.
1435
01:28:00,274 --> 01:28:03,444
Descent was called Project Inferno while it was in development,
1436
01:28:03,486 --> 01:28:06,990
and they kept on sending me VCR, you know, “builds,”
1437
01:28:07,031 --> 01:28:09,742
you know, I couldn’t run it on my computer, but I could watch the video of it.
1438
01:28:09,826 --> 01:28:11,619
and, uh, and it was really cool.
1439
01:28:11,703 --> 01:28:13,079
[Blaster fire]
1440
01:28:13,204 --> 01:28:16,249
Descent was awesome. It had something different to it.
1441
01:28:16,666 --> 01:28:19,794
During that time, developers were trying to find a different
1442
01:28:19,877 --> 01:28:21,713
take on first person shooters.
1443
01:28:21,796 --> 01:28:25,091
And this is like really cool, six degrees of freedom rotating.
1444
01:28:25,258 --> 01:28:28,052
It looks really good. The, the technology is beyond
1445
01:28:28,219 --> 01:28:30,263
the Ultima Underworld technology.
1446
01:28:30,430 --> 01:28:33,391
I would love to publish this game,
1447
01:28:33,474 --> 01:28:36,477
but like I, at the time, was too busy with Raven,
1448
01:28:36,519 --> 01:28:40,732
and so, I couldn’t take on another game on top of everything that was going on
1449
01:28:40,815 --> 01:28:44,444
with all the business, because Doom exploded the world.
1450
01:28:44,610 --> 01:28:48,364
And then they just, like, go to Interplay. Interplay, boom, publishes it,
1451
01:28:48,448 --> 01:28:51,159
and the rest is history.
1452
01:28:51,367 --> 01:28:54,912
When Descent was first presented to us, it was really crude.
1453
01:28:54,954 --> 01:28:57,290
I mean, it really wasn’t a game.
1454
01:28:57,373 --> 01:29:02,045
It was just a simulator of a little spaceship flying in an interior of an asteroid.
1455
01:29:02,086 --> 01:29:04,505
Matt Toschlog was in touch with Brian Fargo,
1456
01:29:04,505 --> 01:29:07,467
and Brian was out looking for a lot of different games,
1457
01:29:07,467 --> 01:29:11,512
and we also started working with Parallax on the development of Descent.
1458
01:29:11,512 --> 01:29:14,807
And so, there was sort of, like, our foray into that space.
1459
01:29:14,807 --> 01:29:17,643
In Descent, there is no such thing as down
1460
01:29:17,643 --> 01:29:20,313
so, therefore once you get vertigo,
1461
01:29:20,313 --> 01:29:22,356
you spiral out of control.
1462
01:29:22,356 --> 01:29:26,360
The 360 rotation; I think that’s the thing that really surprised everybody,
1463
01:29:26,360 --> 01:29:28,529
because I remember, when we presented at different
1464
01:29:28,529 --> 01:29:32,200
trade shows and presented to different editors and publishers, et cetera,
1465
01:29:32,200 --> 01:29:35,036
like PC Gamer, um, they looked at it, and they were all shocked.
1466
01:29:35,036 --> 01:29:36,996
The interface really surprised them.
1467
01:29:36,996 --> 01:29:41,584
People were just overwhelmed with the ability of moving in all directions.
1468
01:29:41,584 --> 01:29:44,796
There have been numerous people at, uh, Interplay QA
1469
01:29:44,796 --> 01:29:47,799
who got motion sickness from playing the game.
1470
01:29:47,799 --> 01:29:50,343
While it was a decent frame rate,
1471
01:29:50,343 --> 01:29:52,929
it was still below 30 frames per second.
1472
01:29:52,929 --> 01:29:55,932
The average hardware of the time,
1473
01:29:55,932 --> 01:29:58,684
it ran between 15 and 20 frames per second.
1474
01:29:58,684 --> 01:30:01,354
I never got motion sick. I, I thought it was great.
1475
01:30:01,354 --> 01:30:04,440
I could totally handle that. You know, Space Road was the same.
1476
01:30:04,440 --> 01:30:07,777
You’re rotating in space trying to dock with something
1477
01:30:07,777 --> 01:30:10,196
and having to get used to the rotating perspective and all that.
1478
01:30:10,196 --> 01:30:13,241
But, no one was really ready for the 360 rotation.
1479
01:30:13,241 --> 01:30:15,868
And I noticed a lot of people at, at first
1480
01:30:15,868 --> 01:30:19,872
were getting lost, and that was one of the reasons the Guide Bot got put into the game.
1481
01:30:19,872 --> 01:30:21,999
But, it was revolutionary,
1482
01:30:21,999 --> 01:30:26,587
and the delight that we saw from people’s faces was absolutely a thrill.
1483
01:30:26,587 --> 01:30:30,383
This is gonna be a really cool game. It’s so different than anything we’re doing
1484
01:30:30,383 --> 01:30:32,593
Which is, ‘A dude with a gun runs around.’
1485
01:30:32,593 --> 01:30:35,847
We, at the time, thought, ‘You know, we gotta go head to head with Doom.
1486
01:30:35,847 --> 01:30:38,599
We gotta just make some comparisons straight away.’
1487
01:30:38,599 --> 01:30:42,103
And Descent offers all these different types of combat experiences.
1488
01:30:42,103 --> 01:30:45,231
It’s a true 3D space, Doom is not.
1489
01:30:45,231 --> 01:30:47,066
We had to distinguish ourselves,
1490
01:30:47,066 --> 01:30:49,902
because it was kind of a shooter, but it really wasn’t.
1491
01:30:49,902 --> 01:30:53,698
It was mostly like this sci-fi exploration
1492
01:30:53,698 --> 01:30:57,577
with great controls and also some combat experiences as well.
1493
01:30:57,577 --> 01:31:00,955
Descent was something that they brought something different, new,
1494
01:31:00,955 --> 01:31:04,041
and fresh to the genre, so I think that’s the way
1495
01:31:04,041 --> 01:31:07,587
why it stood out amongst all the other games that were being developed at the time.
1496
01:31:07,920 --> 01:31:11,924
High speed Deathmatch with ships inside of tunnels was pretty cool.
1497
01:31:11,924 --> 01:31:15,511
It was also the first title at Interplay that we had a CD-ROM.
1498
01:31:15,511 --> 01:31:19,974
That was a big deal. One thing that was really important to us: the cover image of the box
1499
01:31:19,974 --> 01:31:22,268
had to be dynamic and incredible.
1500
01:31:22,268 --> 01:31:25,438
We spent just a lot of time on screenshots
1501
01:31:25,438 --> 01:31:28,024
really getting that right trajectory.
1502
01:31:28,024 --> 01:31:30,693
Those are all the pre-Photoshop days, right? So,
1503
01:31:30,693 --> 01:31:33,779
when we did screenshots, those were real screenshots.
1504
01:31:33,779 --> 01:31:37,200
We wanted to create the dynamic icon in the front of the box
1505
01:31:37,200 --> 01:31:40,786
and just kind of really own that space in a big way.
1506
01:31:40,786 --> 01:31:44,290
Back in those days, for PC games, you could do things that were really unique:
1507
01:31:44,290 --> 01:31:47,627
pull-out packages, really 3D textures.
1508
01:31:47,627 --> 01:31:50,087
Part of the game experience was buying that box,
1509
01:31:50,087 --> 01:31:53,174
going to the game store and picking up that package and just, like, ‘
1510
01:31:53,174 --> 01:31:55,509
‘Ah, I’ve really got something here.’
1511
01:31:56,510 --> 01:31:59,889
I look back at Descent as something I’m very proud to be a part of.
1512
01:32:00,056 --> 01:32:02,433
It was the thing, for me, where I realized,
1513
01:32:02,433 --> 01:32:03,684
‘I’m in the right place.’
1514
01:32:04,018 --> 01:32:07,897
This is just breakthrough technology, a new potential for gameplay.
1515
01:32:08,231 --> 01:32:13,653
It was like that spark of innovation
Descent was pushing the hardware as hard as it could.
1516
01:32:23,120 --> 01:32:26,958
[whistling]
1517
01:32:27,124 --> 01:32:30,503
I am here to kick ass and chew bubblegum, and I’m all out of gum.
1518
01:32:30,503 --> 01:32:31,796
They love that one.
1519
01:32:33,172 --> 01:32:41,097
[Heavy metal track]
1520
01:32:41,514 --> 01:32:43,224
[Whoosh]
1521
01:32:50,189 --> 01:32:52,984
Hail to the King Baby
1522
01:32:53,526 --> 01:32:56,612
Todd Replogle was the programmer for all the Duke games,
1523
01:32:56,654 --> 01:32:59,949
and he was working on a game that he was calling Heavy Metal at the time,
1524
01:32:59,991 --> 01:33:03,369
because he just wanted that sort of, you know, heavy metal attitude,
1525
01:33:03,452 --> 01:33:07,540
and I said, ‘Look, you know, why don’t we name it after a character like comics do?’
1526
01:33:07,665 --> 01:33:11,335
So, we started batting around names, and I remember I came up with the name ‘Duke’
1527
01:33:11,377 --> 01:33:13,838
because I felt like it was a good, strong, powerful first name,
1528
01:33:14,046 --> 01:33:17,174
and Todd came up with the idea for ‘Nukem’ as the last name, so
1529
01:33:18,301 --> 01:33:19,427
[Duke] Bitching
1530
01:33:19,510 --> 01:33:22,179
Really, the Duke Nukem look didn’t come about until
1531
01:33:22,221 --> 01:33:25,891
my partner, George Broussard, he changed the hair color from white to yellow
1532
01:33:25,975 --> 01:33:28,185
and made it a short military crop,
1533
01:33:28,227 --> 01:33:30,730
and he gave Duke this bright, white smile.
1534
01:33:30,771 --> 01:33:33,065
[Duke] Damn, I’m looking good.
1535
01:33:33,107 --> 01:33:36,527
It just turned into a fun little platformer with shooting.
1536
01:33:36,569 --> 01:33:39,071
He didn’t wear armor, and we had him do
1537
01:33:39,113 --> 01:33:42,408
crazy flips sometimes when he jumped, almost like he’s showing off.
1538
01:33:42,491 --> 01:33:45,161
You know, that was really the roots of his character that we
1539
01:33:45,202 --> 01:33:46,620
embellished with each game.
1540
01:33:46,662 --> 01:33:49,915
I was kind of creative directing over development of Duke Nukem II,
1541
01:33:49,999 --> 01:33:52,460
and I said, ‘What is the big thing about Duke?
1542
01:33:52,501 --> 01:33:54,253
Well, he’s really kind of vain.
1543
01:33:54,295 --> 01:33:56,714
What if he collected his own memorabilia?’
1544
01:33:56,797 --> 01:33:59,383
So, he collects his own memorabilia in Duke Nukem II.
1545
01:33:59,717 --> 01:34:01,552
[Duke] I’m back.
1546
01:34:02,928 --> 01:34:05,890
And, Duke 3, it kind of went over the top again.
1547
01:34:06,015 --> 01:34:08,392
It all really came together with Duke Nukem 3D.
1548
01:34:08,726 --> 01:34:12,605
The initial version of Duke 3D, they were just doing a bunch of levels.
1549
01:34:12,730 --> 01:34:14,982
It just wasn’t turning out fun.
1550
01:34:15,358 --> 01:34:17,109
Kill me.
1551
01:34:17,276 --> 01:34:20,696
At one point, like I was watching the Duke team members
1552
01:34:20,780 --> 01:34:23,157
work on the game ‘till 5:00 PM,
1553
01:34:23,324 --> 01:34:26,202
say, ‘We are done with work,’ and then play Doom together.
1554
01:34:26,410 --> 01:34:29,288
I just, like, pulled George in a room, closed the door, and said,
1555
01:34:29,372 --> 01:34:31,540
‘This game is not turning out fun. Everybody is
1556
01:34:31,582 --> 01:34:33,793
stopping working on it and playing Doom.
1557
01:34:33,876 --> 01:34:36,837
You have to intervene and make this a fun game.’
1558
01:34:36,921 --> 01:34:40,758
And, to George’s credit, he got rid of the previous head of it and took it over himself,
1559
01:34:40,925 --> 01:34:42,718
and that was turning out really fun.
1560
01:34:43,928 --> 01:34:47,640
They kind of, like, used a bunch of known movie lines as, you know, Duke things.
1561
01:34:50,643 --> 01:34:51,644
Groovy.
1562
01:34:51,811 --> 01:34:52,603
[gunshots]
1563
01:34:52,812 --> 01:34:54,230
[Duke] Groovy.
1564
01:34:54,522 --> 01:34:57,191
In 1990, I moved here to San Diego.
1565
01:34:57,233 --> 01:35:00,903
In 1995, Lani Minella, the casting director,
1566
01:35:00,903 --> 01:35:04,490
was in my studio to record an automobile dealer commercial.
1567
01:35:04,490 --> 01:35:07,034
And she came in, we’re setting up the microphones
1568
01:35:07,034 --> 01:35:10,913
and I turned my mic on, and I started doing wacky voices and being crazy,
1569
01:35:10,913 --> 01:35:13,290
Just, you know, to kind of show off to her,
1570
01:35:13,290 --> 01:35:15,960
and she said, ‘Wow! You’ve got remarkable range!
1571
01:35:15,960 --> 01:35:18,421
How would you like to act in video games?’
1572
01:35:18,421 --> 01:35:23,342
And I’d played a few. ‘There’s no voices in video games.’ She said, ‘Well, there’s gonna be.’
1573
01:35:23,342 --> 01:35:26,554
And there’s this game called Duke Nukem that I think you’d be great for.
1574
01:35:26,554 --> 01:35:30,891
The very first game that I auditioned for, and I landed it that day.
1575
01:35:30,891 --> 01:35:32,560
[Duke] Damn, I’m good.
1576
01:35:32,560 --> 01:35:35,354
Lani Minella was with me in the studio as the director,
1577
01:35:35,354 --> 01:35:37,940
and she dialed up George Broussard.
1578
01:35:37,940 --> 01:35:40,443
George gets on the phone, and Lani says, ‘George,
1579
01:35:40,443 --> 01:35:44,572
tell John what you think the character should be like. What is he based on?
1580
01:35:44,572 --> 01:35:48,242
‘He’s a badass character. Who’s that badass you have in mind?’
1581
01:35:48,242 --> 01:35:51,120
For some reason, he thought Charles Bronson,
1582
01:35:51,120 --> 01:35:55,124
and I went, ‘Oh, Charles Bronson, you want me to talk like Charles Bronson?’
1583
01:35:55,166 --> 01:35:57,042
He goes, ‘No, no, no, that’s not it.’
1584
01:35:57,126 --> 01:35:59,336
And Lani suggested that I imitate
1585
01:35:59,336 --> 01:36:01,172
Clint Eastwood from Dirty Harry.
1586
01:36:01,255 --> 01:36:04,800
‘So, you gotta ask yourself, do you feel lucky? Well, do you, punk?’
1587
01:36:05,009 --> 01:36:07,803
And George went, ‘I like that tonality,
1588
01:36:07,845 --> 01:36:11,348
but Duke Nukem is a roided out huge muscular dude, and I, I said,
1589
01:36:11,432 --> 01:36:13,184
‘Okay, I’l just lower it an octave.’
1590
01:36:13,267 --> 01:36:16,103
Well, do you feel lucky? Do you, punk?
1591
01:36:16,228 --> 01:36:21,025
And that was it, and I’ve been talking like this now for what? 30 years? You know?
1592
01:36:21,192 --> 01:36:24,445
We could not have picked a better voice actor for Duke with Jon St. John.
1593
01:36:24,487 --> 01:36:26,822
He relished the role to this day.
1594
01:36:26,906 --> 01:36:30,159
He played it with gritty enthusiasm and just embraced
1595
01:36:30,201 --> 01:36:32,912
the direction that George Broussard gave him for the character.
1596
01:36:33,162 --> 01:36:37,249
Oh yeah, I, I get requests for these lines on social media all the time
1597
01:36:37,249 --> 01:36:39,251
but, of course, I’ve found a way to monetize it.
1598
01:36:39,376 --> 01:36:42,588
So, now I just send them to my Cameo.
1599
01:36:42,713 --> 01:36:47,843
Jason King is chewing gum and kicking ass on Kung Fu Hotdog.
1600
01:36:47,927 --> 01:36:50,763
And, guess what? He’s all out of ass.
1601
01:36:50,888 --> 01:36:53,557
Duke Nukem added a level of tongue in cheek
1602
01:36:53,682 --> 01:36:56,060
machismo to the first person shooter genre.
1603
01:36:56,060 --> 01:36:59,772
If the only thing you know about first person shooter is Doom and Quake
1604
01:36:59,772 --> 01:37:04,026
and, you know, demons and hell and, you know, blah, blah, blah.
1605
01:37:04,026 --> 01:37:08,280
And then, you have this, this completely over the top character.
1606
01:37:08,489 --> 01:37:12,159
I think the biggest impression that it made on me was
1607
01:37:12,159 --> 01:37:16,288
that a game like this doesn’t have to take itself so seriously.
1608
01:37:16,330 --> 01:37:17,414
You know?
1609
01:37:18,958 --> 01:37:20,793
[Duke] I ain’t afraid of no quake.
1610
01:37:20,876 --> 01:37:25,464
I mean that was the first time I think I’d play a game where the character had like a personality,
1611
01:37:25,464 --> 01:37:27,633
more like a ‘90s action film.
1612
01:37:27,633 --> 01:37:30,427
You know, Last Action Hero, Demolition Man,
1613
01:37:30,427 --> 01:37:32,596
like all these movies had a bit of, like, an awareness
1614
01:37:32,596 --> 01:37:34,557
and, like, a comedy factor.
1615
01:37:35,558 --> 01:37:38,227
Don’t give up your day job.
1616
01:37:38,227 --> 01:37:42,022
The folks at, uh, Triptych and at 3D Realms and Apogee,
1617
01:37:42,022 --> 01:37:45,401
they came up with all the lines. Well, they stole most of them.
1618
01:37:45,401 --> 01:37:48,279
Obviously, Duke Nukem’s lines were mostly stolen.
1619
01:37:48,487 --> 01:37:52,866
I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass,
1620
01:37:52,866 --> 01:37:55,327
and I’m all out of bubblegum.
1621
01:37:55,327 --> 01:37:56,829
[gunshot]
1622
01:37:56,829 --> 01:37:59,164
I think what happened with, uh, Scott Miller and George Broussard was
1623
01:37:59,290 --> 01:38:01,834
they clearly were big fans of genre films
1624
01:38:01,875 --> 01:38:05,212
such as Evil Dead, and They Live, and they basically just ripped lines
1625
01:38:05,212 --> 01:38:08,173
from those movies that are classic iconic films
1626
01:38:08,173 --> 01:38:10,718
and kind of introduced it to a new generation of kids that didn’t even know
1627
01:38:10,718 --> 01:38:12,177
what those lines were from.
1628
01:38:12,303 --> 01:38:15,431
[gunshots]
1629
01:38:15,598 --> 01:38:16,807
Hail to the King, baby.
1630
01:38:16,890 --> 01:38:17,766
[gunshots]
1631
01:38:17,850 --> 01:38:19,810
[Duke] Hail to the King, baby.
1632
01:38:19,935 --> 01:38:22,062
Oh, there were some lines that I, uh,
1633
01:38:22,062 --> 01:38:25,649
I was triggered by Lani during the recording session.
1634
01:38:25,691 --> 01:38:28,902
For some reason, I find the captain’s log somewhere,
1635
01:38:28,944 --> 01:38:31,196
and I couldn’t stop thinking about
1636
01:38:31,280 --> 01:38:33,282
a turd at that point.
1637
01:38:33,449 --> 01:38:38,454
Huh? The captain’s log? [laughs]
I can’t do it!
1638
01:38:38,537 --> 01:38:40,289
Every time I think about it.
1639
01:38:40,372 --> 01:38:42,583
I could never say it without laughing.
1640
01:38:42,666 --> 01:38:43,876
[Duke] Rocking!
1641
01:38:46,462 --> 01:38:49,256
[Explosions]
1642
01:38:49,632 --> 01:38:52,426
When I first joined 3D Realms and
1643
01:38:52,509 --> 01:38:55,095
was working on Duke 3D, it was, it was a joy
1644
01:38:55,179 --> 01:38:58,265
because Ken Silverman’s build engine was awesome.
1645
01:38:58,307 --> 01:39:00,768
It, it had a lot of advantages over Doom.
1646
01:39:00,851 --> 01:39:03,354
It was very extendable, and, and it was easy
1647
01:39:03,395 --> 01:39:06,023
for designers and programmers to play with it.
1648
01:39:06,065 --> 01:39:08,692
He put together a demo for the build engine
1649
01:39:08,692 --> 01:39:10,694
in a very short amount of time,
1650
01:39:10,694 --> 01:39:12,738
and it was just, like, very impressive.
1651
01:39:12,738 --> 01:39:15,741
Build, really, was started from a public announcement
1652
01:39:15,741 --> 01:39:19,119
from mid-software announcing all the features of Doom.
1653
01:39:19,119 --> 01:39:22,581
This was in early ‘93. So I would read through the features one by one.
1654
01:39:22,581 --> 01:39:24,875
It was obviously really ambitious,
1655
01:39:24,875 --> 01:39:27,920
and so I started prototyping. I knew about the angled walls
1656
01:39:27,920 --> 01:39:30,839
and the ceilings and floors, but the important thing is
1657
01:39:30,839 --> 01:39:32,925
it was good enough to get Apogee’s interest.
1658
01:39:33,008 --> 01:39:34,551
[Duke] Groovy.
1659
01:39:34,551 --> 01:39:37,137
I actually used the trick, the big feature,
1660
01:39:37,137 --> 01:39:38,972
the ability to look up and down.
1661
01:39:38,972 --> 01:39:41,141
Nobody really told me how I could do it,
1662
01:39:41,141 --> 01:39:44,937
so I thought to myself, ‘Well, hm, I could just shift the horizon up and down.’
1663
01:39:44,937 --> 01:39:47,106
It might not be correct perspective,
1664
01:39:47,106 --> 01:39:49,692
but it’ll actually allow you to still look up and down.
1665
01:39:49,692 --> 01:39:52,236
Due to the limitations of the Doom engine,
1666
01:39:52,236 --> 01:39:55,489
they really couldn’t capture cityscapes,
1667
01:39:55,489 --> 01:39:57,658
because the game only allowed
1668
01:39:57,658 --> 01:40:00,327
flat ground and vertical walls.
1669
01:40:00,327 --> 01:40:04,206
One of the biggest things I added that really changed the design of everything
1670
01:40:04,206 --> 01:40:05,958
was the addition of slopes.
1671
01:40:05,958 --> 01:40:09,753
Duke, because it had the ability to do slanted walls,
1672
01:40:09,753 --> 01:40:11,714
was able to do slanted roofs,
1673
01:40:11,714 --> 01:40:14,216
dumpsters that actually had the slanted roof.
1674
01:40:14,216 --> 01:40:17,344
It allowed them a lot more freedom and level design.
1675
01:40:17,344 --> 01:40:19,388
We had contract artists that would come and go,
1676
01:40:19,388 --> 01:40:21,682
but the core group that was in there every morning.
1677
01:40:21,682 --> 01:40:24,101
evening, night was 8-10 people
1678
01:40:24,101 --> 01:40:26,437
and, uh, for that whole game, there’s two level designers:
1679
01:40:26,437 --> 01:40:28,021
me and Allen Bloom.
1680
01:40:28,021 --> 01:40:30,232
Allen and I basically had our freedom to
1681
01:40:30,232 --> 01:40:33,110
I was never told, ‘Do a sushi bar’ or, or
1682
01:40:33,110 --> 01:40:36,363
‘Do a, this or that.’ Once we had gotten a level
1683
01:40:36,363 --> 01:40:38,615
started, you know like, ‘Okay, it’s gonna be a sushi restaurant,
1684
01:40:38,615 --> 01:40:41,368
and, here, I fleshed out most of the geometry,’
1685
01:40:41,368 --> 01:40:44,580
then a lot of input came in, like we, we tested every night.
1686
01:40:47,124 --> 01:40:50,294
[Duke] ♪Born to be wild♪
1687
01:40:50,502 --> 01:40:52,671
The abyss, where it’s a whole canyon,
1688
01:40:52,671 --> 01:40:54,214
it has an earthquake halfway through where
1689
01:40:54,214 --> 01:40:56,133
stuff comes down and everything.
1690
01:40:56,133 --> 01:40:58,093
This is a big hallway that goes like this
1691
01:40:58,093 --> 01:41:00,971
and then changes when, when everything comes down.
1692
01:41:00,971 --> 01:41:02,890
Hollywood Holocaust, the, the opening map.
1693
01:41:02,890 --> 01:41:06,935
Now, you had memorable locations, the, the movie screen
1694
01:41:06,935 --> 01:41:09,229
that you could discover the secret behind and so on,
1695
01:41:09,229 --> 01:41:11,190
arcade games in there that you could play.
1696
01:41:11,482 --> 01:41:13,984
[Duke] Hmm..don’t have time to play with myself.
1697
01:41:14,067 --> 01:41:17,738
You know, it wasn’t a big map, but it, it just set the stage for the entire experience
1698
01:41:17,738 --> 01:41:20,073
and got the game off on the right foot.
1699
01:41:20,073 --> 01:41:23,452
It was the first time in a first person action game that
1700
01:41:23,452 --> 01:41:26,872
we, as players, had a, a sense of a real place.
1701
01:41:26,872 --> 01:41:29,166
You felt like you could actually go there.
1702
01:41:29,333 --> 01:41:32,628
[Duke] Somebody’s gonna frigging pay for screwing up my vacation.
1703
01:41:32,711 --> 01:41:33,879
[thunder cracks]
1704
01:41:33,962 --> 01:41:36,507
With Duke 3D, their environmental design
1705
01:41:36,507 --> 01:41:40,052
with interactive environments was so important to FPS games.
1706
01:41:40,052 --> 01:41:42,346
They raised the bar when they did that.
1707
01:41:42,429 --> 01:41:46,558
[Duke] That’s one doomed Space Marine. Groovy.
1708
01:41:46,892 --> 01:41:49,853
That was the first FPS where the world seemed real,
1709
01:41:49,853 --> 01:41:51,855
like Doom was all these weird space stations and these
1710
01:41:51,855 --> 01:41:54,650
hellish environments, and then Duke Nukem was, ‘This is like a city street
1711
01:41:54,650 --> 01:41:56,652
and this is a store, and this is a nightclub,
1712
01:41:56,652 --> 01:41:58,695
and there’s a pool table, and there’s a bathroom.
1713
01:41:58,695 --> 01:42:02,866
I can’t really remember seeing any game prior to that that kind of nailed that feeling of authenticity.
1714
01:42:02,866 --> 01:42:05,536
We can’t compete with what Doom does well,
1715
01:42:05,536 --> 01:42:08,163
and it’s a very dark, gritty, very serious.
1716
01:42:08,163 --> 01:42:11,041
So, we decided to do a lot of things that Doom wasn’t doing:
1717
01:42:11,333 --> 01:42:12,668
gave Duke Nukem a voice.
1718
01:42:12,835 --> 01:42:15,128
[Duke] Those alien bastards shot up my ride.
1719
01:42:15,212 --> 01:42:16,964
We added humor to the game.
1720
01:42:17,297 --> 01:42:18,215
[Duke] Yeah, die.
1721
01:42:18,298 --> 01:42:20,175
Interactive environments.
1722
01:42:20,259 --> 01:42:23,720
It felt like you’re a real character, because you’re in real world locations.
1723
01:42:23,720 --> 01:42:24,930
That’s the first thing.
1724
01:42:25,013 --> 01:42:27,724
The second thing is that, because the game was so heavy on interactivity
1725
01:42:27,724 --> 01:42:30,727
it actually felt like you were a person, like a hero.
1726
01:42:30,894 --> 01:42:34,690
Not just a video game hero but a real hero in the real world.
1727
01:42:34,815 --> 01:42:36,608
[Duke] Let God sort him out.
1728
01:42:36,650 --> 01:42:39,152
Well, you’re gonna go straight to talking about the strippers in that game.
1729
01:42:39,194 --> 01:42:41,738
because that was the main thing I remember interacting with at the time.
1730
01:42:41,822 --> 01:42:43,073
[Duke] Shake it, baby.
1731
01:42:43,156 --> 01:42:47,035
I love that the animators took the time to show Duke
1732
01:42:47,160 --> 01:42:49,580
perched on top of an alien neck taking a dump.
1733
01:42:49,705 --> 01:42:51,748
That is just the best thing ever.
1734
01:42:51,874 --> 01:42:55,085
‘cause he literally does it and read the new newspaper at the same time
1735
01:42:55,669 --> 01:42:58,463
When you add in that interactivity, you add in the, the character of Duke Nukem,
1736
01:42:58,463 --> 01:43:00,966
you add in there over the top mentality and, you know, the,
1737
01:43:01,008 --> 01:43:03,135
the weaponry in that, that was in that game, you had an instant classic
1738
01:43:03,176 --> 01:43:06,263
with Duke Nukem that took first person shooters to the next level.
1739
01:43:06,430 --> 01:43:09,808
I mean, back then when you’re making an FPS on the PC,
1740
01:43:09,933 --> 01:43:11,768
we felt like the rule was,
1741
01:43:11,894 --> 01:43:15,314
‘Well, the keyboard goes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0,’
1742
01:43:15,480 --> 01:43:19,109
so we’re gonna get 10 weapons. It’s like the first weapon had to be a pistol.
1743
01:43:19,276 --> 01:43:21,069
Of course, Duke had its own twist,
1744
01:43:21,111 --> 01:43:25,324
but they were very much derived from those first five weapons in Doom,
1745
01:43:25,365 --> 01:43:27,910
even the fifth weapon in Doom was the rocket launcher,
1746
01:43:27,951 --> 01:43:30,329
and the fifth weapon in Duke Nukem was a rocket launcher.
1747
01:43:30,370 --> 01:43:33,165
Once we got past those give basic once, we felt like,
1748
01:43:33,165 --> 01:43:34,124
‘It’s on.’
1749
01:43:34,207 --> 01:43:35,876
[gunfire]
[Duke] Come get some.
1750
01:43:35,959 --> 01:43:38,921
And, of course, Duke had some innovations with things like the pipe bomb.
1751
01:43:39,004 --> 01:43:40,714
[explosion]
1752
01:43:40,839 --> 01:43:43,634
and the trip wires and the freeze gun.
1753
01:43:43,675 --> 01:43:46,094
There’s not really, like, a bad weapon in that game.
1754
01:43:46,136 --> 01:43:47,679
Even a pistol, like, has its place.
1755
01:43:47,721 --> 01:43:49,723
My favorite weapon is the shotgun.
1756
01:43:49,806 --> 01:43:52,684
It’s a Mossberg, and it just looks so cool, and it sounds
1757
01:43:52,726 --> 01:43:54,144
insane when you shoot with it.
1758
01:43:54,811 --> 01:43:57,481
Probably a devastator being able to bust those things out
1759
01:43:57,522 --> 01:43:59,816
and just clear out a whole room is pretty satisfying.
1760
01:43:59,900 --> 01:44:01,860
But, they’re all awesome, man, even the shrink ray’s fun.
1761
01:44:01,902 --> 01:44:03,946
Like it’s, it’s just so creative for its time.
1762
01:44:04,029 --> 01:44:05,864
Shrink people with a shrink ray, you could
1763
01:44:05,948 --> 01:44:08,909
you could go up and stomp on them. I just thought that was
[crunch]
1764
01:44:08,951 --> 01:44:11,161
I smiled and laughed every time I saw that.
1765
01:44:11,286 --> 01:44:13,705
Originally, it was my, uh,
1766
01:44:13,830 --> 01:44:16,458
combat boots that were used as the boot,
1767
01:44:16,500 --> 01:44:18,585
and then, of course Richard Gray will tell you later,
1768
01:44:18,710 --> 01:44:20,754
one weekend, they needed to make an art tweak.
1769
01:44:20,837 --> 01:44:22,798
He wore his own combat boots,
1770
01:44:22,923 --> 01:44:25,801
That’s my foot. Those are my…I still have the boots
1771
01:44:25,884 --> 01:44:29,805
right here in Texas. He has a pair too, but I can tell those are my blue jeans.
1772
01:44:29,930 --> 01:44:34,643
And he loves to brag about how he stole my glory by putting his foot in the game.
1773
01:44:36,478 --> 01:44:39,773
[Duke] It’s down to you and me, you one-eyed freak.
1774
01:44:39,856 --> 01:44:42,234
When I recorded the first Duke Nukem 3D game,
1775
01:44:42,275 --> 01:44:43,485
[Duke] Come get some.
1776
01:44:43,527 --> 01:44:46,029
I did not know there was any kind of following whatsoever
1777
01:44:46,071 --> 01:44:48,699
until 1999 or 2000
1778
01:44:48,824 --> 01:44:51,368
when I got my first invitation to a convention.
1779
01:44:51,493 --> 01:44:53,996
I was flown across country first class,
1780
01:44:54,037 --> 01:44:56,456
put up in a really nice hotel
1781
01:44:56,540 --> 01:45:00,585
and they pay me, and the fans acted like I’m some kind of superstar.
1782
01:45:00,711 --> 01:45:02,671
and I was baffled by it.
1783
01:45:02,754 --> 01:45:05,632
I was absolutely blown away that people came out to see me.
1784
01:45:05,716 --> 01:45:08,468
At the end of the convention, they said, ‘Hey, thank you so much.
1785
01:45:08,635 --> 01:45:10,429
You helped bump up our attendance by like
1786
01:45:10,470 --> 01:45:13,056
5,000 people this year, and I’m like, ‘What?
1787
01:45:13,223 --> 01:45:15,434
I can’t believe anybody even knows this game.’
1788
01:45:15,475 --> 01:45:17,936
And they couldn’t believe that I didn’t know
1789
01:45:18,020 --> 01:45:19,980
Duke Nukem 3D was a big deal.
1790
01:45:20,022 --> 01:45:21,231
[Duke] Let’s rock.
1791
01:45:21,231 --> 01:45:23,650
Duke 3D was a game that
1792
01:45:23,692 --> 01:45:26,111
kind of put us at the same level as in software,
1793
01:45:26,153 --> 01:45:28,989
so that was like, ‘Okay, we’ve arrived with Duke 3D’
1794
01:45:29,031 --> 01:45:31,199
So, Duke turned into a fantastic game.
1795
01:45:31,283 --> 01:45:34,077
If I had to pick between doing the first Quake and doing Duke,
1796
01:45:34,161 --> 01:45:35,412
I, I would pick Duke.
1797
01:45:35,537 --> 01:45:37,622
I feel more happy about what we did.
1798
01:45:37,706 --> 01:45:41,376
It was so fun. I had so much fun playing through that entire game.
1799
01:45:41,460 --> 01:45:43,170
They did what they needed to do, right?
1800
01:45:43,253 --> 01:45:46,798
That’s why you still know who Duke Nukem is now, you know, 20
1801
01:45:46,923 --> 01:45:48,341
20 something years later.
1802
01:45:48,633 --> 01:45:54,431
[gunshots]
1803
01:45:54,556 --> 01:45:56,016
[Duke] Game over.
1804
01:45:56,141 --> 01:45:59,394
Duke Nukem and I share very few commonalities
1805
01:45:59,436 --> 01:46:03,982
except that we both like bubblegum. Other than that, we’re nothing alike
1806
01:46:04,107 --> 01:46:07,319
[Duke] The question is, do you have bubblegum?
1807
01:46:07,402 --> 01:46:11,865
Oh, damn, and I’m all out of gum.
1808
01:46:11,990 --> 01:46:20,415
♪♪♪
1809
01:46:20,874 --> 01:46:22,876
All the four build engine games that we launched
1810
01:46:23,001 --> 01:46:26,004
back in 1994, they were all very, very different.
1811
01:46:26,046 --> 01:46:27,672
Unless someone told you they ran on the same engine,
1812
01:46:27,714 --> 01:46:28,965
you probably wouldn’t even really know it,
1813
01:46:29,007 --> 01:46:30,884
because you’ve just got those vastly different themes.
1814
01:46:30,926 --> 01:46:32,969
It’s like Duke’s, like, the action hero,
1815
01:46:33,011 --> 01:46:34,471
Lo Wang’s, like the martial artist,
1816
01:46:34,513 --> 01:46:36,765
and then Caleb’s like the horror movie kind of thing
1817
01:46:37,015 --> 01:46:39,684
Blood looked a hundred times better than Duke,
1818
01:46:39,726 --> 01:46:43,146
fantastic art and genuinely creepy.
1819
01:46:43,271 --> 01:46:44,856
Blood was really special.
1820
01:46:44,981 --> 01:46:47,400
The subject matter was very horrifying.
1821
01:46:47,484 --> 01:46:50,112
Seeing all the horror references sprinkled in
1822
01:46:50,153 --> 01:46:52,823
is just a real treat for fans of the genre.
1823
01:46:54,658 --> 01:46:57,202
My slave.
1824
01:46:57,369 --> 01:46:58,995
What is your bidding, master?
1825
01:46:59,079 --> 01:47:01,414
Even the cover had blood on it.
1826
01:47:01,498 --> 01:47:03,750
It had a lot of themes that were
1827
01:47:03,792 --> 01:47:07,337
not popular with parents who were primarily buying these games for their kids.
1828
01:47:07,379 --> 01:47:11,216
Occultism is really intertwined with this era of FPSs.
1829
01:47:11,341 --> 01:47:16,096
I don’t know if it’s something about, like, the Satanic panic of the ‘80s or ‘90s.
1830
01:47:16,221 --> 01:47:19,015
You know, you’ve got Heretic and Hexen and Doom, obviously.
1831
01:47:19,141 --> 01:47:21,768
People are really obsessed with this idea of
1832
01:47:21,810 --> 01:47:25,522
these evil folks in subterranean layers doing rituals
1833
01:47:25,605 --> 01:47:28,400
and, you know, we have to go down there and stop them, I guess.
1834
01:47:28,441 --> 01:47:31,444
The difficulty of that game is pretty legendary.
1835
01:47:31,528 --> 01:47:33,655
It’s not for the weak and, um,
1836
01:47:33,738 --> 01:47:35,782
I think that’s one of its strong suits.
1837
01:47:35,907 --> 01:47:38,827
It has its own arsenal of weapons which somehow
1838
01:47:38,869 --> 01:47:42,372
breaks the mold and, and seems completely separated from what Duke and Lo Wang did.
1839
01:47:42,455 --> 01:47:46,168
I love the voodoo doll. That’s classic. I’d love to see more stuff like that.
1840
01:47:46,251 --> 01:47:49,462
The dynamite, of course, is one of my favorites.
1841
01:47:49,504 --> 01:47:53,425
mostly because I think I’ve killed myself more times with it than I’ve killed enemies.
1842
01:47:53,508 --> 01:47:56,887
I actually borrowed the original disc off a friend of mine and never gave it back to him,
1843
01:47:56,970 --> 01:47:58,847
so my copy of Blood is not my own.
1844
01:47:58,930 --> 01:48:01,433
It’s a classic and rightly so, I think.
1845
01:48:01,725 --> 01:48:05,729
[Explosion]
1846
01:48:06,229 --> 01:48:17,616
♪♪♪
1847
01:48:18,116 --> 01:48:20,076
You no mess with Lo Wang.
1848
01:48:20,160 --> 01:48:22,454
Back then, the whole first person shooter industry
1849
01:48:22,579 --> 01:48:25,081
was ruled by 3D Realms and its software.
1850
01:48:25,207 --> 01:48:27,542
Duke 3D really showed that
1851
01:48:27,584 --> 01:48:30,462
Apogee internally could develop a hit game
1852
01:48:30,503 --> 01:48:33,506
and, um, all the seeds were there in the original Shadow Warrior game.
1853
01:48:33,673 --> 01:48:36,384
And it started as a concept. ‘Hey, let’s, you know, do a
1854
01:48:36,426 --> 01:48:39,596
ninja version of Duke Nukem.’ ‘Cool, use the builders and go for that.’
1855
01:48:39,763 --> 01:48:43,642
Once again, we had a character with humor, a lot of crazy weapons.
1856
01:48:43,767 --> 01:48:45,894
The sticky bomb was a natural evolution.
1857
01:48:45,977 --> 01:48:49,940
I remember talking with about that with Allen while we were still working on Duke 3D.
1858
01:48:50,023 --> 01:48:52,817
Better watch out. Boom, boom.
1859
01:48:53,944 --> 01:48:56,529
I mean, the real gun, what was the movie we saw?
1860
01:48:56,613 --> 01:48:57,948
It was an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.
1861
01:48:58,073 --> 01:49:00,909
[zapping and explosions]
1862
01:49:00,951 --> 01:49:02,619
You’ve been erased.
1863
01:49:02,744 --> 01:49:03,745
Eraser.
1864
01:49:03,787 --> 01:49:05,705
We’re like, ‘That’s awesome.’ We just stole that.
1865
01:49:05,872 --> 01:49:09,417
[gunshots]
[chuckling]
1866
01:49:09,501 --> 01:49:13,046
Shotgun was really important to me and, you know, Jim Norwood wanted a full
1867
01:49:13,129 --> 01:49:16,800
automatic thing and, you know to me, the dance
1868
01:49:16,967 --> 01:49:20,303
that was happening where two players both equipped with a shotgun
1869
01:49:20,387 --> 01:49:23,265
were kind of alternating their point of attack
1870
01:49:23,348 --> 01:49:25,809
while trying to hide during their point of vulnerability,
1871
01:49:25,850 --> 01:49:27,727
I remember feeling like, ‘Okay,
1872
01:49:28,019 --> 01:49:29,771
what if it went in the other direction?
1873
01:49:29,813 --> 01:49:31,731
You know, the thump, thump, thump, thump, thump.
1874
01:49:31,898 --> 01:49:34,567
[gunshots]
1875
01:49:34,859 --> 01:49:37,237
Back in the ‘90s, every game that came out
1876
01:49:37,279 --> 01:49:39,948
had a leap forward in technology that people
1877
01:49:39,990 --> 01:49:42,575
would be blown away by. You know, it was just a tough world
1878
01:49:42,659 --> 01:49:44,494
releasing a game like Shadow Warrior with an
1879
01:49:44,536 --> 01:49:47,664
with an engine that was probably four or five years old at that time.
1880
01:49:47,789 --> 01:49:50,500
Shadow Warrior is certainly a very worthy
1881
01:49:50,583 --> 01:49:54,921
kind of cousin to Duke Nukem, I would say, in terms of its, again, sense of humor.
1882
01:49:55,005 --> 01:49:57,299
That’s no ordinary ring.
1883
01:49:57,382 --> 01:50:00,760
Definitely elements of that would, would be seen as, you know
1884
01:50:00,802 --> 01:50:04,097
inappropriate and, and, and sort of, um, culturally insensitive today
1885
01:50:04,180 --> 01:50:05,390
[explosion]
1886
01:50:05,557 --> 01:50:07,517
You look like a stupid.
1887
01:50:07,600 --> 01:50:09,436
You know, nevertheless, it represents a snapshot of, you know,
1888
01:50:09,436 --> 01:50:11,354
the games that were being made at the time
1889
01:50:11,396 --> 01:50:14,357
Shadow Warrior lives to this day. You know, we sold the rights in
1890
01:50:14,441 --> 01:50:17,319
full to Devolver several years ago, and they keep
1891
01:50:17,360 --> 01:50:18,862
releasing new Shadow Warrior games.
1892
01:50:18,862 --> 01:50:20,864
In the new Devolver reboot games,
1893
01:50:20,864 --> 01:50:23,825
Lo Want is clearly younger, he’s more realistic.
1894
01:50:23,867 --> 01:50:28,371
He’s less of a caricature like we had with our original Lo Wang.
1895
01:50:28,371 --> 01:50:30,832
You find out that he’s a big fan of comics and,
1896
01:50:30,832 --> 01:50:34,586
and he’s got other sort of hobbies on the side and, you know,
1897
01:50:34,586 --> 01:50:37,630
nowadays, characters are not as one dimensional as they used to be.
1898
01:50:37,630 --> 01:50:41,301
You know, Devolver’s just done a great job modernizing the game and
1899
01:50:41,301 --> 01:50:43,803
and making it more compatible
1900
01:50:43,803 --> 01:50:46,431
with our current ways of thinking.
1901
01:50:54,022 --> 01:50:57,025
[music builds]
1902
01:51:09,871 --> 01:51:12,290
[roaring]
1903
01:51:13,500 --> 01:51:15,877
So, when we first went into doing Quake,
1904
01:51:15,919 --> 01:51:18,630
the idea was it was gonna be a lot more like a role playing game.
1905
01:51:18,922 --> 01:51:22,592
Quake was originally a game that we started making after the first
1906
01:51:22,634 --> 01:51:25,720
Commander Keen Trilogy in January of 1991.
1907
01:51:25,887 --> 01:51:27,722
We wanted to make a game called Quake,
1908
01:51:27,722 --> 01:51:31,393
because Quake was part of the DandD universe that John Carmack had invented.
1909
01:51:31,393 --> 01:51:33,937
And we did get to go on an adventure with Quake,
1910
01:51:33,937 --> 01:51:35,980
and it was like the coolest thing ever.
1911
01:51:35,980 --> 01:51:38,942
We even put an ad inside of Commander Keen,
1912
01:51:38,942 --> 01:51:42,487
and we said, ‘Quake, The Fight for Justice is the name of the next game that we’re gonna make.’
1913
01:51:42,487 --> 01:51:45,698
We started making the game, and we just were like,
1914
01:51:45,698 --> 01:51:48,785
‘You know what? The technology’s not here. We do not want to ruin Quake.’
1915
01:51:48,785 --> 01:51:51,663
So, four years later, that’s when we really started Quake,
1916
01:51:51,663 --> 01:51:54,249
because the plan was to do a full 3D game,
1917
01:51:54,499 --> 01:51:57,335
and now, we can actually have a hammer of thunderbolts,
1918
01:51:57,335 --> 01:52:00,880
the Hellgate Cube, and all the other cool stuff that Quake has.
1919
01:52:01,214 --> 01:52:03,007
We’re always trying to do new things,
1920
01:52:03,007 --> 01:52:04,759
and ‘What is the gameplay that we could do?
1921
01:52:04,968 --> 01:52:07,137
I don’t wanna make another clone of Doom.
1922
01:52:07,262 --> 01:52:10,265
Can we do hand-to-hand combat type stuff from a third person viewpoint
1923
01:52:10,306 --> 01:52:13,309
and, like, maybe we do some FPS every once in a while?’
1924
01:52:13,351 --> 01:52:16,938
But as time went on, it took a really long time to make the engine,
1925
01:52:17,021 --> 01:52:19,149
and the team started getting burned out.
1926
01:52:19,357 --> 01:52:20,942
It was pretty hard.
1927
01:52:21,025 --> 01:52:24,112
That was the project where I did really hit a wall,
1928
01:52:24,154 --> 01:52:28,283
and I think that’s a useful thing for people to find out that everybody has their limits.
1929
01:52:28,366 --> 01:52:31,077
All the technology was so new.
1930
01:52:31,161 --> 01:52:34,330
John Carmack was inventing the plane
1931
01:52:34,456 --> 01:52:36,666
while he was flying the plane,
1932
01:52:36,749 --> 01:52:39,502
and we were the passengers outside the plane,
1933
01:52:39,544 --> 01:52:41,921
you know, building things onto it.
1934
01:52:42,046 --> 01:52:44,924
At the beginning, we had designers building maps
1935
01:52:45,049 --> 01:52:47,385
that just had to be thrown away over and over again.
1936
01:52:47,510 --> 01:52:51,431
At some point, my office ended up being next to John’s.
1937
01:52:51,598 --> 01:52:53,933
He chose to have it be me
1938
01:52:53,975 --> 01:52:56,686
that he would come to and say, ‘Hey, can you test this thing?
1939
01:52:56,769 --> 01:52:58,605
American was super valuable at that point.
1940
01:52:58,646 --> 01:53:01,983
It was completely cool with him that I made him throw away
1941
01:53:01,983 --> 01:53:04,194
his work every time I changed something.
1942
01:53:04,319 --> 01:53:06,237
I did put a lot of people,
1943
01:53:06,279 --> 01:53:08,781
practically the whole company, through the ringer with that.
1944
01:53:09,073 --> 01:53:11,326
We’re just spinning wheels the whole time,
1945
01:53:11,409 --> 01:53:14,412
because the engine took so long to get done.
1946
01:53:14,496 --> 01:53:16,414
Part of the company doesn’t want to explore anything.
1947
01:53:16,414 --> 01:53:19,501
They just want to make another FPS like Doom and ship the thing.
1948
01:53:19,584 --> 01:53:21,294
‘We’re done, we’re mentally drained.’
1949
01:53:21,336 --> 01:53:23,588
And I wanted to do the new game design stuff.
1950
01:53:23,630 --> 01:53:26,090
It’s like we just had this meeting and, all of a sudden,
1951
01:53:26,132 --> 01:53:29,385
everything that we’d done went to shit.
1952
01:53:29,385 --> 01:53:32,388
They’re, ‘Yeah, screw these medieval weapons.
1953
01:53:32,514 --> 01:53:36,309
I wanna get back to shotguns and future weapons.’
1954
01:53:36,392 --> 01:53:38,561
I’m like, ‘Oh, fuck, man.’
1955
01:53:38,561 --> 01:53:42,106
Quake was the first time where I did have to really kind of confront
1956
01:53:42,190 --> 01:53:46,152
the fact that, you know, no matter how hard I work, I can’t do everything.
1957
01:53:46,194 --> 01:53:48,363
It was the hardest project that we had done from
1958
01:53:48,446 --> 01:53:49,822
a development process.
1959
01:53:51,950 --> 01:53:53,826
People complained about the brown
1960
01:53:53,910 --> 01:53:57,664
and gray palette, and that was because we had so many colors per light.
1961
01:53:57,705 --> 01:53:59,874
The amount of colors with the light maps
1962
01:53:59,916 --> 01:54:03,628
ate up most of that VGA palette which only has 256 colors total in it.
1963
01:54:03,836 --> 01:54:07,257
So, yeah, we were limited, because we wanted more lighting.
1964
01:54:08,216 --> 01:54:12,971
We picked the colors that best make us a Lovecraftian, dingy, dark,
1965
01:54:13,221 --> 01:54:15,557
unsettling, violent, you know,
1966
01:54:15,557 --> 01:54:18,017
blast fest, and that’s why the game looks that way.
1967
01:54:18,518 --> 01:54:20,853
I’ve always been a big fan of horror and, in Quake,
1968
01:54:20,937 --> 01:54:23,439
for the first time, I think, I was actually able to sneak in
1969
01:54:23,481 --> 01:54:24,899
actual Lovecraft stuff.
1970
01:54:24,983 --> 01:54:30,113
and one of the ways I did that is I got a copy of my book,
and I gave a copy to
1971
01:54:30,196 --> 01:54:33,449
id and, specifically, Adrian and Kevin Cloud were reading it.
1972
01:54:33,491 --> 01:54:37,412
So, a lot of the monsters are based directly off images from this book.
1973
01:54:37,745 --> 01:54:39,205
And I like that world.
1974
01:54:39,289 --> 01:54:41,541
It was very inspirational with, uh,
1975
01:54:41,583 --> 01:54:43,835
many of the characters, and we
1976
01:54:43,876 --> 01:54:46,671
worked on the characters in a, a very unique way.
1977
01:54:46,713 --> 01:54:49,841
Kevin would design the characters
1978
01:54:49,882 --> 01:54:51,926
within a, a 3D program
1979
01:54:51,968 --> 01:54:55,763
and splay out the characters so I could draw the skin.
1980
01:54:55,847 --> 01:54:59,142
One of the things that was a big improvement was the Fiend, the leaping Fiend.
1981
01:54:59,183 --> 01:55:02,228
The big melee monster in Doom was the
1982
01:55:02,270 --> 01:55:04,105
we called it The Demon, the pink-y things,
1983
01:55:04,147 --> 01:55:06,441
and they were actually a pretty boring monster. They would run up to you
1984
01:55:06,524 --> 01:55:08,109
and bite you but, the Fiends,
1985
01:55:08,151 --> 01:55:10,778
you’re actually afraid of, cause they jumped into you like a bunny.
1986
01:55:10,820 --> 01:55:13,781
You know, we had basically four level designers and
1987
01:55:13,823 --> 01:55:17,201
and each one of us, you know, was basically kind of assigned to
1988
01:55:17,285 --> 01:55:20,455
to an episode, and, and all the episodes are really cool.
1989
01:55:20,496 --> 01:55:22,457
You know, they all have very unique personalities,
1990
01:55:22,457 --> 01:55:24,709
and they’re all very different which is something that, I think,
1991
01:55:24,751 --> 01:55:29,797
makes Quake as magical and timeless as it is.
1992
01:55:29,839 --> 01:55:32,425
One of the castles, The Ebon Fortress, is like
1993
01:55:32,467 --> 01:55:34,510
sunken half in water,
1994
01:55:34,594 --> 01:55:37,513
you know, swimming through half the castle before you can get out of the water
1995
01:55:37,555 --> 01:55:39,432
and play through the other parts, and then there’s
1996
01:55:39,474 --> 01:55:41,851
even more water in other areas, so it’s like
1997
01:55:41,893 --> 01:55:43,686
a really cool half and half thing.
1998
01:55:43,770 --> 01:55:46,481
It also let us do a lot more things with
1999
01:55:46,564 --> 01:55:48,566
verticality, you know, there’s,
2000
01:55:48,608 --> 01:55:52,236
there’s that level I do where there’s the pool of water,
2001
01:55:52,278 --> 01:55:55,073
beams over it where you’re clambering up, and you’re getting the high end.
2002
01:55:55,156 --> 01:55:56,658
You can look down and spot things.
2003
01:55:56,699 --> 01:55:58,493
And then, we soon realized that,
2004
01:55:58,576 --> 01:56:01,162
if we have true verticality in the levels,
2005
01:56:01,245 --> 01:56:04,749
then, suddenly, this gives you a lot more places to lurk
2006
01:56:04,791 --> 01:56:06,834
when you’re trying to snipe someone in Deathmatch.
2007
01:56:06,876 --> 01:56:08,419
So, that became a huge thing.
2008
01:56:08,461 --> 01:56:10,421
I would sit there doing experiments,
2009
01:56:10,463 --> 01:56:13,383
and I would have boxes that were experiments on high gravity,
2010
01:56:13,424 --> 01:56:17,512
low gravity, you know, I’d do boxes that were experiments on super high damage.
2011
01:56:17,679 --> 01:56:20,973
there were a lot of weapons that I built that never saw the light of day.
2012
01:56:21,057 --> 01:56:23,226
You know, Romero would get really pissed, because I would
2013
01:56:23,309 --> 01:56:25,978
I would invite him into a Deathmatch, and then we would start fighting,
2014
01:56:26,104 --> 01:56:30,441
and he’d find that I’d written in code for, basically, Romero-seeking missiles
2015
01:56:30,525 --> 01:56:32,527
that would fly through the map
2016
01:56:32,610 --> 01:56:34,529
and avoid walls and hit him.
2017
01:56:34,737 --> 01:56:37,115
I remember Romero being, like, adamant like,
2018
01:56:37,240 --> 01:56:38,825
‘That’s not cool. Don’t do that.’
2019
01:56:38,950 --> 01:56:40,493
[laughing]
2020
01:56:40,576 --> 01:56:43,162
But, for some reason, everybody found
2021
01:56:43,204 --> 01:56:44,914
low gravity to be fun,
2022
01:56:44,997 --> 01:56:48,167
and so it was accepted that, ‘Okay, American, if you want to build a larger scale
2023
01:56:48,209 --> 01:56:49,919
low gravity map, go for it.’
2024
01:56:50,002 --> 01:56:54,298
The Wizard’s Manse is another like, ‘That looks like a giant castle, possibly,
2025
01:56:54,382 --> 01:56:56,801
you know, mansion thing,’ which is where I staged the
2026
01:56:56,968 --> 01:57:00,304
the dragon shot in the early screenshots that I released.
2027
01:57:00,388 --> 01:57:03,975
It’s funny ‘cause there are two levels that have Disneyland inspirations, and that’s one of them.
2028
01:57:04,058 --> 01:57:06,185
Almost the very end of the whole level, you finally
2029
01:57:06,185 --> 01:57:09,063
get up to the top bridge, you would, like,
2030
01:57:09,147 --> 01:57:12,024
‘Oh, nice, they’re giving me some health.’ You run over and you go inside
2031
01:57:12,024 --> 01:57:15,903
the elevator, and you press the button, and the door Star Wars closes behind you.
2032
01:57:17,655 --> 01:57:19,407
And then, you go underwater.
2033
01:57:19,449 --> 01:57:22,827
You start burping, because you can’t breathe underwater,
2034
01:57:22,869 --> 01:57:24,829
and this thing’s taking you on a ride,
2035
01:57:24,829 --> 01:57:27,749
and you’re dying, but I just terrified the player
2036
01:57:27,749 --> 01:57:30,752
with this long underwater ride.
2037
01:57:30,835 --> 01:57:33,296
that they can’t do anything about. They cannot get out of it.
2038
01:57:33,463 --> 01:57:35,256
It’s, it was really fun.
2039
01:57:36,048 --> 01:57:40,428
So, one of the coolest things about the original Quake was that
2040
01:57:40,511 --> 01:57:43,639
Trent Reznor, rockstar Trent Reznor, you know, worked on
2041
01:57:43,765 --> 01:57:46,601
not only the music but, you know, the sound effects.
2042
01:57:46,642 --> 01:57:49,562
Trent reached out. It was serendipitous,
2043
01:57:49,687 --> 01:57:53,566
because I was a huge fan, and Carmack was a huge fan.
2044
01:57:53,733 --> 01:57:57,695
You know, we were floored. we were, we were fanboying, you know?
2045
01:58:01,616 --> 01:58:05,286
Trent’s music really gave it this personality, this vibe
2046
01:58:05,328 --> 01:58:07,705
this, this, this setting, this feeling.
2047
01:58:07,830 --> 01:58:09,749
So, when you hear the
2048
01:58:09,791 --> 01:58:12,752
ambient sounds of a Quake map,
2049
01:58:12,835 --> 01:58:15,004
you hear the music in the background,
2050
01:58:15,046 --> 01:58:17,590
and you hear the sounds of the enemies.
2051
01:58:17,715 --> 01:58:19,300
It feels good together.
2052
01:58:19,467 --> 01:58:22,762
♪♪♪
2053
01:58:22,845 --> 01:58:25,890
That grenade launcher was a combination of several sounds.
2054
01:58:25,890 --> 01:58:28,726
Some of them had come from the Nine Inch Nails sound library.
2055
01:58:28,726 --> 01:58:31,312
some of them from me doing fully.
2056
01:58:31,521 --> 01:58:32,480
♪♪♪
2057
01:58:32,647 --> 01:58:35,358
I went up on the roof at the id offices,
2058
01:58:35,399 --> 01:58:38,194
and I was blowing up fireworks, and I had long
2059
01:58:38,236 --> 01:58:41,239
PVC tubing that was, you know, probably about this big around,
2060
01:58:41,280 --> 01:58:45,326
and I would blow up a firework on one end and record on the other,
2061
01:58:45,409 --> 01:58:50,414
and that would create this incredibly satisfying ‘pwong’ sound.
2062
01:58:50,456 --> 01:58:55,127
There’s a sound when you pick up the Quad Damage in Quake
2063
01:58:55,211 --> 01:58:59,715
♪♪♪
2064
01:58:59,966 --> 01:59:02,927
that unleashes your inner demon.
2065
01:59:03,052 --> 01:59:05,429
It skips all the way through
2066
01:59:05,513 --> 01:59:08,975
your conscious brain and just, like, you turn into a
2067
01:59:09,100 --> 01:59:11,936
violent reptile at that point. I love that sound.
2068
01:59:12,019 --> 01:59:13,354
[roaring]
2069
01:59:13,437 --> 01:59:16,482
The rocket launcher had its own sound. That was really great too,
2070
01:59:16,524 --> 01:59:19,485
but the feel went with that sound which is why it works.
2071
01:59:19,569 --> 01:59:22,780
My favorite weapon in the original Quake is definitely the rocket launcher.
2072
01:59:22,905 --> 01:59:24,866
just ‘cause of the skill,
2073
01:59:24,907 --> 01:59:27,076
you know, shooting that rocket
2074
01:59:27,118 --> 01:59:28,202
and then timing it.
2075
01:59:28,286 --> 01:59:29,537
Boom!
2076
01:59:29,620 --> 01:59:31,873
The rocket launcher was obviously the most dominant
2077
01:59:31,914 --> 01:59:34,584
weapon in Quake just because you could use it at any range.
2078
01:59:34,709 --> 01:59:37,169
It was reasonably hard to dodge,
2079
01:59:37,253 --> 01:59:41,007
and it did a lot of damage, and it also enabled a lot of mobility through
2080
01:59:41,048 --> 01:59:42,758
through things like rocket jumping
2081
01:59:42,800 --> 01:59:45,887
Rocket jumping, what?
2082
01:59:46,012 --> 01:59:48,764
When we released Quake, we were like, ‘Ooh, this is going to be really great,’
2083
01:59:48,890 --> 01:59:51,767
you know, to see people play through and all this stuff like,
2084
01:59:51,893 --> 01:59:54,562
uh, ‘Level finished in 11 seconds.’ We’re like,
2085
01:59:54,604 --> 01:59:56,647
‘What is going on?’
2086
01:59:56,689 --> 01:59:59,191
And then, we watch these demos, and they just, like, rocket jump.
2087
01:59:59,275 --> 02:00:01,319
They’re like, ‘What is that?’
2088
02:00:01,360 --> 02:00:03,988
Oh my god, all the levels, all of them.
2089
02:00:04,071 --> 02:00:04,989
[laughing]
2090
02:00:05,031 --> 02:00:06,657
And we’re like, ‘We’re not gonna fix that.’
2091
02:00:06,741 --> 02:00:09,493
You know, like, ‘If you’re really good, you’ve earned it.’
2092
02:00:09,577 --> 02:00:13,831
It is hard to rocket jump and, in those early days, it was hard to rocket jump.
2093
02:00:13,873 --> 02:00:15,708
Then, that fed into eSports.
2094
02:00:16,167 --> 02:00:18,669
I definitely think Quake popularized eSports, certainly in the Western markets
2095
02:00:18,753 --> 02:00:20,838
certainly in the Western markets,
2096
02:00:20,880 --> 02:00:24,967
pretty much everyone that was into online gaming at the time, they played Quake.
2097
02:00:25,051 --> 02:00:27,595
The skill ceiling in Quake
2098
02:00:27,678 --> 02:00:31,390
is higher than any game that I can imagine.
2099
02:00:31,557 --> 02:00:33,726
So, the reason that Quake is so popular
2100
02:00:33,768 --> 02:00:36,479
for decades after it was made,
2101
02:00:36,562 --> 02:00:40,608
was because it pioneered so many things at the time
2102
02:00:40,650 --> 02:00:43,194
that the aftershocks of
2103
02:00:43,235 --> 02:00:46,781
Quake can still be felt in the industry today.
2104
02:00:46,864 --> 02:00:49,659
For the first time, we have 3D mouselook for aiming,
2105
02:00:49,700 --> 02:00:52,495
you know, and moving around and Internet multiplayer
2106
02:00:52,536 --> 02:00:55,623
and an in-game console for the first time to type in,
2107
02:00:55,665 --> 02:00:59,126
you know, change variables and connect to servers and all that kind of stuff.
2108
02:00:59,210 --> 02:01:01,003
If you want to make a great first person shooter,
2109
02:01:01,045 --> 02:01:02,797
start doing exactly what Quake did.
2110
02:01:02,838 --> 02:01:07,051
Movement needs to be as accurate, precise and responsive as possible.
2111
02:01:07,134 --> 02:01:08,844
Second part is shooting,
2112
02:01:08,928 --> 02:01:12,473
making weapons feel really punchy and powerful,
2113
02:01:12,515 --> 02:01:14,350
and that's a hard thing to do.
2114
02:01:45,381 --> 02:01:47,425
Going to my first LAN party
2115
02:01:47,425 --> 02:01:50,928
you know, walking into this, like, student house where
2116
02:01:50,928 --> 02:01:54,223
gamers had driven from across the country
2117
02:01:54,223 --> 02:01:56,642
with their own PCs, and they were
2118
02:01:56,642 --> 02:01:59,270
all wired together, and they were having a tournament
2119
02:01:59,270 --> 02:02:01,480
between these two Quake clans,
2120
02:02:01,480 --> 02:02:03,816
it felt like seeing the future.
2121
02:02:05,276 --> 02:02:08,529
It felt like, ‘This is how people are going to be
2122
02:02:08,529 --> 02:02:12,491
entertained in the future. They're going to actually form teams and play against each other.
2123
02:02:12,491 --> 02:02:14,452
[cheering]
2124
02:02:14,452 --> 02:02:16,620
Back in those days,
2125
02:02:16,620 --> 02:02:20,207
you know, LAN parties were a very popular thing to do
2126
02:02:20,207 --> 02:02:23,836
And, over time, you know, these events started getting pretty big,
2127
02:02:23,836 --> 02:02:26,547
went from, like, dozens of people to hundreds to people,
2128
02:02:26,547 --> 02:02:28,549
obviously, eventually thousands of people.
2129
02:02:28,549 --> 02:02:31,469
As they started getting to scale, they started talking to sponsors,
2130
02:02:31,469 --> 02:02:34,764
you know, video card manufacturers, CPU manufacturers,
2131
02:02:34,972 --> 02:02:39,060
some people made a business about hosting these LAN parties and events at conference centers, right?
2132
02:02:39,060 --> 02:02:41,479
They would charge people admission to be a part of it,
2133
02:02:41,479 --> 02:02:45,107
and they would use some of that admission in the form of cash prizes:
2134
02:02:45,107 --> 02:02:48,861
50 bucks, a hundred bucks, to a few hundred dollars, at least in the early days.
2135
02:02:51,363 --> 02:02:54,241
The moment that you are actively engaged
2136
02:02:54,241 --> 02:02:56,202
in competition, it changes everything.
2137
02:02:56,202 --> 02:02:59,413
There's a click, and then there's a passion, and then there's an obsession.
2138
02:02:59,872 --> 02:03:02,500
They’re here in Seattle for the World Doom Championships.
2139
02:03:05,753 --> 02:03:09,924
Deathmatch ‘95 was essentially the first worldwide tournament.
2140
02:03:10,091 --> 02:03:13,344
They held multiple tournaments to find the local champions,
2141
02:03:13,344 --> 02:03:16,597
and then flew all of us to Microsoft headquarters in Redmond.
2142
02:03:16,680 --> 02:03:18,099
[gunshot]
2143
02:03:18,140 --> 02:03:20,976
These games are getting really realistic.
2144
02:03:21,018 --> 02:03:23,354
I might even play in the Big Doom tournament.
2145
02:03:23,354 --> 02:03:26,273
It was really the first big eSports event.
2146
02:03:26,273 --> 02:03:30,486
There was cash as part of the prize, there was like a $10,000 PC,
2147
02:03:30,569 --> 02:03:33,114
and a lifetime subscription of id software games,
2148
02:03:33,197 --> 02:03:36,617
which, which they never actually lived up to.
2149
02:03:36,659 --> 02:03:40,121
Uh, but it’s, um, it's fine. I, I owe a lot to id software,
2150
02:03:40,121 --> 02:03:45,042
going from playing largely at home to, you know, a stage at Microsoft headquarters,
2151
02:03:45,042 --> 02:03:47,753
where there's like hundreds of spectators,
2152
02:03:47,878 --> 02:03:51,799
not just like any tournament, like a real world championship tournament,
2153
02:03:52,091 --> 02:03:55,386
probably the first true eSports event.
2154
02:03:57,012 --> 02:04:00,599
eSports were happening as we were making Quake.
2155
02:04:00,599 --> 02:04:04,145
We were, like, pulled into eSports discussions with lots of people.
2156
02:04:04,145 --> 02:04:06,564
They wanted to, like, buy up a supermarket
2157
02:04:06,564 --> 02:04:09,275
and turn it into a giant Deathmatch arcade,
2158
02:04:09,275 --> 02:04:11,861
you know, like this stuff was happening all over the place.
2159
02:04:11,861 --> 02:04:14,488
People were incoming, with all their ideas
2160
02:04:14,488 --> 02:04:18,117
‘cause they see that the intensity of Deathmatch is a sport,
2161
02:04:18,159 --> 02:04:19,952
and that sport can be monetized.
2162
02:04:20,161 --> 02:04:23,497
I had built up a pretty well known reputation online
2163
02:04:23,581 --> 02:04:27,001
as being, you know, essentially the best Doom and Doom II player in the world.
2164
02:04:27,001 --> 02:04:29,837
You know, I think I was like 16 or 17 at the time.
2165
02:04:29,920 --> 02:04:33,340
One day, I got a, I got a call from the Wall Street Journal.
2166
02:04:33,424 --> 02:04:36,468
He was writing a story about, kind of, the rise of online gaming,
2167
02:04:36,468 --> 02:04:40,681
and then it ends up being on the front page above the fold,
2168
02:04:40,681 --> 02:04:42,683
you know, like everyone started calling me:
2169
02:04:42,683 --> 02:04:45,227
CEOs of a bunch of different big companies.
2170
02:04:45,227 --> 02:04:48,230
I was being offered thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars
2171
02:04:48,230 --> 02:04:50,357
to be sponsored by these companies.
2172
02:04:50,357 --> 02:04:53,485
You know, that was literally the day I became a, a pro gamer.
2173
02:04:53,485 --> 02:04:55,529
Everybody could kind of see where it was going,
2174
02:04:55,529 --> 02:04:58,824
and this idea of the Red Annihilation tournament
2175
02:04:58,824 --> 02:05:03,579
where I put up my first Ferrari, turbo Ferrari, as the grand prize.
2176
02:05:03,787 --> 02:05:08,083
Some people got to see the real range of skill sets that were available there
2177
02:05:08,083 --> 02:05:10,628
where it's a great thing when you take your local badass
2178
02:05:10,628 --> 02:05:13,005
and then you put him in with a world class player,
2179
02:05:13,005 --> 02:05:15,507
and you find out it's like, ‘No, you're not the top level.
2180
02:05:15,507 --> 02:05:17,426
You're not even in the right ballpark.’
2181
02:05:17,426 --> 02:05:20,137
A big Quake tournament featuring a red Ferrari.
2182
02:05:20,137 --> 02:05:21,805
Right, right, which you won.
2183
02:05:21,805 --> 02:05:24,725
I ended up winning. You won, and you were too young to even drive it at the time, right?
2184
02:05:24,725 --> 02:05:27,353
And you started to see the PGL and the CPL
2185
02:05:27,353 --> 02:05:31,065
and all those early leagues that were getting teams together
2186
02:05:31,065 --> 02:05:33,943
and having venues, like giant venues.
2187
02:05:33,943 --> 02:05:37,446
By 2000, you go to a CPL event and there are
2188
02:05:37,488 --> 02:05:41,533
5000 people there that brought their computers,
2189
02:05:41,575 --> 02:05:43,577
and they hang out, you know?
2190
02:05:43,577 --> 02:05:47,122
There's no physical limitations. You don't have to be a certain size like basketball,
2191
02:05:47,206 --> 02:05:50,459
and there's no geographical limitations. There's really no gender limitations.
2192
02:05:50,834 --> 02:05:52,378
My clan, PMS clan,
2193
02:05:52,419 --> 02:05:55,756
it became a home for thousands and thousands of women.
2194
02:05:55,756 --> 02:05:58,425
It gave the opportunity for, you know,
2195
02:05:58,467 --> 02:06:02,596
maybe almost a hundred to compete, you know, professionally, at professional tournaments.
2196
02:06:03,514 --> 02:06:05,933
It's literally something that was like a culture
2197
02:06:05,975 --> 02:06:10,646
for us in a sisterhood that
2198
02:06:10,646 --> 02:06:14,108
of a sport that just drove a passion in all of us,
2199
02:06:14,108 --> 02:06:16,986
There's a lot that you have to sacrifice in your life to become a pro gamer,
2200
02:06:16,986 --> 02:06:19,154
because it's, it's a full time job.
2201
02:06:19,154 --> 02:06:22,574
The people who compete, especially nowadays, it's insane.
2202
02:06:22,658 --> 02:06:26,662
Training’s pretty intense, uh, for any team going into competition,
2203
02:06:26,787 --> 02:06:28,330
and we, uh, take it seriously.
2204
02:06:28,330 --> 02:06:31,292
Playing eSports, you're playing the same game for eight hours a day,
2205
02:06:31,333 --> 02:06:33,544
every day to stay competitive
2206
02:06:33,627 --> 02:06:36,171
and to not embarrass yourself at a tournament, you know?
2207
02:06:36,213 --> 02:06:38,716
Strategizing, it's the same as any sport.
2208
02:06:38,757 --> 02:06:40,426
In basketball, you're going to have your playbook.
2209
02:06:40,426 --> 02:06:43,345
The competitive dynamics were such that it was very legit.
2210
02:06:43,345 --> 02:06:45,097
Your great players rose to the top,
2211
02:06:45,139 --> 02:06:48,225
you could appreciate the skill of the people that you're watching,
2212
02:06:48,267 --> 02:06:52,396
which I think is a prerequisite for any sport to thrive
2213
02:06:52,438 --> 02:06:55,441
and, you know, we saw that from the early days of games.
2214
02:06:56,817 --> 02:06:59,778
Going to these events with just a whole bunch of people who just want to
2215
02:06:59,862 --> 02:07:03,115
talk and play video games, it was like my people.
2216
02:07:43,864 --> 02:07:46,492
I joined Rare fresh out of university,
2217
02:07:46,533 --> 02:07:50,120
and they had just finished Donkey Kong Country so they were really famous and successful.
2218
02:07:50,204 --> 02:07:52,164
I, I couldn't believe I got a job there.
2219
02:07:52,247 --> 02:07:54,792
They were still doing a lot of 2D sprite-based games
2220
02:07:54,833 --> 02:07:56,752
and, after about three months, Martin Hollis,
2221
02:07:56,794 --> 02:08:00,172
the team leader came in and asked me about working on a James Bond game.
2222
02:08:00,214 --> 02:08:02,841
Nintendo bought the license and had given it to Rare and said,
2223
02:08:02,925 --> 02:08:04,802
‘Would you like to do something with this?’ Rare weren't too sure
2224
02:08:04,843 --> 02:08:08,555
because, obviously, film license tie-in games at that time were notoriously bad.
2225
02:08:08,680 --> 02:08:11,225
Martin had said to them, ‘Well, I'd like to do it,
2226
02:08:11,392 --> 02:08:13,894
but I want to do it on the new console that we know is coming out
2227
02:08:13,936 --> 02:08:17,606
And, at that stage, that was Project Reality which became the Nintendo 64.
2228
02:08:18,065 --> 02:08:22,736
Breathtakingly realistic 3D video entertainment ever witnessed,
2229
02:08:22,820 --> 02:08:24,029
Project Reality.
2230
02:08:24,571 --> 02:08:29,201
which we knew very little about other than that it was going to be very powerful in 3D.
2231
02:08:29,326 --> 02:08:32,413
Project Reality will bring to home video players
2232
02:08:32,496 --> 02:08:36,041
the same types of astounding visual effects seen in movies.
2233
02:08:36,125 --> 02:08:40,295
I had just done a 3D modeling course at university in Bournemouth,
2234
02:08:40,337 --> 02:08:42,798
the only course at the time that did 3D computer modeling.
2235
02:08:42,840 --> 02:08:47,052
When I went to Bournemouth University back in 1993,
2236
02:08:47,136 --> 02:08:49,680
I literally sat next to Karl Hilton.
2237
02:08:49,763 --> 02:08:52,766
When we graduated, he got a job at Rare,
2238
02:08:52,850 --> 02:08:55,352
and I said, ‘Oh, is this something I could do?’ And he went,
2239
02:08:55,394 --> 02:08:57,896
‘Yeah, we'll see if we can swing you an interview.’ So, he said,
2240
02:08:57,896 --> 02:09:01,191
‘All you need to do is just tell him that Virtua Cop is your favorite game.’
2241
02:09:04,736 --> 02:09:06,905
Help me.
2242
02:09:07,239 --> 02:09:10,868
So, that’s what I did. I talked about Virtua Cop, even though I knew nothing about it,
2243
02:09:10,951 --> 02:09:13,162
but he told me all the stuff I was supposed to say,
2244
02:09:13,245 --> 02:09:15,330
and I got the job before I left the interview.
2245
02:09:15,456 --> 02:09:18,459
The thing that was fun about Virtua Cop was it set up all these great gun battles
2246
02:09:18,584 --> 02:09:22,087
where people would jump out from behind things and try and shoot you and you had to react to it and
2247
02:09:22,212 --> 02:09:24,631
and the camera would narrate you through the whole game.
2248
02:09:25,466 --> 02:09:27,551
You could set up really fancy gunplay
2249
02:09:27,634 --> 02:09:29,470
and so, we felt that lent itself very naturally
2250
02:09:29,553 --> 02:09:32,431
to something like Bond where he's, he's a great shot.
2251
02:09:32,556 --> 02:09:34,933
The on rail shooter was how we started.
2252
02:09:35,017 --> 02:09:39,480
If you look back now at the original footage, it just felt weird.
2253
02:09:39,771 --> 02:09:42,107
It would make you look left or look right
2254
02:09:42,149 --> 02:09:43,984
whereas you actually wanted to look the other way
2255
02:09:43,984 --> 02:09:46,278
because guards were coming the other way.
2256
02:09:46,320 --> 02:09:48,030
We weren't sure at that point if the
2257
02:09:48,113 --> 02:09:51,283
the console was really going to be powerful enough to do proper 3D
2258
02:09:51,325 --> 02:09:54,286
where you could roam around, and we wanted to keep the frame rate really fast
2259
02:09:54,369 --> 02:09:57,122
and, actually, the performance on the early emulators that we had for Nintendo
2260
02:09:57,164 --> 02:10:00,792
was really good, so we got all enthusiastic and decided, ‘Ah, we don't need to have it on rails at all.
2261
02:10:00,876 --> 02:10:04,296
We'll just be free roaming,’ and I remember Nintendo sending us a little
2262
02:10:04,338 --> 02:10:06,965
almost manual of things you shouldn't, shouldn't do with the new console,
2263
02:10:07,007 --> 02:10:09,843
and one of it was, says, ‘Don't try and do 3D first person shooters,
2264
02:10:09,885 --> 02:10:12,095
because it'll be too much.’ But, we kind of just ignored that.
2265
02:10:12,429 --> 02:10:16,975
♪ Violin Concerto in E Major, "Spring" ♪
2266
02:10:20,395 --> 02:10:22,397
We were in this old farmhouse.
2267
02:10:22,439 --> 02:10:25,234
Some of the teams were in what was called, you know,
2268
02:10:25,317 --> 02:10:28,028
the stables, because they were converted stables.
2269
02:10:28,070 --> 02:10:31,490
We were all newbies, and we were making this license game which wasn't typically Nintendo,
2270
02:10:31,532 --> 02:10:33,492
so no one was really interested in us.
JB
2271
02:10:33,492 --> 02:10:34,451
[laughing]
2272
02:10:34,493 --> 02:10:38,455
We started just about the same time the art department started on the film.
2273
02:10:38,539 --> 02:10:42,626
♪Golden eye, I found his weakness♪
2274
02:10:42,751 --> 02:10:46,505
So, we get chauffeured down to Leavesden Studios in the back of this Mercedes.
2275
02:10:46,547 --> 02:10:48,507
They gave us full access, so we walked around all the sets
2276
02:10:48,840 --> 02:10:51,301
as long as they weren't filming at the time and took photos of everything.
2277
02:10:51,385 --> 02:10:52,970
We went round St. Petersburg,
2278
02:10:53,011 --> 02:10:55,013
we went round the airport set,
2279
02:10:55,013 --> 02:10:57,808
we went round the, the big end sequence set
2280
02:10:57,849 --> 02:11:00,227
where all the computers were and everything
2281
02:11:00,269 --> 02:11:03,480
because, at that time, we had this thing called a digital camera.
2282
02:11:04,481 --> 02:11:06,400
Introducing the digital camera!
2283
02:11:06,441 --> 02:11:08,777
which didn't exist in 1994.
2284
02:11:08,944 --> 02:11:10,946
It makes everything you do look better.
2285
02:11:11,154 --> 02:11:13,407
We had this massive, massive brick
2286
02:11:13,448 --> 02:11:15,742
and we used that to photograph everything.
2287
02:11:15,784 --> 02:11:17,703
Most of the textures in Golden Eye were
2288
02:11:17,703 --> 02:11:20,122
were just scans of the photos that I took.
2289
02:11:20,247 --> 02:11:24,459
I've still got the photographs that we took from Statue Park which is one of the sets I built.
2290
02:11:24,543 --> 02:11:26,461
I come from an architecture background so, suddenly,
2291
02:11:26,503 --> 02:11:29,006
it was not being, being a 2D sprite artist
2292
02:11:29,131 --> 02:11:31,967
but being a 3D thinker that, that made all the difference.
2293
02:11:32,259 --> 02:11:34,219
[Bond music]
2294
02:11:34,386 --> 02:11:37,180
Karl was the guy doing all of the architectural elements.
2295
02:11:37,222 --> 02:11:40,100
I didn't move into doing the background until later on.
2296
02:11:40,183 --> 02:11:43,478
I built the Jungle area and Statue Park.
2297
02:11:43,729 --> 02:11:47,190
A lot of that was left up to me because we had a lot of photo reference.
2298
02:11:47,232 --> 02:11:50,110
So, I essentially had a map and a floor plan,
2299
02:11:50,110 --> 02:11:54,323
and it was like, ‘Right, just populate this area and give it some blinds
2300
02:11:54,448 --> 02:11:57,576
and put some, lots of statues in it that we have reference for.’
2301
02:11:58,744 --> 02:12:01,330
The dam’s a perfect example of how GoldenEye was
2302
02:12:01,371 --> 02:12:04,124
very, very random and badly planned.
2303
02:12:04,207 --> 02:12:06,918
Duncan Botwood, he wasn’t an artist, he was a designer.
2304
02:12:07,002 --> 02:12:09,087
He went and blocked out the dam,
2305
02:12:09,129 --> 02:12:12,090
the main masses of the dam and the mountains and the road that led up to it
2306
02:12:12,299 --> 02:12:15,302
and sent it to me, and I open it up, and it's like, ‘Woah,
2307
02:12:15,302 --> 02:12:17,262
this isn't gonna work.’
2308
02:12:17,262 --> 02:12:20,724
Which is fair, you know, because, you know, Duncan's job was to get the design of the level
2309
02:12:20,766 --> 02:12:22,601
based on the movie and how we were going to use it.
2310
02:12:22,601 --> 02:12:24,311
So, at that point, it’s like, ‘Okay, how am I…
2311
02:12:24,311 --> 02:12:25,604
How am I going to make this work?’
2312
02:12:25,729 --> 02:12:28,231
I can do it.
-Then, get on with it!
2313
02:12:28,357 --> 02:12:30,984
When I was designing the layouts, it was all based on doglegs.
2314
02:12:31,068 --> 02:12:33,528
so it felt like you were looking at a lot but, actually.
2315
02:12:33,570 --> 02:12:35,739
what it was actually having to draw wasn't much. We had a
2316
02:12:35,781 --> 02:12:39,993
system where I could put in elements that would, as soon as it wasn't on the screen, it would get turned off.
2317
02:12:40,077 --> 02:12:43,538
So, you were literally just walking around in a cone of what you could see.
2318
02:12:43,997 --> 02:12:46,500
The train depot is full of those big crates
2319
02:12:46,541 --> 02:12:49,378
because effectively what I was doing there was creating another maze
2320
02:12:49,378 --> 02:12:52,589
where I could block off the views, so it feels like you’re in a big space with lots of things
2321
02:12:52,673 --> 02:12:55,676
but, actually, you're effectively in an interior space without a ceiling.
2322
02:12:55,842 --> 02:12:56,802
[gunshots]
2323
02:12:56,927 --> 02:13:00,931
I had a sort of, like, steep learning curve because I hadn't done any of the levels at all.
2324
02:13:00,972 --> 02:13:04,810
So Karl taught me about how to make the textures and how to make them work,
2325
02:13:04,810 --> 02:13:06,395
especially for things like the trees,
2326
02:13:06,395 --> 02:13:08,563
because you can only have so many polygons
2327
02:13:08,563 --> 02:13:10,857
and, if you've got a jungle level, you're trying to make it out of
2328
02:13:10,857 --> 02:13:14,820
millions and millions of flowers or trees or what have you.
2329
02:13:15,278 --> 02:13:17,823
If you look at GoldenEye, it's almost a black and white game
2330
02:13:17,864 --> 02:13:22,160
because that saves us a lot of memory by using a lot of black and white textures and then coloring them.
2331
02:13:22,285 --> 02:13:24,413
The archives in St. Petersburg is a perfect example where
2332
02:13:24,454 --> 02:13:26,665
you see a couple of corridors that he runs down,
2333
02:13:26,707 --> 02:13:31,211
and you see the main library where he swings across and goes out the window into the tank area.
2334
02:13:31,378 --> 02:13:34,131
[Military music]
[gunshots]
2335
02:13:34,256 --> 02:13:37,718
One of my favorite things in the world is when you get into the tank on GoldenEye.
2336
02:13:38,885 --> 02:13:40,387
[tank engine starts]
2337
02:13:40,512 --> 02:13:41,555
You know what I mean, right?
2338
02:13:41,680 --> 02:13:44,558
Suddenly, you're in the tank. Suddenly, you’re daddy? Yeah.
2339
02:13:44,850 --> 02:13:45,976
[heavy breathing]
[explosions]
2340
02:13:48,145 --> 02:13:49,604
[explosions]
2341
02:13:49,730 --> 02:13:51,732
That's a great moment in gaming.
2342
02:13:52,983 --> 02:13:55,861
But, you weren't always shooting in Goldeneye.
2343
02:13:55,944 --> 02:13:57,696
You were doing puzzles,
2344
02:13:57,863 --> 02:13:59,698
you were figuring stuff out.
2345
02:14:00,699 --> 02:14:03,869
GoldenEye was seen as a Bond adventure game.
2346
02:14:06,121 --> 02:14:08,707
That was probably one of my favorite bits that he comes in through there,
2347
02:14:08,707 --> 02:14:11,543
and there's a guard having on the toilet with a newspaper,
2348
02:14:11,585 --> 02:14:13,754
and we thought, you know, ‘It's funny to do those things.’
2349
02:14:13,795 --> 02:14:15,964
So, being able to recreate it was great.
2350
02:14:16,047 --> 02:14:16,882
[silenced gunshot]
2351
02:14:17,674 --> 02:14:18,967
You’re late, 007.
2352
02:14:19,009 --> 02:14:20,510
I had to stop in the bathroom.
2353
02:14:20,594 --> 02:14:23,555
I was the character builder, and I did all the animations.
2354
02:14:23,638 --> 02:14:27,601
I built Roger Moore, I built Sean Connery, and I built Timothy Dalton,
2355
02:14:27,642 --> 02:14:30,228
because we had an all Bond version at one go.
2356
02:14:36,318 --> 02:14:39,821
And we were told early on, you know, you've got access to the whole Bond universe.
2357
02:14:39,905 --> 02:14:40,655
[heavenly choral music]
2358
02:14:40,781 --> 02:14:42,657
We discovered later, we didn't.
2359
02:14:42,699 --> 02:14:44,826
[Bond music]
2360
02:14:44,910 --> 02:14:46,995
We only had the right for Pierce Brosnan
2361
02:14:47,037 --> 02:14:49,915
Sorting out the permissions with Sean Connery and his estate,
2362
02:14:50,040 --> 02:14:51,750
it became too expensive.
2363
02:14:51,833 --> 02:14:54,878
When they did some of the playtesting, everybody would play a Bond,
2364
02:14:54,920 --> 02:14:57,255
and they did first one to 100 kills.
2365
02:14:57,339 --> 02:15:00,675
Martin won it by one kill, I think
2366
02:15:00,801 --> 02:15:02,385
[machine gun]
[Bond music]
2367
02:15:02,594 --> 02:15:05,388
It was B Jones, the character artist, who
2368
02:15:05,430 --> 02:15:07,557
put the suit on. At the time, it was a cutting edge suit,
2369
02:15:07,599 --> 02:15:09,434
and we weren't sure what we needed.
2370
02:15:09,434 --> 02:15:11,853
It was her and Duncan Botwood that did most of it,
2371
02:15:11,978 --> 02:15:14,523
I would get him set up in the motion capture suit.
2372
02:15:14,648 --> 02:15:19,486
I would run the actual system, and he would become my body if you like,
2373
02:15:19,528 --> 02:15:23,114
and we had a magnetic system called Flock of Birds.
2374
02:15:23,323 --> 02:15:25,742
The system would sit on a shelf
2375
02:15:25,826 --> 02:15:28,620
up on the side of the wall and wires would run
2376
02:15:28,703 --> 02:15:32,582
to Duncan. So, if you can imagine, we had to be extremely careful,
2377
02:15:32,666 --> 02:15:35,919
because the wires were only so long and, if he wanted to do some
2378
02:15:36,086 --> 02:15:38,713
epic deaths, we had to sort of, like, be very precise with it
2379
02:15:38,797 --> 02:15:42,551
because, literally, he would yank the entire thing off the wall.
2380
02:15:42,801 --> 02:15:43,885
[machine gun]
Ahhh!
2381
02:15:45,220 --> 02:15:48,723
And it was just sort of, ‘Just capture everything we can and just use it.’
2382
02:15:48,849 --> 02:15:49,808
♪♪♪
2383
02:15:50,183 --> 02:15:52,853
Once we started going in and we realized that it looked really good,
2384
02:15:52,853 --> 02:15:54,437
so it's like, ‘Okay, well, what if we…
2385
02:15:54,437 --> 02:15:57,274
If we do the shooting body parts, we need to do all the animations for that as well
2386
02:15:57,274 --> 02:15:59,860
We had a list of moves that we needed to capture.
2387
02:15:59,901 --> 02:16:02,946
So, it would be shot in hand but recover, shot in hand and die,
2388
02:16:02,988 --> 02:16:05,574
because you could die from a hand shot, obviously,
2389
02:16:05,615 --> 02:16:08,034
Grab your leg, grab your left leg, grab your right leg, grab your arm,
2390
02:16:08,034 --> 02:16:09,411
you know, grab your head,
2391
02:16:09,494 --> 02:16:11,496
do a roll over, and then come up with your gun,
2392
02:16:11,580 --> 02:16:14,082
and then shot, get shot from the knee position.
2393
02:16:14,124 --> 02:16:17,127
So, all of these things were considered as part of it.
2394
02:16:17,294 --> 02:16:19,921
If we wanted to do a body hit,
2395
02:16:20,005 --> 02:16:21,464
I would tell him to close his eyes,
2396
02:16:21,506 --> 02:16:25,594
because the last thing you want with motion capture is for someone to tense up.
2397
02:16:25,719 --> 02:16:28,597
So, I was like, ‘Just relax, and I'm going to shoot you.’
2398
02:16:28,722 --> 02:16:31,892
I would sneak up behind him or sneak up in front of him and literally
2399
02:16:31,933 --> 02:16:34,477
whack him in the shoulder,
2400
02:16:34,644 --> 02:16:38,148
and you would then get that pushback or that push forward
2401
02:16:38,231 --> 02:16:41,192
and, sometimes, I would literally knock him to the ground.
2402
02:16:41,484 --> 02:16:42,444
[slap]
Ooh!
2403
02:16:42,611 --> 02:16:44,779
Yeah, he did suffer for his art, that's for sure.
2404
02:16:45,071 --> 02:16:46,156
[gunshots]
2405
02:16:46,489 --> 02:16:49,409
So all the main characters, we had their photos, and we could just
2406
02:16:49,451 --> 02:16:52,537
scan them and stick them on the thing. Obviously, we’re very limited to how
2407
02:16:52,579 --> 02:16:55,457
complex the models could be. They had to be very basic face shape and then
2408
02:16:55,498 --> 02:16:59,294
all the information on who the character was, was done through the texture of the face.
2409
02:16:59,377 --> 02:17:01,713
And, at that point, it’s like, ‘We need more characters than we've got,
2410
02:17:01,755 --> 02:17:03,715
because we've got to have all the guards.’ So, the obvious thing was,
2411
02:17:03,715 --> 02:17:05,467
‘Well, we’ll just use our own faces.’
2412
02:17:05,550 --> 02:17:07,594
We would take the photographs and I would
2413
02:17:07,677 --> 02:17:11,806
cut them in half and then split it over, because all the promotional photographs we had
2414
02:17:11,848 --> 02:17:15,644
were all lit from one side, so I would have to make them work.
2415
02:17:15,644 --> 02:17:17,187
♪♪♪
2416
02:17:17,270 --> 02:17:19,856
But, because they were only, like, this big,
2417
02:17:19,856 --> 02:17:21,691
you know, it was very, very forgiving.
2418
02:17:21,733 --> 02:17:24,527
B Jones who did the art got into the habit of, you know, changing them a bit
2419
02:17:24,611 --> 02:17:26,571
so making them look a bit gruesome.
2420
02:17:26,696 --> 02:17:27,614
[shots]
Ahh!
2421
02:17:27,656 --> 02:17:30,533
I'm on one of the guards, and I've got a big scar down my face.
2422
02:17:30,909 --> 02:17:34,621
To have your face in the game seemed amazing, because most first person shooter characters look
2423
02:17:34,663 --> 02:17:38,917
generally hand drawn or modeled characters and, suddenly, you had photos.
2424
02:17:39,000 --> 02:17:42,796
We didn't just have Dr. Doak and Martin and Karl and all that
2425
02:17:42,921 --> 02:17:46,174
we had the groundsmen, we've got the kitchen staff,
2426
02:17:46,341 --> 02:17:48,218
we've got the kids from Rare,
2427
02:17:48,301 --> 02:17:50,720
we've got some random plumber
2428
02:17:50,762 --> 02:17:51,846
Mamma mia!
2429
02:17:51,888 --> 02:17:55,350
that came in one day. That’s why, when you see on some of these, like, Wiki pages,
2430
02:17:55,475 --> 02:17:59,771
it’s like, ‘Who are these people?’ They’re just random people that came into the building,
2431
02:17:59,854 --> 02:18:02,273
There was a point where we were wondering whether you could be able to actually
2432
02:18:02,315 --> 02:18:05,944
scan in a photo and stick it in GoldenEye for the multiplayer levels.
2433
02:18:05,986 --> 02:18:07,362
Yes, with Game Boy Camera,
2434
02:18:07,362 --> 02:18:10,073
you can turn pho-tography into fun-tography.
2435
02:18:10,490 --> 02:18:13,493
That was a little beyond what we could do. In the end,
2436
02:18:13,618 --> 02:18:16,705
Well, actually, Xenia Onatopp’s breasts.
2437
02:18:16,705 --> 02:18:19,499
They were particularly memorable, because we had to try and figure out
2438
02:18:19,582 --> 02:18:23,503
the best way of getting the best shape out of the fewest polygons.
2439
02:18:23,712 --> 02:18:28,091
This time, the pleasure will be all mine.
2440
02:18:28,341 --> 02:18:31,302
All the hands in GoldenEye are, of course, all boxes because they're all like this,
2441
02:18:31,344 --> 02:18:34,556
because they have to hold guns, but that was the best way we could come up with that.
2442
02:18:34,597 --> 02:18:38,309
But, they still had six texture maps on them that were all drawn by hand,
2443
02:18:38,393 --> 02:18:42,314
because you had this one, this one, this one.
2444
02:18:42,397 --> 02:18:46,943
That was kind of modeled off my hand. Everybody's got clubbed hands in GoldenEye.
2445
02:18:47,068 --> 02:18:49,487
♪♪♪
2446
02:18:49,654 --> 02:18:52,032
So, we all had our favorite Bond movies
2447
02:18:52,115 --> 02:18:54,617
and I thought, ‘Well, if I can build anything from any of the Bond movies,
2448
02:18:54,617 --> 02:18:58,413
what do I want to build?’ And it's like, ‘Oh, I want to I want to build the Moonraker set.’ You know,
2449
02:18:58,455 --> 02:19:01,541
let's do that, and we'll turn it into a multiplayer, you know? Great, fantastic.
2450
02:19:01,791 --> 02:19:04,127
[gunshots]
2451
02:19:04,502 --> 02:19:08,423
We had this huge book of guns at work which was basically
2452
02:19:08,506 --> 02:19:12,218
Jane’s reference book of guns. So, you knew the firing rate.
2453
02:19:12,260 --> 02:19:15,638
you knew how many bullets it would take, you know, and all of these stats went into
2454
02:19:15,722 --> 02:19:18,516
making these guns work as you see them.
2455
02:19:18,600 --> 02:19:20,393
So, they are as real as we could make them
2456
02:19:20,602 --> 02:19:26,149
[gunshots]
2457
02:19:26,232 --> 02:19:29,194
I mean, the club's famous for being horrendously inaccurate
2458
02:19:29,319 --> 02:19:30,570
♪♪♪
2459
02:19:30,779 --> 02:19:33,406
and they actually give the gun some character because, up until that point,
2460
02:19:33,406 --> 02:19:35,950
things like Doom, they'd had funny names like BFG and they did things,
2461
02:19:36,034 --> 02:19:38,203
but here, you had a whole series of guns which were just bullet guns,
2462
02:19:38,244 --> 02:19:40,121
because it wasn't a sci-fi thing.
2463
02:19:40,163 --> 02:19:42,499
It's James Bond. So, ‘What do you do to make it interesting?’
2464
02:19:42,540 --> 02:19:44,959
And it's like, ‘Okay, well, this gun has a higher fire rate,
2465
02:19:45,001 --> 02:19:47,587
but it's really inaccurate. This gun, it makes a great noise,
2466
02:19:47,670 --> 02:19:50,965
But, we should have the golden gun. It doesn't look great, but it kills with one shot.’
2467
02:19:51,007 --> 02:19:52,217
That's it. You know?
2468
02:19:52,384 --> 02:19:55,470
[gunshots]
2469
02:19:55,553 --> 02:19:58,098
GoldenEye was the seminal first person shooter
2470
02:19:58,181 --> 02:20:01,309
on consoles that kind of introduced the idea of first person shooting
2471
02:20:01,351 --> 02:20:06,147
to a console generation of players as well as multiplayer,
four-player split-screen gaming.
2472
02:20:06,231 --> 02:20:10,235
The first FPS game that I played was GoldenEye 007.
2473
02:20:10,276 --> 02:20:13,238
It was a game as I was growing up
2474
02:20:13,279 --> 02:20:16,074
and, right at the college year starting out,
2475
02:20:16,157 --> 02:20:18,034
my friends and I would get drunk and
2476
02:20:18,076 --> 02:20:19,577
go home from the bar and play.
2477
02:20:19,619 --> 02:20:21,371
[fast gunshots]
2478
02:20:21,621 --> 02:20:24,499
You’ll sit down and play it with a bunch of your friends and we would just
2479
02:20:24,624 --> 02:20:26,876
stay up for like 10 hours straight just playing.
2480
02:20:26,960 --> 02:20:29,337
We wouldn’t even realize that we had stayed up through the night.
2481
02:20:29,379 --> 02:20:33,675
[gunshots and ricochet]
2482
02:20:34,092 --> 02:20:36,594
It was never planned.
2483
02:20:37,053 --> 02:20:39,764
We were playing a lot of Bomberman in lunchtimes,
2484
02:20:39,848 --> 02:20:42,183
and we were just having so much fun because it was four-player
2485
02:20:42,183 --> 02:20:45,353
and, in the evenings, we played a lot of Doom on the Unix machines. We had
2486
02:20:45,353 --> 02:20:47,689
network Doom, then we just thought, ‘You know, we have to get a
2487
02:20:47,689 --> 02:20:51,151
a split screen shooter in on this, because it's just too much fun not to,
2488
02:20:51,151 --> 02:20:53,361
and we didn't know if the, if the console could handle it.
2489
02:20:53,486 --> 02:20:56,698
that was just around the time that Steve Ellis joined the team.
2490
02:20:56,865 --> 02:20:59,200
Very, very quickly he had it up and running.
2491
02:20:59,200 --> 02:21:00,910
Simon Farmer, who's a production manager,
2492
02:21:00,910 --> 02:21:03,621
came over one evening and saw us playing it
2493
02:21:03,621 --> 02:21:06,291
and asked, ‘What's that?’ And it’s like, ‘Oh, it's a multiplayer GoldenEye.
2494
02:21:06,291 --> 02:21:08,334
It was, like, that was a surprise.
2495
02:21:08,334 --> 02:21:11,171
You know, you're supposed to be finishing this game because it has to be launched.
2496
02:21:11,171 --> 02:21:13,298
Instead, we're busy making a multiplayer version.
2497
02:21:13,298 --> 02:21:14,883
I mean, it's deeply unprofessional.
2498
02:21:14,883 --> 02:21:16,634
We were a bunch of newbies who never made a game before.
2499
02:21:16,634 --> 02:21:19,262
So, the initial reaction to Rare was, ‘Can you please just
2500
02:21:19,262 --> 02:21:21,431
focus on what you're supposed to be doing?
2501
02:21:21,431 --> 02:21:23,641
Which was perfectly reasonable on their part.
2502
02:21:23,641 --> 02:21:29,105
♪♪♪
2503
02:21:29,105 --> 02:21:31,608
Nobody actually liked playing slappers only,
2504
02:21:31,608 --> 02:21:34,485
but we love just running around trying to slap each other to death,
2505
02:21:34,485 --> 02:21:37,238
like it was just the, just the stupidity of the whole thing,
2506
02:21:37,238 --> 02:21:39,824
like trying to slap somebody playing as Oddjob,
2507
02:21:39,824 --> 02:21:42,368
like, you know, they're out there all the way on the ground, and you're trying to hit him,
2508
02:21:42,368 --> 02:21:44,454
like there's just something appealing about that
2509
02:21:44,454 --> 02:21:47,457
to us, like, you know, 12 year olds or whatever,
2510
02:21:47,457 --> 02:21:49,417
whatever age we were at the time playing it.
2511
02:21:49,417 --> 02:21:51,211
And it was just funny, because, you know,
2512
02:21:51,211 --> 02:21:53,463
‘slapper’ means something else in England, of course,
2513
02:21:53,463 --> 02:21:57,675
so it was a kind of a play on words to see what we could get away with, you know?
2514
02:21:57,675 --> 02:22:00,345
This is going to be, you know, the new controller.
2515
02:22:00,345 --> 02:22:03,306
I wish I had it still, but we got sent a prototype version,
2516
02:22:03,306 --> 02:22:06,100
and we're like, you know, ‘What on earth is that?’
2517
02:22:06,100 --> 02:22:08,478
All first person shooters up to that point had been based in PC,
2518
02:22:08,478 --> 02:22:10,813
and they've generally been mice driven
2519
02:22:10,813 --> 02:22:13,900
with the analog little stick. You know, we felt that the shooting game was so important,
2520
02:22:13,900 --> 02:22:16,528
because you've suddenly had fine adjustment.
2521
02:22:16,528 --> 02:22:19,948
The control was the number one thing that really felt good. It was almost like,
2522
02:22:19,948 --> 02:22:21,950
‘That's how you do it on a console.
2523
02:22:21,950 --> 02:22:23,910
That's how movement should work.
2524
02:22:23,910 --> 02:22:32,126
♪♪♪
2525
02:22:32,126 --> 02:22:34,087
We didn’t have too many expectations, you know,
2526
02:22:34,087 --> 02:22:35,797
We had a great time making it.
2527
02:22:35,797 --> 02:22:38,258
We saw everything that was wrong with it, like you always do with your own creations.
2528
02:22:38,258 --> 02:22:41,135
You know, we knew that the frame rate was ropey in places,
2529
02:22:41,135 --> 02:22:43,805
there were bits that we wanted to do that we didn't get to do,
2530
02:22:43,805 --> 02:22:45,598
lots of bits of narrative that we dropped.
2531
02:22:45,598 --> 02:22:47,767
And then, it wasn't until, I think, it was the E2 show in Atlanta,
2532
02:22:47,767 --> 02:22:49,727
when we turned up with it almost finished,
2533
02:22:49,727 --> 02:22:52,897
Nintendo put it on a load screen, and everyone was turning up playing it
2534
02:22:52,897 --> 02:22:55,233
and then, they were coming away saying good things about it,
2535
02:22:55,233 --> 02:22:57,735
you know, and that was the first indication
2536
02:22:57,735 --> 02:23:00,405
that we had something pretty good on our hands.
2537
02:23:00,405 --> 02:23:05,576
GoldenEye, load a Rumble Pak, and see how it feels when 007 meets M64.
2538
02:23:05,576 --> 02:23:06,995
♪♪♪
2539
02:23:06,995 --> 02:23:09,080
Well, there's that famous quote from Miyamoto,
2540
02:23:09,080 --> 02:23:11,416
where, you know, a delayed game can be good,
2541
02:23:11,416 --> 02:23:14,085
but a rushed game is forever shitty, something like that.
2542
02:23:14,085 --> 02:23:15,712
You know the quote, everybody knows the quote.
2543
02:23:15,712 --> 02:23:17,714
He wanted James Bond to go around
2544
02:23:17,714 --> 02:23:19,757
a hospital right at the end and shake hands
2545
02:23:19,757 --> 02:23:22,260
with all the people that Bond had shot,
2546
02:23:22,260 --> 02:23:25,179
which was just the most bizarre,
2547
02:23:25,179 --> 02:23:27,557
bizarre request of like, ‘Why?
2548
02:23:27,557 --> 02:23:29,600
Why would you want to do that?’
2549
02:23:29,600 --> 02:23:32,937
And that's one of the reasons why the bodies then began to disappear.
2550
02:23:32,937 --> 02:23:35,940
We did have a version right at the beginning where we developed
2551
02:23:35,940 --> 02:23:38,318
this series of cards and what they would do, they would
2552
02:23:38,318 --> 02:23:41,571
show the blood coming out of the body, and it was hideous.
2553
02:23:41,571 --> 02:23:43,114
♪♪♪
2554
02:23:43,114 --> 02:23:45,241
It was not a typical Nintendo product at that time,
2555
02:23:45,241 --> 02:23:47,160
clearly, I mean, they've tended to do, you know
2556
02:23:47,160 --> 02:23:49,746
lots of much more children-based games, and this was clearly
2557
02:23:49,746 --> 02:23:53,082
not a child-based game, because you were James Bond and James Bond kills people.
2558
02:23:56,210 --> 02:23:59,630
It was in the rental charts for two years, which was absolutely stunning,
2559
02:23:59,630 --> 02:24:01,632
but it was such a slow burn, GoldenEye.
2560
02:24:01,632 --> 02:24:04,886
You know, it was never that, ‘Oh my goodness, we've had this massive hit.’
2561
02:24:04,886 --> 02:24:07,430
It was this very, very long, slow burn which, obviously,
2562
02:24:07,430 --> 02:24:10,308
still is, because we're doing an interview about it now.
2563
02:24:10,308 --> 02:24:12,894
None of us had made a game before, none of us had worked together before.
2564
02:24:12,894 --> 02:24:15,438
I couldn't believe my luck. My first job in the industry,
2565
02:24:15,438 --> 02:24:19,025
working on the cutting edge console at a company that was world-renowned,
2566
02:24:19,025 --> 02:24:21,486
working on technology that everyone was getting very excited about,
2567
02:24:21,486 --> 02:24:25,073
and almost no one had a chance to use it, but I had two of them on my desk, you know?
2568
02:24:25,073 --> 02:24:27,492
And we were making a Bond game, and I love James Bond.
2569
02:24:27,492 --> 02:24:30,453
So, you know, from my point of view, I couldn't have been happier.
2570
02:24:30,453 --> 02:24:34,207
That was my first job out of college after learning computer animation.
2571
02:24:34,207 --> 02:24:38,002
I was an artist, I managed to get a job, I managed to join this team.
2572
02:24:38,002 --> 02:24:40,630
It's a hell of a thing to suddenly just drop into.
2573
02:24:40,630 --> 02:24:43,633
It opened doors for me, something rotten over the years,
2574
02:24:43,633 --> 02:24:45,301
to say that I worked on GoldenEye.
2575
02:24:45,301 --> 02:24:53,935
♪♪♪
2576
02:24:55,561 --> 02:25:12,787
♪♪♪
2577
02:25:12,787 --> 02:25:15,123
This is a good story, I hope you have enough film.
2578
02:25:15,123 --> 02:25:17,792
Doom was just murder murder murder murder.
2579
02:25:17,792 --> 02:25:20,795
‘Oh, I see something! Murder. Oh! Puzzle’
2580
02:25:20,795 --> 02:25:22,547
That was the whole plot
2581
02:25:22,547 --> 02:25:26,384
of pretty much every single game made that is made in the first person shooter genre.
2582
02:25:26,384 --> 02:25:29,053
Go from Wolf, Doom, Doom II, Quake,
2583
02:25:29,053 --> 02:25:31,597
that's the plot. But, Quake II
2584
02:25:31,597 --> 02:25:33,766
opens up with this full motion movie
2585
02:25:33,766 --> 02:25:37,520
♪♪♪
2586
02:25:37,520 --> 02:25:39,147
of you being in a drop ship.
2587
02:25:39,147 --> 02:25:42,942
♪♪♪
2588
02:25:42,942 --> 02:25:44,986
It reminded me a lot of Starship Troopers.
2589
02:25:44,986 --> 02:25:47,989
♪♪♪
2590
02:25:47,989 --> 02:25:50,074
Remember your training,
2591
02:25:50,074 --> 02:25:52,452
and you will make it back alive.
2592
02:25:52,452 --> 02:25:54,579
Flying around, getting knocked off course.
2593
02:25:54,579 --> 02:25:57,540
♪♪♪
2594
02:25:57,540 --> 02:25:59,041
We’ll see what we can do. Holy shit!
2595
02:25:59,041 --> 02:26:00,710
♪♪♪
2596
02:26:00,710 --> 02:26:03,004
And then, when you get into the very first room,
2597
02:26:03,004 --> 02:26:05,923
you see the debris of where you came into the ceiling,
2598
02:26:05,923 --> 02:26:07,842
and you see your pod and it's like, ‘Okay,
2599
02:26:07,842 --> 02:26:11,220
now I'm actually in a real environment,
2600
02:26:11,220 --> 02:26:13,014
and I'm the intruder.
2601
02:26:13,014 --> 02:26:14,891
By the time Quake II rolled around,
2602
02:26:14,891 --> 02:26:20,313
we're experiencing a sea change in the people who made up id.
2603
02:26:20,313 --> 02:26:22,565
At that point, Romero had left.
2604
02:26:22,565 --> 02:26:27,111
Having people come in who had significant development experience
2605
02:26:27,111 --> 02:26:30,406
led to this dramatic shift in
2606
02:26:30,406 --> 02:26:32,241
the way that the game presented itself.
2607
02:26:32,241 --> 02:26:35,203
We knew we wanted to do
2608
02:26:35,203 --> 02:26:37,413
something different. We wanted
2609
02:26:37,413 --> 02:26:40,291
themed enemies, wanted a theme world.
2610
02:26:40,291 --> 02:26:43,127
The idea for the story was
2611
02:26:43,127 --> 02:26:44,879
taken from The Guns of Navarone.
2612
02:26:44,879 --> 02:26:46,005
The Guns of Navarone.
2613
02:26:46,005 --> 02:26:48,508
It’s this World War II story where the Allies have to
2614
02:26:48,508 --> 02:26:50,968
take up the Nazi guns so that the Allies
2615
02:26:50,968 --> 02:26:52,887
could land on the shore.
2616
02:26:52,887 --> 02:26:56,682
You go to Stroggos in the single person pods,
2617
02:26:56,682 --> 02:26:59,268
because you were too small to be hit by the big guns.
2618
02:26:59,268 --> 02:27:01,479
And then, you had to land on Stroggos,
2619
02:27:01,479 --> 02:27:04,148
you had to find the big gun, got to take it down,
2620
02:27:04,148 --> 02:27:07,527
so then humanity can finally attack Stroggos.
2621
02:27:07,527 --> 02:27:10,530
We, the rest of humanity, wish them luck,
2622
02:27:10,530 --> 02:27:12,740
and Godspeed as well.
2623
02:27:12,740 --> 02:27:15,451
♪♪♪
2624
02:27:15,451 --> 02:27:17,370
I'm pro Quake II, man. I'm another one of those guys.
2625
02:27:17,370 --> 02:27:20,331
It's so funny that people hate on it for doing something different
2626
02:27:20,331 --> 02:27:21,916
which is really odd to me because
2627
02:27:21,916 --> 02:27:24,877
do you just want the second game to do the exact same thing the first game did?
2628
02:27:24,877 --> 02:27:26,462
I've never understood that argument.
2629
02:27:26,462 --> 02:27:29,632
I always like changing themes from game to game,
2630
02:27:29,632 --> 02:27:30,967
generate new ideas.
2631
02:27:30,967 --> 02:27:33,219
I mean, it really should have had a different name.
2632
02:27:33,219 --> 02:27:35,680
We knew it had absolutely nothing to do with Quake One.
2633
02:27:35,680 --> 02:27:37,431
People outside the industry
2634
02:27:37,431 --> 02:27:42,562
do not have a good understanding of how challenging it is to name a product.
2635
02:27:42,562 --> 02:27:44,438
Every word has been used,
2636
02:27:44,438 --> 02:27:46,941
practically every pair of words has been used.
2637
02:27:46,941 --> 02:27:49,944
One of the guys came up with WOR, W-O-R,
2638
02:27:49,944 --> 02:27:53,698
which I, honestly today, think was a way better name than Quake II.
2639
02:27:53,698 --> 02:27:56,867
You come up with a bunch of cool stuff, you send it off to lawyers,
2640
02:27:56,867 --> 02:28:00,371
and they come back, and they tell you all the dangers of using any of the things
2641
02:28:00,371 --> 02:28:02,873
that you put on your list, and we just got frustrated,
2642
02:28:02,873 --> 02:28:05,126
and we were like, ‘Screw it, it's Quake II.’
2643
02:28:05,126 --> 02:28:06,002
♪♪♪
2644
02:28:06,002 --> 02:28:11,132
Looking back, probably not the best business decision.
2645
02:28:11,132 --> 02:28:14,885
It was a lot of fun to work on, not just a straightforward shooter
2646
02:28:14,885 --> 02:28:17,138
like we had done in the past.
2647
02:28:17,138 --> 02:28:19,974
We rarely interacted with each other
2648
02:28:19,974 --> 02:28:22,810
on the actual designs we were producing.
2649
02:28:22,810 --> 02:28:25,771
You know, ‘This is your Canvas, you paint it,
2650
02:28:25,771 --> 02:28:29,191
and each one of us put our own individual stamp
2651
02:28:29,191 --> 02:28:31,444
on the areas we created.
2652
02:28:31,444 --> 02:28:34,280
We wanted to focus on a single experience
2653
02:28:34,280 --> 02:28:37,867
in a themed world with a unique look.
2654
02:28:37,867 --> 02:28:39,535
You play through it, it makes sense.
2655
02:28:39,535 --> 02:28:42,496
You're not just suddenly, you know, off on a tangent.
2656
02:28:42,496 --> 02:28:44,498
You had an overall objective which
2657
02:28:44,498 --> 02:28:48,502
kind of helped the player immerse themselves in the story and the experience.
2658
02:28:48,502 --> 02:28:51,505
We also had the ability to make
2659
02:28:51,505 --> 02:28:54,175
hub areas where you could go into one level,
2660
02:28:54,175 --> 02:28:57,386
you could go out, you could come back. We could tell a better story.
2661
02:28:57,386 --> 02:29:00,681
The one big secret area that I did
2662
02:29:00,681 --> 02:29:04,185
that kind of defined how the game was supposed to work
2663
02:29:04,185 --> 02:29:08,189
which was I built a tram car into that level.
2664
02:29:08,189 --> 02:29:09,607
♪♪♪
2665
02:29:09,607 --> 02:29:12,610
If you rode it around 13 times,
2666
02:29:12,610 --> 02:29:14,945
there was a panel in the wall,
2667
02:29:14,945 --> 02:29:18,783
it opened up and showed you a goofy looking comic book character.
2668
02:29:18,783 --> 02:29:22,370
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy kind of bubbled into my head
2669
02:29:22,370 --> 02:29:25,873
and, in that book, he had the Bugblatter Beast of Traal
2670
02:29:25,873 --> 02:29:28,793
which is the dumbest creature in the universe.
2671
02:29:28,793 --> 02:29:31,170
That kind of slammed together with my sense of
2672
02:29:31,170 --> 02:29:33,965
characters being very influenced by Chuck Jones,
2673
02:29:33,965 --> 02:29:35,966
you know, just kind of ridiculous characters.
2674
02:29:35,966 --> 02:29:38,427
♪♪♪
2675
02:29:38,427 --> 02:29:42,306
I think Doom, Doom II, Quake, Quake II, Quake III, they were all like very different beasts.
2676
02:29:42,306 --> 02:29:45,601
Quake II was a slower game.
2677
02:29:45,601 --> 02:29:48,437
The railgun really changed the dynamics of the gameplay,
2678
02:29:48,437 --> 02:29:52,733
because it did so much damage at essentially, you know, infinite range.
2679
02:29:52,733 --> 02:29:57,363
But, the railgun was literally ripped off from the movie Eraser with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
2680
02:29:57,363 --> 02:29:59,615
♪♪♪
2681
02:29:59,615 --> 02:30:03,369
I’m back.
2682
02:30:03,369 --> 02:30:06,080
You can thank Arnold Schwarzenegger for the railgun.
2683
02:30:06,080 --> 02:30:08,791
A lot of people don't understand
2684
02:30:08,791 --> 02:30:11,001
the subtleties that make weapons in first person shooters
2685
02:30:11,001 --> 02:30:14,380
feel really good and really powerful and punchy.
2686
02:30:14,380 --> 02:30:16,132
♪♪♪
2687
02:30:16,132 --> 02:30:18,259
Great shotguns usually have a little
2688
02:30:18,259 --> 02:30:20,594
clinky delay before they shoot
2689
02:30:20,594 --> 02:30:22,012
♪♪♪
2690
02:30:22,012 --> 02:30:23,723
which makes them feel more powerful.
2691
02:30:23,723 --> 02:30:25,641
If you look really quick,
2692
02:30:25,641 --> 02:30:28,269
the weapon kinda drags along a little bit.
2693
02:30:28,269 --> 02:30:31,564
It feels a bit more floaty, but it still feels as precise to shoot.
2694
02:30:31,564 --> 02:30:34,734
There's a lot of little details there, screen effects and so on that makes
2695
02:30:34,734 --> 02:30:37,653
weapons feel really punchy and crunchy and alive.
2696
02:30:37,653 --> 02:30:39,238
♪♪♪
2697
02:30:39,238 --> 02:30:42,575
Plus, it brings back the BFG and it's like a really cool version of the BFG,
2698
02:30:42,575 --> 02:30:44,452
you know, which no one ever talks about.
2699
02:30:44,452 --> 02:30:46,454
♪♪♪
2700
02:30:46,454 --> 02:30:49,081
But, I’ll talk about BFG and every other Doom game, but it's like,
2701
02:30:49,081 --> 02:30:51,417
‘It's right here, man, you know, what about this one?’
2702
02:30:51,417 --> 02:30:53,002
♪♪♪
2703
02:30:53,002 --> 02:30:57,173
We could, uh, create prettier areas because we had coloured lighting,
2704
02:30:57,173 --> 02:31:00,426
which many people forget, but it’s the first game to have colored lighting
2705
02:31:00,426 --> 02:31:02,762
uh, which was very exciting at the time.
2706
02:31:02,762 --> 02:31:05,306
There's a lot of really cool elements in that game that I think get overlooked,
2707
02:31:05,306 --> 02:31:08,726
like it’s got some great body horror stuff with this alien race that are, like,
2708
02:31:08,726 --> 02:31:11,312
harvesting every species they can find
2709
02:31:11,312 --> 02:31:12,980
so they can continue to survive.
2710
02:31:12,980 --> 02:31:16,442
It would’ve been nice to have it actually be damaged
2711
02:31:16,442 --> 02:31:18,360
where you shot on the body but,
2712
02:31:18,360 --> 02:31:20,905
technically, we just couldn't do that at the time.
2713
02:31:20,905 --> 02:31:24,033
So, yeah, just another added texture of grossness.
2714
02:31:24,033 --> 02:31:26,076
I wasn't gonna complain.
2715
02:31:26,076 --> 02:31:28,204
♪♪♪
2716
02:31:28,204 --> 02:31:30,289
I do feel that
2717
02:31:30,289 --> 02:31:33,918
Quake II is more special than I think people give it credit for.
2718
02:31:33,918 --> 02:31:36,170
You know, we did a lot of things, again, that had
2719
02:31:36,170 --> 02:31:38,547
never been done before.
2720
02:31:38,547 --> 02:31:42,134
and with such a small team to create such a unique
2721
02:31:42,134 --> 02:31:45,888
and different experience, a different world, in a pretty short amount of time
2722
02:31:45,888 --> 02:31:47,640
was truly remarkable.
2723
02:31:47,640 --> 02:31:51,352
I do think it gets the short end of the stick of the three Quakes
2724
02:31:51,352 --> 02:31:54,855
but, in some aspects, it's my favorite.
2725
02:31:54,855 --> 02:32:10,412
♪♪♪
2726
02:32:10,412 --> 02:32:13,123
Well, I think Colony defined a lot of
2727
02:32:13,123 --> 02:32:16,168
what we think of in terms of first person shooters.
2728
02:32:16,168 --> 02:32:19,880
That's one of the reasons Tom Clancy got in touch with me.
2729
02:32:19,880 --> 02:32:22,383
David and Tom came up with the idea
2730
02:32:22,383 --> 02:32:24,802
that Tom would provide some IP,
2731
02:32:24,802 --> 02:32:26,595
and they would make a game about it.
2732
02:32:26,595 --> 02:32:28,889
Colony is the first time he'd ever experienced
2733
02:32:28,889 --> 02:32:31,267
a story in a game
2734
02:32:31,267 --> 02:32:33,853
versus just playing Pong or something.
2735
02:32:33,853 --> 02:32:38,315
The first trial run we did was the game called SSN. It was a submarine simulator.
2736
02:32:38,315 --> 02:32:39,859
♪♪♪
2737
02:32:39,859 --> 02:32:43,070
A lot of the SSN team wound up being the core team
2738
02:32:43,070 --> 02:32:44,989
that developed Rainbow Six.
2739
02:32:44,989 --> 02:32:47,658
And so, once SSN was a moderate success,
2740
02:32:47,658 --> 02:32:50,578
they're like, ‘Oh okay, we should spin out a separate company,
2741
02:32:50,578 --> 02:32:52,288
and that would, that was going to be Red Storm.
2742
02:32:52,288 --> 02:32:56,834
♪♪♪
2743
02:32:56,834 --> 02:32:59,086
So, the original idea for Rainbow Six
2744
02:32:59,086 --> 02:33:01,714
was created by a guy named Mustafa Famer. He said,
2745
02:33:01,714 --> 02:33:04,758
‘Why don't you do a game based on the FBI hostage rescue team?’
2746
02:33:04,758 --> 02:33:06,552
We’re like, Oh, that’s kind of cool. That’s a neat idea.’
2747
02:33:06,552 --> 02:33:08,721
Tom started introducing me to some of his friends,
2748
02:33:08,721 --> 02:33:11,557
and one of the groups he introduced me to was the
2749
02:33:11,557 --> 02:33:14,351
FBI hostage rescue team in Quantico.
2750
02:33:14,351 --> 02:33:18,063
They took me to one of their training facilities,
2751
02:33:18,063 --> 02:33:20,357
and they were going to have a live training session.
2752
02:33:20,357 --> 02:33:21,942
I’d never see anything like that:
2753
02:33:21,942 --> 02:33:26,947
black helicopters that fly over these buildings, all dressed in black ninjas
2754
02:33:26,947 --> 02:33:30,826
who repelled down onto the top of the building, and they start blowing shit up
2755
02:33:30,826 --> 02:33:32,202
[explosion]
2756
02:33:32,202 --> 02:33:35,164
It’s an organization with the resources and the authority
2757
02:33:35,164 --> 02:33:37,833
to fight terrorism wherever it flourishes.
2758
02:33:37,833 --> 02:33:40,920
So I call Tom up, ‘You know, we gotta do this.
2759
02:33:40,920 --> 02:33:43,422
It’s the most amazing thing. We have to do a game.’
2760
02:33:43,422 --> 02:33:46,800
He said, ‘I like that. I want an international force.’
2761
02:33:46,800 --> 02:33:49,178
It would be composed of the best and brightest
2762
02:33:49,178 --> 02:33:51,931
counterterrorism experts from every country.
2763
02:33:51,931 --> 02:33:54,308
And he said, ‘If you do the game, I'll do the book.’
2764
02:33:54,308 --> 02:33:56,644
It would operate in absolute secrecy,
2765
02:33:56,644 --> 02:34:00,731
its existence known only to the most senior government officials.
2766
02:34:00,731 --> 02:34:04,234
Its codename is Rainbow.
2767
02:34:04,234 --> 02:34:07,821
The storyline revolving around, like, these radical environmentalists
2768
02:34:07,821 --> 02:34:10,783
who were intending to destroy all of Earth with a pandemic,
2769
02:34:10,783 --> 02:34:13,285
that was the original story I created,
2770
02:34:13,285 --> 02:34:16,246
and Tom decided he liked enough to write it.
2771
02:34:16,246 --> 02:34:23,629
♪♪♪
2772
02:34:23,629 --> 02:34:25,756
The Tom Clancy games were interesting
2773
02:34:25,756 --> 02:34:28,092
in that they were first person but the pace
2774
02:34:28,092 --> 02:34:30,386
was, like, very slow and methodical.
2775
02:34:30,386 --> 02:34:33,472
I wanted an FPS that I could win at.
2776
02:34:33,472 --> 02:34:36,850
I was 30 years old at the time, and so my twitch reflexes
2777
02:34:36,850 --> 02:34:39,061
were not as good as they had been.
2778
02:34:39,061 --> 02:34:41,063
I couldn't beat the 18 year olds,
2779
02:34:41,063 --> 02:34:43,857
but I felt like I had, like, a lot of tactical knowledge,
2780
02:34:43,857 --> 02:34:47,611
and it's like, ‘I want a game that rewards a player like me.’
2781
02:34:47,611 --> 02:34:50,239
You have to do the planning, ‘I'm gonna do this, you're gonna do this,
2782
02:34:50,239 --> 02:34:52,116
you're gonna do this’ and spending
2783
02:34:52,116 --> 02:34:54,618
hours planning and minutes executing.
2784
02:34:54,618 --> 02:34:56,578
♪♪♪
2785
02:34:56,578 --> 02:34:58,747
The intersection of one shot, one kill and managing a team
2786
02:34:58,747 --> 02:35:02,042
intersected really, really well and was a pure accident.
2787
02:35:02,042 --> 02:35:03,711
I didn't want them to be superheroes.
2788
02:35:03,711 --> 02:35:07,548
I wanted them to actually feel like real human beings.
2789
02:35:07,548 --> 02:35:09,550
We wanted gunfights to be realistic and,
2790
02:35:09,550 --> 02:35:12,386
and, realistically, very few people survive
2791
02:35:12,386 --> 02:35:15,347
being shot even once. You have your team has six,
2792
02:35:15,347 --> 02:35:17,683
and it's kind of like you have, you know,
2793
02:35:17,683 --> 02:35:19,268
six times you can get shot.
2794
02:35:19,268 --> 02:35:20,269
Tango down.
2795
02:35:20,269 --> 02:35:23,230
I think the biggest thing that we added, I think, was the targeting reticle.
2796
02:35:23,230 --> 02:35:25,482
You had crosshairs before,
2797
02:35:25,482 --> 02:35:27,735
but I think that we were the first people
2798
02:35:27,735 --> 02:35:30,863
to ever have an expanding and contracting reticle.
2799
02:35:30,863 --> 02:35:33,240
♪♪♪
2800
02:35:33,240 --> 02:35:35,993
We kind of thought that, like, the shooting would be the fun part,
2801
02:35:35,993 --> 02:35:39,371
and what we discovered by accident was that
2802
02:35:39,371 --> 02:35:42,624
it was as much fun to sort of sneak around and spy on people
2803
02:35:42,624 --> 02:35:46,879
and plan out what you're going to do as to actually do the shooting.
2804
02:35:46,879 --> 02:35:50,132
And so, all of the future level designs we did were
2805
02:35:50,132 --> 02:35:52,926
based around having long approaches.
2806
02:35:52,926 --> 02:35:55,846
Your mission is to retake the Belgian Embassy in London.
2807
02:35:55,846 --> 02:35:58,390
What I remember about the, the embassy level was, um,
2808
02:35:58,390 --> 02:36:00,893
we demoed it at E3, and the lead artist,
2809
02:36:00,893 --> 02:36:03,228
a guy named Jonathan Peden, was
2810
02:36:03,228 --> 02:36:05,105
demonstrating and he was mic’d up.
2811
02:36:05,105 --> 02:36:07,608
He actually sent his team
2812
02:36:07,608 --> 02:36:10,152
upstairs to rescue the ambassador,
2813
02:36:10,152 --> 02:36:12,279
and he was just kind of showing off to everybody
2814
02:36:12,279 --> 02:36:14,573
that you create this plan and, you know, they would
2815
02:36:14,573 --> 02:36:18,118
they AIs would go off and execute it, and he was talking, he wasn't really paying attention,
2816
02:36:18,118 --> 02:36:22,164
and his AI team actually rescued the ambassador
2817
02:36:22,164 --> 02:36:24,875
and came back down the stairs,
2818
02:36:24,875 --> 02:36:27,920
and Jonathan was so surprised, because this usually didn't work.
2819
02:36:27,920 --> 02:36:29,922
The AI was kind of shaky at this point
2820
02:36:29,922 --> 02:36:32,049
that he just saw some bodies coming downstairs,
2821
02:36:32,049 --> 02:36:34,802
and he shot the ambassador in the head and killed him.
2822
02:36:34,802 --> 02:36:37,179
And he's, he's mic’d up, he's like, ‘Oh, shit.’
2823
02:36:37,179 --> 02:36:39,598
And he's like, ‘Oh, no, no’ and…
2824
02:36:39,598 --> 02:36:43,602
But, I mean, that was the point we realized we actually had something really, really cool.
2825
02:36:43,602 --> 02:36:45,896
♪♪♪
2826
02:36:45,896 --> 02:36:47,689
We'd done this, like, little PC game,
2827
02:36:47,689 --> 02:36:50,734
and we didn't have a good sense of how it was performing.
2828
02:36:50,734 --> 02:36:54,154
And then, all of a sudden, I was in all these meetings where we had to discuss
2829
02:36:54,154 --> 02:36:56,448
how it was going to be migrated to console,
2830
02:36:56,448 --> 02:36:59,827
and I'm like, ‘Oh, I guess people really like it.’
2831
02:36:59,827 --> 02:37:01,036
[laughing]
2832
02:37:01,036 --> 02:37:02,412
Take them down.
2833
02:37:02,412 --> 02:37:05,958
So, that's where Rainbow Six came from. It was literally that phone call.
2834
02:37:05,958 --> 02:37:08,794
We just had, like, a vision and kind of stuck to the vision,
2835
02:37:08,794 --> 02:37:10,379
and it kind of worked out.
2836
02:37:10,379 --> 02:37:12,923
And I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is the best game ever.’
2837
02:37:12,923 --> 02:37:15,050
but I want you to know that you deserve all that and more.
♪♪♪
2838
02:37:15,050 --> 02:37:17,010
You knew, when you signed on with this crew,
2839
02:37:17,010 --> 02:37:19,429
there wouldn't be any parades or medal ceremonies,
2840
02:37:19,429 --> 02:37:42,077
but I want you to know that you deserve all that and more.
♪♪♪
2841
02:37:42,077 --> 02:37:43,620
For a short period of time,
2842
02:37:43,620 --> 02:37:46,707
Quake II was the
2843
02:37:46,707 --> 02:37:49,334
first person shooter game that everyone played
2844
02:37:49,334 --> 02:37:53,797
♪♪♪
2845
02:37:53,797 --> 02:37:55,799
until Unreal came out.
2846
02:37:55,799 --> 02:38:09,438
♪♪♪
2847
02:38:09,438 --> 02:38:11,899
So, back in the day, a gentleman named James Schmalz
2848
02:38:11,899 --> 02:38:14,985
produced a couple of games, Epic Pinball and Extreme Pinball,
2849
02:38:14,985 --> 02:38:18,197
which were huge breakout hits for Epic back in the Shareware
2850
02:38:18,197 --> 02:38:20,073
era in the 1990s.
2851
02:38:20,073 --> 02:38:22,784
James was a very talented artist and programmer
2852
02:38:22,784 --> 02:38:25,495
who could basically do it all, and he took kind of his
2853
02:38:25,495 --> 02:38:28,207
tremendous art skills and started applying it to 3D.
2854
02:38:28,207 --> 02:38:31,543
Early versions of Unreal were kind of terrain based.
2855
02:38:31,543 --> 02:38:34,296
James wanted to make a game where you were mech in a cave
2856
02:38:34,296 --> 02:38:35,923
where, if you think about it, doesn't make a lot of sense,
2857
02:38:35,923 --> 02:38:37,758
‘cause there's not a lot of room for a mech to go.
2858
02:38:37,758 --> 02:38:40,552
Eventually, that started transitioning into Tim Sweeney's involvement
2859
02:38:40,552 --> 02:38:44,097
and development of the engine and subsequently the game, Unreal.
2860
02:38:44,097 --> 02:38:51,688
♪♪♪
2861
02:38:51,688 --> 02:38:55,817
We talk about FPS as a genre that has, for decades,
2862
02:38:55,817 --> 02:38:58,779
always been a representation of new technological features,
2863
02:38:58,779 --> 02:39:01,531
and Unreal was maybe one of the best examples of that
2864
02:39:01,531 --> 02:39:04,701
id, back in the day, was infamous for being Carmack’s Studio.
2865
02:39:04,701 --> 02:39:07,663
You know, at Epic, we had a little bit better of a balance, I'd like to believe,
2866
02:39:07,663 --> 02:39:09,790
of having design versus tech.
2867
02:39:09,790 --> 02:39:12,751
Tim Sweeney and the programmers came up with an ability to make water
2868
02:39:12,751 --> 02:39:15,712
that looked glistening and looked beautiful in the environment.
2869
02:39:15,712 --> 02:39:17,506
But, now, the player is gonna swim through this.
2870
02:39:17,506 --> 02:39:20,509
♪♪♪
2871
02:39:20,509 --> 02:39:24,471
Mark Rein, the very, very savvy businessman that worked with Tim Sweeney,
2872
02:39:24,471 --> 02:39:27,057
cornered him. He's like, ‘Tim, you know, we should make our own engine,
2873
02:39:27,057 --> 02:39:29,518
and we can sell this. Not only should we sell the engine,
2874
02:39:29,518 --> 02:39:32,145
we should also partner with licensees, give them feedback,
2875
02:39:32,145 --> 02:39:35,482
and give them the actual support on the engine, and then make the engine better
2876
02:39:35,482 --> 02:39:37,067
and work with them as partners’
2877
02:39:37,067 --> 02:39:40,070
which led to the burgeoning Unreal engine business that it is today.
2878
02:39:40,070 --> 02:39:42,990
♪♪♪
2879
02:39:42,990 --> 02:39:46,827
Unreal seemed to be that point in time when it was more about
2880
02:39:46,827 --> 02:39:49,788
moving through a world, and it just seemed to be that was now,
2881
02:39:49,788 --> 02:39:52,457
instead of running to the exit sign and pressing that button,
2882
02:39:52,457 --> 02:39:54,710
it was like, ‘No, you were, like, progressing through somewhere.’
2883
02:39:54,710 --> 02:39:57,546
Prisoner 849 escaping.
2884
02:39:57,546 --> 02:40:00,048
You start off in a prison ship, and then that level ends
2885
02:40:00,048 --> 02:40:02,509
but, then suddenly, you're on like a giant alien planet,
2886
02:40:02,509 --> 02:40:05,012
and you’re kind of running around for a bit like, ‘Oh, where am I supposed to go?’
2887
02:40:05,012 --> 02:40:07,389
And then, you find the mine entrance,
2888
02:40:07,389 --> 02:40:09,766
and you start going through all these mines and you come out of the mines
2889
02:40:09,766 --> 02:40:12,060
on, like, the top of these mountains.
2890
02:40:12,060 --> 02:40:14,813
We didn't really have cutscenes. We basically had the premise:
2891
02:40:14,813 --> 02:40:18,442
the player is a prisoner, they’re on this floating spaceship that's a prison ship,
2892
02:40:18,442 --> 02:40:21,153
crash lands in the Bermuda Triangle of the galaxy.
2893
02:40:21,153 --> 02:40:24,364
All these different aliens and creatures and spaceships and environments are there.
2894
02:40:24,364 --> 02:40:25,741
That tied it all together.
2895
02:40:25,741 --> 02:40:28,827
We'd let the player just kind of find the story as they went through.
2896
02:40:28,827 --> 02:40:29,745
♪♪♪
2897
02:40:29,745 --> 02:40:31,830
For me, pacing is everything.
2898
02:40:31,830 --> 02:40:33,498
id’s games were always at 11,
2899
02:40:33,498 --> 02:40:35,626
and I'm a big believer that, if you're always at 11, like
2900
02:40:35,626 --> 02:40:37,711
it's like the person who shouts all the time like,
2901
02:40:37,711 --> 02:40:39,629
eventually, you just start tuning them out.
2902
02:40:39,629 --> 02:40:42,758
You know, you have to kind of have those ebbs and those flows of those moments,
2903
02:40:42,758 --> 02:40:45,052
and I did the very first level of Unreal,
2904
02:40:45,052 --> 02:40:48,805
and you really don't have any fights in that environment. It's basically just setting the tone:
2905
02:40:48,805 --> 02:40:51,224
you're in this crashed spaceship, and then you start getting
2906
02:40:51,224 --> 02:40:54,102
teasers of the monsters that you'll later fight,
2907
02:40:54,102 --> 02:40:56,480
which was a technique I learned from, you know, being a fan of the
2908
02:40:56,480 --> 02:41:00,525
first Alien movie where you really don't get to see a good look of the alien until Act Three.
2909
02:41:00,525 --> 02:41:02,527
It just seemed to have, like, this dynamic
2910
02:41:02,527 --> 02:41:05,405
soundtrack at the time too. The music in that game is still amazing.
2911
02:41:05,405 --> 02:41:08,658
That seemed to work in tandem with what you were playing.
2912
02:41:08,658 --> 02:41:09,993
♪♪♪
2913
02:41:09,993 --> 02:41:12,079
Like, it wasn't just like, ‘Okay, now I'm playing this level,
2914
02:41:12,079 --> 02:41:14,623
and it's playing that heavy metal track that I've heard twice already.
2915
02:41:14,623 --> 02:41:17,042
It was like, ‘No, this is like a completely new soundscape.’
2916
02:41:17,042 --> 02:41:17,834
♪♪♪
2917
02:41:17,834 --> 02:41:20,796
So, about once a year, when my wife and I like to pick an actor and actress that we like
2918
02:41:20,796 --> 02:41:22,547
and burn through a lot of their movies, one year, I'm like,
2919
02:41:22,547 --> 02:41:24,091
‘Let's do Jean-Claude Van Damme.’
2920
02:41:24,091 --> 02:41:27,135
And so, I fired up Hard Target, which I hadn't seen in years,
2921
02:41:27,135 --> 02:41:29,554
and there's a famous scene in there where
2922
02:41:29,554 --> 02:41:32,015
Jean-Claude Van Damme doesn't just shoot a bad guy,
2923
02:41:32,015 --> 02:41:34,226
he kicks a gas can in front of the guy's head
2924
02:41:34,226 --> 02:41:37,020
then shoots the gas can which explodes.
2925
02:41:37,020 --> 02:41:39,231
[explosions]
2926
02:41:39,231 --> 02:41:41,024
Now, I was working on Unreal, we had this
2927
02:41:41,024 --> 02:41:43,693
shock rifle with a primary which was an instant laser beam
2928
02:41:43,693 --> 02:41:47,030
with a slow-moving orb that came up that you could use as the alternate firearm, like,
2929
02:41:47,030 --> 02:41:49,908
‘What if you could shoot your alternate firearm and make a mega explosion?’
2930
02:41:49,908 --> 02:41:51,243
♪♪♪
2931
02:41:51,243 --> 02:41:53,453
Your alternate weapon mechanic does at least
2932
02:41:53,453 --> 02:41:55,997
allow you to kind of fold two things together, right?
2933
02:41:55,997 --> 02:41:58,500
So, you have two ideas that you're carrying around at any given time.
2934
02:41:58,500 --> 02:42:02,129
I can bounce a set of flat pellets off the wall to catch somebody,
2935
02:42:02,129 --> 02:42:05,465
or I can lob a grenade a longer distance on the right quick
2936
02:42:05,465 --> 02:42:07,342
That's a form of player creativity, right?
2937
02:42:07,342 --> 02:42:10,512
So much of the first Unreal and later Unreal Tournament were developed virtually right
2938
02:42:10,512 --> 02:42:13,223
in the early days of the Internet, and I remember sitting in my apartment
2939
02:42:13,223 --> 02:42:17,394
in Southern California. I got a phone call from Mark Rein. I’m playing Quake One, right?
2940
02:42:17,394 --> 02:42:20,480
And he's like, ‘You need to download this mod for this. It's called The Reaper Bot.’
2941
02:42:20,480 --> 02:42:23,358
Suddenly, I'm offline, but I'm playing against opponents
2942
02:42:23,358 --> 02:42:25,152
that are as good as human players,
2943
02:42:25,152 --> 02:42:27,237
and I was like, ‘What is this?’ And Mark’s like, ‘Yeah, there's this
2944
02:42:27,237 --> 02:42:30,323
this programmer, a network Programmer out of IBM, this guy named Steve Polge.
2945
02:42:30,323 --> 02:42:32,951
He coded this up as a mod himself, like, and we're going to try and
2946
02:42:32,951 --> 02:42:35,454
recruit them to do the AI for Unreal.
2947
02:42:35,454 --> 02:42:38,457
Years later, Steve came on board, wound up doing really, really cool AI
2948
02:42:38,457 --> 02:42:42,252
for the Skaarj and all the creatures in Unreal which later transferred over to Unreal Tournament
2949
02:42:42,252 --> 02:42:44,212
and the AI in Unreal Tournament,
2950
02:42:44,212 --> 02:42:46,506
and it's yet another example of something cool
2951
02:42:46,506 --> 02:42:49,092
coming out of the mod scene that winds up being massively influential
2952
02:42:49,092 --> 02:42:50,594
across the entire business.
2953
02:42:50,594 --> 02:42:53,138
Back in the 90s, when Unreal came out,
2954
02:42:53,138 --> 02:42:55,557
it was still on 56k dial up.
2955
02:42:55,557 --> 02:43:00,604
So, to be able to just play multiplayer against bots that would still kick your ass was pretty appealing..
2956
02:43:00,604 --> 02:43:03,356
We had to manually path the environments.
2957
02:43:03,356 --> 02:43:07,110
We had to, like, run tests with the bots, follow them to make sure they didn't look stupid,
2958
02:43:07,110 --> 02:43:10,238
to make sure that they were playing as good as human players.
2959
02:43:10,238 --> 02:43:13,200
You don't really see bot AI in games anymore, probably because it's too
2960
02:43:13,200 --> 02:43:15,911
time consuming to develop and code, I would imagine,
2961
02:43:15,911 --> 02:43:18,538
but I know that a lot of the AI that they used for the bots in
2962
02:43:18,538 --> 02:43:22,417
Unreal and Unreal Tournament was basically what just got carried over from the single player
2963
02:43:22,417 --> 02:43:24,503
which, again, is probably why that single player was so good,
2964
02:43:24,503 --> 02:43:26,463
because it actually had challenging combat.
2965
02:43:26,463 --> 02:43:27,756
♪♪♪
2966
02:43:27,756 --> 02:43:30,759
I had all these crazy ideas for what the game could be called, like,
2967
02:43:30,759 --> 02:43:34,471
in hindsight, incredibly generic names like Dark Earth and things like that, right?
2968
02:43:34,471 --> 02:43:37,974
And, after so many email battles, so many in person verbal fights,
2969
02:43:37,974 --> 02:43:41,269
Tim finally said, ‘Look, this is it. We're just going to call it Unreal, and then
2970
02:43:41,269 --> 02:43:44,397
the marketing came out where they're like, ‘It's called Unreal because it is.’
2971
02:43:44,397 --> 02:43:46,775
It just worked.
2972
02:43:46,775 --> 02:43:49,945
That was the game that cemented myself as a creator in the business.
2973
02:43:49,945 --> 02:43:53,490
Not gonna lie, that was some of the hardest years of my life.
2974
02:43:53,490 --> 02:43:56,535
I was 16 hours a day, just working. It was sleep, work,
2975
02:43:56,535 --> 02:43:59,579
sleep, work, sleep work, pounding Mountain Dew, cases of Mountain Dew.
2976
02:43:59,579 --> 02:44:01,331
I don't know how it didn't get kidney stones
2977
02:44:01,331 --> 02:44:03,375
but, at the end of the day, it was worth it.
2978
02:44:03,375 --> 02:44:07,170
Everything ultimately happened for a reason. It turned out great, but it wasn't easy.
2979
02:44:07,170 --> 02:44:13,927
♪♪♪
2980
02:44:13,927 --> 02:44:14,928
Die.
2981
02:44:14,970 --> 02:44:18,640
I'll tell you a story about Duke. The very first E3 we ever went to,
2982
02:44:18,807 --> 02:44:21,851
the whole team went, and Duke has come out
2983
02:44:21,851 --> 02:44:24,396
as the hot game of E3 in 1996,
2984
02:44:24,396 --> 02:44:26,898
and we're walking around, and we don't want to leave the hall.
2985
02:44:26,898 --> 02:44:31,403
We literally are still walking in the hall after they're tearing it down,
2986
02:44:31,403 --> 02:44:34,239
and then these, these two European guys come up to us,
2987
02:44:34,239 --> 02:44:37,242
and they ask us, ‘Did you all create Duke?’ And we're like, ‘Yeah,’ and he goes,
2988
02:44:37,242 --> 02:44:38,702
‘Hey, we'd love to talk to you.’
2989
02:44:38,702 --> 02:44:42,497
They had built this spider to where you could climb up this little ladder
2990
02:44:42,497 --> 02:44:45,667
and go inside its belly, and that was the meeting room,
2991
02:44:45,667 --> 02:44:49,004
and on each of the legs is a monitor from the games.
2992
02:44:49,004 --> 02:44:51,840
So, we're sitting there in a spider's belly
2993
02:44:51,840 --> 02:44:55,594
with six people in a belly that's designed for four,
2994
02:44:55,594 --> 02:44:59,973
and they asked us, ‘Have you ever thought about starting your own company?’
2995
02:44:59,973 --> 02:45:02,767
And we looked at each other, and we're like,
2996
02:45:02,767 --> 02:45:05,061
‘No, we haven't until right now.’
2997
02:45:05,061 --> 02:45:14,529
♪♪♪
2998
02:45:14,529 --> 02:45:17,532
Quake: Scourge of Armagon was my very first
2999
02:45:17,532 --> 02:45:20,452
game where I got to actually make the game
3000
02:45:20,452 --> 02:45:22,996
instead of market it, so I designed the characters,
3001
02:45:22,996 --> 02:45:25,373
I designed the weapons,
3002
02:45:25,373 --> 02:45:27,375
but we added to the universe.
3003
02:45:27,375 --> 02:45:29,961
I loved it. We knew what we were doing.
3004
02:45:29,961 --> 02:45:32,714
Every time we showed him something they were like, ‘Yeah, that's good. Keep going.’
3005
02:45:32,714 --> 02:45:36,092
That team created some of the most iconic
3006
02:45:36,092 --> 02:45:38,303
levels and Quake to date,
3007
02:45:38,303 --> 02:45:41,723
including levels like DM1,
3008
02:45:41,723 --> 02:45:44,017
♪♪♪
3009
02:45:44,017 --> 02:45:48,104
the very first space level ever.
3010
02:45:48,104 --> 02:45:51,316
It's not like I invented the automobile, a very, you know,
3011
02:45:51,316 --> 02:45:53,985
somebody would have come up with floating,
3012
02:45:53,985 --> 02:45:56,696
you know, in the open, void space,
3013
02:45:56,696 --> 02:45:57,989
but I was the first.
3014
02:45:57,989 --> 02:46:01,159
I started it at the office, and people would walk by and say,
3015
02:46:01,159 --> 02:46:03,953
‘What are you, What are you doing?’ And I said, I've described very basically what I'm doing.
3016
02:46:03,953 --> 02:46:06,289
‘I'm making this flat.’ They said, ‘What are you wasting your time for?
3017
02:46:06,289 --> 02:46:10,960
You're never gonna get the frame rate of these people, you can see the entire level.
3018
02:46:10,960 --> 02:46:14,923
So, I stayed at home and, and got it going to where it was playable
3019
02:46:14,923 --> 02:46:16,925
and then had people start to play it, and they were like,
3020
02:46:16,925 --> 02:46:21,805
‘Hey, this is a great idea,’ and I'm like, ‘Hey, I know.’
3021
02:46:21,805 --> 02:46:25,266
Having made Duke and a Quake game,
3022
02:46:25,266 --> 02:46:28,561
we had a pedigree at that point where, when we sat down
3023
02:46:28,561 --> 02:46:31,022
to decide what SiN was going to be about,
3024
02:46:31,064 --> 02:46:32,774
we had a history to pull from.
3025
02:46:32,774 --> 02:46:37,737
♪♪♪
3026
02:46:37,987 --> 02:46:38,988
[record scratch]
3027
02:46:39,280 --> 02:46:45,870
♪♪♪
3028
02:46:45,995 --> 02:46:49,165
We wanted to change the way video games stories were told.
3029
02:46:49,457 --> 02:46:53,878
♪♪♪
3030
02:46:53,962 --> 02:46:57,590
Hostiles are armed and extremely dangerous. Approach with deadly force.
3031
02:46:57,590 --> 02:46:59,926
We really want it to feel like you're in a comic book.
3032
02:47:00,260 --> 02:47:04,931
♪♪♪
3033
02:47:05,181 --> 02:47:06,808
Hey, that was a good shot.
3034
02:47:06,808 --> 02:47:09,102
And Joel Thomas came in and started designing
3035
02:47:09,102 --> 02:47:13,440
the characters, and I was able to direct Joel in the designing of the world.
3036
02:47:13,440 --> 02:47:16,025
So, it really shaped up to be
3037
02:47:16,025 --> 02:47:18,319
a great comic book-like video game.
3038
02:47:18,319 --> 02:47:20,363
Not so fast.
3039
02:47:20,363 --> 02:47:23,158
We had such incredible level designers.
3040
02:47:23,158 --> 02:47:27,036
We wanted to create more experiences within that single level,
3041
02:47:27,036 --> 02:47:29,664
because most games, at that point, once you run through the hallway,
3042
02:47:29,664 --> 02:47:30,999
there's no reason to go back.
3043
02:47:30,999 --> 02:47:34,127
And we thought, ‘What if you made it so that, depending on what you do,
3044
02:47:34,127 --> 02:47:37,172
there's a fork in the road, and you can't go this way, ‘cause you didn't do the right thing.’
3045
02:47:37,172 --> 02:47:39,507
But, you can do this one, because you did that thing.
3046
02:47:39,507 --> 02:47:42,761
We decided to create action-based outcomes.
3047
02:47:42,761 --> 02:47:46,014
So, your actions in the game really mattered,
3048
02:47:46,014 --> 02:47:48,808
and it changed the levels, it changed the narrative,
3049
02:47:48,808 --> 02:47:52,562
it changed the outcome to change whether or not you could find a secret.
3050
02:47:52,562 --> 02:47:54,397
If you want to live, get out of here.
3051
02:47:54,439 --> 02:47:57,442
It was really a way to create this depth
3052
02:47:57,442 --> 02:47:59,611
for the real fans who wanted to enjoy
3053
02:47:59,611 --> 02:48:01,404
a much deeper experience.
3054
02:48:01,404 --> 02:48:04,282
It sounds like a great idea until you start having to playtest
3055
02:48:04,282 --> 02:48:07,160
all these different permutations of the player path.
3056
02:48:07,160 --> 02:48:09,204
And it turned out to be a real nightmare.
3057
02:48:09,204 --> 02:48:11,456
Die, you ugly son of a bitch.
3058
02:48:11,456 --> 02:48:13,917
We thought players would play the game more than once.
3059
02:48:13,917 --> 02:48:15,710
‘Okay, now I'm gonna do it and go this way.’
3060
02:48:15,710 --> 02:48:18,880
We never got any feedback if that was any good,
3061
02:48:18,880 --> 02:48:20,965
because all they knew was linear,
3062
02:48:20,965 --> 02:48:23,968
and they went that way and not thinking that you can go this way.
3063
02:48:23,968 --> 02:48:28,139
They just didn't think this. So, it was a big waste of time.
3064
02:48:28,139 --> 02:48:32,936
The release of the original SiN is, has definitely a lot of mixed, mixed emotions.
3065
02:48:32,936 --> 02:48:35,480
This incredibly big ambitious game,
3066
02:48:35,480 --> 02:48:38,316
and it had so much great content,
3067
02:48:38,316 --> 02:48:41,736
but it was also released with a lot of bugs
3068
02:48:41,736 --> 02:48:45,323
up against a titan like Half-Life.
3069
02:48:45,323 --> 02:48:49,077
it never would have beat Half-Life, but it would’ve been the Pepsi to their Coca Cola.
3070
02:48:49,077 --> 02:48:50,161
♪♪♪
3071
02:48:50,161 --> 02:48:53,289
Tell me, how do you expect this to end?
3072
02:48:53,289 --> 02:48:56,084
We had not revisited the SiN franchise
3073
02:48:56,084 --> 02:48:58,127
after the initial launch and the add-on pack,
3074
02:48:58,127 --> 02:49:02,590
and I started designing what would be SiN 2.
3075
02:49:02,590 --> 02:49:05,093
And I wasn't telling anyone I was doing this,
3076
02:49:05,093 --> 02:49:08,388
just me and the concept guys. I was doing it because I knew in my heart,
3077
02:49:08,388 --> 02:49:10,098
‘One day, we're going to do this.’
3078
02:49:10,098 --> 02:49:13,518
Doug Lombardi, who was the vice president of Valves,
3079
02:49:13,518 --> 02:49:17,689
asked me, ‘Hey, how would you guys like to reboot the SiN franchise
3080
02:49:17,689 --> 02:49:20,525
and utilize the Half-Life 2 engine to do it?’
3081
02:49:20,525 --> 02:49:21,818
♪♪♪
3082
02:49:21,818 --> 02:49:24,445
‘Yeah, I think we want to do that.’
3083
02:49:24,445 --> 02:49:28,032
Trust me, he knew exactly what he was doing.
3084
02:49:28,032 --> 02:49:30,118
We knew we wanted to make episodic content
3085
02:49:30,118 --> 02:49:33,538
but, when you make episodic content, we still need to have it at a price point
3086
02:49:33,538 --> 02:49:35,957
that makes sense for the support of the developer.
3087
02:49:35,957 --> 02:49:40,753
And so, we said, ‘How do we make a $20 game that plays more than four hours?’
3088
02:49:40,753 --> 02:49:44,173
Well, we came up with the dynamic difficulty system
3089
02:49:44,173 --> 02:49:47,343
so that depending on how good the player was
3090
02:49:47,343 --> 02:49:50,805
determined the difficulty of the game.
3091
02:49:50,805 --> 02:49:53,850
The AI started responding to how they played.
3092
02:49:53,850 --> 02:49:56,311
One of the coolest things that we did with SiN episodes
3093
02:49:56,311 --> 02:49:58,438
was we sat a professional eSports player
3094
02:49:58,438 --> 02:50:02,442
down next to a person who had never played a first person shooter,
3095
02:50:02,442 --> 02:50:05,403
and they finished within 60 seconds of each other,
3096
02:50:05,403 --> 02:50:09,741
and they both turned around and said they had the best experience of their life playing a video game.
3097
02:50:09,741 --> 02:50:12,785
We were just doing these things, because they made sense.
3098
02:50:12,785 --> 02:50:15,330
You know, we were fans and gamers ourselves.
3099
02:50:15,330 --> 02:50:18,917
That's the great power of being an independent developer.
3100
02:50:18,917 --> 02:50:21,836
We were doing things, because that's what we wanted the market to do,
3101
02:50:21,836 --> 02:50:24,631
and we decided that we would be the example
3102
02:50:24,631 --> 02:50:27,592
within the market that made that possible.
3103
02:50:27,592 --> 02:50:33,181
I'm a visionary, Blade. I will change the world.
3104
02:50:33,181 --> 02:50:36,643
♪♪♪
3105
02:50:36,643 --> 02:50:39,103
My name is John Parker Hammond.
3106
02:50:39,103 --> 02:50:43,024
I was born on March 14th, 1928.
3107
02:50:43,024 --> 02:50:46,361
What follows is a record of certain events in which I took part
3108
02:50:46,361 --> 02:50:49,948
between the years 1980 and 1997
3109
02:50:49,948 --> 02:50:53,409
on an island I’ll call Site B.
3110
02:50:53,409 --> 02:50:56,537
The thing about Trespasser is that it has a whole bunch of systems
3111
02:50:56,537 --> 02:50:59,958
that probably would have worked if we had six months or nine months to finish them.
3112
02:50:59,958 --> 02:51:02,210
♪♪♪
3113
02:51:02,210 --> 02:51:04,253
The project got started,
3114
02:51:04,253 --> 02:51:07,215
basically, because I became really obsessed
3115
02:51:07,215 --> 02:51:09,801
with locomotion and
3116
02:51:09,801 --> 02:51:11,636
modeling characters
3117
02:51:11,636 --> 02:51:14,889
dynamically rather than as animation playback.
3118
02:51:14,889 --> 02:51:17,392
DreamWorks was trying to figure out what to be.
3119
02:51:17,392 --> 02:51:20,395
Steven was really interested in Jurassic Park at the time,
3120
02:51:20,395 --> 02:51:23,690
and so somebody offered me this like, ‘Hey, you can do anything you want
3121
02:51:23,690 --> 02:51:25,692
if it's in the Jurassic Park universe.’
3122
02:51:25,692 --> 02:51:29,654
Welcome to Jurassic Park.
3123
02:51:29,654 --> 02:51:31,698
♪♪♪
3124
02:51:31,698 --> 02:51:33,783
The crazy son of a bitch, you’re dead.
3125
02:51:33,783 --> 02:51:35,743
I was like, ‘Okay, cool.’ So bipeds, quadrupeds,
3126
02:51:35,743 --> 02:51:37,996
got it, done, I could work on that. That'd be fun.’
3127
02:51:37,996 --> 02:51:42,458
That was exactly how much deep thought went into that.
3128
02:51:42,458 --> 02:51:44,502
♪♪♪
3129
02:51:44,502 --> 02:51:45,878
Six left.
3130
02:51:45,878 --> 02:51:49,257
♪♪♪
3131
02:51:49,257 --> 02:51:51,259
I remember the wavy the arm,
3132
02:51:51,259 --> 02:51:53,261
so you always have your arm extended
3133
02:51:53,261 --> 02:51:56,264
in front of you, and it kind of just bumps into stuff.
3134
02:51:56,264 --> 02:51:59,892
There's some very, like, kind of glitchy and funny physics to the game.
3135
02:51:59,892 --> 02:52:03,479
We went too far. We had it so the weapons could catch on things
3136
02:52:03,479 --> 02:52:05,773
and, like, you really were simulating all that stuff,
3137
02:52:05,773 --> 02:52:07,942
because I was trying really hard
3138
02:52:07,942 --> 02:52:10,319
to explore this idea of
3139
02:52:10,319 --> 02:52:12,822
really giving you the feeling that you're somewhere.
3140
02:52:12,822 --> 02:52:15,658
Dropping the HUD was a direct result of that Looking Glass
3141
02:52:15,658 --> 02:52:17,869
thought process of simulating the experience.
3142
02:52:17,869 --> 02:52:19,078
Looks like 20.
3143
02:52:19,078 --> 02:52:21,622
I had this idea at the time because I was like, you know,
3144
02:52:21,622 --> 02:52:24,542
an extreme young, like, art school idea
3145
02:52:24,542 --> 02:52:27,837
that anything you had to put on a HUD was a failure.
3146
02:52:27,837 --> 02:52:30,089
It's like your high school English teacher saying,
3147
02:52:30,089 --> 02:52:31,591
‘You know, show me, don't tell me.
3148
02:52:31,591 --> 02:52:34,260
What is it like to be low on ammo,
3149
02:52:34,260 --> 02:52:36,512
trapped on an island with real dinosaurs?’
3150
02:52:36,512 --> 02:52:40,433
‘Okay, it's not like min/maxing like a number
3151
02:52:40,433 --> 02:52:43,311
in the corner of your screen, right? We have to do better than that.’
3152
02:52:43,311 --> 02:52:46,230
Five,
3153
02:52:46,230 --> 02:52:48,483
Four.
3154
02:52:48,483 --> 02:52:52,361
The overarching story of Trespasser that caused it to not be finished
3155
02:52:52,361 --> 02:52:55,114
was that we were at a brand new publisher
3156
02:52:55,114 --> 02:52:59,327
who didn't yet know that young teams was something really promising,
3157
02:52:59,327 --> 02:53:02,705
needed to just be, like, given the extra time to finish it.
3158
02:53:02,705 --> 02:53:06,292
Like, ‘Well, you know, you reached the end of your budget. And so that's it, we're shipping this.’
3159
02:53:06,292 --> 02:53:10,338
And I was like 29. I was like, ‘Okay.’
3160
02:53:10,338 --> 02:53:13,424
♪♪♪
3161
02:53:13,424 --> 02:53:15,384
So, there you go.
3162
02:53:15,384 --> 02:53:17,678
But, well hey, there are a lot of ideas in there
3163
02:53:17,678 --> 02:53:20,181
born of the experience of trying to do
3164
02:53:20,181 --> 02:53:24,560
immersive storytelling of trying to tell a story with an environment that lives on.
3165
02:53:24,560 --> 02:53:27,146
The main switchboard is temporarily unattended.
3166
02:53:27,146 --> 02:53:29,816
You know, I always want to be that guy who takes credit for that I was a
3167
02:53:29,816 --> 02:53:31,609
great genius, and I saw into the future.
3168
02:53:31,609 --> 02:53:35,029
Eh, no, I mean, like these are pretty obvious ideas,
3169
02:53:35,029 --> 02:53:37,907
just I was lucky enough to be one of the first guys trying them out,
3170
02:53:37,907 --> 02:53:41,327
and so I saw clearly what needed to happen,
3171
02:53:41,327 --> 02:53:44,038
needed to happen, needed to happen, needed to happen.
3172
02:53:44,038 --> 02:53:47,834
Good morning, and welcome to the Black Mesa Transit System.
3173
02:53:47,834 --> 02:53:52,088
This automated train is provided for the security and convenience
3174
02:53:52,088 --> 02:53:55,383
of the Black Mesa Research Facility personnel.
3175
02:53:55,383 --> 02:53:56,425
♪♪♪
3176
02:53:56,884 --> 02:53:59,929
We started getting early previews of the Half-Life content,
3177
02:53:59,929 --> 02:54:03,224
and I remember that having a dramatic impact on my brain.
3178
02:54:03,224 --> 02:54:07,395
I was just blown away. I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is cinematic storytelling.’
3179
02:54:07,395 --> 02:54:12,358
The time is 8:47 am.
3180
02:54:12,358 --> 02:54:16,404
Honestly, Half-Life kind of made everything else look lame to me.
3181
02:54:16,404 --> 02:54:21,409
Current topside temperature is 93 degrees.
3182
02:54:21,409 --> 02:54:24,412
It just took FPSs to a whole different level, in my opinion.
3183
02:54:24,412 --> 02:54:28,082
No smoking, eating or drinking are permitted
3184
02:54:28,082 --> 02:54:30,418
within the Black Mesa Transit System.
3185
02:54:30,418 --> 02:54:34,714
Half-Life, for the first time, it felt you were kind of invested in a character and
3186
02:54:34,714 --> 02:54:37,425
and what happens. It’s not just killing the monsters.
3187
02:54:37,425 --> 02:54:40,428
There was the idea of, you know, an ordinary guy
3188
02:54:40,428 --> 02:54:44,682
who isn't equipped to deal with the problems he's forced to confront.
3189
02:54:44,682 --> 02:54:47,018
I mean, that's a really compelling narrative.
3190
02:54:47,018 --> 02:54:51,105
More lives than your own may depend on your fitness.
3191
02:54:51,105 --> 02:54:53,024
You've never played this kind of game before.
3192
02:54:53,024 --> 02:54:56,527
This is something new. The quality
3193
02:54:56,527 --> 02:55:00,364
oozed out of every moment and every image and every encounter.
3194
02:55:00,364 --> 02:55:03,701
Low clearance security, please contact
3195
02:55:03,701 --> 02:55:05,786
I remember there was a, a load lifter, like,
3196
02:55:05,786 --> 02:55:09,081
that had four legs that was picking up stuff like a forklift.
3197
02:55:09,081 --> 02:55:11,167
So you would see, ‘Oh yeah, there are people working here.
3198
02:55:11,167 --> 02:55:14,795
There's just…This is a living breathing place.
3199
02:55:14,795 --> 02:55:18,132
I think what's so special about Half-Life is its pacing.
3200
02:55:18,132 --> 02:55:21,093
You're on this train on your way into work
3201
02:55:21,093 --> 02:55:23,804
which is very different from
3202
02:55:23,804 --> 02:55:25,514
the shooter's that preceded it, right?
3203
02:55:25,514 --> 02:55:28,726
It's passive. You're just sort of watching.
3204
02:55:28,726 --> 02:55:32,480
Missing a scheduled urinalysis or radiation checkup
3205
02:55:32,480 --> 02:55:35,483
is grounds for immediate termination.
3206
02:55:35,483 --> 02:55:39,320
The exciting part about that was just like just showing people and setting a tone.
3207
02:55:39,320 --> 02:55:42,698
It's about storytelling where you are the protagonist,
3208
02:55:42,698 --> 02:55:44,700
and you get to choose what to look at,
3209
02:55:44,700 --> 02:55:47,662
and you get to pick up on what different clues there are.
3210
02:55:47,662 --> 02:55:50,831
You can play this again and see things that you probably hadn't seen before.
3211
02:55:50,831 --> 02:55:54,418
Now arriving at Sector C test labs
3212
02:55:54,418 --> 02:55:57,046
you're already committed.
♪♪♪
3213
02:55:57,046 --> 02:55:59,298
But, what it does is it sets up the character,
3214
02:55:59,298 --> 02:56:02,343
it sets up the world, and it just immerses you in the experience,
3215
02:56:02,343 --> 02:56:05,304
and then, when the story unfolds and the action starts,
3216
02:56:05,304 --> 02:56:14,981
you're already committed.
♪♪♪
3217
02:56:14,981 --> 02:56:19,026
Half-Life was a game that taught everyone in our industry a lesson.
3218
02:56:19,026 --> 02:56:21,737
♪♪♪
3219
02:56:21,737 --> 02:56:23,739
This story is, like, built into the levels.
3220
02:56:23,739 --> 02:56:25,908
It's built into what you're seeing in the game.
3221
02:56:25,908 --> 02:56:27,785
It's always around you.
3222
02:56:27,785 --> 02:56:30,746
Weren’t you supposed to be in the test chamber a half an hour ago?
3223
02:56:30,746 --> 02:56:34,083
There was enough player freedom that players could feel a sense of agency
3224
02:56:34,083 --> 02:56:38,838
and actually experience agency to some extent.
3225
02:56:38,838 --> 02:56:40,548
♪♪♪
3226
02:56:40,548 --> 02:56:42,717
Oh my god, what are you doing?
3227
02:56:42,717 --> 02:56:47,096
For me, the launch of Half-Life was really when Day One was released.
3228
02:56:47,096 --> 02:56:51,475
That was a preview version that had, like, the start of the game.
3229
02:56:51,767 --> 02:56:54,562
and that was when we actually got to hear reactions, like,
3230
02:56:54,562 --> 02:56:57,398
from other game developers, you know, from the press.
3231
02:56:57,398 --> 02:56:59,900
People saw that and were just, you know, blown away.
3232
02:56:59,900 --> 02:57:03,529
Why do we all have to wear these ridiculous ties?
3233
02:57:03,529 --> 02:57:06,949
You are not expecting anybody to murder you,
3234
02:57:06,949 --> 02:57:09,785
you're expected to just badge in and get to work.
3235
02:57:09,785 --> 02:57:13,581
Welcome to the HEV Mark IV.
3236
02:57:13,581 --> 02:57:15,583
Which is what happens to you,
3237
02:57:15,583 --> 02:57:17,376
and then you get to your job,
3238
02:57:17,376 --> 02:57:18,336
It seems to be…
3239
02:57:18,336 --> 02:57:20,671
you push the cart,
3240
02:57:20,671 --> 02:57:22,465
and then hell breaks loose.
3241
02:57:22,465 --> 02:57:24,467
♪♪♪
3242
02:57:24,467 --> 02:57:25,593
Shall we begin?
3243
02:57:25,593 --> 02:57:34,810
♪♪♪
3244
02:57:34,810 --> 02:57:36,729
Like, why does everyone care about Half-Life?
3245
02:57:36,729 --> 02:57:40,441
And people say, like, ‘Oh, the story!’ and they, they go and they look at the story, and they’re like,
3246
02:57:40,441 --> 02:57:42,777
‘That doesn't look like a terribly interesting story.’
3247
02:57:42,777 --> 02:57:45,613
and it's like, ‘It wasn't the story. It was the way the story was told, right?’
3248
02:57:45,613 --> 02:57:49,617
Get to the surface as soon as you can, and let someone know what stranded down here
3249
02:57:49,617 --> 02:57:53,621
Black Mesa was really a coherent place that you felt like you could understand.
3250
02:57:53,621 --> 02:57:57,291
It was a set of labs, you know, you see scientists working in the lab,
3251
02:57:57,291 --> 02:57:59,627
you come back, there's an explosion, and it's destroyed,
3252
02:57:59,627 --> 02:58:02,463
and the areas change, and you felt like you really understood it,
3253
02:58:02,463 --> 02:58:04,006
and you understood the different parts.
3254
02:58:04,006 --> 02:58:06,550
So, it's really up to the level designers to maintain that.
3255
02:58:06,550 --> 02:58:08,761
They wanted it to feel seamless.
3256
02:58:08,761 --> 02:58:11,472
Their ambition was that it would actually be seamless,
3257
02:58:11,472 --> 02:58:13,516
that they would be able to load in advance,
3258
02:58:13,516 --> 02:58:15,017
and we wouldn't feel those levels, but it never quite got there.
3259
02:58:15,017 --> 02:58:19,146
Input/output on the computers was never quite good enough.
3260
02:58:19,146 --> 02:58:22,108
By the time we shipped the PlayStation 2 version,
3261
02:58:22,108 --> 02:58:25,528
we did some nice hacks in there where it was just like a brief hitch,
3262
02:58:25,528 --> 02:58:28,114
and then you're in, because we were able to use
3263
02:58:28,114 --> 02:58:31,200
the fact that a PlayStation 2 had a PlayStation 1
3264
02:58:31,200 --> 02:58:32,868
basically living inside of it,
3265
02:58:32,868 --> 02:58:35,788
and we use that to do that work ahead of time.
3266
02:58:35,788 --> 02:58:37,873
The cinematics if you can even call them that
3267
02:58:37,873 --> 02:58:41,210
were always seen from your perspective.
3268
02:58:41,210 --> 02:58:43,712
I think the reason to not have Gordon Freeman talk
3269
02:58:43,712 --> 02:58:46,048
was more of a stylistic thing originally just to kind of
3270
02:58:46,048 --> 02:58:47,967
keep it more about what was happening in the game world
3271
02:58:47,967 --> 02:58:50,302
but, definitely being put in that dude's shoes the entire time,
3272
02:58:50,302 --> 02:58:54,056
that's the whole essence of the genre, isn't it?
♪♪♪
3273
02:58:54,056 --> 02:58:57,268
The other thing I remember about Half-Life is just its amazing sound design.
3274
02:58:57,268 --> 02:58:58,811
♪♪♪
3275
02:58:58,811 --> 02:59:02,690
Gordon Freeman’s silence makes room for the audio in that game to really rise
3276
02:59:02,690 --> 02:59:04,942
and fill the space with something memorable.
3277
02:59:04,942 --> 02:59:07,653
♪♪♪
3278
02:59:07,653 --> 02:59:09,488
Cool little UI that still has some of the most
3279
02:59:09,488 --> 02:59:12,241
iconic UI sounds ever as you select your different weapons.
3280
02:59:12,241 --> 02:59:14,243
♪♪♪
3281
02:59:14,243 --> 02:59:17,371
The health dispenser, the crowbar when it's hitting different things,
3282
02:59:17,371 --> 02:59:20,541
the Headcrab. They really resonate.
3283
02:59:20,541 --> 02:59:21,542
♪♪♪
3284
02:59:21,542 --> 02:59:23,627
One of the most exciting parts of Half-Life is actually like
3285
02:59:23,627 --> 02:59:26,172
you've spent all this effort battling your way
3286
02:59:26,172 --> 02:59:28,591
through these aliens to get to the surface.
3287
02:59:28,591 --> 02:59:30,968
The soldiers, they're going to come save us.
3288
02:59:30,968 --> 02:59:33,304
But then, you get there, they're killing the scientists.
3289
02:59:33,304 --> 02:59:35,181
They're cleaning up the whole place.
3290
02:59:35,181 --> 02:59:38,225
Oh, there's not just a story to this game. That is a real twist.
3291
02:59:38,225 --> 02:59:39,226
Nothing is safe.
3292
02:59:39,226 --> 02:59:40,811
♪♪♪
3293
02:59:40,811 --> 02:59:44,148
The first time I remember really realizing that half life was something special
3294
02:59:44,148 --> 02:59:46,942
was the first level when you encounter the soldiers, the Marines,
3295
02:59:46,942 --> 02:59:50,821
and I was hiding for a second and I saw a grenade come flying over the railing
3296
02:59:50,821 --> 02:59:53,115
and land on my face, and it blew me up and killed me.
3297
02:59:53,115 --> 02:59:53,741
That was the first time ever in a game where I was like,
3298
02:59:53,741 --> 02:59:56,619
‘Oh my god, like, AI can do that?’
3299
02:59:56,619 --> 03:00:00,956
♪♪♪
3300
03:00:00,956 --> 03:00:01,749
Nice hit
3301
03:00:01,749 --> 03:00:03,959
And then, you start playing it, you can hear them like communicating
3302
03:00:03,959 --> 03:00:05,920
and talking to each other.
3303
03:00:05,920 --> 03:00:08,923
♪♪♪
3304
03:00:08,923 --> 03:00:11,217
which was just, like, revolutionary at the time.
3305
03:00:11,217 --> 03:00:13,260
They would say what they're going to do.
3306
03:00:13,260 --> 03:00:15,346
Yes, sir.
3307
03:00:15,346 --> 03:00:18,682
They would say like ‘Reloading’ or ‘Grenade!’
3308
03:00:18,682 --> 03:00:19,808
Grenade!
3309
03:00:19,808 --> 03:00:23,103
♪♪♪
3310
03:00:23,103 --> 03:00:27,691
The soldiers, the bad guys, the civilians, the scientists, et cetera
3311
03:00:27,691 --> 03:00:30,152
really made the game feel
3312
03:00:30,152 --> 03:00:32,655
like you're in a world, and Valve
3313
03:00:32,655 --> 03:00:35,282
successfully immersed you in that
3314
03:00:35,282 --> 03:00:36,450
[screaming]
3315
03:00:36,450 --> 03:00:39,703
Half-Life said, ‘This is how it should be done.’
3316
03:00:39,703 --> 03:00:42,540
The way they taught the player
3317
03:00:42,540 --> 03:00:46,168
how to solve puzzles was really, really interesting.
3318
03:00:46,168 --> 03:00:49,213
They'd always introduce an element of
3319
03:00:49,213 --> 03:00:53,592
the big puzzle to come in a way that was accessible and
3320
03:00:53,592 --> 03:00:56,011
doable so that, when you got to the bigger puzzles,
3321
03:00:56,011 --> 03:00:58,973
you already had a sense of, ‘Oh, this is what I have to do,’
3322
03:00:58,973 --> 03:01:02,351
and I think it was just absolute genius.
3323
03:01:02,351 --> 03:01:03,894
♪♪♪
3324
03:01:03,894 --> 03:01:07,565
We had talked to Valve about the idea of an expansion pack,
3325
03:01:07,565 --> 03:01:10,734
because Valve was very of the mindset of the mod mindset,
3326
03:01:10,734 --> 03:01:14,488
and Randy Pitchford, he was in the process of forming Gearbox,
3327
03:01:14,488 --> 03:01:17,741
and they had been kind of pitching to do some different projects
3328
03:01:17,741 --> 03:01:20,869
for Sierra, so here's a great opportunity where we can take
3329
03:01:20,869 --> 03:01:23,497
an expansion pack and just kind of
3330
03:01:23,497 --> 03:01:26,917
start evolving and adding to the franchise.
3331
03:01:26,917 --> 03:01:29,712
Anyone out there got a good view of the LC yet?
3332
03:01:29,712 --> 03:01:32,339
Here's the deal, we got to make a game here.
3333
03:01:32,339 --> 03:01:34,550
Let's start with somebody else's IP,
3334
03:01:34,550 --> 03:01:37,845
‘What's out there?’ and we're looking at Valves' game Half-Life,
3335
03:01:37,845 --> 03:01:41,015
and this looks amazing, and I have this idea,
3336
03:01:41,015 --> 03:01:44,393
and the idea was to be the soldier and the soldiers perspective.
3337
03:01:44,393 --> 03:01:46,145
Freeman could be anywhere.
3338
03:01:46,145 --> 03:01:50,107
We worked it out. I got really specific and detailed in my budget,
3339
03:01:50,107 --> 03:01:52,902
my plan, and I was able to get to a point where I could do it for
3340
03:01:52,902 --> 03:01:56,322
$750,000, and they said yes.
3341
03:01:56,322 --> 03:01:59,325
Randy Pitchford and I got along, we've been friends for years.
3342
03:01:59,325 --> 03:02:03,704
I think they finally realized, like many producers and developers did,
3343
03:02:03,704 --> 03:02:06,832
after they finally listened to my demo reels,
3344
03:02:06,832 --> 03:02:09,126
that this isn't the only voice I do,
3345
03:02:09,126 --> 03:02:12,504
and so they were kind enough to, to put me in that game.
3346
03:02:12,504 --> 03:02:14,506
Rise and shine ladies!
3347
03:02:14,506 --> 03:02:18,010
My name is senior drill instructor, Dwight T. Barnes.
3348
03:02:18,010 --> 03:02:20,512
The first and last words I want to hear out of your mouths…
3349
03:02:20,512 --> 03:02:22,514
What is your major malfunction, son?
3350
03:02:22,514 --> 03:02:25,601
Sorry to the audio guy for this going all over the top.
3351
03:02:25,601 --> 03:02:27,770
Sound off like you got a pair.
3352
03:02:27,770 --> 03:02:31,440
And it began that way but then, as we continued to record,
3353
03:02:31,440 --> 03:02:33,817
we toned it down into something different.
3354
03:02:33,817 --> 03:02:37,363
Mounted on the wall below me, you will see a PCB.
3355
03:02:37,488 --> 03:02:39,698
But, the initial recording sessions, when I was
3356
03:02:39,698 --> 03:02:42,326
screaming like R. Lee Erney, were hilarious
3357
03:02:42,326 --> 03:02:43,952
I wish I still had the tape.
3358
03:02:43,952 --> 03:02:46,997
Go, go, go! Run up and over those platforms!
3359
03:02:46,997 --> 03:02:48,624
Move, move, move!
3360
03:02:48,624 --> 03:02:50,626
It was really fun to just kind of
3361
03:02:50,626 --> 03:02:53,671
experiment and allow them to add horizontal
3362
03:02:53,671 --> 03:02:56,799
story details into the Half-Life world.
3363
03:02:56,799 --> 03:02:59,009
That was really additive and really exciting.
3364
03:02:59,009 --> 03:03:01,679
When I flew up there, I think it was the end of January
3365
03:03:01,679 --> 03:03:03,430
of 1999.
3366
03:03:03,430 --> 03:03:06,475
I had a deal done, and it was underway with the work
3367
03:03:06,475 --> 03:03:11,438
so that I showed up to the Electronic Entertainment Expo with a frickin disc,
3368
03:03:11,438 --> 03:03:15,567
and I had two maps that I had built and some new guns
3369
03:03:15,567 --> 03:03:17,903
and some characters that Steven Bond made,
3370
03:03:17,903 --> 03:03:20,906
and we did a demo of Half-Life: Opposing Force
3371
03:03:20,906 --> 03:03:26,203
at E3 of 1999 not even three months after that first conversation.
3372
03:03:26,203 --> 03:03:35,462
♪♪♪
3373
03:03:35,462 --> 03:03:39,216
I remember first meeting with Gabe about Half-Life.
3374
03:03:39,216 --> 03:03:41,218
His whole pitch was,
3375
03:03:41,218 --> 03:03:43,178
‘We're going to make a first person shooter,
3376
03:03:43,178 --> 03:03:45,180
but it's going to have a really compelling story,’
3377
03:03:45,180 --> 03:03:49,143
and that's why Half-Life will always live as one of the classics of the genre,
3378
03:03:49,143 --> 03:03:53,480
because it's the first one where they really did that and did it right.
3379
03:03:53,480 --> 03:03:56,275
And you can see the influences of Half-Life
3380
03:03:56,275 --> 03:03:58,277
in many games even to this day.
3381
03:03:58,277 --> 03:04:02,072
Gabe said once that Half-Life was like his love letter to Trespasser.
3382
03:04:02,072 --> 03:04:05,159
That just made me cry. It was probably the feeling
3383
03:04:05,159 --> 03:04:08,078
of having been on an Olympic team
3384
03:04:08,078 --> 03:04:10,456
that lost the medal last Olympics,
3385
03:04:10,456 --> 03:04:14,418
watching the team win the medal at the next Olympics.
3386
03:04:14,418 --> 03:04:18,672
It was, like, awesome, but super painful.
3387
03:04:18,672 --> 03:04:22,718
I think that all of the things that I felt were important
3388
03:04:22,718 --> 03:04:26,221
about immersive storytelling and giving that experience of
3389
03:04:26,221 --> 03:04:29,099
being somewhere were there
3390
03:04:29,099 --> 03:04:31,602
and refined, so they really weren't.
3391
03:04:31,602 --> 03:04:32,352
♪♪♪
3392
03:04:32,352 --> 03:04:34,646
Yeah, there are revolutionary games,
3393
03:04:34,646 --> 03:04:36,857
but all I think we need is,
3394
03:04:36,857 --> 03:04:39,026
‘Let's do this thing a little better each time.
3395
03:04:39,026 --> 03:04:40,778
Let's do it a little better each time.’
3396
03:04:40,778 --> 03:04:43,489
You know, ‘Maybe we'll fail but let's at least try,’
3397
03:04:43,489 --> 03:04:48,035
and Half-Life was, ‘Let, let's do this better.’
3398
03:04:48,035 --> 03:04:50,370
♪♪♪
3399
03:04:50,370 --> 03:04:53,874
It also had an interesting effect on Deus Ex..
3400
03:04:53,874 --> 03:04:57,294
I am rather looking forward to this analysis, aren't you?
3401
03:04:57,294 --> 03:04:59,296
Maybe you should try getting a job.
3402
03:04:59,296 --> 03:05:01,882
Did you understand that last announcement?
3403
03:05:01,882 --> 03:05:04,092
There are a lot of ways to define success.
3404
03:05:04,092 --> 03:05:07,262
One is turning every player into an author of their
3405
03:05:07,304 --> 03:05:08,972
of their own experience.
3406
03:05:08,972 --> 03:05:12,434
The more you can do that, the more game-like your game is
3407
03:05:12,434 --> 03:05:15,437
and the more you're advancing the state of the art.
3408
03:05:15,437 --> 03:05:24,279
♪♪♪
3409
03:05:24,279 --> 03:05:27,533
Warren had been in the game industry already for a while
3410
03:05:27,533 --> 03:05:30,077
and, one day, I heard, ‘Oh my god,
3411
03:05:30,077 --> 03:05:32,704
Warren Spector’s team has been let go from Looking Glass,
3412
03:05:32,704 --> 03:05:36,291
and I'm like, ‘What? Why would they do that?
3413
03:05:36,291 --> 03:05:39,837
♪♪♪
3414
03:05:39,837 --> 03:05:42,840
He was making The Dark Project which was actually Thief,
3415
03:05:42,840 --> 03:05:46,093
you know, so he was, like, making this really cool new stealth game.
3416
03:05:46,093 --> 03:05:48,345
♪♪♪
3417
03:05:48,345 --> 03:05:52,057
Warren Spector, one of the most legendary guys in gaming,
3418
03:05:52,057 --> 03:05:56,979
and his team basically had two weeks to find a new source of funding or job.
3419
03:05:56,979 --> 03:05:59,147
So, I called up Warren and said,
3420
03:05:59,147 --> 03:06:02,067
you know, ‘Hey, so can I, can I come down there
3421
03:06:02,067 --> 03:06:04,528
and try to sell you on Ion Storm?’
3422
03:06:04,528 --> 03:06:07,072
You know? And he's just like, ‘Sure, why not?’
3423
03:06:07,072 --> 03:06:09,575
So, John Romero and I
3424
03:06:09,575 --> 03:06:13,787
drove from Dallas to Austin in his bright yellow Humvee
3425
03:06:13,787 --> 03:06:17,082
♪♪♪
3426
03:06:17,082 --> 03:06:20,919
playing air guitar the whole way down while driving.
3427
03:06:20,919 --> 03:06:24,923
When I am driving, and I'm listening to music,
3428
03:06:24,923 --> 03:06:28,218
and it's metal stuff, I have my hands on the steering wheel,
3429
03:06:28,218 --> 03:06:31,221
trying to play guitar while I'm driving,
3430
03:06:31,221 --> 03:06:33,432
you know, just, you know, whenever I could
3431
03:06:33,432 --> 03:06:35,726
hold onto the steering wheel and do something.
3432
03:06:35,726 --> 03:06:39,521
Thrashing to some hair metal for the three hour trip.
3433
03:06:39,521 --> 03:06:42,649
When we went down there, I told Warren,
3434
03:06:42,649 --> 03:06:46,904
‘You can make anything you want, use any engine that you want,
3435
03:06:46,904 --> 03:06:49,364
and take as long as you want, and
3436
03:06:49,364 --> 03:06:51,867
you can have as much money as it needs to do that,
3437
03:06:51,867 --> 03:06:53,827
[laughing]
3438
03:06:53,827 --> 03:06:56,788
and he's like, ‘What?’
3439
03:06:56,788 --> 03:07:00,959
Troubleshooter was a description of the character
3440
03:07:00,959 --> 03:07:02,336
that you were gonna play.
3441
03:07:02,336 --> 03:07:06,798
Jake Shooter, the ex-CIA operative who goes rogue,
3442
03:07:06,798 --> 03:07:09,259
Figured he was your type, a real hard ass.
3443
03:07:09,259 --> 03:07:11,678
I wanted to make a game set in the real world.
3444
03:07:11,678 --> 03:07:14,181
It was a flawed concept from the start,
3445
03:07:14,181 --> 03:07:16,975
but what wasn't flawed was
3446
03:07:16,975 --> 03:07:21,313
the idea of player empowerment and genre matchup.
3447
03:07:21,313 --> 03:07:25,317
So, to that extent, Deus Ex was the logical outcome.
3448
03:07:25,317 --> 03:07:28,612
It was a pretty clear expression of that hope
3449
03:07:28,612 --> 03:07:32,366
that we could let players solve problems the way they wanted.
3450
03:07:32,366 --> 03:07:35,369
What Deus Ex captured, for a lot of us I think,
3451
03:07:35,369 --> 03:07:37,829
was freedom and openness.
3452
03:07:37,829 --> 03:07:41,291
It was giving you gadgets and tools and abilities,
3453
03:07:41,291 --> 03:07:43,543
essentially, to sort of manage an environment.
3454
03:07:43,543 --> 03:07:45,629
It was one of the first games to give
3455
03:07:45,629 --> 03:07:49,174
the player agency on the way they wanted to solve
3456
03:07:49,174 --> 03:07:52,678
a challenge in a level, like you could just run and gun in there,
3457
03:07:52,678 --> 03:07:56,306
or you could sneak and hack to get through a situation.
3458
03:07:56,306 --> 03:08:00,852
That would just really kind of opened up what first person games could be.
3459
03:08:00,852 --> 03:08:04,564
You're not allowed to say the word puzzle at my studios or on my projects.
3460
03:08:04,564 --> 03:08:07,651
You can say ‘problem,’ you can say ‘challenge,’
3461
03:08:07,651 --> 03:08:11,154
because, in my totally arbitrary artificial way,
3462
03:08:11,154 --> 03:08:15,951
that means multiple solutions, you decide,
3463
03:08:15,951 --> 03:08:19,162
and the way I like to structure games
3464
03:08:19,162 --> 03:08:22,249
is you see a challenge,
3465
03:08:22,249 --> 03:08:25,752
you make a plan, then you execute the plan.
3466
03:08:25,752 --> 03:08:28,422
You see the consequences of that plan,
3467
03:08:28,422 --> 03:08:31,299
and you're now confronted with a challenge
3468
03:08:31,299 --> 03:08:35,178
driven partly by me, or my team more precisely,
3469
03:08:35,178 --> 03:08:38,181
and partly by the player's action.
3470
03:08:38,181 --> 03:08:43,645
I remember a place in the game that I had played 100 times,
3471
03:08:43,645 --> 03:08:46,565
and I knew there were three problems in this space
3472
03:08:46,565 --> 03:08:49,276
that had to be solved separately,
3473
03:08:49,276 --> 03:08:53,363
and I watched this tester hiding here,
3474
03:08:53,363 --> 03:08:56,033
moving this object over there,
3475
03:08:56,033 --> 03:08:58,493
maneuvering himself in a particular position,
3476
03:08:58,493 --> 03:09:02,414
so he couldn't be seen. He got out the weakest weapon in the game,
3477
03:09:02,414 --> 03:09:06,501
took one shot, and solved all three of those problems at once,
3478
03:09:06,501 --> 03:09:11,757
♪♪♪
and no one on planet Earth had ever done that before.
3479
03:09:11,757 --> 03:09:15,635
That tester created his own experience, told his own story.
3480
03:09:15,635 --> 03:09:19,306
That was way more important than any story I could ever have told.
3481
03:09:19,306 --> 03:09:22,476
That's the kind of empowerment we want.
3482
03:09:22,476 --> 03:09:24,936
I remember Warren's pitch for that game. It was like,
3483
03:09:24,936 --> 03:09:27,564
‘Everybody else is going, you know, more broad,
3484
03:09:27,564 --> 03:09:29,816
like you need more levels, more monsters,
3485
03:09:29,816 --> 03:09:32,027
more of everything, show off the graphics.’
3486
03:09:32,027 --> 03:09:35,822
And he was, like, small and deep was his game,
3487
03:09:35,822 --> 03:09:38,909
really intricate level and world design without having
3488
03:09:38,909 --> 03:09:42,120
to worry about how many enemies you're trying to throw on the screen
3489
03:09:42,120 --> 03:09:44,623
at once or frame rate or this or that.
3490
03:09:44,623 --> 03:09:47,250
In the immersive simulation genre, when we're doing it right,
3491
03:09:47,250 --> 03:09:49,169
when we're doing our best I should say,
3492
03:09:49,169 --> 03:09:52,005
the game is tuning itself to players, because the game is not
3493
03:09:52,005 --> 03:09:54,841
about how clever and creative the designer is.
3494
03:09:54,841 --> 03:09:58,386
It's about how clever and creative I am as a player.
3495
03:09:58,386 --> 03:10:01,932
If you're gonna dictate to me, just go make a shooter,
3496
03:10:01,932 --> 03:10:04,476
you know? And there's nothing wrong with that, by the way.
3497
03:10:04,476 --> 03:10:08,021
Shooters are wonderful. I love them. I just don't want to make them.
3498
03:10:08,021 --> 03:10:11,691
You've got 10 seconds to beat it before I add you to the list of NSF casualties.
3499
03:10:11,691 --> 03:10:15,570
Easy bro, just having us a conversation.
3500
03:10:15,570 --> 03:10:17,030
Five seconds.
3501
03:10:17,030 --> 03:10:24,037
♪♪♪
3502
03:10:24,037 --> 03:10:28,458
In 2291 in an attempt to control violence among deep space minors,
3503
03:10:28,458 --> 03:10:31,711
the New Earth government legalized no holds barred fighting.
3504
03:10:31,711 --> 03:10:39,803
♪♪♪
3505
03:10:39,803 --> 03:10:41,763
The classic arena shooter, I think, is one of those things that
3506
03:10:41,763 --> 03:10:43,598
will always hold a place in my heart.
3507
03:10:43,598 --> 03:10:45,809
To me, in 1999, there is no
3508
03:10:45,809 --> 03:10:48,603
greater and more interesting year to an FPS player.
3509
03:10:48,603 --> 03:10:51,523
That was the birth of modern multiplayer in my opinion.
3510
03:10:51,523 --> 03:10:54,609
The time has come to prove you are the best.
3511
03:10:54,609 --> 03:11:00,073
♪♪♪
3512
03:11:00,073 --> 03:11:03,869
The big change in Quake III was
3513
03:11:03,869 --> 03:11:07,289
we exclusively focused on multiplayer.
3514
03:11:07,289 --> 03:11:10,750
Now, you could play by yourself, but you played against bots.
3515
03:11:10,792 --> 03:11:13,879
This was at a time when clans,
3516
03:11:13,879 --> 03:11:16,256
multiplayer gaming, this was taking off.
3517
03:11:16,256 --> 03:11:18,592
No one has ever really seen that before, so
3518
03:11:18,592 --> 03:11:22,387
Quake III certainly just embraced that.
3519
03:11:22,387 --> 03:11:24,806
It kind of helped to popularize that sort of fast paced
3520
03:11:24,806 --> 03:11:28,226
twitch competitive shooting in the ‘90s and the early 2000s.
3521
03:11:28,226 --> 03:11:30,937
When you sit down and play Quake III
3522
03:11:30,937 --> 03:11:33,648
for the first time, it feels so fast and so responsive
3523
03:11:33,648 --> 03:11:36,860
and, before you know it, you're you feel like you're in complete control
3524
03:11:36,860 --> 03:11:38,195
of this character.
3525
03:11:38,195 --> 03:11:39,821
You are tied for the lead!
3526
03:11:39,821 --> 03:11:42,824
Quake II didn’t feel like Quake, and Quake III didn't feel like Quake II
3527
03:11:42,824 --> 03:11:45,285
you know, the physics were different, like everything was different.
3528
03:11:45,285 --> 03:11:47,662
But, I have to start thinking of what's above me,
3529
03:11:47,662 --> 03:11:50,457
I have to start thinking of what's below me,
3530
03:11:50,457 --> 03:11:53,043
changing the verticality of the level.
3531
03:11:53,043 --> 03:11:55,754
What makes a good map for an arena shooter is flow.
3532
03:11:55,754 --> 03:11:57,797
You get to the end, and then there's a staircase going down,
3533
03:11:57,797 --> 03:12:00,592
and then you can loop back around to the other part, and there's other little areas.
3534
03:12:00,592 --> 03:12:03,720
It's always kind of like uroboros, like looping in on itself.
3535
03:12:03,720 --> 03:12:06,890
Every time I used to play it, because you can select the different character models,
3536
03:12:06,890 --> 03:12:09,434
I’d always play as the Doom model,
3537
03:12:09,434 --> 03:12:11,269
which was obviously, you know, the Doom guy.
3538
03:12:11,269 --> 03:12:14,105
You could download any character you wanted to download.
3539
03:12:14,105 --> 03:12:16,233
It’s, like, it doesn't matter how stupid it was,
3540
03:12:16,233 --> 03:12:19,736
and there was just something insane about how wild that is.
3541
03:12:19,736 --> 03:12:20,737
♪♪♪
3542
03:12:20,737 --> 03:12:22,822
So, when we were working on the Quake series,
3543
03:12:22,822 --> 03:12:25,784
our friends over at Epic were working on Unreal.
3544
03:12:25,784 --> 03:12:28,954
♪♪♪
3545
03:12:28,954 --> 03:12:32,290
It was nice that they took things in different directions.
3546
03:12:32,290 --> 03:12:36,127
♪♪♪
3547
03:12:36,127 --> 03:12:37,462
First blood.
3548
03:12:37,462 --> 03:12:39,464
♪♪♪
3549
03:12:39,464 --> 03:12:42,008
Deathmatch, when it comes to first person shooters is a no brainer,
3550
03:12:42,008 --> 03:12:43,260
♪♪♪
3551
03:12:43,260 --> 03:12:46,054
and then you start moving over to more tactical and more team-based modes
3552
03:12:46,054 --> 03:12:48,431
such as Capture the Flag, then eventually Domination,
3553
03:12:48,431 --> 03:12:51,851
and then kind of the crown jewel of Unreal Tournament that helps separate it,
3554
03:12:51,851 --> 03:12:53,103
which was Assault.
3555
03:12:53,103 --> 03:12:57,565
Steve Polge wanted to create something that was team based,
but also something that felt like
3556
03:12:57,565 --> 03:13:00,151
you were there going to an actual objective,
3557
03:13:00,151 --> 03:13:03,697
as opposed to, say, get a flag or go stand in this location.
3558
03:13:03,697 --> 03:13:06,574
So, we wind up with really, really cool maps, you know? Poncho made a map where you're essentially
3559
03:13:06,574 --> 03:13:09,452
on a speeding train. Dave Ewing made a map,
3560
03:13:09,452 --> 03:13:11,746
whereas it was essentially a recreation of Normandy
3561
03:13:11,746 --> 03:13:13,081
where you're storming the beach.
3562
03:13:13,081 --> 03:13:14,958
Some of these maps, you can sit there and you can, like,
3563
03:13:14,958 --> 03:13:18,128
use the Instagib and, like, shoot your friend across the maps
3564
03:13:18,128 --> 03:13:20,338
that can get to the CTF flag faster.
3565
03:13:20,338 --> 03:13:23,341
Oh my god, for some reason, Instagib just,
3566
03:13:23,341 --> 03:13:24,634
‘Oh, it was amazing.’
3567
03:13:24,634 --> 03:13:26,636
♪♪♪
3568
03:13:26,636 --> 03:13:30,015
Steve Polge had the idea of mutators that you can apply to your match
3569
03:13:30,015 --> 03:13:32,225
to make the game infinitely replayable,
3570
03:13:32,225 --> 03:13:35,186
and there's something to be said about taking a game
3571
03:13:35,186 --> 03:13:38,898
that is so deep and just boiling it down to its essence right?
3572
03:13:38,898 --> 03:13:42,110
And that's why Facing Worlds was such a brilliant Capture the Flag map.
3573
03:13:42,110 --> 03:13:44,904
It was two towers. Let's see how good you are.
3574
03:13:44,904 --> 03:13:47,324
♪♪♪
3575
03:13:47,324 --> 03:13:49,409
I was so used to id software's games, where you know,
3576
03:13:49,409 --> 03:13:52,871
the gratification and the feedback were quintessential to their success,
3577
03:13:52,871 --> 03:13:56,374
and so I was thinking, ‘Let's reward the players’, you know, good aim.’
3578
03:13:56,374 --> 03:13:58,793
If they shoot the opponent in the head, like, let's let the player know.
3579
03:13:58,793 --> 03:14:01,129
And so, I told Brandon this, and I went to his office,
3580
03:14:01,129 --> 03:14:04,424
and he had an AI just standing there, and he, he shot in the head and put little text on the screen,
3581
03:14:04,424 --> 03:14:06,009
and said, ‘Headshot.’ I mean, I’m like, ‘No no, no.
3582
03:14:06,009 --> 03:14:08,219
Make it so, when it's the final blow, that it, like,
3583
03:14:08,219 --> 03:14:10,555
pops the enemy's head off, then it says ‘Headshot.’
3584
03:14:10,555 --> 03:14:11,514
Headshot.
3585
03:14:11,514 --> 03:14:14,934
Then, you get that, you know, feedback that hits that kind of dopamine of your brain, right?
3586
03:14:14,934 --> 03:14:16,227
Headshot
3587
03:14:16,227 --> 03:14:18,772
And then, ‘How can we reward success with the player?
3588
03:14:18,772 --> 03:14:21,649
Success over a longer period of time, success over a short time.’
3589
03:14:21,649 --> 03:14:24,277
So, we came up with a system of double kill, multikills.
3590
03:14:24,277 --> 03:14:25,653
♪♪♪
3591
03:14:25,653 --> 03:14:28,948
And it goes on and on and on to ultimately wind up with ‘God-like.’
3592
03:14:28,948 --> 03:14:30,116
God-like.
3593
03:14:30,116 --> 03:14:32,452
The announcer's voice is booming, and you're like, you're shaking,
3594
03:14:32,452 --> 03:14:34,412
like ‘I can't believe I got one of these, right?’
3595
03:14:34,412 --> 03:14:35,538
First blood.
3596
03:14:35,538 --> 03:14:37,957
It sounded like the voice of Satan coming up from hell itself.
3597
03:14:37,957 --> 03:14:40,627
Killing spree.
3598
03:14:40,627 --> 03:14:43,213
It wasn't really, I think, until
3599
03:14:43,213 --> 03:14:45,673
we were producing Quake III Arena,
3600
03:14:45,673 --> 03:14:49,177
and Epic was working on Unreal Tournament
3601
03:14:49,177 --> 03:14:52,847
where the true battle of the religions started.
3602
03:14:52,847 --> 03:14:55,308
You've got Quake III, and you’ve got Unreal Tournament
releasing in the same month.
3603
03:14:55,308 --> 03:14:56,226
Dominate.
3604
03:14:56,226 --> 03:15:00,522
You've got Quake III, and you’ve got Unreal Tournament
releasing in the same month.
3605
03:15:00,522 --> 03:15:02,690
Monster kill.
3606
03:15:02,690 --> 03:15:04,150
[explosions]
3607
03:15:04,150 --> 03:15:06,069
To this day, people still argue about it, right?
3608
03:15:06,069 --> 03:15:08,405
And each game, of course, had its merits so, you know, UT,
3609
03:15:08,405 --> 03:15:09,864
you know, the bright more colorful one
3610
03:15:09,864 --> 03:15:11,825
with the wacky weapons and the crazy movements
3611
03:15:11,825 --> 03:15:14,160
and Quake, you know, kind of was a little bit more snug
3612
03:15:14,160 --> 03:15:16,371
in regards to the aiming and the feel.
3613
03:15:16,371 --> 03:15:21,209
My experience with Quake III was always just Team Deathmatch,
the most played game mode, but then obviously
3614
03:15:21,209 --> 03:15:25,296
in Unreal Tournament, you had like the Assault maps and Capture The Flag and these giant maps.
3615
03:15:25,296 --> 03:15:25,922
♪♪♪
3616
03:15:25,922 --> 03:15:29,384
I think what makes any game great in terms of multiplayer
3617
03:15:29,384 --> 03:15:32,095
and competition is the old adage,
3618
03:15:32,095 --> 03:15:34,013
‘Easy to learn, hard to master.’
3619
03:15:34,013 --> 03:15:38,184
You need a game that's simple in terms of like the core gameplay loop,
3620
03:15:38,184 --> 03:15:42,313
the core gameplay mechanics but allows a lot of versatility
3621
03:15:42,313 --> 03:15:45,066
to essentially that the player themselves to express.
3622
03:15:45,066 --> 03:15:45,608
♪♪♪
3623
03:15:45,608 --> 03:15:47,610
Perfect win.
3624
03:15:47,610 --> 03:15:50,071
Some players were really able to do both.
3625
03:15:50,071 --> 03:15:53,825
So, I do think that the team at Epic really did the right thing
3626
03:15:53,825 --> 03:15:57,412
by not going directly against us
3627
03:15:57,412 --> 03:15:58,746
but going with us.
3628
03:15:58,746 --> 03:16:00,748
I think it worked out well.
3629
03:16:00,748 --> 03:16:04,669
Monster kill, kill, kill.
3630
03:16:04,669 --> 03:16:16,848
♪♪♪
3631
03:16:16,848 --> 03:16:19,726
Robin and I grew up in the same town
3632
03:16:19,726 --> 03:16:22,479
in the far southeastern corner of Australia.
3633
03:16:22,479 --> 03:16:26,608
You know, we're both kind of studying but mostly playing video games.
3634
03:16:26,608 --> 03:16:28,735
All my memories of that era
3635
03:16:28,735 --> 03:16:32,322
are all very, like, LAN party-centric.
3636
03:16:32,322 --> 03:16:34,657
These guys, big Doom players,
3637
03:16:34,657 --> 03:16:37,869
they introduced us to this fortress map.
3638
03:16:37,869 --> 03:16:40,580
When you spawned, you would fall down one of sort of three holes
3639
03:16:40,580 --> 03:16:42,665
in front of you and the holes would give you one of
3640
03:16:42,665 --> 03:16:44,083
a couple of different weapon loadouts.
3641
03:16:44,083 --> 03:16:46,586
The fortress map and its structure,
3642
03:16:46,586 --> 03:16:48,505
even with just two-on-two, kind of made us realize,
3643
03:16:48,505 --> 03:16:51,257
like how much more sort of excitement
3644
03:16:51,257 --> 03:16:55,887
and strategy you could have with a team-based structure.
3645
03:16:55,887 --> 03:16:59,682
And that was one of the fun things about that first year or so of Quake modding.
3646
03:16:59,682 --> 03:17:02,393
They released essentially all their game code.
3647
03:17:02,393 --> 03:17:05,688
We've done a bit of Doom modding and certainly a bunch of Doom mapmaking.
3648
03:17:05,688 --> 03:17:07,982
And so, we started thinking about
3649
03:17:07,982 --> 03:17:11,569
what kind of things we'd do once the modding tools came out.
3650
03:17:11,569 --> 03:17:14,948
It was really just like, ‘Okay, what's that fun thing we can add?’
3651
03:17:14,948 --> 03:17:18,034
We we're actually playing Hexen that had three different classes:
3652
03:17:18,034 --> 03:17:20,787
a warrior, and it had a medic, and it had a mage.
3653
03:17:20,787 --> 03:17:24,541
Here’s one piece of gameplay we really like.
3654
03:17:24,541 --> 03:17:25,416
‘Let’s make that.’
3655
03:17:25,416 --> 03:17:28,878
You can tell the order in which classes were implemented in Team Fortress
3656
03:17:28,878 --> 03:17:32,757
strictly by just the number that you press to select them.
3657
03:17:32,757 --> 03:17:36,177
The sniper class was definitely the most exciting.
3658
03:17:36,177 --> 03:17:39,347
We spent so many hours, just like three of us
3659
03:17:39,347 --> 03:17:41,015
trying a different, like, mechanic.
3660
03:17:41,015 --> 03:17:44,435
‘Okay, do you hold down to charge up?’ We just tried so many different ways
3661
03:17:44,435 --> 03:17:47,855
until we sort of settled on the one that we wanted.
3662
03:17:47,855 --> 03:17:51,359
Hours of just laughing, running around the map, killing each other.
3663
03:17:51,359 --> 03:17:55,113
The engineer and the spy, the last two classes we did,
3664
03:17:55,113 --> 03:17:58,116
we had a bunch of different people coming to our LAN parties,
3665
03:17:58,116 --> 03:18:00,285
and they were all over the skill spectrum,
3666
03:18:00,285 --> 03:18:03,329
and we wanted to all be able to play the same game at the same time.
3667
03:18:03,329 --> 03:18:06,541
The engineer could really be more tactical.
3668
03:18:06,541 --> 03:18:08,418
We saw the sentry guns and aliens were like,
3669
03:18:08,418 --> 03:18:11,713
‘I want to play with those in the game somehow.’
3670
03:18:11,713 --> 03:18:14,299
We did no marketing, we didn't have a web page.
3671
03:18:14,299 --> 03:18:17,385
We just put the zip file on CDROM.com
3672
03:18:17,385 --> 03:18:19,053
and hoped people would find it.
3673
03:18:19,053 --> 03:18:20,388
Exactly.
3674
03:18:20,388 --> 03:18:22,181
After a few days, we started getting some emails
3675
03:18:22,181 --> 03:18:25,059
from people saying, like, ‘Hey, like, we really liked this game.’
3676
03:18:25,059 --> 03:18:27,186
Like, ‘What are you guys doing next?’
3677
03:18:27,186 --> 03:18:29,522
This is getting up around the two year mark.
3678
03:18:29,522 --> 03:18:33,192
We got an email from Scott Lynch over at Sierra.
3679
03:18:33,192 --> 03:18:35,361
He was wondering if we would be interested
3680
03:18:35,361 --> 03:18:38,239
in building a version of Team Fortress for Half-Life.
3681
03:18:38,239 --> 03:18:41,618
We were like, ‘Whoa, like, shit’s getting real.’
3682
03:18:41,618 --> 03:18:46,122
The modability of Half-Life was something that Valve cared about a ton.
3683
03:18:46,122 --> 03:18:48,875
Like, the right strategy was really to
3684
03:18:48,875 --> 03:18:51,836
take Half-Life and make it a great platform for mods
3685
03:18:51,836 --> 03:18:54,547
in the same way that Quake was a great platform for mods.
3686
03:18:54,547 --> 03:18:56,466
I remember it being really fun because I, you know,
3687
03:18:56,466 --> 03:18:58,718
there was no design to really be done. It was just like,
3688
03:18:58,718 --> 03:19:01,763
‘Make all that over there,’ like ‘Make it work over here.’
3689
03:19:01,763 --> 03:19:03,973
But, it was also that it seemed like there was a real opportunity
3690
03:19:03,973 --> 03:19:06,643
for Team Fortress to be played by a bunch of new people.
3691
03:19:06,643 --> 03:19:08,061
Like, ‘Let's get it out there.
3692
03:19:08,061 --> 03:19:10,146
Let's get more people playing Team Fortress.’
3693
03:19:10,146 --> 03:19:12,982
A lack of optimism has never been a problem.
3694
03:19:12,982 --> 03:19:16,819
♪♪♪
3695
03:19:16,819 --> 03:19:19,739
Well, so you have to…You die.
3696
03:19:19,739 --> 03:19:22,325
You could, you could spawn, move forward,
3697
03:19:22,325 --> 03:19:25,161
and die in like 20 seconds, and then have to wait three minutes
3698
03:19:25,161 --> 03:19:28,873
before you get to play again? Like, this’ll never be popular.
3699
03:19:28,873 --> 03:19:29,957
♪♪♪
3700
03:19:29,957 --> 03:19:30,958
Negative.
3701
03:19:30,958 --> 03:19:39,634
♪♪♪
3702
03:19:39,634 --> 03:19:40,385
Follow me.
3703
03:19:40,385 --> 03:19:42,512
Negative. Roger that.
3704
03:19:42,512 --> 03:19:43,930
Affirmative.
3705
03:19:43,930 --> 03:19:46,557
Headshotting Robin three rounds in a row
3706
03:19:46,557 --> 03:19:49,477
and having him yell out from his office and rage quit,
3707
03:19:49,477 --> 03:19:51,145
I think, was really the time when I'm like,
3708
03:19:51,145 --> 03:19:54,357
‘Okay, yeah, we need to, like, spend more time with this product,’
3709
03:19:54,357 --> 03:19:56,192
[gunshots]
3710
03:19:56,192 --> 03:19:57,694
because it was awesome.
3711
03:19:57,694 --> 03:20:00,655
I always remember Counter-Strike as a lesson to myself
3712
03:20:00,655 --> 03:20:04,534
in my inability to accurately predict what's fun.
3713
03:20:04,534 --> 03:20:07,870
The arena shooters that had mostly preceded Counter-Strike
3714
03:20:07,870 --> 03:20:10,623
obviously have a completely different sensibility when it
3715
03:20:10,623 --> 03:20:12,250
comes to map design and weapon sets.
3716
03:20:12,250 --> 03:20:14,794
You could actually, like, save up your money from the kill,
3717
03:20:14,794 --> 03:20:16,587
you've gotten stuff and buy weapons,
3718
03:20:16,587 --> 03:20:18,798
and you got to choose the weapons you want.
3719
03:20:18,798 --> 03:20:21,718
One thing about Counter-Strike that's interesting: it's not just one shot, kill.
3720
03:20:21,718 --> 03:20:24,137
It's really the level design,
3721
03:20:24,137 --> 03:20:27,640
you can position yourself, and you have to have counter positions,
3722
03:20:27,640 --> 03:20:31,644
and you really, it is a really more strategic multiplayer.
3723
03:20:31,644 --> 03:20:34,897
If I had to try and identify what makes Counter-Strike so special,
3724
03:20:34,897 --> 03:20:37,650
it's both the counter terrorists and the terrorists
3725
03:20:37,650 --> 03:20:39,444
head toward Bombsite B.
3726
03:20:39,444 --> 03:20:42,572
They'll reach a choke point almost the exactly same time.
3727
03:20:42,572 --> 03:20:46,409
And that's incredibly deliberate on the designers part,
3728
03:20:46,409 --> 03:20:49,078
that they want you to sort of reach these jousting moments
3729
03:20:49,078 --> 03:20:51,205
where you come together with your opponent,
3730
03:20:51,205 --> 03:20:54,250
and what that does is it creates this incredible
3731
03:20:54,250 --> 03:20:58,004
meta-game where you can play off the expectations of that timing.
3732
03:20:58,004 --> 03:21:00,006
Enemy down.
3733
03:21:00,006 --> 03:21:02,175
When are they going to come around this corner?
3734
03:21:02,175 --> 03:21:04,469
When do they think I'm going to come around this corner? Which corner
3735
03:21:04,469 --> 03:21:06,095
do they think I’m gonna come around?
3736
03:21:06,095 --> 03:21:09,056
So, that sort of mind game of, like, ‘When do I do something different?
3737
03:21:09,056 --> 03:21:12,143
And when do they think that I'm going to do something different, and I don't do something different?’
3738
03:21:12,143 --> 03:21:13,811
Fire in the hole.
3739
03:21:13,811 --> 03:21:15,104
Know where to put your flashes,
3740
03:21:15,104 --> 03:21:17,190
because that was always a very important,
3741
03:21:17,190 --> 03:21:19,400
especially when you had to rush to a certain spot,
3742
03:21:19,400 --> 03:21:21,527
you know, like long A and Dust II or something.
3743
03:21:21,527 --> 03:21:25,990
You just had to know how to hit your marks and to know when to buy and when to save.
3744
03:21:25,990 --> 03:21:28,284
If you buy too much ammo, it could take up too much money.
3745
03:21:28,284 --> 03:21:30,203
And then, if you didn't win that round, you realize,
3746
03:21:30,203 --> 03:21:32,872
‘Oh man, I can't even get a weapon for the next round.’
3747
03:21:32,872 --> 03:21:35,249
Up until that point, we'd seen nothing like that, right?
3748
03:21:35,249 --> 03:21:38,294
Like, everything before that was instant spawn.
3749
03:21:38,294 --> 03:21:41,339
When you die in Counter-Strike, yeah, you had to sit there for five minutes
3750
03:21:41,339 --> 03:21:43,841
while the rest of the team either won or lost and there was like
3751
03:21:43,841 --> 03:21:46,052
that excruciating pain of being sitting on the bench
3752
03:21:46,052 --> 03:21:47,637
waiting and hoping you won.
3753
03:21:47,637 --> 03:21:48,971
♪♪♪
3754
03:21:48,971 --> 03:21:52,475
I actually played. so much Counter-Strike in high school that I actually failed English one year.
3755
03:21:52,475 --> 03:21:56,395
I had to go to summer school, and I hated that because it took up all of my extra time
3756
03:21:56,395 --> 03:21:59,398
I could have been home playing more Counter-Strike.
3757
03:21:59,398 --> 03:22:02,193
It was such a fun time of my life was Counter-Strike.
3758
03:22:02,193 --> 03:22:04,654
That really brought me into PC gaming.
3759
03:22:04,654 --> 03:22:07,156
I’m your man, homie. Ah, I tried to sneak through the door, man.
3760
03:22:07,156 --> 03:22:09,492
Can't make it, can't make it. The shit’s stuck.
3761
03:22:09,492 --> 03:22:12,119
Door stuck, door stuck,
3762
03:22:12,119 --> 03:22:13,579
[explosion]
3763
03:22:13,579 --> 03:22:15,122
Terrorists win.
3764
03:22:15,122 --> 03:22:18,876
♪♪♪
3765
03:22:18,876 --> 03:22:21,712
When the dark intellect escaped the fire,
3766
03:22:21,712 --> 03:22:23,756
man stood in the ashes of Mother Earth.
3767
03:22:23,756 --> 03:22:25,258
♪♪♪
3768
03:22:25,258 --> 03:22:29,178
For 200 years, the immortal emperor built Earth's armies.
3769
03:22:29,178 --> 03:22:30,596
♪♪♪
3770
03:22:30,596 --> 03:22:32,139
But only Earth’s.
3771
03:22:32,139 --> 03:22:33,391
♪♪♪
3772
03:22:33,391 --> 03:22:36,227
For people who played this game and loved it as,
3773
03:22:36,227 --> 03:22:39,564
as I did, they'll say, ‘What do you mean? This wasn't that obscure game,
3774
03:22:39,564 --> 03:22:41,357
like this was amazing for the time.
3775
03:22:41,357 --> 03:22:43,776
This is one of the best first person shooters ever made,
3776
03:22:43,776 --> 03:22:47,697
and I agree. But, Tribes, for many people,
3777
03:22:47,697 --> 03:22:49,991
they'll say, ‘Tribes? Like what are you, what are you talking about?
3778
03:22:49,991 --> 03:22:51,909
Like, what do you, what, what even is this game?
3779
03:22:51,909 --> 03:23:00,501
♪♪♪
3780
03:23:00,501 --> 03:23:04,130
All of these first person shooters up to that point were corridor shooters,
3781
03:23:04,130 --> 03:23:07,633
you know, you, you maybe would have kind of like a large room where you could fight in.
3782
03:23:07,633 --> 03:23:10,970
Tribes basically said, ‘What if it was all terrain? And what if everybody had jetpacks?’
3783
03:23:10,970 --> 03:23:13,931
The only time I ever played a Tribes game was at a LAN party,
3784
03:23:13,931 --> 03:23:14,599
♪♪♪
3785
03:23:14,599 --> 03:23:16,684
never played it before, and I thought my skills
3786
03:23:16,684 --> 03:23:18,394
from, like, Counter-Strike and Quake,
3787
03:23:18,394 --> 03:23:20,396
whatever, would carry across, and I just got what.
3788
03:23:20,396 --> 03:23:23,691
It was very difficult to get into.
3789
03:23:23,691 --> 03:23:25,610
It was not user friendly.
3790
03:23:25,610 --> 03:23:28,654
It was this incredible, squad-based,
3791
03:23:28,654 --> 03:23:32,325
very large map competitive shooter.
3792
03:23:32,325 --> 03:23:35,119
You had jump packs, you had disc guns,
3793
03:23:35,119 --> 03:23:36,996
you had character classes,
3794
03:23:36,996 --> 03:23:39,373
and the draw distances were huge.
3795
03:23:39,373 --> 03:23:42,668
Starsiege: Tribesinfluenced Halo primarily
3796
03:23:42,668 --> 03:23:46,047
because it was in this big open setting.
3797
03:23:46,047 --> 03:23:47,590
Players had all of this freedom
3798
03:23:47,590 --> 03:23:50,593
to move around this enormous exterior
3799
03:23:50,593 --> 03:23:53,179
that we were just blown away by at that time.
3800
03:23:53,179 --> 03:23:56,515
It had multi-person drivable vehicles,
3801
03:23:56,515 --> 03:23:58,351
height map terrain,
3802
03:23:58,351 --> 03:24:00,353
incredible mobility to rocket around
3803
03:24:00,353 --> 03:24:03,064
from one location to another. It featured capture the flag
3804
03:24:03,064 --> 03:24:04,815
as its primary game mode.
3805
03:24:04,815 --> 03:24:08,069
It was super fast-paced, super fun to play.
3806
03:24:08,069 --> 03:24:10,738
It was one of those games that I think captured our imagination.
3807
03:24:10,738 --> 03:24:12,865
Everybody remembers the disc launcher,
3808
03:24:12,865 --> 03:24:16,285
because it's kind of the most aesthetically distinctive gun,
3809
03:24:16,285 --> 03:24:19,664
but I really liked the fusion mortar. It's, it's got this,
3810
03:24:19,664 --> 03:24:23,209
you know, radioactive green parabolic trail.
3811
03:24:23,209 --> 03:24:25,962
It's like a sniper grenade launcher and, basically,
3812
03:24:25,962 --> 03:24:28,631
you're able to fling these things incredibly long distances,
3813
03:24:28,631 --> 03:24:30,967
they have massive splash damage radius.
3814
03:24:30,967 --> 03:24:34,136
It had a dedicated grenade button.
3815
03:24:34,136 --> 03:24:37,306
In most first person shooters you, like, switch to the grenade,
3816
03:24:37,306 --> 03:24:39,266
and then you can throw it, and that's all you can do
3817
03:24:39,266 --> 03:24:45,272
until you switch to something else which basically means you never use them.
whereas, Tribes, you could just one tap, throw a grenade.
3818
03:24:45,272 --> 03:24:47,692
Again, the movement style was so
3819
03:24:47,692 --> 03:24:50,653
challenging and interesting and physics-driven.
3820
03:24:50,653 --> 03:24:55,950
In a way, that was very novel. You had players
writing guides online about how to ski,
3821
03:24:55,950 --> 03:24:58,327
how to manage their jetpacks and battery level.
3822
03:24:58,327 --> 03:25:00,454
They stumbled into this idea of skiing
3823
03:25:00,454 --> 03:25:02,456
which was kind of like strafe jumping in Quake,
3824
03:25:02,456 --> 03:25:05,084
all that kind of, you know, or lift jumping in Unreal Tournament.
3825
03:25:05,084 --> 03:25:08,170
That's, you know, emergent game design at its best in first person shooters.
3826
03:25:08,170 --> 03:25:11,215
It featured classes, premade loadouts,
3827
03:25:11,215 --> 03:25:13,551
Destroy the enemy general. Attack!
3828
03:25:13,551 --> 03:25:15,678
It just did so many things
3829
03:25:15,678 --> 03:25:17,680
that most shooters were not doing.
3830
03:25:17,680 --> 03:25:19,849
I mean, I remember going like, ‘Oh my god, like what?
3831
03:25:19,849 --> 03:25:23,269
What is this thing? This is amazing,’ and we played the heck out of it
3832
03:25:23,269 --> 03:25:25,104
at Bungie back in the day,
3833
03:25:25,104 --> 03:25:27,857
Tribes just deserves a lot of recognition,
3834
03:25:27,857 --> 03:25:29,150
and it doesn't get it.
3835
03:25:29,150 --> 03:25:31,152
I'm not sure what to attribute that to.
3836
03:25:31,152 --> 03:25:34,030
I think Tribes had a difficult time competing.
3837
03:25:34,030 --> 03:25:36,157
It was very innovative, but it didn't have the
3838
03:25:36,157 --> 03:25:38,826
marketing and sales attention at Sierra.
3839
03:25:38,826 --> 03:25:41,746
Half-Life had just consumed all the oxygen in the room.
3840
03:25:41,746 --> 03:25:45,041
It was all just Half-Life and/or Counter-Strike once Counter-Strike
3841
03:25:45,041 --> 03:25:46,500
became a retail product.
3842
03:25:46,500 --> 03:25:48,878
I think it's a very underrated game,
3843
03:25:48,878 --> 03:25:51,797
and I think it had a lot more influence than people realize.
3844
03:25:51,797 --> 03:25:53,799
What I took away from it was
3845
03:25:53,799 --> 03:25:55,384
the fun of playing with friends.
3846
03:25:55,384 --> 03:25:57,845
First person shooters are way more fun
3847
03:25:57,845 --> 03:25:59,764
when you're all immersed in this world
3848
03:25:59,764 --> 03:26:02,099
together and working toward a common objective.
3849
03:26:02,099 --> 03:26:13,986
♪♪♪
3850
03:26:13,986 --> 03:26:16,697
PlanetSide was all about the, the scale
3851
03:26:16,697 --> 03:26:18,866
that we wanted to give people
3852
03:26:18,866 --> 03:26:22,661
an idea of what a planetary battle would look like:
3853
03:26:22,661 --> 03:26:25,289
different continents, and we had vehicles,
3854
03:26:25,289 --> 03:26:28,292
you had infantry, and you had flying vehicles as well.
3855
03:26:28,292 --> 03:26:29,001
♪♪♪
3856
03:26:29,001 --> 03:26:31,337
The team was small. I think we were like
3857
03:26:31,337 --> 03:26:33,547
15, 20 people.
3858
03:26:33,547 --> 03:26:36,384
We didn't have the ability to have,
3859
03:26:36,384 --> 03:26:38,511
like, large scale battles
3860
03:26:38,511 --> 03:26:40,596
for a really long time in development.
3861
03:26:40,596 --> 03:26:44,391
We ended up opening it up to the rest of SOE.
3862
03:26:44,391 --> 03:26:47,103
I remember that day and it was just, like, insane,
3863
03:26:47,103 --> 03:26:49,355
I was working at SOE, and
3864
03:26:49,355 --> 03:26:52,024
I was just amazed at the scope
3865
03:26:52,024 --> 03:26:53,984
and the scale of that game.
3866
03:26:53,984 --> 03:26:57,404
That vastness and the, the chaos.
3867
03:26:57,404 --> 03:27:01,242
It was just something that I’d never experienced before in a first person shooter.
3868
03:27:01,242 --> 03:27:04,411
The fact that they had managed to do that was really mind blowing.
3869
03:27:04,411 --> 03:27:07,915
The game itself was more about territory controls,
3870
03:27:07,915 --> 03:27:09,875
like a game of Risk, right?
3871
03:27:09,875 --> 03:27:12,753
Everybody's familiar with that. We look at the map, and you see,
3872
03:27:12,753 --> 03:27:14,505
you know, exactly where
3873
03:27:14,505 --> 03:27:17,133
each one of the factions are taking over.
3874
03:27:17,133 --> 03:27:20,469
One of the things that was most memorable for me,
3875
03:27:20,469 --> 03:27:23,139
was, you know, coming in, being able to understand like,
3876
03:27:23,139 --> 03:27:24,849
what the factions were
3877
03:27:24,849 --> 03:27:28,519
and create three different identities for each one of the groups,
3878
03:27:28,519 --> 03:27:31,063
specifically for the Vanu Sovereignty, you know,
3879
03:27:31,063 --> 03:27:33,232
hence the purple tie today.
3880
03:27:33,232 --> 03:27:36,694
The big issue was, of course, the, the competition.
3881
03:27:36,694 --> 03:27:39,697
Battlefield was a long-running franchise at that point,
3882
03:27:39,697 --> 03:27:43,159
and there was just a market share that we had to go after,
3883
03:27:43,159 --> 03:27:46,287
and we knew we had to capture in order to be successful.
3884
03:27:46,287 --> 03:27:48,873
Luckily, technology, you know, caught up.
3885
03:27:48,873 --> 03:27:52,168
We spent a lot of time working on the engine that we were building
3886
03:27:52,168 --> 03:27:54,587
specifically for Planetside 2
3887
03:27:54,587 --> 03:27:57,506
that would allow us to put thousands of people
3888
03:27:57,506 --> 03:28:00,050
on 8K by 8K maps.
3889
03:28:00,050 --> 03:28:02,136
Often when you're developing a game like that,
3890
03:28:02,136 --> 03:28:03,888
you've got blinders on,
3891
03:28:03,888 --> 03:28:06,557
and you don't understand
3892
03:28:06,557 --> 03:28:09,101
what it's going to be like once the general public is in
3893
03:28:09,101 --> 03:28:11,187
and actually experiencing it.
3894
03:28:11,187 --> 03:28:13,564
And, yeah, that first time jumping in and,
3895
03:28:13,564 --> 03:28:16,567
and seeing everybody basically do whatever they wanted,
3896
03:28:16,567 --> 03:28:18,777
[laughing]
3897
03:28:18,777 --> 03:28:21,864
coordinated or not, was a real trip.
3898
03:28:21,864 --> 03:28:24,116
It’s just hard to describe, like, that first time
3899
03:28:24,116 --> 03:28:26,327
you get that experience,
3900
03:28:26,327 --> 03:28:28,412
because that was really exciting to me.
3901
03:28:28,412 --> 03:28:31,832
It's like, for the longest, we were like, ‘Oh, we don't know if it's gonna work or not’
3902
03:28:31,832 --> 03:28:34,627
like, because we were all kind of working in this bubble
3903
03:28:34,627 --> 03:28:38,422
and then, once we hit that switch, and you get all these people kind of running around,
3904
03:28:38,422 --> 03:28:39,798
it's just, it’s just insane.
3905
03:28:39,798 --> 03:28:48,182
♪♪♪
3906
03:28:48,182 --> 03:28:49,183
[static]
3907
03:28:49,183 --> 03:28:51,769
Let me now unveil XBox.
3908
03:28:51,769 --> 03:28:53,896
♪♪♪
3909
03:28:53,896 --> 03:28:57,024
Bill, you've certainly revolutionized the technology we know today,
3910
03:28:57,024 --> 03:28:57,733
[static]
3911
03:28:57,733 --> 03:29:00,069
Super fast graphics, connectivity.
3912
03:29:00,069 --> 03:29:03,697
The XBox is important to the future of this industry.
3913
03:29:03,697 --> 03:29:07,701
This is Seamus Blackley, and he's the Chief Technology Officer here at Microsoft.
3914
03:29:07,701 --> 03:29:11,121
He's making sure that this thing gets completed on time.
3915
03:29:11,121 --> 03:29:13,540
‘Do they even think it'll work? Do they even think it's a real platform?
3916
03:29:13,540 --> 03:29:16,168
I don't know.’ We look back on it, it seems obvious
3917
03:29:16,168 --> 03:29:18,379
but, at that time, many people were calling it coffin box,
3918
03:29:18,379 --> 03:29:20,130
like you don't want to get in the coffin.
3919
03:29:20,130 --> 03:29:22,967
‘Don't work for XBox. It’s going to fail, fail, fail, fail.’’
3920
03:29:22,967 --> 03:29:28,430
♪♪♪
3921
03:29:28,430 --> 03:29:31,558
The Covenant believed that what they call the silent cartographer
3922
03:29:31,558 --> 03:29:34,353
is somewhere under this island.
3923
03:29:34,353 --> 03:29:37,815
The cartographer is a Map Room that will lead us to Halo’s Control Center.
3924
03:29:37,815 --> 03:29:42,611
♪♪♪
Touchdown. Hit it, Marines!
3925
03:29:42,611 --> 03:29:53,497
♪♪♪
3926
03:29:53,497 --> 03:29:56,083
Could we possibly make any more noise?
3927
03:29:56,083 --> 03:29:57,376
♪♪♪
3928
03:29:57,376 --> 03:29:58,544
I guess so.
3929
03:29:58,544 --> 03:30:01,964
♪♪♪
3930
03:30:01,964 --> 03:30:04,300
Bill Gates had come to see an early demo of Trespasser.
3931
03:30:04,300 --> 03:30:06,760
because Microsoft was an investor in DreamWorks.
3932
03:30:06,760 --> 03:30:10,180
He was super impressed and he said, ‘You should come work at Microsoft for Direct X.’
3933
03:30:10,180 --> 03:30:13,100
♪♪♪
3934
03:30:13,100 --> 03:30:15,769
Forget progress by proxy,
3935
03:30:15,769 --> 03:30:18,188
land on your own net.
3936
03:30:18,188 --> 03:30:21,317
Welcome to the third place.
3937
03:30:21,317 --> 03:30:22,526
♪♪♪
3938
03:30:22,526 --> 03:30:25,029
Around that time, Sony was starting to do some
3939
03:30:25,070 --> 03:30:27,156
PR around PlayStation 2,
3940
03:30:27,281 --> 03:30:30,159
and I'm kind of getting excited about the idea of defeating Sony.
3941
03:30:30,242 --> 03:30:31,618
♪♪♪
3942
03:30:31,618 --> 03:30:34,830
The idea that occurred to me was that it should be basically a hardware device
3943
03:30:34,830 --> 03:30:37,041
optimized for Direct X.
3944
03:30:37,041 --> 03:30:39,335
So it's a Direct X box,
3945
03:30:39,335 --> 03:30:41,503
and that was, like, a part of the sales technique.
3946
03:30:41,503 --> 03:30:43,005
‘This will get Windows in the living room.’
3947
03:30:43,005 --> 03:30:45,966
We had all these PC games in development.
3948
03:30:45,966 --> 03:30:51,638
We could just easily port our stuff over to it.
Of course, that was not at all what happened and was incredibly naive.
3949
03:30:51,638 --> 03:30:54,266
It was a pure game console, it was always gonna be a pure game console.
3950
03:30:54,266 --> 03:30:56,810
I didn't even fucking care if it ran Windows, okay?
3951
03:30:56,810 --> 03:30:59,396
But, that's not what we told the Microsoft executives.
3952
03:30:59,396 --> 03:31:00,356
I wanted to show you something
3953
03:31:00,356 --> 03:31:02,358
We told them that this was smart, because it would
3954
03:31:02,399 --> 03:31:04,568
get the Windows operating system into the living room.
3955
03:31:04,568 --> 03:31:05,652
♪♪♪
3956
03:31:05,652 --> 03:31:08,822
It's going to use a PC architecture and an Intel processor,
3957
03:31:08,822 --> 03:31:11,575
but it's not really going to run Windows.
3958
03:31:11,575 --> 03:31:13,994
♪♪♪
3959
03:31:13,994 --> 03:31:16,455
So then, we were, went into a big meeting.
3960
03:31:16,455 --> 03:31:18,791
The room was full of vice presidents,
3961
03:31:18,791 --> 03:31:21,335
so many that they couldn't fit around the big long table.
3962
03:31:21,335 --> 03:31:23,754
There were vice presidents along the walls too.
3963
03:31:23,754 --> 03:31:26,382
And then, the last person to come in was Bill,
3964
03:31:26,382 --> 03:31:29,760
and Bill was carrying our PowerPoint deck,
3965
03:31:29,760 --> 03:31:33,847
a printed copy of it, and he walks in and throws it down the table
3966
03:31:33,847 --> 03:31:38,769
and says, ‘This is a fucking insult to everything I've accomplished at this company,’
3967
03:31:38,769 --> 03:31:42,773
♪♪♪
3968
03:31:42,773 --> 03:31:45,401
and that was the start of the meeting.
3969
03:31:45,401 --> 03:31:47,694
♪♪♪
3970
03:31:47,694 --> 03:31:49,905
I expected to be fired from Microsoft
3971
03:31:49,905 --> 03:31:51,907
and never be able to get another job again.
3972
03:31:51,907 --> 03:31:54,118
So, Bill would yell at us for a while
3973
03:31:54,118 --> 03:31:57,287
about the technology decisions we had made,
3974
03:31:57,287 --> 03:32:00,666
and we just kept saying, ‘You know, we've spent a year looking at this.
3975
03:32:00,666 --> 03:32:03,627
If you want to get into this business,
3976
03:32:03,627 --> 03:32:05,587
we're confident this is the way to do it.’
3977
03:32:05,587 --> 03:32:08,132
And then Ballmer says, ‘What about Sony?’
3978
03:32:08,132 --> 03:32:10,926
And then, Bill says, ‘I think we should do this.’
3979
03:32:10,926 --> 03:32:13,303
♪♪♪
3980
03:32:13,303 --> 03:32:15,848
Kevin and I were going to the Tokyo Game Show.
3981
03:32:15,848 --> 03:32:19,935
We rode the train, and the subway doors opened, we walked out,
3982
03:32:19,935 --> 03:32:25,315
and the whole subway station was covered with XBox logos.
3983
03:32:25,315 --> 03:32:28,110
It was so insane,
3984
03:32:28,110 --> 03:32:31,113
given the fact that, really, I was just expecting to be fired.
3985
03:32:31,113 --> 03:32:34,741
He saw something in this group of weirdos.
3986
03:32:34,741 --> 03:32:37,035
I think they reminded him of the start of Microsoft,
3987
03:32:37,035 --> 03:32:40,539
and that, that is should be made to work, and he supported us,
3988
03:32:40,539 --> 03:32:42,082
and that was a really big deal.
3989
03:32:42,082 --> 03:32:53,343
♪♪♪
That was February, 2000. We were launching November, 2001.
3990
03:32:53,343 --> 03:32:56,597
I mean, that's less than two years away.
3991
03:32:56,597 --> 03:32:59,099
I was looking for anything I could get.
3992
03:32:59,099 --> 03:33:03,562
We were taking some of our PC lineup and repurposing it for console,
3993
03:33:03,562 --> 03:33:06,398
and I was, me and my whole deal team,
3994
03:33:06,398 --> 03:33:08,734
we were out shaking the trees all around the world
3995
03:33:08,734 --> 03:33:11,195
to try to find projects.
3996
03:33:11,195 --> 03:33:14,198
We are starting to see some great games come back to the Mac,
3997
03:33:14,198 --> 03:33:16,492
but this is one of the coolest I've ever seen.
3998
03:33:16,492 --> 03:33:18,994
♪♪♪
3999
03:33:18,994 --> 03:33:22,623
Everybody on the team knew that we had something special with Halo.
4000
03:33:22,623 --> 03:33:29,505
♪♪♪
4001
03:33:29,505 --> 03:33:32,424
Basically, I was sitting in my office one day and my phone rang,
4002
03:33:32,424 --> 03:33:35,052
and it was Peter Tamte on the line.
4003
03:33:35,052 --> 03:33:37,804
He more or less told me that things weren't going that well at Bungie,
4004
03:33:37,804 --> 03:33:40,974
that they were going out of business.
4005
03:33:40,974 --> 03:33:43,477
When Microsoft bought Bungie,
4006
03:33:43,477 --> 03:33:47,439
we had some broad ideas about a story,
4007
03:33:47,439 --> 03:33:49,942
and a few characters, vehicles and weapons.
4008
03:33:49,942 --> 03:33:54,446
We had a really fun multiplayer game that was like a 4 on 14 game.
4009
03:33:54,446 --> 03:33:57,032
We didn't have working AI.
4010
03:33:57,032 --> 03:34:01,912
We did not have anything like a mission plan or a script.
4011
03:34:01,912 --> 03:34:05,999
The early iterations of Halo were pretty hysterical.
4012
03:34:05,999 --> 03:34:08,585
It did not start out as a first person shooter.
4013
03:34:08,585 --> 03:34:11,004
It actually started out as a strategy game.
4014
03:34:11,004 --> 03:34:14,258
It wasn't until we had built some
4015
03:34:14,258 --> 03:34:18,428
vehicle physics for a little 4x4 type vehicle that I had built,
4016
03:34:18,428 --> 03:34:21,181
and we would command it to move from one location to the other,
4017
03:34:21,181 --> 03:34:24,393
and it was pretty cool to see the physics
4018
03:34:24,393 --> 03:34:27,187
and the interaction with the vehicle and the terrain,
4019
03:34:27,187 --> 03:34:30,065
and we got to the point where we're thinking,
4020
03:34:30,065 --> 03:34:33,402
‘Why are we letting the AI drive these around? Why don't we
4021
03:34:33,402 --> 03:34:35,028
start driving it ourselves?’
4022
03:34:35,028 --> 03:34:38,365
♪♪♪
4023
03:34:38,365 --> 03:34:42,411
That was the very first big step that we took
4024
03:34:42,411 --> 03:34:49,042
in turning it into something that would
somewhat resemble the Halo that we played in 2001.
4025
03:34:49,042 --> 03:34:53,714
We realized, ‘Wow, it’s…It's way more fun to play on the ground
4026
03:34:53,714 --> 03:34:55,591
as one of these little tiny Marines
4027
03:34:55,591 --> 03:34:58,176
surrounded by all this beautiful sci-fi landscape,
4028
03:34:58,176 --> 03:35:01,346
being as close as possible to the, to the action.
4029
03:35:01,346 --> 03:35:04,308
That first person perspective just touched a lot of those
4030
03:35:04,308 --> 03:35:06,018
bases for us.
4031
03:35:06,018 --> 03:35:08,437
What felt like a tight combat loop?
4032
03:35:08,437 --> 03:35:10,856
What felt super immersive in the sci-fi world?
4033
03:35:10,856 --> 03:35:12,983
What made business sense? We
4034
03:35:12,983 --> 03:35:16,528
specifically wanted to create a world that was beautiful,
4035
03:35:16,528 --> 03:35:20,907
a place the player would want to stay and play in.
4036
03:35:20,907 --> 03:35:24,453
In Doom, they throw hundreds of enemies at a time at you.
4037
03:35:24,453 --> 03:35:26,788
We could have, like, eight.
4038
03:35:26,788 --> 03:35:31,043
So, we had to have enemies that would last longer than that
4039
03:35:31,043 --> 03:35:33,837
and could live longer and were, you know, smart enough to
4040
03:35:33,837 --> 03:35:36,506
retreat and flank you.
4041
03:35:36,506 --> 03:35:37,341
♪♪♪
4042
03:35:37,341 --> 03:35:40,093
There was outdoors and indoors
4043
03:35:40,093 --> 03:35:41,887
in the middle of this huge battle,
4044
03:35:41,887 --> 03:35:45,140
and then I can jump into a Warthog somebody's driving,
4045
03:35:45,140 --> 03:35:48,185
and I can be running the chain gun on the back, you know?
4046
03:35:48,185 --> 03:35:51,188
If it didn't feel as fluid as Quake
4047
03:35:51,188 --> 03:35:54,983
or if it didn't give you the precision of Half-Life,
4048
03:35:54,983 --> 03:35:56,151
it wasn't good enough.
4049
03:35:56,151 --> 03:35:59,571
So, when it came to starting to play with a controller
4050
03:35:59,571 --> 03:36:03,575
that had analog controls, and we could creep along at our own pace,
4051
03:36:03,575 --> 03:36:05,535
we could do things that we just never
4052
03:36:05,535 --> 03:36:08,246
could do with a keyboard and mouse.
4053
03:36:08,246 --> 03:36:10,707
I saw every iteration of controller
4054
03:36:10,707 --> 03:36:13,877
that they were working on, and some of them were pretty wild.
4055
03:36:13,877 --> 03:36:17,339
The Duke was just 1 of 30
4056
03:36:17,339 --> 03:36:20,592
wooden prototypes that they brought by that day.
4057
03:36:20,592 --> 03:36:22,803
I remember the first time I held the Duke controller. I remember thinking
4058
03:36:22,803 --> 03:36:24,930
I was holding a giant dinner plate.
4059
03:36:24,930 --> 03:36:27,057
Duke controller is so big.
4060
03:36:27,182 --> 03:36:29,434
I almost need a trailer to move it around
4061
03:36:29,601 --> 03:36:31,061
Whenever I went to Japan,
4062
03:36:31,061 --> 03:36:35,107
constant feedback I would get is, ‘It's black.
4063
03:36:35,107 --> 03:36:37,192
Black is the color of death.’
4064
03:36:37,192 --> 03:36:38,485
♪♪♪
4065
03:36:38,485 --> 03:36:40,946
‘X, X is the letter of death.
4066
03:36:40,946 --> 03:36:43,573
Xbox, it’s the death box.’
4067
03:36:43,573 --> 03:36:47,411
♪♪♪
4068
03:36:47,411 --> 03:36:50,622
I'd be like, ‘The PlayStation is black.’
4069
03:36:50,622 --> 03:36:52,958
They’d be like, ‘Oh well, that's, that's okay.’
4070
03:36:52,958 --> 03:36:55,460
The controller should weigh
4071
03:36:55,460 --> 03:36:58,839
the same weight as water in your hands.
4072
03:36:58,839 --> 03:37:02,884
‘Okay, it's the weight of water in my hands, okay.’
4073
03:37:02,884 --> 03:37:05,512
As a statement, as a expression of the brand,
4074
03:37:05,512 --> 03:37:08,598
as Microsoft's first, you know,
4075
03:37:08,598 --> 03:37:10,600
foray into this world, it felt right.
4076
03:37:10,600 --> 03:37:12,978
It all felt part of a piece.
4077
03:37:12,978 --> 03:37:14,855
Sorry for the quick thaw, Master Chief.
4078
03:37:14,855 --> 03:37:17,315
People could not answer the question of,
4079
03:37:17,315 --> 03:37:20,402
‘Would you like your y-axis normal or inverted?’
4080
03:37:20,402 --> 03:37:24,197
So, we had to come up with a way to get them
4081
03:37:24,197 --> 03:37:27,701
to choose entirely based on what came naturally to them.
4082
03:37:27,701 --> 03:37:30,454
Just look at each of the flashing panels to target them.
4083
03:37:30,454 --> 03:37:32,914
So, the chief waking from cryosleep,
4084
03:37:32,914 --> 03:37:35,542
it gave us this perfect opportunity
4085
03:37:35,542 --> 03:37:38,086
to get off on the right foot immediately.
4086
03:37:38,086 --> 03:37:39,504
‘Okay, that looks good.’
4087
03:37:39,504 --> 03:37:42,424
Took quite a bit of time for us to kind of
4088
03:37:42,424 --> 03:37:45,010
explore some of the universe and what we could do.
4089
03:37:45,010 --> 03:37:47,679
That was when we hired Joe Staten,
4090
03:37:47,679 --> 03:37:51,391
and we started really delving deeper into
4091
03:37:51,391 --> 03:37:52,893
writing the story.
4092
03:37:52,893 --> 03:37:55,187
The team had already done a huge amount of world building,
4093
03:37:55,187 --> 03:37:58,774
character creation. Joe brought a lot to the table
4094
03:37:58,774 --> 03:38:01,902
in giving the Master Chief a personality
4095
03:38:01,902 --> 03:38:03,487
without ever showing his face.
4096
03:38:03,487 --> 03:38:04,321
♪♪♪
4097
03:38:04,321 --> 03:38:06,865
For me, the way into Master Chief's character
4098
03:38:06,865 --> 03:38:08,658
actually wasn't through him
4099
03:38:08,658 --> 03:38:11,036
but rather through his partner,
4100
03:38:11,036 --> 03:38:12,370
through Cortana.
4101
03:38:12,370 --> 03:38:13,705
Sleep well?
4102
03:38:13,705 --> 03:38:15,832
No thanks to your driving, yes.
4103
03:38:15,832 --> 03:38:19,461
I firmly believe you can't have Halo without Cortana.
4104
03:38:19,461 --> 03:38:23,423
One of my favorite cinematics is where you return to
4105
03:38:23,423 --> 03:38:25,884
the Covenant ship that's floating over the Halo ring.
4106
03:38:25,884 --> 03:38:27,052
♪♪♪
4107
03:38:27,052 --> 03:38:29,888
Oh, I see, the coordinate data needs to be…
4108
03:38:29,888 --> 03:38:31,056
♪♪♪
4109
03:38:31,056 --> 03:38:32,349
Right, sorry.
4110
03:38:32,349 --> 03:38:34,309
Now, the chief didn't have to say anything.
4111
03:38:34,309 --> 03:38:38,230
He just had to react in an honest way
4112
03:38:38,230 --> 03:38:41,733
to this, this person inside his head.
4113
03:38:41,733 --> 03:38:46,363
Those moments showed players what Master Chief's personality is,
4114
03:38:46,363 --> 03:38:50,116
The more we've pushed those kinds of character interactions with one another,
4115
03:38:50,116 --> 03:38:53,495
the more kind of relatable those characters became.
4116
03:38:53,495 --> 03:38:56,081
Now would be a very good time to leave.
4117
03:38:56,081 --> 03:38:58,333
She could crack Covenant security systems,
4118
03:38:58,333 --> 03:39:00,627
dive into ancient alien technology.
4119
03:39:00,627 --> 03:39:01,503
You all right?
4120
03:39:01,503 --> 03:39:03,588
We wanted to make sure that her personality
4121
03:39:03,588 --> 03:39:07,384
represented, you know, these, these things that she was capable of.
4122
03:39:07,384 --> 03:39:11,179
A dozen Covenant superior battleships against a single Halcyon-class cruiser.
4123
03:39:11,179 --> 03:39:13,807
With those odds, I'm content with three,
4124
03:39:13,807 --> 03:39:15,058
make that four fills.
4125
03:39:15,058 --> 03:39:16,268
♪♪♪
4126
03:39:16,268 --> 03:39:20,272
So, from the very beginning, Halo had multiplayer,
4127
03:39:20,272 --> 03:39:22,524
we could network our computers.
4128
03:39:22,524 --> 03:39:26,611
Our characters had vastly different capabilities. We could do super jumps.
4129
03:39:26,611 --> 03:39:28,280
We used to spend, you know,
4130
03:39:28,280 --> 03:39:31,408
two hours every afternoon playing multiplayer,
4131
03:39:31,408 --> 03:39:33,785
and that was before we had
4132
03:39:33,785 --> 03:39:35,996
anything working on the single player side.
4133
03:39:35,996 --> 03:39:40,500
I think it was two nights before we went Gold Master.
4134
03:39:40,500 --> 03:39:42,711
Jason Jones, the creative director,
4135
03:39:42,711 --> 03:39:44,462
went into code
4136
03:39:44,462 --> 03:39:47,424
and, for the human pistol for multiplayer,
4137
03:39:47,424 --> 03:39:50,051
it just does, like, three times as much damage.
4138
03:39:50,051 --> 03:39:53,889
It completely destroyed the multiplayer balance.
4139
03:39:53,889 --> 03:39:57,017
♪♪♪
4140
03:39:57,017 --> 03:39:59,644
Yeah, it was pretty effective, wasn't it?
4141
03:39:59,644 --> 03:40:03,773
♪♪♪
4142
03:40:03,773 --> 03:40:05,734
Halo: Combat Evolved,
4143
03:40:05,734 --> 03:40:09,404
After Halo shipped, it became the biggest Xbox game.
4144
03:40:09,404 --> 03:40:11,489
incredibly successful.
4145
03:40:11,489 --> 03:40:14,409
Almost everybody on the team wanted to go work on something else.
4146
03:40:14,409 --> 03:40:16,703
Jason Jones, who was really
4147
03:40:16,703 --> 03:40:20,457
the glue that was holding all the different functions.
4148
03:40:20,457 --> 03:40:24,210
He wanted to go off and work on a new franchise
4149
03:40:24,210 --> 03:40:27,672
and let the core team keep going and do Halo 2.
4150
03:40:27,672 --> 03:40:29,966
We're going in!
4151
03:40:29,966 --> 03:40:32,594
Get tactical Marines!
4152
03:40:32,594 --> 03:40:35,555
Get aboard that carrier, secure the Prophet of Regret.
4153
03:40:35,555 --> 03:40:37,933
♪♪♪
4154
03:40:37,933 --> 03:40:40,644
We spent a good amount of time at the very beginning
4155
03:40:40,644 --> 03:40:44,397
thinking about how we were going to devise spaces,
4156
03:40:44,397 --> 03:40:47,317
how we were going to create all of those characters and such
4157
03:40:47,317 --> 03:40:50,320
and what kind of technologies we could utilize
4158
03:40:50,320 --> 03:40:53,323
within the engine to make things look a lot better.
4159
03:40:53,323 --> 03:40:55,575
Also spent a lot of time kind of figuring out what,
4160
03:40:55,575 --> 03:40:57,452
what direction the story should take.
4161
03:40:57,452 --> 03:41:02,499
The tasks you must undertake as the Arbiter are perilous, suicidal.
4162
03:41:02,499 --> 03:41:06,086
You will die as each Arbiter has before you.
4163
03:41:06,086 --> 03:41:08,838
If you're going to experience the story of the hero,
4164
03:41:08,838 --> 03:41:11,883
well, what about experiencing the story of the villain, quote, unquote?
4165
03:41:11,883 --> 03:41:13,468
Playing as the Arbiter
4166
03:41:13,468 --> 03:41:17,222
was one way to give you a lot of insight
4167
03:41:17,222 --> 03:41:20,183
into the Covenant that you wouldn't have normally had.
4168
03:41:20,183 --> 03:41:22,143
All of a sudden, you got access to a lot of
4169
03:41:22,143 --> 03:41:25,897
cool weapons and vehicles that you wouldn't normally have had,
4170
03:41:25,897 --> 03:41:29,275
and you got to see the AI from the other side.
4171
03:41:29,275 --> 03:41:31,277
I love that they were taking risks
4172
03:41:31,277 --> 03:41:34,114
and letting you play another character
4173
03:41:34,114 --> 03:41:36,658
and dual wielding and, you know,
4174
03:41:36,658 --> 03:41:39,160
other super cool stuff that they introduced in there.
4175
03:41:39,160 --> 03:41:41,037
And it just looked super cool
4176
03:41:41,037 --> 03:41:43,415
to run around with double SMG,
4177
03:41:43,415 --> 03:41:46,668
and it was one of the very first things we showed about the game.
4178
03:41:46,668 --> 03:41:48,670
It was before we had actually finished
4179
03:41:48,670 --> 03:41:51,840
all the tech that would allow you to actually dual wield.
4180
03:41:51,840 --> 03:41:55,760
So, in that demo video, when we switched to
4181
03:41:55,760 --> 03:41:59,097
dual wielding SMGs, it's actually just one SMG
4182
03:41:59,097 --> 03:42:02,475
with another SMG stuck on the side of it just floating there.
4183
03:42:02,475 --> 03:42:04,686
Lots of smoke and mirrors in announcements.
4184
03:42:04,686 --> 03:42:09,065
♪♪♪
4185
03:42:09,065 --> 03:42:10,358
I and others
4186
03:42:10,358 --> 03:42:13,903
bled gallons of blood in order to make sure an Xbox had
4187
03:42:13,903 --> 03:42:16,865
networking capability and a hard drive.
4188
03:42:16,865 --> 03:42:20,160
Halo 2 really defined Xbox Live.
4189
03:42:20,160 --> 03:42:24,039
Anybody owning Xbox had to have Halo 2.
4190
03:42:24,039 --> 03:42:26,249
Bungie was innovative and matchmaking.
4191
03:42:26,249 --> 03:42:30,003
You could just go onto Xbox Live and find yourself in a match and minutes,
4192
03:42:30,003 --> 03:42:32,130
and the better you play, the more you were
4193
03:42:32,130 --> 03:42:34,966
getting matched with people of like skills.
4194
03:42:34,966 --> 03:42:37,427
For the first two years of
4195
03:42:37,427 --> 03:42:39,471
Xbox Live’s existences,
4196
03:42:39,471 --> 03:42:42,557
I think something like 90% of
4197
03:42:42,557 --> 03:42:44,309
players were playing Halo 2.
4198
03:42:44,309 --> 03:42:52,067
♪♪♪
4199
03:42:52,067 --> 03:42:55,320
I am your shield. I am your soul.
4200
03:42:55,320 --> 03:43:00,366
♪♪♪
4201
03:43:00,366 --> 03:43:02,994
There was certainly pressure with Halo three to
4202
03:43:02,994 --> 03:43:05,663
make that generational leap, and we just tried to go big
4203
03:43:05,663 --> 03:43:08,374
with almost every decision.
4204
03:43:08,374 --> 03:43:10,752
Halo 3, we wanted to go epic
4205
03:43:10,752 --> 03:43:14,506
and make the world feel incredible.
4206
03:43:14,506 --> 03:43:21,429
♪♪♪
4207
03:43:21,429 --> 03:43:24,182
I think Finish the Fight might’ve been sort of an apology.
4208
03:43:24,182 --> 03:43:25,975
You mind telling me what you're doing on that ship?
4209
03:43:25,975 --> 03:43:28,686
For kind of how Halo 2 wrapped up
4210
03:43:28,686 --> 03:43:30,438
Finishing this fight.
4211
03:43:30,438 --> 03:43:32,565
Finish the fight was a rallying cry.
4212
03:43:32,565 --> 03:43:35,193
If you're with us, and you played through Halo 2,
4213
03:43:35,193 --> 03:43:38,822
this is where we give you that ending that you’ve been waiting for.
4214
03:43:38,822 --> 03:43:48,039
that you've been waiting for.
♪♪♪
4215
03:43:48,039 --> 03:43:51,042
The idea was: you have to make the greatest game ever.
4216
03:43:51,042 --> 03:43:51,960
♪♪♪
4217
03:43:51,960 --> 03:43:54,170
This is the only way this is going to be successful.
4218
03:43:54,170 --> 03:43:57,924
It has to be extraordinary on all sorts of levels.
4219
03:43:57,924 --> 03:44:00,593
The Prophet of Truth, as I'm sure people realize, is in fact
4220
03:44:00,593 --> 03:44:02,345
is, in fact, the Prophet of Lies.
4221
03:44:02,345 --> 03:44:04,597
The classic dramatic tradition to
4222
03:44:04,597 --> 03:44:07,642
name characters the opposite of what they are.
4223
03:44:07,642 --> 03:44:11,104
There was a sense of, ‘I'm gonna finish everything I ever
4224
03:44:11,187 --> 03:44:13,857
I ever wanted to do with the Halo series:
4225
03:44:13,857 --> 03:44:16,234
having a Scarab that could walk around
4226
03:44:16,234 --> 03:44:17,944
arbitrarily and react to you.
4227
03:44:17,944 --> 03:44:20,864
and the Covenant ships flying overhead and such,
4228
03:44:20,864 --> 03:44:22,824
bigger and bigger and bigger and
4229
03:44:22,824 --> 03:44:24,742
really strongly integrating the
4230
03:44:24,742 --> 03:44:27,120
on foot combat with the vehicle combat.
4231
03:44:27,120 --> 03:44:30,248
For the look and feel of it to the creative direction of it,
4232
03:44:30,248 --> 03:44:34,419
that was the vibe that I wanted to push through to the rest of the game,
4233
03:44:34,419 --> 03:44:37,380
It's going to have to kind of redefine Xbox Live.
4234
03:44:37,380 --> 03:44:39,841
One of the reasons why Halo’s multiplayer
4235
03:44:40,216 --> 03:44:43,845
worked was because we gave you so many options to customize it.
4236
03:44:43,845 --> 03:44:45,722
You could go swords-only,
4237
03:44:45,722 --> 03:44:49,100
you could increase the release spawn time.
4238
03:44:49,100 --> 03:44:51,644
You could really tailor it to what you and your group likes.
4239
03:44:51,644 --> 03:44:54,022
Forge was kind of an extension of that.
4240
03:44:54,022 --> 03:44:57,358
Initially, it was just: place a few objects,
4241
03:44:57,358 --> 03:44:59,319
move the weapons around a little bit,
4242
03:44:59,319 --> 03:45:03,114
change the spawn rates of things as a modification to a map.
4243
03:45:03,114 --> 03:45:06,743
And then, a couple of the artists looked at it and went,
4244
03:45:06,743 --> 03:45:08,828
‘Well, if we can place objects,
4245
03:45:08,828 --> 03:45:12,290
we're gonna place a lot of objects and see what happens.
4246
03:45:12,290 --> 03:45:17,962
♪♪♪
4247
03:45:17,962 --> 03:45:19,923
Halo 3 was the victory lap
4248
03:45:19,923 --> 03:45:22,675
where we just wanted to make the perfect Halo.
4249
03:45:22,675 --> 03:45:24,677
Oh, I know what the ladies like.
4250
03:45:24,677 --> 03:45:29,390
We never had any idea that Halo was going to become a cultural phenomenon.
4251
03:45:29,390 --> 03:45:33,353
Halo was big, and everyone was playing Halo and ‘This is the future. This is awesome.’
4252
03:45:33,436 --> 03:45:37,023
Halo has a special place in my heart,
it was the gamechanger
4253
03:45:37,065 --> 03:45:42,153
I remember doing LAN parties. We would system link, like, four consoles together in a basement
4254
03:45:42,153 --> 03:45:46,658
Wen we saw the lines for me when we saw the fan reaction
4255
03:45:46,658 --> 03:45:49,744
We were struck by it.
4256
03:45:49,744 --> 03:45:52,038
No one had seen anything like it at the time.
4257
03:45:52,038 --> 03:45:54,249
The reason why I'm sitting here 20 years later,
4258
03:45:54,249 --> 03:45:56,251
why we're still making Halo games,
4259
03:45:56,251 --> 03:45:59,879
it showed that you can create a rock solid shooter experience,
4260
03:45:59,879 --> 03:46:04,008
but you can also create a beautiful, mysterious world
4261
03:46:04,008 --> 03:46:06,261
that people want to spend time in.
4262
03:46:06,261 --> 03:46:10,306
It can tell a story with characters, that, that matter,
4263
03:46:10,306 --> 03:46:14,018
It was just an iconic moment in the history of games.
4264
03:46:14,018 --> 03:46:15,895
♪♪♪
4265
03:46:15,895 --> 03:46:19,565
Wake me when you need me.
4266
03:46:19,607 --> 03:46:23,569
Don’t make a girl a promise, if you know you can't keep it.
4267
03:46:23,569 --> 03:46:44,757
♪♪♪
4268
03:46:44,757 --> 03:46:46,217
There was a titanic problem that, you know
4269
03:46:46,217 --> 03:46:51,180
nobody under the age of 30 might even know about
4270
03:46:51,180 --> 03:46:54,600
which is hilarious which is that, at that time,
4271
03:46:54,600 --> 03:46:58,604
a serious argument existed, a religious war existed
4272
03:46:58,604 --> 03:47:03,985
that shooters could never work on a console,
4273
03:47:03,985 --> 03:47:07,030
that, to play a shooter, you had to have a mouse and a keyboard
4274
03:47:07,030 --> 03:47:09,198
because of the response speed of the mouse and a bunch of other stuff,
4275
03:47:09,198 --> 03:47:11,617
and I know that sounds insane but,
4276
03:47:11,617 --> 03:47:15,580
at the time, you would have tons of people tell you,
4277
03:47:15,580 --> 03:47:19,292
‘You should not try to make a shooter on a console, because it would be terrible.’
4278
03:47:19,292 --> 03:47:23,087
Yo, listen up. We will not live in a two dimensional world.
4279
03:47:23,087 --> 03:47:27,383
We will take a look around. We will not be confined.
4280
03:47:27,383 --> 03:47:31,220
Every single person that had an N64 when it came out played Turok.
4281
03:47:31,220 --> 03:47:34,724
That's like an iconic N64 game.
4282
03:47:34,724 --> 03:47:38,353
The concept is just so appealing. It's like you get to shoot dinosaurs,
4283
03:47:38,353 --> 03:47:43,649
like prehistoric world, like the box art looked awesome.
4284
03:47:43,649 --> 03:47:47,779
One of the big parts of Turok was he was a Native American,
4285
03:47:47,779 --> 03:47:52,116
and you didn't really see indigenous people being represented that way
4286
03:47:52,116 --> 03:47:55,161
as heroes in video games or just protagonists.
4287
03:47:55,161 --> 03:47:56,079
♪♪♪
4288
03:47:56,079 --> 03:47:58,748
When I was a kid, and I was playing it, the game was way too hard for me,
4289
03:47:58,748 --> 03:48:02,585
and it terrified me because, like, the fog was so thick that it,
4290
03:48:02,585 --> 03:48:04,629
it felt like a survival horror game.
4291
03:48:04,629 --> 03:48:08,174
It didn't feel like a running gun shooter,
4292
03:48:08,174 --> 03:48:11,302
because you had to play it so methodically,
4293
03:48:11,302 --> 03:48:13,596
because you never knew when a raptor was just going to, like,
4294
03:48:13,596 --> 03:48:16,015
bust out of the fog and kill you.
4295
03:48:16,015 --> 03:48:18,059
♪♪♪
4296
03:48:18,059 --> 03:48:22,730
What amazed me was that Night Dive’s port, by removing the fog,
4297
03:48:22,730 --> 03:48:25,358
you actually get to play that game
4298
03:48:25,358 --> 03:48:27,610
the way the designers intended.
4299
03:48:27,610 --> 03:48:31,322
That opened up a whole can of worms,
4300
03:48:31,322 --> 03:48:34,534
because not only did the original developers
4301
03:48:34,534 --> 03:48:37,995
implement that fog so that the draw distance would be a lot shorter,
4302
03:48:37,995 --> 03:48:42,667
but they also did it so that they wouldn't have to fully model the entire world as well.
4303
03:48:42,667 --> 03:48:46,003
And so, when we kind of pulled back that curtain, we discovered
4304
03:48:46,003 --> 03:48:48,798
that the tops of the trees didn't exist,
4305
03:48:48,798 --> 03:48:52,468
a lot of geometry was missing.
4306
03:48:52,468 --> 03:48:55,847
And so, we had to bring on a 3D artist to basically
4307
03:48:55,847 --> 03:48:59,183
complete the assets that were now visible for the first time.
4308
03:48:59,183 --> 03:49:01,352
I am Turok.
4309
03:49:01,352 --> 03:49:11,737
♪♪♪
4310
03:49:11,737 --> 03:49:13,781
Perfect Dark was created by
4311
03:49:13,781 --> 03:49:17,535
us taking a load of words, describing words and verbs,
4312
03:49:17,535 --> 03:49:19,495
sticking them on the back of a door,
4313
03:49:19,495 --> 03:49:22,206
and then removing them one by one
4314
03:49:22,206 --> 03:49:25,376
until we came up with two that kind of worked together.
4315
03:49:25,376 --> 03:49:29,547
Perfect Dark was all about stealthiness and going around and trying to find out what's going on and,
4316
03:49:29,547 --> 03:49:32,550
and it's dark, both in sense of light and also dark in terms of sense of the
4317
03:49:32,550 --> 03:49:34,469
conspiracy plot that we were trying to follow up.
4318
03:49:34,469 --> 03:49:37,096
Hands up, and step away from the alien.
4319
03:49:37,096 --> 03:49:39,724
We'd watched a lot of X-Files. X-Files was big at the time,
4320
03:49:39,724 --> 03:49:42,185
so there's darkness there as well. So, the whole dark thing
4321
03:49:42,185 --> 03:49:43,978
just became sort of dominant for us.
4322
03:49:43,978 --> 03:49:46,272
Of course, we'd all seen Lara Croft by that point,
4323
03:49:46,272 --> 03:49:48,524
and we wanted something more real,
4324
03:49:48,524 --> 03:49:50,735
something that we could aspire to
4325
03:49:50,735 --> 03:49:53,529
and still have her as a, a, a spy character.
4326
03:49:53,529 --> 03:49:55,448
♪♪♪
4327
03:49:55,448 --> 03:49:59,452
Half the guns come from a book on Judge Dredd.
4328
03:49:59,452 --> 03:50:02,371
Quite honestly, if you look at them, you can see that we've just stolen things
4329
03:50:02,371 --> 03:50:05,166
straight out of them and adapted them for Perfect Dark.
4330
03:50:05,166 --> 03:50:07,627
Um, Joanna Dark’s wetsuit
4331
03:50:07,627 --> 03:50:12,256
comes from an episode of UFO which was an English sci-fi show from the ‘60s.
4332
03:50:12,256 --> 03:50:14,800
I mean, it's essentially the exact same wetsuit,
4333
03:50:14,800 --> 03:50:16,594
but no one's made the connection yet.
4334
03:50:16,594 --> 03:50:20,556
You know, if you look at the graphical quality between Perfect Dark and GoldenEye,
4335
03:50:20,556 --> 03:50:22,892
fundamentally the same engine and the same console,
4336
03:50:22,892 --> 03:50:24,769
but it took a big step forward.
4337
03:50:24,769 --> 03:50:28,523
There were lots of good design ideas that we didn't get into GoldenEye.
4338
03:50:28,523 --> 03:50:30,775
We thought, ‘We should definitely have bots in this,
4339
03:50:30,775 --> 03:50:33,069
because it opens up so much more. It means you don't need to
4340
03:50:33,069 --> 03:50:35,238
have three people around the screen and four people around the screen,
4341
03:50:35,238 --> 03:50:37,240
you can do it against the bot. So, it was an early thing.
4342
03:50:37,240 --> 03:50:40,159
One of the first things I think we worked on was some basic bot AI.
4343
03:50:40,159 --> 03:50:43,287
♪♪♪
4344
03:50:43,287 --> 03:50:44,288
Gotta shoot.
4345
03:50:44,288 --> 03:50:49,210
♪♪♪
4346
03:50:49,210 --> 03:50:51,671
There was a game called TimeSplitters
4347
03:50:51,671 --> 03:50:53,756
that had come out on the PlayStation
4348
03:50:53,756 --> 03:50:57,969
shortly before we started working on the Xbox version of Halo.
4349
03:50:57,969 --> 03:51:00,304
That, it was not the default option,
4350
03:51:00,304 --> 03:51:04,225
but did have a very similar two-stick method of control
4351
03:51:04,225 --> 03:51:06,394
That two-stick solution made a lot of sense to us.
4352
03:51:06,394 --> 03:51:09,605
I remember when we took the first version of TimeSplitters to E3,
4353
03:51:09,605 --> 03:51:12,608
and we had four-player split screen in the Egyptian level
4354
03:51:12,608 --> 03:51:14,902
with 12 characters running around it,
4355
03:51:14,902 --> 03:51:18,531
and it was running at 60 frames a second and, coming from GoldenEye and Perfect Dark
4356
03:51:18,531 --> 03:51:21,784
which struggled, it's like, ‘This is, you know, wow!’ You know?
4357
03:51:21,784 --> 03:51:24,078
We wanted to make a sandbox game,
4358
03:51:24,078 --> 03:51:26,747
different scenarios and different weapons,
4359
03:51:26,747 --> 03:51:29,458
and the way to do that, obviously, was to have different time periods
4360
03:51:29,458 --> 03:51:32,336
and base it on classic film settings.
4361
03:51:32,336 --> 03:51:34,505
So. you know, you've got the Egyptian adventurer thing,
4362
03:51:34,505 --> 03:51:36,591
you know, which is like Raiders of the Lost Ark and that kind of stuff,
4363
03:51:36,591 --> 03:51:39,760
and then you had the classic robot sci-fi movie set in the future,
4364
03:51:39,760 --> 03:51:42,680
and then stick a first person shooter in there and have a bit of fun with it.
4365
03:51:42,680 --> 03:51:47,351
Oh yeah, that's right.
4366
03:51:47,351 --> 03:51:52,607
♪♪♪
4367
03:51:52,607 --> 03:51:55,026
The world is full of stories
4368
03:51:55,026 --> 03:51:57,320
and, from time to time,
4369
03:51:57,320 --> 03:52:00,740
they permit themselves to be told.
4370
03:52:00,740 --> 03:52:02,158
What are you looking at?
4371
03:52:02,158 --> 03:52:04,994
Prey 2006 is definitely a game that
4372
03:52:04,994 --> 03:52:07,538
a lot of people would love to see come back.
4373
03:52:07,538 --> 03:52:10,458
Tommy, a Native American, is the protagonist
4374
03:52:10,458 --> 03:52:13,878
who's more or less thrust into the situation against his will
4375
03:52:13,878 --> 03:52:15,504
Redwater!
4376
03:52:15,504 --> 03:52:18,716
I did a lot of research on, uh, different tribes,
4377
03:52:18,716 --> 03:52:23,387
and the Cherokee mythology lined up really well with what we wanted to accomplish with the game.
4378
03:52:23,387 --> 03:52:26,724
The inclusion of the spirit world
4379
03:52:26,724 --> 03:52:29,977
and the spirit animals and diving more into
4380
03:52:29,977 --> 03:52:32,772
Native American culture, I think, was a really
4381
03:52:32,772 --> 03:52:34,231
strong element of the game.
4382
03:52:34,231 --> 03:52:38,444
Uniqua whose breath gives life to all growth will help us in our time of need.
4383
03:52:38,444 --> 03:52:41,405
There was an absolute intention to
4384
03:52:41,405 --> 03:52:45,951
not make a joke-filled caricature of any sort of culture
4385
03:52:45,951 --> 03:52:49,163
We really wanted to treat this topic, you know, with respect.
4386
03:52:49,163 --> 03:52:51,957
Stop that thing!
4387
03:52:51,957 --> 03:52:53,876
Jen, I’ll find a way to get you off that.
4388
03:52:53,876 --> 03:52:55,878
The big thing for prey was portals, right?
4389
03:52:55,878 --> 03:52:58,756
You have the ability to kind of put this portal and see into a different environment
4390
03:52:58,756 --> 03:53:00,966
or shoot through it or transfer through and things like that
4391
03:53:00,966 --> 03:53:04,011
which later would wind up being incredibly successful Valve games of Portal and Portal 2, right?
4392
03:53:04,011 --> 03:53:05,721
♪♪♪
4393
03:53:05,721 --> 03:53:09,892
We brought in Gary Whitta who used to be the editor for PC Gamer magazine.
4394
03:53:09,892 --> 03:53:13,270
He wrote the full game script for us.
4395
03:53:13,270 --> 03:53:16,899
He later went on to write the Book of Eli and, uh,
4396
03:53:16,899 --> 03:53:19,860
Rogue One so, you know, he's done pretty well
4397
03:53:19,860 --> 03:53:22,279
for himself since doing our pre-script.
4398
03:53:22,279 --> 03:53:24,740
Hey, man, are you okay?
4399
03:53:24,740 --> 03:53:26,492
Shit, guess not.
4400
03:53:26,492 --> 03:53:27,993
♪♪♪
4401
03:53:27,993 --> 03:53:29,995
Nobody threatens my planet.
4402
03:53:29,995 --> 03:53:32,581
♪♪♪
4403
03:53:32,581 --> 03:53:36,544
Now, you see first person shooters on consoles everywhere
4404
03:53:36,544 --> 03:53:38,087
and also even on mobile.
4405
03:53:38,087 --> 03:53:41,215
All those people who said a shooter could never work on a console
4406
03:53:41,215 --> 03:53:44,468
because the immediacy of the mouselook was lost,
4407
03:53:44,468 --> 03:53:46,470
uh, they were obviously wrong.
4408
03:53:46,470 --> 03:53:48,681
♪♪♪
4409
03:53:48,681 --> 03:53:51,809
The amount of care and design that goes into
4410
03:53:51,809 --> 03:53:53,853
both the controller itself
4411
03:53:53,853 --> 03:53:57,189
and the way that the signals from the controller process,
4412
03:53:57,189 --> 03:53:59,734
that's an art form and, when it's done well,
4413
03:53:59,734 --> 03:54:02,653
it is every bit as responsive if not more responsive
4414
03:54:02,653 --> 03:54:04,488
than a mouse can feel,
4415
03:54:04,488 --> 03:54:06,949
and that controller is specific to that console,
4416
03:54:06,949 --> 03:54:10,286
and every developer and every player has the same one more or less,
4417
03:54:10,286 --> 03:54:13,414
and it gets really tweaked out to be really, really, really perfect,
4418
03:54:13,414 --> 03:54:15,249
uh, and that's critical.
4419
03:54:15,249 --> 03:54:16,959
Ready for liftoff.
4420
03:54:16,959 --> 03:54:19,003
That’s religion.
4421
03:54:19,003 --> 03:54:20,713
♪♪♪
4422
03:54:20,713 --> 03:54:22,423
Sound the alarm! She’s here.
4423
03:54:22,423 --> 03:54:23,424
Lights out.
4424
03:54:23,424 --> 03:54:40,024
♪♪♪
4425
03:54:40,024 --> 03:54:44,028
When Half-Life 2 was in development, Gabe had this vision of Steam
4426
03:54:44,028 --> 03:54:46,489
and what Steam would become and how important it would be.
4427
03:54:46,489 --> 03:54:49,909
I remember him presenting to me. He was thinking about,
4428
03:54:49,909 --> 03:54:52,620
‘How could people be able to play Half-Life without having to have
4429
03:54:52,620 --> 03:54:55,456
the CD or DVD ROM to play it?’
4430
03:54:55,456 --> 03:54:58,083
And he had pulled in a lot of
4431
03:54:58,083 --> 03:55:01,504
very brilliant people into Valve about to start the, the idea
4432
03:55:01,504 --> 03:55:03,547
of how Steam could work.
4433
03:55:03,547 --> 03:55:06,383
♪♪♪
4434
03:55:06,383 --> 03:55:09,428
They thought through a marketplace, they thought through a world in which
4435
03:55:09,428 --> 03:55:12,139
PC games could become like the absolute
4436
03:55:12,139 --> 03:55:14,683
epicenter of all great gaming entertainment.
4437
03:55:14,683 --> 03:55:17,686
We’re super strong believers that, like, platforms
4438
03:55:17,686 --> 03:55:20,356
have to become valuable to everyone in the ecosystem
4439
03:55:20,356 --> 03:55:22,733
around the customers and to the developers.
4440
03:55:22,733 --> 03:55:25,903
Once they had sort of the ability to manage their own IP,
4441
03:55:25,903 --> 03:55:28,948
then they were able to invest in their own marketplace.
4442
03:55:28,948 --> 03:55:32,493
Valve had just a whole head start over everybody.
4443
03:55:32,493 --> 03:55:35,830
Rise and shine, Mr. Freeman.
4444
03:55:35,830 --> 03:55:39,291
Rise and shine.
4445
03:55:39,291 --> 03:55:42,545
I think what made Half-Life 2 so special was that
4446
03:55:42,545 --> 03:55:46,298
it understood the legacy that the first one had created
4447
03:55:46,298 --> 03:55:50,636
so well, and it had expanded upon that the perfect way.
4448
03:55:50,636 --> 03:55:54,890
I think I remember that feeling at the outset of the game of
4449
03:55:54,890 --> 03:55:58,394
‘We lost,’ which I think is still so rare in games, right?
4450
03:55:58,394 --> 03:56:01,689
You know, Earth has been taken over. There's an evil overlord.
4451
03:56:01,689 --> 03:56:05,150
You know, ‘Who's The Combine?’ Oh my gosh, and like that suppressive
4452
03:56:05,150 --> 03:56:09,113
dystopian environment that is so effective in Half-Life.
4453
03:56:09,113 --> 03:56:10,406
♪♪♪
4454
03:56:10,406 --> 03:56:13,617
There's so much that happens in that game, and it's kind of hard to pick a point.
4455
03:56:13,617 --> 03:56:15,911
I do find The G-Man aspect pretty interesting.
4456
03:56:15,911 --> 03:56:18,747
I know a lot of the theories are that he's like a future version of Gordon
4457
03:56:18,747 --> 03:56:21,458
It's like Gordon Freeman, G-Man.
4458
03:56:21,458 --> 03:56:26,255
The inclusion of physics changed everything about fps puzzle design.
4459
03:56:26,255 --> 03:56:30,134
They didn't just use it for feedback that we way that everyone uses ragdoll.
4460
03:56:30,134 --> 03:56:35,139
They used physics as puzzles, and I still have not seen any other game
4461
03:56:35,139 --> 03:56:37,975
do it to the level that they did it in Half-Life 2.
4462
03:56:37,975 --> 03:56:41,937
We were always an engineering-focused company and still are today,
4463
03:56:41,937 --> 03:56:44,231
so technology, to us, has always been.
4464
03:56:44,231 --> 03:56:48,027
sort of in service of the game design. If it's not interesting in and of itself,
4465
03:56:48,027 --> 03:56:52,197
it's got to have some applicability to the game experience that's really interesting.
4466
03:56:52,197 --> 03:56:53,699
♪♪♪
4467
03:56:53,699 --> 03:56:56,118
The most clever idea in any first person shooter
4468
03:56:56,118 --> 03:56:58,203
was definitely the gravity gun in Half-Life 2.
4469
03:56:58,203 --> 03:57:00,748
You can call it the zero point energy field manipulator,
4470
03:57:00,748 --> 03:57:02,750
if you really want to. Give it a try.
4471
03:57:02,750 --> 03:57:05,836
It just added so much fun to the experience,
4472
03:57:05,836 --> 03:57:10,382
♪♪♪
4473
03:57:10,382 --> 03:57:13,802
such a simple and clever idea. Genius, total genius.
4474
03:57:13,802 --> 03:57:17,264
We built the bulk of Half-Life 2 in the last, like, year and a half.
4475
03:57:17,264 --> 03:57:20,684
We go from a bunch of bones to the finished game,
4476
03:57:20,684 --> 03:57:23,020
but the first sort of two, three years,
4477
03:57:23,020 --> 03:57:25,064
we're building a bunch of those pieces.
4478
03:57:25,064 --> 03:57:27,858
The gravity gun comes out of that period of time.
4479
03:57:27,858 --> 03:57:32,446
That's the old passage to Raven Home. We don't go there anymore.
4480
03:57:32,446 --> 03:57:35,157
I will never forget going to Raven home,
4481
03:57:35,157 --> 03:57:39,370
picking up those giant saw blades, and cutting somebody in half with them.
4482
03:57:39,370 --> 03:57:41,246
♪♪♪
4483
03:57:41,246 --> 03:57:44,625
I don't think any game had ever done anything like that up to that point.
4484
03:57:44,625 --> 03:57:46,335
♪♪♪
4485
03:57:46,335 --> 03:57:49,296
The storytelling of Half Life 2
4486
03:57:49,296 --> 03:57:51,924
is what expands its importance over the original game.
4487
03:57:51,924 --> 03:57:55,427
If I'd known you were going to come straight up to my office,
4488
03:57:55,427 --> 03:57:58,430
I wouldn't have bothered hunting you in the first place.
4489
03:57:58,430 --> 03:58:01,308
It's just so good. The Citadel, I mean, the whole
4490
03:58:01,308 --> 03:58:05,896
mythology around, and the story around the game just became massive after 2.
4491
03:58:05,896 --> 03:58:09,233
I think about the expressiveness of Alyx Vance's face.
4492
03:58:09,233 --> 03:58:11,026
Dr. Freeman, I presume.
4493
03:58:11,026 --> 03:58:13,570
As something that has no business holding up,
4494
03:58:13,570 --> 03:58:15,489
you know, more than a decade later,
4495
03:58:15,489 --> 03:58:19,159
putting your hand on the elevator door as I descend down
4496
03:58:19,159 --> 03:58:21,453
and looking up at her, and the eye contact.
4497
03:58:21,453 --> 03:58:23,998
The way Valve was able to animate that character
4498
03:58:23,998 --> 03:58:25,457
holds up as just one of the greatest
4499
03:58:25,457 --> 03:58:28,419
characters, I think, of that era.
4500
03:58:28,419 --> 03:58:33,257
They purposely and consciously designed that game to be a rollercoaster.
4501
03:58:33,257 --> 03:58:35,050
Gordon Freeman.
4502
03:58:35,050 --> 03:58:43,809
I had so much in it, It was, it was definitely unbelievable storytelling,
incredible environmental design, you name it.
4503
03:58:43,809 --> 03:58:47,771
It's a perfect game. I can't even say, I can't even say more about it.
4504
03:58:47,771 --> 03:58:53,318
4505
03:58:53,318 --> 03:58:54,319
Sincerely,
4506
03:58:54,319 --> 03:58:58,657
♪♪♪
4507
03:58:58,657 --> 03:59:01,160
We’d always sort of said to ourselves, ‘We'll never ship one more than one game at a time
4508
03:59:01,160 --> 03:59:04,288
because, every time a game got close to shipping, all the other games
4509
03:59:04,288 --> 03:59:06,623
would sort of, like, just bleed on. Everyone would work on it,
4510
03:59:06,623 --> 03:59:10,252
and then with The Orange Box who are like, ‘Let's build five games
4511
03:59:10,252 --> 03:59:13,672
and ship them on three different platforms on the same day.’
4512
03:59:13,672 --> 03:59:16,216
Yeah, it's painful, but fun.
4513
03:59:16,216 --> 03:59:24,141
♪♪♪
4514
03:59:24,141 --> 03:59:26,101
One of my favorite games of all time,
4515
03:59:26,101 --> 03:59:30,272
I still think it was just absolute genius, was Portal.
4516
03:59:30,272 --> 03:59:34,276
Welcome to the Aperture Science Computer Aided Enrichment Center.
4517
03:59:34,276 --> 03:59:36,111
Portal was really fresh, like
4518
03:59:36,111 --> 03:59:39,281
‘Here's another game that uses the first person viewpoint
4519
03:59:39,281 --> 03:59:42,785
but uses a gun that's very different than everything else.’
4520
03:59:42,785 --> 03:59:46,371
The Aperture Science handheld portal device.
4521
03:59:46,371 --> 03:59:48,457
It was a super fun game to get through
4522
03:59:48,457 --> 03:59:51,001
Portal was very accessible to a lot of people,
4523
03:59:51,001 --> 03:59:52,961
because it wasn't violent.
4524
03:59:52,961 --> 03:59:54,838
You have a gun, so to speak,
4525
03:59:54,838 --> 03:59:57,674
but it's just meant for puzzle solving more than anything.
4526
03:59:57,674 --> 04:00:00,552
There's these robots that are shooting at me, and there's these turrets,
4527
04:00:00,552 --> 04:00:03,639
and you can't directly destroy them or remove them.
4528
04:00:03,639 --> 04:00:06,183
You have to use your brain and your problem solving.
4529
04:00:06,183 --> 04:00:09,686
At the very end, when you find the secret passages behind everything,
4530
04:00:09,686 --> 04:00:12,898
so good, because they'd like transitioned from
4531
04:00:12,898 --> 04:00:16,235
this really cool puzzler to, like, the end of a story
4532
04:00:16,235 --> 04:00:18,737
and, like, what's going on in Aperture Labs.
4533
04:00:18,737 --> 04:00:21,240
Eventually, we hope we're going to be tied into Half-Life
4534
04:00:21,240 --> 04:00:25,035
♪♪♪
4535
04:00:25,035 --> 04:00:28,247
because, at that point, I think the whole story of Half-Life was still pretty much up in the air.
4536
04:00:28,247 --> 04:00:31,458
It was almost like the Marvel films, like, back then when you just had all these different
4537
04:00:31,458 --> 04:00:34,461
storylines and all this stuff connecting, so it was just kind of interesting
4538
04:00:34,461 --> 04:00:35,921
to see where they were going to take it
4539
04:00:35,921 --> 04:00:38,382
Never mind, it's a mystery I’ll solve later.
4540
04:00:38,382 --> 04:00:41,260
The other thing was: Portal was hilarious.
4541
04:00:41,260 --> 04:00:45,347
Good job. As part of a required test protocol,
4542
04:00:45,347 --> 04:00:48,892
we will stop it enhancing the truth in three,
4543
04:00:48,892 --> 04:00:50,018
two,
4544
04:00:50,018 --> 04:00:53,438
GLaDOS and Shodan are often compared with one another,
4545
04:00:53,438 --> 04:00:57,985
because she's literally the only thing that you have to hold on to.
4546
04:00:57,985 --> 04:01:00,946
But, at the same time, she's also trying to kill you.
4547
04:01:00,946 --> 04:01:06,243
You become so familiar with her that you form kind of a relationship and a bond
4548
04:01:06,243 --> 04:01:09,955
and, when you do finally meet her and you defeat her,
4549
04:01:09,955 --> 04:01:13,167
there's almost this bittersweet element to it
4550
04:01:13,167 --> 04:01:15,460
where you feel like you've lost your connection
4551
04:01:15,460 --> 04:01:18,005
with the world that you're escaping from.
4552
04:01:18,005 --> 04:01:20,174
it may be my favorite game of all time,
4553
04:01:20,174 --> 04:01:23,802
because I think it’s just so exquisitely well done.
4554
04:01:23,802 --> 04:01:35,022
♪♪♪
4555
04:01:35,022 --> 04:01:38,817
Team Fortress 2 is such an interesting animal in the FPS landscape
4556
04:01:38,817 --> 04:01:42,321
It's been kind of a guinea pig for Valve.
4557
04:01:42,321 --> 04:01:45,157
We'd started building Team Fortress 2 for Quake II at that point
4558
04:01:45,157 --> 04:01:48,327
which is what seemed like the obvious next step, and our hope was to
4559
04:01:48,327 --> 04:01:50,454
build that into a retail product of some kind.
4560
04:01:50,454 --> 04:01:53,457
Well, we were struggling to find a really good sort of identity
4561
04:01:53,457 --> 04:01:55,417
for what Team Fortress is.
4562
04:01:55,417 --> 04:01:57,836
We had no idea what we're doing. We're in that classic case of, like,
4563
04:01:57,836 --> 04:02:01,715
‘You're so screwed, because you don't even know what you don't know.’
4564
04:02:01,715 --> 04:02:05,344
It was so sort of open-ended that we had trouble sort of finding, like,
4565
04:02:05,344 --> 04:02:08,680
sort of what the core gameplay was.
4566
04:02:08,680 --> 04:02:12,476
Team Fortress 2 stopped being in development for a while during Half-Life 2.
4567
04:02:12,476 --> 04:02:14,478
Half-Life 2 really needs to ship,
4568
04:02:14,478 --> 04:02:17,064
and then we'll revisit our options sort of later.
4569
04:02:17,064 --> 04:02:20,192
We start working on Team Fortress 2 again,
4570
04:02:20,192 --> 04:02:22,152
and we decide this time, ‘We’re
4571
04:02:22,152 --> 04:02:23,528
‘We're not going to screw it up.’
4572
04:02:23,528 --> 04:02:25,614
I’m not a crazed gunman, dad, I'm an assassin.
4573
04:02:25,614 --> 04:02:28,951
♪♪♪
4574
04:02:28,951 --> 04:02:30,911
It’s a sound of progress, my friend.
4575
04:02:30,911 --> 04:02:33,872
We should be looking at non-photorealistic stuff here.
4576
04:02:33,872 --> 04:02:37,668
It doesn't have to be the sort of textured, you know, photorealistic world
4577
04:02:37,668 --> 04:02:40,796
where you're just taking the most important parts, you know, just like any cartoon,
4578
04:02:40,796 --> 04:02:46,301
taking the most important parts, and blowing them up as big and bright as possible,
4579
04:02:46,301 --> 04:02:48,679
and that really fit the Team Fortress gameplay
4580
04:02:48,679 --> 04:02:51,348
in a way that we needed and didn't know we needed.
4581
04:02:51,348 --> 04:02:53,433
I mean, look at it. It's just amazing.
4582
04:02:53,433 --> 04:02:56,353
Valve managed to tell a pretty interesting,
4583
04:02:56,353 --> 04:03:00,065
funny, engaging story without any sort of campaign.
4584
04:03:00,065 --> 04:03:02,609
So, you have to ask yourself, ‘How did they manage to do that?’
4585
04:03:02,609 --> 04:03:04,861
Like, every time we made a video, we're like, ‘Oh okay,
4586
04:03:04,861 --> 04:03:07,823
here's what's exciting about a character.
4587
04:03:07,823 --> 04:03:10,701
We can take that, and we can put it, like, back into the game.
4588
04:03:10,701 --> 04:03:13,203
Sniper has his jarate, you know,
4589
04:03:13,203 --> 04:03:15,372
these jars of piss that he throws at people.
4590
04:03:15,372 --> 04:03:17,374
Like that's, that's strange. That's from the video.
4591
04:03:17,374 --> 04:03:18,583
Yeah!
4592
04:03:18,583 --> 04:03:21,545
I think we all understand, as FPS players today,
4593
04:03:21,545 --> 04:03:24,047
the concept of the hero shooter, you know,
4594
04:03:24,047 --> 04:03:26,883
having interesting characters that you can pick from, and they all have
4595
04:03:26,883 --> 04:03:29,761
an interesting hairstyle and costume and voice,
4596
04:03:29,761 --> 04:03:32,681
and I'm gonna pick the one that most appeals to me in the moment
4597
04:03:32,681 --> 04:03:37,477
That idea doesn't exist in my opinion without Team Fortress 2,
4598
04:03:37,477 --> 04:03:40,981
because, at the end of the day, long as as two people left on a planet,
4599
04:03:40,981 --> 04:03:43,275
someone is gonna want someone dead.
4600
04:03:43,275 --> 04:03:47,029
♪♪♪
4601
04:03:47,029 --> 04:03:50,615
F.E.A.R., when I first played it, it was like at a, a LAN center.
4602
04:03:50,615 --> 04:03:54,369
Those LAN centers, the one I used to go to, was dark, and it was, like, quiet.
4603
04:03:54,369 --> 04:03:56,121
Everybody’s just click, click, click, away.
4604
04:03:56,121 --> 04:03:58,749
You're just sitting there, and you're playing and, all of a sudden, like, someone, like,
4605
04:03:58,749 --> 04:04:00,042
goes to open a chip bag next to you.
4606
04:04:00,042 --> 04:04:01,752
♪♪♪
4607
04:04:01,752 --> 04:04:03,754
Ah! Whoa, okay.
4608
04:04:03,754 --> 04:04:05,964
I'm still, I'm still in the real world.
4609
04:04:05,964 --> 04:04:14,222
♪♪♪
4610
04:04:14,222 --> 04:04:17,351
We really pushed the envelope on graphics.
4611
04:04:17,351 --> 04:04:22,105
It looked amazing if you had the right hardware,
4612
04:04:22,105 --> 04:04:26,360
and it was in a world that was inspired by Japanese horror movies
4613
04:04:26,360 --> 04:04:31,114
which were just becoming a popular thing in the US.
4614
04:04:31,114 --> 04:04:33,450
A remake of The Ring was coming out.
4615
04:04:33,450 --> 04:04:35,869
He shows me things.
4616
04:04:35,869 --> 04:04:38,080
The scary stuff is great, because it kind of catches you off guard.
4617
04:04:38,080 --> 04:04:40,123
They just really seem to know when to do it.
4618
04:04:40,123 --> 04:04:42,000
♪♪♪
4619
04:04:42,000 --> 04:04:46,630
Alma was always scripted to come out at poignant moments.
4620
04:04:46,630 --> 04:04:50,467
You had gotten through a hard battle and you were, like, relieved and then,
4621
04:04:50,467 --> 04:04:52,552
‘Oh no! There’s Alma!’
4622
04:04:52,552 --> 04:04:54,930
That perfectly manages to balance that horror element
4623
04:04:54,930 --> 04:04:58,141
with over-the-top gunplay in action.
4624
04:04:58,141 --> 04:05:01,478
Still probably some of the best you'll get in the whole genre.
4625
04:05:01,478 --> 04:05:04,439
and could think for itself.
♪♪♪
4626
04:05:04,439 --> 04:05:07,025
as something that was really effective.
4627
04:05:07,025 --> 04:05:09,861
I wanted to create something that was truly intelligent
4628
04:05:09,861 --> 04:05:15,200
and could think for itself.
♪♪♪
4629
04:05:15,200 --> 04:05:18,829
I just wanted to give the building blocks to an AI system
4630
04:05:18,829 --> 04:05:21,998
that, in real time, could say, ‘Well, if this is the goal,
4631
04:05:21,998 --> 04:05:25,377
I gotta find a sequence of actions that can satisfy that goal,
4632
04:05:25,377 --> 04:05:27,754
and I can search the space of actions
4633
04:05:27,754 --> 04:05:32,259
and try them out in different combinations as fast as a processor can handle.’
4634
04:05:32,259 --> 04:05:35,387
Fall back. Do you see them? Don’t let it get away.
4635
04:05:35,387 --> 04:05:38,765
We made the environment more interactive with
4636
04:05:38,765 --> 04:05:41,977
shelves the enemies could knock over to get in your way
4637
04:05:41,977 --> 04:05:45,021
or cables they could flip to create cover,
4638
04:05:45,021 --> 04:05:48,650
windows they could dive through to get away from you or to surprise you.
4639
04:05:48,650 --> 04:05:52,154
They sort of telegraph their movements, you hear them sort of communicating with each other,
4640
04:05:52,154 --> 04:05:55,157
and that sort of conveys an intelligence
4641
04:05:55,157 --> 04:05:57,742
♪♪♪
4642
04:05:57,742 --> 04:06:01,746
announcing to you what they knew about what you were doing
4643
04:06:01,746 --> 04:06:04,374
and what they plan to do next.
4644
04:06:04,374 --> 04:06:07,002
You might be crawling around through the air ducts
4645
04:06:07,002 --> 04:06:11,339
when you hear one of the enemies look up and say, He's in the vents!’
4646
04:06:11,339 --> 04:06:12,883
He’s in the ceiling!
4647
04:06:12,883 --> 04:06:15,260
And those kinds of moments are, are possible
4648
04:06:15,260 --> 04:06:17,721
when you have characters that are
4649
04:06:17,721 --> 04:06:21,516
designed to observe and talk about the world around them.
4650
04:06:21,516 --> 04:06:24,728
The other thing that holds up well about F.E.A.R. is certainly its weapon set.
4651
04:06:24,728 --> 04:06:27,856
You know, I think about the, the Penetrator,
4652
04:06:27,856 --> 04:06:30,609
just a fabulous name for a gun.
4653
04:06:30,609 --> 04:06:31,818
♪♪♪
4654
04:06:31,818 --> 04:06:35,530
Best shotgun, and this is not up for debate, is F.E.A.R. Shotgun.
4655
04:06:35,530 --> 04:06:37,866
If there's anyone who argues it’s just incorrect.
4656
04:06:37,866 --> 04:06:49,377
apart from that, that lets you shoot someone, and they will just turn into mist.
♪♪♪
4657
04:06:49,377 --> 04:06:52,172
So, Fear was supposed to feel like an action movie
4658
04:06:52,172 --> 04:06:56,092
where things should be just happening around you, bottles should be breaking,
4659
04:06:56,092 --> 04:07:01,473
and chandeliers should be falling, and it should just feel like you're in, in a movie.
4660
04:07:01,473 --> 04:07:04,434
But, there are plenty of times where things wouldn't work out as we hope,
4661
04:07:04,434 --> 04:07:07,854
like John Mulkey and I worked for a long time on
4662
04:07:07,854 --> 04:07:10,273
what we called the combat opportunities system
4663
04:07:10,273 --> 04:07:14,945
being like juicy opportunities for, like, dramatic moments.
4664
04:07:14,945 --> 04:07:16,905
But, it was really hard to get the AI
4665
04:07:16,905 --> 04:07:20,033
to get the right balance of thinking about those
4666
04:07:20,033 --> 04:07:22,327
versus thinking about shooting at you, the player.
4667
04:07:22,327 --> 04:07:26,706
And so, we'd have these test runs where you'd come into a room,
4668
04:07:26,706 --> 04:07:29,751
and the AI would come in, and they'd go crazy.
4669
04:07:29,751 --> 04:07:33,088
They'd be shooting chandeliers and bottles and, like,
4670
04:07:33,088 --> 04:07:35,632
shooting like ten different things, and you're just standing there, and then like,
4671
04:07:35,632 --> 04:07:37,884
‘Bang, bang, bang bang.’
4672
04:07:37,884 --> 04:07:41,096
Fire, give me some pressure fire.
4673
04:07:41,096 --> 04:07:44,099
There's always, like, a tricky, tricky balance
4674
04:07:44,099 --> 04:07:48,436
of getting the moments you want, but, but having that designer’s touch
4675
04:07:48,436 --> 04:07:51,690
of doing them the way you want them to play out.
4676
04:07:51,690 --> 04:08:01,533
♪♪♪
4677
04:08:01,533 --> 04:08:04,661
Some games start with an art direction
4678
04:08:04,661 --> 04:08:09,958
or a story conceit. In the case of Borderlands, it started with a design idea.
4679
04:08:09,958 --> 04:08:17,299
♪♪♪
4680
04:08:17,299 --> 04:08:19,384
Before Wolfenstein came out,
4681
04:08:19,384 --> 04:08:21,011
I was a role playing gamer.
4682
04:08:21,011 --> 04:08:25,849
It's possible that, even to this day, that the game that has consumed more of my play hours
4683
04:08:25,849 --> 04:08:28,560
than any other game is NetHack.
4684
04:08:28,560 --> 04:08:30,687
♪♪♪
4685
04:08:30,687 --> 04:08:35,108
I realized that, what makes a first person shooter fun:
4686
04:08:35,108 --> 04:08:38,653
the moment to moment dodging and aiming and hitting the target
4687
04:08:38,653 --> 04:08:42,657
is a totally different thing that what makes NetHack fun or Diablo fun.
4688
04:08:42,657 --> 04:08:46,453
What makes Diablo fun is becoming more powerful, collecting loot.
4689
04:08:46,453 --> 04:08:49,914
And, in that epiphany, I realized we can put these things together.
4690
04:08:49,914 --> 04:08:51,791
♪♪♪
4691
04:08:51,791 --> 04:08:55,879
One game that stands out that maybe we weren't anticipating to be as big of a hit as it was
4692
04:08:55,879 --> 04:08:58,214
is probably the original Borderlands.
4693
04:08:58,214 --> 04:09:03,219
We were still playing a lot of hyper serious military contemporary games.
4694
04:09:03,219 --> 04:09:06,222
Today, it's absolutely acceptable
4695
04:09:06,222 --> 04:09:11,102
to have the biggest game in the world, Fortnite, with this non realistic cartoon art style.
4696
04:09:11,144 --> 04:09:13,772
When we did it, it was scandalous.
4697
04:09:13,772 --> 04:09:18,860
This notion of, like, a comedic, lighthearted FPS that was like open world,
4698
04:09:18,860 --> 04:09:20,779
we just didn't really know what to make of it.
4699
04:09:20,779 --> 04:09:23,114
We were swimming around fishing for it,
4700
04:09:23,114 --> 04:09:25,825
trying to find how to put it all together, how to make the Bible.
4701
04:09:25,825 --> 04:09:29,663
But I knew, I knew that RPG and shooter could go together
4702
04:09:29,663 --> 04:09:36,294
♪♪♪
4703
04:09:36,294 --> 04:09:38,129
I love the Claptrap character.
4704
04:09:38,129 --> 04:09:40,256
Hello, traveler!
4705
04:09:40,256 --> 04:09:43,301
Claptrap wasn't part of the plan, wasn't part of the design.
4706
04:09:43,301 --> 04:09:45,929
There was a concept artist that was doing some interesting work,
4707
04:09:45,929 --> 04:09:49,391
and Brian Martel was walking by and saw this guy was just doodling.
4708
04:09:49,391 --> 04:09:51,518
Brian’s like, ‘That's cool.’
4709
04:09:51,518 --> 04:09:54,437
It's a perfectly symmetrical character, almost perfectly symmetrical,
4710
04:09:54,437 --> 04:09:56,981
but it feels completely out of balance.
4711
04:09:56,981 --> 04:10:02,779
How do you have symmetry and off balance in one simple shape?
4712
04:10:02,779 --> 04:10:06,866
Buddy, what the hell are you do, doing?
4713
04:10:06,866 --> 04:10:10,453
He built a model of the robot, and he did some monologue,
4714
04:10:10,453 --> 04:10:14,249
and then he would open the door, and the door would start to open,
4715
04:10:14,249 --> 04:10:16,835
and then he ran, and he would go towards the door,
4716
04:10:16,835 --> 04:10:20,171
and there was a bug where he was supposed to wait for the door to open and go through it,
4717
04:10:20,171 --> 04:10:24,634
but he went too early, and he bounced into the door and stopped,
4718
04:10:24,634 --> 04:10:27,303
and then the door went, went open, and so I,
4719
04:10:27,303 --> 04:10:31,182
I had him add an ‘Ow,’ like, we bumped into it, and he said ‘Ow’
4720
04:10:31,182 --> 04:10:33,685
and kind of stuck back and then went into it again.
4721
04:10:33,685 --> 04:10:38,314
It was so fun to watch Claptrap hurt himself, because he was kind of snarky.
4722
04:10:38,314 --> 04:10:41,568
And that's when it stumbled upon me the secret of the character.
4723
04:10:41,568 --> 04:10:45,280
And, when he's up here, he's an absolute jerk.
4724
04:10:45,280 --> 04:10:48,616
And he just, he's the worst person on the planet.
4725
04:10:48,616 --> 04:10:50,660
[evil laughing]
4726
04:10:50,660 --> 04:10:53,496
But, something will happen which will tear him down.
4727
04:10:53,496 --> 04:10:56,958
Right! The guests should be arriving any minute.
4728
04:10:56,958 --> 04:10:59,169
Like when no one shows up to his birthday.
4729
04:10:59,169 --> 04:11:02,338
Feel free to mingle with nobody.
4730
04:11:02,338 --> 04:11:05,717
You’re just like, ‘Oh my God, I feel so bad for him
4731
04:11:05,717 --> 04:11:07,761
and you want to help them out.’
4732
04:11:07,761 --> 04:11:11,806
In Japanese culture, they say that everyone has three masks:
4733
04:11:11,806 --> 04:11:14,976
the mask that they wear that everybody sees,
4734
04:11:14,976 --> 04:11:18,813
and then there's the mask that they only let those people they trust
4735
04:11:18,813 --> 04:11:20,899
and care most about see,
4736
04:11:20,899 --> 04:11:24,611
and then there's a third mask that no one ever sees,
4737
04:11:24,611 --> 04:11:27,197
and it speaks to how we tend to
4738
04:11:27,197 --> 04:11:31,868
feel afraid and uncomfortable to be our true selves.
4739
04:11:31,868 --> 04:11:35,121
Tina, you know, there are, like, other kinds of food, right?
4740
04:11:35,121 --> 04:11:38,666
You haven’t seriously been living on just crumpets for the last few years, have you?
4741
04:11:38,666 --> 04:11:41,628
Tiny Tina is a character that a lot of people love.
4742
04:11:41,628 --> 04:11:43,838
The thing that makes her special:
4743
04:11:43,838 --> 04:11:46,257
she doesn't care about how people judge her,
4744
04:11:46,257 --> 04:11:50,136
and she doesn't care how crazy she might seem.
4745
04:11:50,136 --> 04:11:53,598
And I think all of us have some of that, but Tina doesn’t.
4746
04:11:53,598 --> 04:11:56,726
There’s only one thing to do. Kill the living crap out of him!
4747
04:11:56,726 --> 04:11:59,312
Tina is always her true self.
4748
04:11:59,312 --> 04:12:04,359
It's just really cool to play a game with a friend, because I haven't really had one.
4749
04:12:04,359 --> 04:12:07,487
Whenever I go to PAX or E3, I still see you know,
4750
04:12:07,487 --> 04:12:11,115
cosplayers and sort of people who are outwardly fans of Borderlands
4751
04:12:11,115 --> 04:12:13,576
and its sense of humor and its place.
4752
04:12:13,576 --> 04:12:17,038
It really captured people's attention in a way that we didn't necessarily expect.
4753
04:12:17,038 --> 04:12:18,122
♪♪♪
4754
04:12:18,122 --> 04:12:21,835
The legendary video game financial analyst,
4755
04:12:21,835 --> 04:12:25,922
Michael Pachter, famously said, ‘Borderlands is being sent to die.
4756
04:12:25,922 --> 04:12:28,299
It has no commercial hope whatsoever,
4757
04:12:28,299 --> 04:12:31,511
because you can't sell a cartoon game in a world with
4758
04:12:31,511 --> 04:12:35,557
Gears of War and Call of Duty.’
4759
04:12:35,557 --> 04:12:37,642
I'm very glad they were wrong.
4760
04:12:37,642 --> 04:12:56,995
♪♪♪
4761
04:12:56,995 --> 04:13:00,290
I think this happened around the early 2000s
4762
04:13:00,290 --> 04:13:04,919
with every new first person shooter, making the world became so expensive.
4763
04:13:04,919 --> 04:13:10,592
I think that you can’t really afford to make four or five different paths
4764
04:13:10,592 --> 04:13:12,719
that has as cool scripted events,
4765
04:13:12,719 --> 04:13:15,138
as big explosions and so on, because it's just too expensive.
4766
04:13:15,138 --> 04:13:17,682
Then, you'd rather take your resources, say, ‘Okay, this is the path,
4767
04:13:17,682 --> 04:13:20,518
and then we can make this, you know, feel like a Hollywood movie.
4768
04:13:20,518 --> 04:13:24,480
We make it feel like you're, you know, in Saving Private Ryan.
4769
04:13:24,480 --> 04:13:28,526
Head for cover and get to the shingle. I'll see you on the beach.
4770
04:13:28,526 --> 04:13:31,529
Allied Assault had an opening D-Day mission which was unreal.
4771
04:13:31,529 --> 04:13:33,990
♪♪♪
4772
04:13:33,990 --> 04:13:38,036
They did this Saving Private Ryan moment where you're charging the beach,
4773
04:13:38,036 --> 04:13:41,456
bullets are whizzing by, people are dying, and explosions are happening,
4774
04:13:41,456 --> 04:13:43,625
and you felt like you were in the action.
4775
04:13:43,625 --> 04:13:46,044
♪♪♪
4776
04:13:46,044 --> 04:13:48,713
Call of Duty was birthed from that,
4777
04:13:48,796 --> 04:13:51,299
That group became Infinity War.
4778
04:13:51,424 --> 04:13:54,385
Call of Duty was one of the first games to
4779
04:13:54,385 --> 04:13:57,847
embody the sensibilities of film, I think,
4780
04:13:57,847 --> 04:14:00,016
in a way that was very successful.
4781
04:14:00,016 --> 04:14:01,142
♪♪♪
4782
04:14:01,142 --> 04:14:04,187
You played Call of Duty, and you had that mission in it
4783
04:14:04,187 --> 04:14:07,231
where you’re playing as, like, the Russian soldier, you don't have any weapons,
4784
04:14:07,231 --> 04:14:10,234
you’ve gotta run up this beach for the first 15 minutes, no gun.
4785
04:14:10,234 --> 04:14:14,197
Follow behind the guy in front of you and, when he gets shot, you pick up his gun.
4786
04:14:14,197 --> 04:14:17,575
That’s how you get a gun which is, apparently, historically accurate.
4787
04:14:17,575 --> 04:14:20,244
♪♪♪
4788
04:14:20,244 --> 04:14:23,247
What must it have been like to be one of those soldiers
4789
04:14:23,247 --> 04:14:26,250
in that experience crossing this river and,
4790
04:14:26,250 --> 04:14:28,670
and seeing the boats next to you blow up.
4791
04:14:28,670 --> 04:14:31,422
That's the first game that tried to break away from the mold of like,
4792
04:14:31,422 --> 04:14:34,842
‘Let's just shoot the same soldier over and over and add to the production value
4793
04:14:34,842 --> 04:14:38,137
with the explosions and action scenes.’ It was out of an actual film.
4794
04:14:38,137 --> 04:14:39,806
[explosions]
4795
04:14:39,806 --> 04:14:43,851
The bridge between going into movie theaters and video games are just
4796
04:14:43,851 --> 04:14:46,688
So, the gap is closed.
4797
04:14:46,688 --> 04:14:50,274
You can still get a cinematic experience and be attached to characters
4798
04:14:50,274 --> 04:14:53,945
in a video game just as much as you can on a movie,
4799
04:14:53,945 --> 04:14:56,906
and I think Call of Duty 4 was one of those
4800
04:14:56,906 --> 04:15:00,118
first campaigns that really had a heartfelt story
4801
04:15:00,118 --> 04:15:01,953
that you got attached to the characters.
4802
04:15:01,953 --> 04:15:06,374
♪♪♪
4803
04:15:06,374 --> 04:15:09,836
To this day, like, if I've played Call of Duty for a few hours
4804
04:15:09,836 --> 04:15:12,839
late at night in a dark room, you know,
4805
04:15:12,839 --> 04:15:15,842
I do feel like I've been in some kind of a war.
4806
04:15:15,842 --> 04:15:16,926
♪♪♪
4807
04:15:16,926 --> 04:15:19,053
While we might kind of bemoan how
4808
04:15:19,053 --> 04:15:23,683
scripted the Call of Duty-style game is in 2022,
4809
04:15:23,683 --> 04:15:26,269
at the time, it was a very intense experience.
4810
04:15:26,269 --> 04:15:30,106
Really, it's just easy stuff to digest, like anyone can play those games, you know?
4811
04:15:30,106 --> 04:15:33,651
Run around and shoot someone with a machine gun and then, when the game tells you to hide,
4812
04:15:33,651 --> 04:15:36,029
just hide behind something, you know?
4813
04:15:36,029 --> 04:15:37,613
♪♪♪
4814
04:15:37,613 --> 04:15:40,825
A lot of those early military shooters are still tough as balls.
4815
04:15:40,825 --> 04:15:45,121
The shooters that have focused on spectacle and scale,
4816
04:15:45,121 --> 04:15:47,123
they resonated really well with audiences,
4817
04:15:47,123 --> 04:15:51,294
because there's something about seeing everything together in one environment, you know,
4818
04:15:51,294 --> 04:15:55,590
tanks and aircraft and infantry kind of all rolled together
4819
04:15:55,590 --> 04:15:57,759
and the shooting down an air vehicle with a rocket
4820
04:15:57,759 --> 04:16:00,136
and watching it fall in the sky and fall on a base.
4821
04:16:00,136 --> 04:16:02,722
♪♪♪
4822
04:16:02,722 --> 04:16:06,476
The idea that you're ants in this massive world
4823
04:16:06,476 --> 04:16:08,478
that's so much bigger than you, that dwarfs you.
4824
04:16:08,478 --> 04:16:10,480
It is a really precious experience.
4825
04:16:10,480 --> 04:16:13,900
♪♪♪
4826
04:16:13,900 --> 04:16:16,444
When the Battlefield 1942 came out,
4827
04:16:16,444 --> 04:16:18,488
we lived in that game.
4828
04:16:18,488 --> 04:16:22,033
The fact that you can, like, fly straight down into somebody's tank,
4829
04:16:22,033 --> 04:16:25,369
that you could, like, have Jeeps blast into each other.
4830
04:16:25,369 --> 04:16:29,707
We laughed so hard playing that game, because it was so fun.
4831
04:16:29,707 --> 04:16:33,836
I find it silly that people argue, ‘What's better Call of Duty or Battlefield?’
4832
04:16:33,836 --> 04:16:36,672
Because they're completely different playstyles of game.
4833
04:16:36,672 --> 04:16:40,968
People who want, like, a large scale game,
4834
04:16:40,968 --> 04:16:44,555
yeah, definitely Battlefield’s the way to go. If they want to fly planes and helicopters
4835
04:16:44,555 --> 04:16:48,101
and, you know, it’s the map side. It’s just a different, different kind of beast.
4836
04:16:48,101 --> 04:16:50,311
When it went to World War II, it was like,
4837
04:16:50,311 --> 04:16:53,147
‘Everybody understands this stuff, all the vehicles, all the weapons,
4838
04:16:53,147 --> 04:16:55,316
the stories and the history and all this,’
4839
04:16:55,316 --> 04:16:58,736
so there's so much rich stuff there for their IP creation
4840
04:16:58,736 --> 04:17:02,198
that they both knew that they had taken advantage of something that everybody
4841
04:17:02,198 --> 04:17:05,409
still remembered as a thing and then, like,
4842
04:17:05,409 --> 04:17:08,788
they just raced each other, and everyone else saw the race and how much money the race made,
4843
04:17:08,788 --> 04:17:11,082
and everyone else was making World War II until it just became
4844
04:17:11,082 --> 04:17:14,627
a big World War II genre for a really long time.
4845
04:17:14,627 --> 04:17:17,463
There's certain games that just take the air out of the room.
4846
04:17:17,463 --> 04:17:19,882
So, when you get a game like Kai,
4847
04:17:19,882 --> 04:17:21,884
and you get a game like Battlefield
4848
04:17:21,884 --> 04:17:26,013
where the majority of people are gonna go, regardless of your game.
4849
04:17:26,013 --> 04:17:28,516
It's kind of hard to penetrate that market.
4850
04:17:28,516 --> 04:17:30,643
They keep the game plan nearly identical
4851
04:17:30,643 --> 04:17:34,564
but add new elements to each iteration of heroes.
4852
04:17:34,564 --> 04:17:37,024
It doesn't alienate the previous fans.
4853
04:17:37,024 --> 04:17:39,193
The big AAA first person shooters
4854
04:17:39,360 --> 04:17:42,530
are sort of trapped in that same world as Big Hollywood.
4855
04:17:42,697 --> 04:17:45,324
They're not really going to be that original and fresh,
4856
04:17:45,324 --> 04:17:47,535
because they don't have the freedom to take those chances,
4857
04:17:47,535 --> 04:17:49,871
because it has to be a mainstream hit.
4858
04:17:49,871 --> 04:17:53,207
Well, Call of Duty has almost become lifestyle today
4859
04:17:53,207 --> 04:17:55,126
in console games, right? That,
4860
04:17:55,126 --> 04:17:57,712
that's why they sell so massively and broadly,
4861
04:17:57,712 --> 04:17:59,922
because that can easily be part of your lifestyle,
4862
04:17:59,922 --> 04:18:02,592
and you don't have to play for 20 to 30 hours
4863
04:18:02,592 --> 04:18:05,261
to really make progress you can just play a little bit online
4864
04:18:05,261 --> 04:18:08,055
and have an incredible experience.
4865
04:18:08,055 --> 04:18:12,435
The audience is kind of only used to one thing now
4866
04:18:12,435 --> 04:18:16,647
you know, so I think it'll take something that's really
4867
04:18:16,647 --> 04:18:20,318
innovative that's going to steal those people away from that experience.
4868
04:18:20,318 --> 04:18:43,591
♪♪♪
4869
04:18:43,591 --> 04:18:47,094
I think people were just getting over playing games
4870
04:18:47,094 --> 04:18:49,680
that are just generic regenerating health shooters.
4871
04:18:49,680 --> 04:18:51,682
I think we really got to that point where
4872
04:18:51,682 --> 04:18:54,352
that was just all that was coming out for a time.
4873
04:18:54,352 --> 04:18:56,729
If you're gonna do a first person shooter like a hero shooter,
4874
04:18:56,729 --> 04:18:59,523
you need abilities, you need unique characters, unique movement,
4875
04:18:59,523 --> 04:19:03,945
you know, unique environments, and then you're introducing a new hero once a quarter essentially, right?
4876
04:19:03,945 --> 04:19:06,530
That arena shooter kind of dueling
4877
04:19:06,530 --> 04:19:10,785
1 v 1-type of game has sadly fallen out of favor
4878
04:19:10,785 --> 04:19:15,373
to team-based games like PUBG and Apex Legends and others as well.
4879
04:19:15,373 --> 04:19:16,707
♪♪♪
4880
04:19:16,707 --> 04:19:20,711
There's a lot of focus on the technical aspects of first person shooters today,
4881
04:19:20,711 --> 04:19:26,384
where I wish there was a little more of the personality-driven side of it.
4882
04:19:26,384 --> 04:19:43,901
♪♪♪
4883
04:19:43,901 --> 04:19:48,739
Oh, in my opinion, there's still a lot of gas left in 2.5D games.
4884
04:19:48,739 --> 04:19:53,160
Indies offer something a little bit different.
4885
04:19:53,160 --> 04:19:56,789
They’re not trying to compete in the space that you're normally in.
4886
04:19:56,789 --> 04:20:00,710
You know, you get that fatigue, where you're just playing the same old thing over and over again.
4887
04:20:00,793 --> 04:20:03,671
If you're trying to recreate the past,
4888
04:20:03,879 --> 04:20:06,007
that same sense that
4889
04:20:06,132 --> 04:20:10,261
gamers got when they played a game for the first time.
4890
04:20:10,261 --> 04:20:12,930
You know, it was long enough where we hadn't really had old school games,
4891
04:20:12,930 --> 04:20:15,641
and then you just had all these new people coming in and saying,
4892
04:20:15,641 --> 04:20:19,478
I want to make a game that plays like the games I played when I was a kid,
4893
04:20:19,478 --> 04:20:21,272
and that's why we've got that resurgence
4894
04:20:21,272 --> 04:20:23,524
which we're still seeing, I mean, it's still going on.
4895
04:20:23,524 --> 04:20:26,736
So, I'm friends with this guy, Dave Oshry. He's over there a company called New Blood, and they're
4896
04:20:26,736 --> 04:20:29,071
the ones responsible for the games like Dusk and whatnot
4897
04:20:29,071 --> 04:20:32,325
that are what are referred to lovingly or begrudgingly as Boomer Shooters.
4898
04:20:32,325 --> 04:20:35,328
People were craving a return to old school level design
4899
04:20:35,328 --> 04:20:38,497
or return to speed and skill based-movement,
4900
04:20:38,497 --> 04:20:43,586
fun weapons that were just fun, not necessarily realistic, ridiculous, ludicrous.
4901
04:20:43,586 --> 04:20:46,589
People wanted the fun back in first person shooters.
4902
04:20:46,589 --> 04:20:50,009
The F stands for fun, fun person shooters.
4903
04:20:50,009 --> 04:20:53,554
David Szymanski tweeted at me, I had no idea who he was,
4904
04:20:53,554 --> 04:20:55,681
‘Hey, I think you should check out my game.’
4905
04:20:55,681 --> 04:20:58,893
It was called Dusk, and it was the best feeling
4906
04:20:58,893 --> 04:21:01,729
first person shooter I had ever felt in my life.
4907
04:21:01,729 --> 04:21:05,775
The movement, the sliding, the shooting, the interactivity,
4908
04:21:05,775 --> 04:21:08,110
you could turn the sinks on and off, you could break the sinks,
4909
04:21:08,110 --> 04:21:09,987
you could throw stuff around the room.
4910
04:21:09,987 --> 04:21:12,323
Dusk was pretty cool. It was actually one of the first games
4911
04:21:12,323 --> 04:21:15,826
I think I really kind of like fought to cover on my YouTube channel.
4912
04:21:15,826 --> 04:21:19,830
We put out the original trailer for Dusk, and it went huge.
4913
04:21:19,830 --> 04:21:21,665
It was everywhere. It was on, like, CNET and stuff.
4914
04:21:21,665 --> 04:21:24,835
‘90s-style shooter copies Doom and Quake and stuff,’ and we're like,
4915
04:21:24,835 --> 04:21:27,963
‘Oh, shit.’ We had a lot of eyeballs on us. They were like, ‘Yeah, this looks cool.
4916
04:21:27,963 --> 04:21:29,799
The graphics look like shit’ I'm like…
4917
04:21:29,799 --> 04:21:33,469
But I really wanted people to see that it's not about the graphics.
4918
04:21:33,469 --> 04:21:35,554
It's about the gameplay.
4919
04:21:35,554 --> 04:21:38,599
Looking back, Quake still looks great even though it's got that
4920
04:21:38,599 --> 04:21:42,520
low poly style, because great game design doesn't age,
4921
04:21:42,520 --> 04:21:46,107
and I think we proved that all over again with Dusk.
4922
04:21:46,107 --> 04:21:54,490
♪♪♪
4923
04:21:54,490 --> 04:21:56,951
Ion Fury was a project that
4924
04:21:56,951 --> 04:22:00,204
started off with a much smaller scope just sort of a prequel,
4925
04:22:00,204 --> 04:22:04,041
a quick prequel story that was supposed to be tied to our original Bombshell release,
4926
04:22:04,041 --> 04:22:08,337
but, as it went along, it became very clear that Voidpoint
4927
04:22:08,337 --> 04:22:11,340
was sort of taking this game to a whole other level,
4928
04:22:11,340 --> 04:22:13,342
really making something special.
4929
04:22:13,342 --> 04:22:15,386
The idea with Ion Fury was to,
4930
04:22:15,386 --> 04:22:17,930
to create this kind of alternate timeline.
4931
04:22:17,930 --> 04:22:22,017
What if, instead of 3D Realms making Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior back in the day,
4932
04:22:22,017 --> 04:22:25,104
they decided to do something with the Bombshell character?
4933
04:22:25,104 --> 04:22:26,480
Bring it on.
4934
04:22:26,480 --> 04:22:30,317
And the first 3D shooter that came up was actually with this character.
4935
04:22:30,317 --> 04:22:32,736
Well, the guys that were hired, several of them,
4936
04:22:32,736 --> 04:22:35,865
were from the Duke mod community and had worked
4937
04:22:35,865 --> 04:22:38,826
with the buildings and code, upgraded it in its abilities,
4938
04:22:38,826 --> 04:22:42,663
like added lighting effects, voxel technology.
4939
04:22:42,663 --> 04:22:44,623
That game in particular has just shown
4940
04:22:44,623 --> 04:22:47,168
that engines can have an aesthetic,
4941
04:22:47,168 --> 04:22:50,212
a world that is unique to them and kind of
4942
04:22:50,212 --> 04:22:51,714
timeless and should be preserved.
4943
04:22:51,714 --> 04:22:56,093
You don't have to spend a half a year making 100,000-triangle character
4944
04:22:56,093 --> 04:22:58,429
with motion capture faces and so on.
4945
04:22:58,429 --> 04:23:03,517
You can make beautiful pixel art and then be more efficient and still make fun games.
4946
04:23:03,517 --> 04:23:04,477
Good morning.
4947
04:23:04,477 --> 04:23:06,479
♪♪♪
4948
04:23:06,479 --> 04:23:08,606
We needed the new Wolfenstein games,
4949
04:23:08,606 --> 04:23:10,357
we needed the new Doom games
4950
04:23:10,357 --> 04:23:12,443
to show people that this old style
4951
04:23:12,443 --> 04:23:14,904
of game design isn't actually old.
4952
04:23:14,904 --> 04:23:18,616
MachineGames took Wolfenstein within the direction that I would have taken it.
4953
04:23:18,616 --> 04:23:20,117
I love the gameplay.
4954
04:23:20,117 --> 04:23:22,411
I think they're the company to keep it going,
4955
04:23:22,411 --> 04:23:25,414
because they just have done such a good job.
4956
04:23:25,414 --> 04:23:27,583
It had been a while since I had been
4957
04:23:27,583 --> 04:23:30,920
into the FPS genre until Doom 2016,
4958
04:23:30,961 --> 04:23:33,380
and it completely blew away my expectations.
4959
04:23:33,380 --> 04:23:35,716
Just like, this is exactly Doom.
4960
04:23:35,716 --> 04:23:37,510
This is totally, like, the essence.
4961
04:23:37,510 --> 04:23:40,971
Burning through Doom Eternal a, like, 100 million frames per second, and it’s awesome.
4962
04:23:40,971 --> 04:23:42,765
This is the attitude of Doom.
4963
04:23:42,765 --> 04:23:46,685
It feels like you’re Doom guy for the first time.
4964
04:23:46,685 --> 04:23:49,188
I mean, the glory kills, adding that whole element,
4965
04:23:49,188 --> 04:23:53,359
turning the weaker enemies into walking ammo boxes
4966
04:23:53,359 --> 04:23:55,819
and bed crates was just
4967
04:23:55,819 --> 04:23:58,280
a symphony of violence that you just
4968
04:23:58,280 --> 04:24:00,324
can't experience any other way.
4969
04:24:00,324 --> 04:24:03,994
Great game design doesn't age, it doesn’t go out of style.
4970
04:24:03,994 --> 04:24:05,871
It just needed a fresh coat of paint,
4971
04:24:05,871 --> 04:24:09,500
but you could keep your Call of Duty Warzone, I'm playing Doom Eternal.
4972
04:24:18,884 --> 04:24:21,804
What makes a great first person shooter?
4973
04:24:21,804 --> 04:24:25,516
That’s deep. You're asking the tough questions now.
4974
04:24:26,183 --> 04:24:28,644
Oh, you said we have another hour?
4975
04:24:28,811 --> 04:24:32,565
A great FPS, above and beyond anything else, gives you a sense of flow.
4976
04:24:32,565 --> 04:24:36,569
First person shooter is just the magic of pulling people in
4977
04:24:36,569 --> 04:24:39,113
and you being the character.
4978
04:24:39,113 --> 04:24:42,366
How it moves, how it turns,
4979
04:24:42,366 --> 04:24:44,118
how it reacts to damage
4980
04:24:44,118 --> 04:24:45,661
You need to be in a world that
4981
04:24:45,661 --> 04:24:47,371
sucks you into the experience.
4982
04:24:47,371 --> 04:24:49,456
Obviously, the weapons, your arsenal
4983
04:24:49,456 --> 04:24:51,625
have to be finely tuned.
4984
04:24:51,625 --> 04:24:53,627
If you have 100% mastered something,
4985
04:24:53,627 --> 04:24:54,878
you're done with it,
4986
04:24:54,878 --> 04:24:56,922
but any shooter that has
4987
04:24:56,922 --> 04:25:00,551
close to that mastery level but never lets you have all of it
4988
04:25:00,551 --> 04:25:02,761
is something that will make you play it forever.
4989
04:25:02,761 --> 04:25:03,804
♪♪♪
4990
04:25:03,804 --> 04:25:08,517
Bringing what was great about old games into the present,
and that's what's really interesting.
4991
04:25:08,517 --> 04:25:10,811
We made a dent in the world of gaming
4992
04:25:10,811 --> 04:25:13,606
here with what we did, and it continues to be there.
4993
04:25:13,606 --> 04:25:15,149
I'm proud of that.
4994
04:25:15,149 --> 04:25:17,318
There's more to be done out there for sure.
4995
04:25:17,318 --> 04:25:19,653
I think the FPS genre is
4996
04:25:19,653 --> 04:25:28,245
It helped build gaming. I don't feel gaming would ever jump
to where it is without first person shooters.
4997
04:25:28,245 --> 04:25:31,373
Video games and first person shooter games
4998
04:25:31,373 --> 04:25:33,375
are just more than games.
4999
04:25:33,375 --> 04:25:35,878
They're, they’re a community.
5000
04:25:35,878 --> 04:25:38,297
The first person shooter
5001
04:25:38,297 --> 04:25:40,799
genre is filled with rich stories,
5002
04:25:40,799 --> 04:25:45,554
it's filled with rich characters, these memorable novel gameplay experiences.
5003
04:25:45,554 --> 04:25:48,015
It’s not about just running around shooting stuff,
5004
04:25:48,015 --> 04:25:51,518
it’s about feeling like you're in the shoes of
5005
04:25:51,518 --> 04:25:54,438
the character that you're playing. That immersiveness
5006
04:25:54,438 --> 04:25:57,191
makes you want to revisit it day in and day out.
5007
04:25:57,191 --> 04:26:00,110
When I started, all we were lucky enough to do was
5008
04:26:00,319 --> 04:26:02,488
to make it look like you're inside of a maze,
5009
04:26:02,488 --> 04:26:04,073
and you have a first person view.
5010
04:26:04,073 --> 04:26:06,950
But, once the technology started improving,
5011
04:26:06,950 --> 04:26:09,328
what people did was kind of amazing.
5012
04:26:09,328 --> 04:26:12,373
If you can get involved in something where you personally
5013
04:26:12,373 --> 04:26:14,333
have the opportunity to make a difference.
5014
04:26:14,333 --> 04:26:15,668
That's the key.
5015
04:26:15,668 --> 04:26:19,088
It's, it’s wonderful that people still want to talk about GoldenEye.
5016
04:26:19,088 --> 04:26:22,716
We were all massive James Bond fans. It was a real passion project.
5017
04:26:22,716 --> 04:26:25,719
Lots of people really love that thing you made. It’s very humbling.
5018
04:26:25,719 --> 04:26:28,931
No one I knew was doing this for fame or fortune,
5019
04:26:28,931 --> 04:26:31,225
like we were just playing games and having fun.
5020
04:26:31,225 --> 04:26:34,103
People who have been inspired by
5021
04:26:34,103 --> 04:26:36,689
the products that we were building back in those days.
5022
04:26:36,689 --> 04:26:40,401
I think, perhaps, too much about the word 'legacy.’
5023
04:26:40,401 --> 04:26:42,111
I want to leave something behind.
5024
04:26:42,111 --> 04:26:44,613
We built a good foundation, but people have gone
5025
04:26:44,613 --> 04:26:46,615
above and beyond everything that we did,
5026
04:26:46,615 --> 04:26:48,242
and the world's better for it.
5027
04:26:48,242 --> 04:26:53,789
The thing I wanted to leave behind was not fame or fortune, it was influence.
5028
04:26:53,789 --> 04:26:56,458
One developer said to me,
5029
04:26:56,750 --> 04:26:59,420
‘I started my studio because of your game.’
5030
04:26:59,586 --> 04:27:04,341
And what I want is for my teams to feel the same sense of pride that I do.
5031
04:27:04,341 --> 04:27:07,886
20 years after their next game comes out,
5032
04:27:07,886 --> 04:27:11,432
I want them to, to sit down and shake their heads
5033
04:27:11,432 --> 04:27:13,225
and just go,
5034
04:27:13,225 --> 04:27:15,811
‘Damn, we did that.’
5035
04:27:15,811 --> 04:27:17,688
You know?
5036
04:27:18,147 --> 04:27:20,149
There's, there's nothing better in the world.
5037
04:27:20,274 --> 04:27:22,025
There's nothing better.