All language subtitles for First Person Shooter The Definitive FPS Documentary 2023 1080p CreatorVC WEB-DL AAC 2.0 H.265-Spark.en

It all started back when
I was in high school.

I grew up in the San Francisco Bay area.

I really enjoyed electronics
and I was lucky enough

to get involved in a program
at NASA Ames Research Centre

in Mountain View.

Three of us from local
high schools got involved.

What was coming out at the time were

early vector drawing computer
graphic systems called IMLACs.

Well, it's a really clunky looking thing,
but it really does look a lot like a PC.

It's got a keyboard, it's got a mouse

Steve Colley, Howard Palmer,
and myself were given free rein of

all of this fancy computer graphics.

We were given the challenge to figure
out what you could do with an IMLAC.

Could an IMLAC really visualize a 3D world?

So, Steve Colley started by

creating a program that could do

hidden line removal dynamically
and visualize a cube rotating.

It was one of those things where you,
you look at it, and you're just sort of

bowled over at how cool it was.

So, the next thing was, what if
you had multiple cubes and instead

generated a perspective of being
inside this rays of blocks or cubes

that essentially becomes a maze.

The first thing that I remember seeing
was an environment that you were in

and I, you know, was like, 'Woah!'

So, we were able to create a
visualization from first person

looking down a maze and it
was kind of a maze game as far as...

'Well, can you find the exit?'

That then continued on as to,

'What if we had two IMLACs and
we had them talk to each other?'

When Greg Thompson came
to MIT from Ames, he brought

a whole bunch of usable programs, but the one
that he brought that was really the coolest,

was this thing that they called,
'Maze', and sometimes 'Maze War.'

Dave wrote the program that,
when you type to start up Maze,

it would download into
your IMLAC the Maze game

and then acted as the communication hub

to exchange messages between all of the IMLACs
at Project MAC that were playing the game.

When you moved, a little
message went out to everybody,

and the updating part was
handled in the mainframe program

because it had a vision
of where each player was.

If he could see you,
if you were in his view

it would draw a representation of yourself.

All we had there, really, was
we could draw the person's name.

That was good. Well what if we could turn
it more into a game and shoot each other?

Now, you didn't actually... You couldn't really
draw a gun but, from the first person perspective,

we would draw a representation
of a bullet going down the hallway.

And so, if he is in the square that
the bullet reached at that point in time,

it would declare that other player's dead,

and the other player would get a message that
you're dead, and it would create a visualization

of explosions, essentially, on the screen

along with your name.
Up to eight players, we would have

two numbers of hits and shots,
so you could kind of track the score.

We had enough IMLACs, we could
get some pretty good games going.

The researches are spending
late nights inviting their friends to

get into Project MAC to play this game at
late hours as opposed to doing the problem set

they were probably supposed
to be doing in their dorm rooms.

People would come in from all
over the lab which was, you know,

this large building with
about five floors of it.

J.C.R Licklider himself, we're
seeing playing the game sometimes

and people would sit around and cheer

cheer their favorite players on.

It was kind of like eSports.
I guess it's kind of like eSports.

Very primitive eSports.

It would download into
your IMLAC, the Maze Game,

and then acted as the communication hub.

That basically enabled it to
be played over the Internet.

You could just come in, start up an instance of
being a player in the game, and off you went.

You could shoot, you could
chase each other around,

you could have a lot of fun.

We pioneered online gaming.

It was shocking. It's totally shocking.

The concept, first person
shooter, didn't exist.

It was one of those many
things that was kind of retrofitted.

Maze itself appeared in late 1973.

Years went by, and the
hardware for playing games

improved more and more and more, and

one of the first things that people wanted
to write for anything that had graphics

was a version of Maze.

Once the PCs came out,
billions and billions of knock offs

and, you know, you can trace
the lineage to things like Doom.

I could see that it would catch on,

and I was happy to have happened in to be

one of the contributors
in getting it started.

These days, people see, like, Fortnite, and
they assume harbor rendering has always been.

No, we came from very,
very humble beginnings,

beginnings of games like Battlezone
in which it was just vector lines.

Battlezone was a brilliant application.

It was so compelling to me, and

I just got totally hooked.

The first time you saw that, everything you needed to
know about a first person shooter was already defined.

The first person shooter is
the closest thing you can be to

being in an environment in reality

because first person means, by definition,

that it's from your sight,
and that was Battlezone.

I remember, as a kid, you put your face through
the gunner mechanism, and then you could turn

and then I felt like I was there.
I felt like I was in, like, that tank.

It was so immersive.
You're brought into that world,

and it was so powerful, and I was thinking,

'This is the way everything's
going to work in the future.'

Battlezone is a masterful
game and, if you haven't played it

on a vector arcade stand up
arcade version, you'd need to.

Use the joysticks, play it
like it was meant to be played,

because that experience is extraordinary.

I just played and played, and I got
so good that I got to the point where

I would not lose.

There are things in Battlezone that
Carmack and Romero had to learn

like being shot at from behind,
being able to see the enemy

and the importance of
a radar and auto radar.

Ed Rotberg figured them out for the
very first time and mastered them, right?

I tried playing it recently,
and I'm still pretty good.

I still have that feel for
the game which is so weird

it's been 30-something years.

It's beautiful.
It's like a poem. It's fantastic.

I can't overstate its importance enough.

There's games out there
that basically prove something

that would otherwise be
thought to be impossible.

It sort of set a bar in a
number of different dimensions

that really forced me to rethink about what
these immersive experiences would really mean.

You don't think, 'Oh, I could do that',
until you see somebody else do it.

So, I wanted to build a game, and
I started out working on Apple II's.

I was really obsessed. The Apple II
had some games that were images,

and you can, like, click on something, you go to
another image and, you get about 10-20 images,

you fill up a floppy. I thought,

'There must be a way to
create a world that's more alive.'

I came to 3D as a compression technology

to generate the world and have a
very, very, very tiny file that does it,

and I heard that Apple was going
to be putting out a new computer.

On January 24, Apple
Computer will introduce Macintosh.

I put money down on it. Soon after, the store
gives me a call and says, 'Your Mac is here.'

Every store only got one Mac.

So, they were giving me
their demonstration computer

before they even opened it up.
I thought that was really classy of them.

It was, to me, the future of computing,

and I saw what the game I was
building as the future of gaming.

I invented at least half
of mouselook, if you will.

You take the mouse, and you move
left and right, you'd turn left and right.

Since I couldn't look up and down, what I
did is, move the mouse up, you'd go forward

and move the mouse down, you'd go backwards, and
that proved to be a very, very smooth interface.

I learned something very interesting.
As soon as I added

sound to the game,
like running into a wall,

the perception of the
speed of the game doubled.

There's sort of a real close link between
your auditory system and your visual system

and, when they match up, there's
certainly a heightened sense of realism.

The Colony shipped on two discs:
one was the game, and the full game.

The other was just the sounds.

Basically, I did all the sounds.

Recording whatever, whatever I
get my hands on. That was a lot of fun.

I had built the very, very first corridor.

I could see down, at the
end of it, was this turn.

I was very, very surprised
at how compelling it was.

You're pulled into the
world, and you can't stop.

You can't look away.
It was quite something.

Colony had a number of different pieces.
You start on the ship.

The ship was a safe place where
you could actually learn the interfaces.

And, actually, it turned out the hardest puzzle in
the game was figuring out how to get off the ship.

I put an airlock there, and I figured,

'Everybody knows how an airlock works.'

Now, everybody goes in
the airlock, opens the door,

they go on in, they open
the second door, die.

So, what happens when
you finally do get outside,

you're in a Battlezone-like world.

It was Battlezone.
I replaced the tanks with these creatures,

but it felt good.

This is a family colony
that had been set up,

all the adults were killed, you're in
a world that's very, very dangerous.

You go through the colony,
and you build up the story.

'What happened here?' One room had a slideshow,
even talks about all the different creatures.

The world had it feel continuous,

but every environment, every piece of it had
to have a little bit of a difference to it.

You know, the top three
levels were living quarters.

As you get deeper into the colony, these
creatures that have taken over would attack.

There was like an infinite corridor,
because it looped back to where you started.

And you could actually figure
that out by dropping some things.

I'm sure people probably spent
hours hoping to get to the other end.

I had no idea what a game like that

should be, no, nor did anyone else.

There were a few things in
there that were pure sadism.

One of the first things you
see on the ship is a cigarette

but, if you pick up the
cigarette, which you could do,

it says, 'Cigarettes are hazardous
to your health. You've died'

and you're dead.

I was told by a number of
people I had caused their divorce

because they kind of got a
little too immersed in the game.

But, yeah, it was hard.
But, on the other side,

there was a lot of...
People had a lot of fun.

A favorite id game?

Gosh...

Uh...

Um...

This is gonna sound absurd.

The original games that I played
of theirs were the side-scrollers.

I went to Softdisk in March of 1989

and I immediately met Tom Hall.

I interviewed with IBM and
Gould and lots of other companies

and I kind of thought about it and go,

'No, this is boring. I want to make games.'

I wanted to start a gaming
disk, Gamer's Edge,

and I needed to have a team
of people to help me with it.

So, I hired John Carmack.

When I was growing up, I
really was the only one that was

into computers at the level that I was.

Like, I could tell just from, like, running
tennis that this was a really good programmer.

John Romero and Lane Roathe
were the first two programmers

that I had ever met
that I really felt like,

'Wow, they're doing awesome things, and I've
got so much that I can learn from them.'

And then, I needed an artist,
so I just looked around the room,

and I saw this long-haired
guy on a computer.

I was like, 'Oh, he probably
listens to metal. He'll totally fit in.'

When I was in college, my professor,

he told me there was a position
opening up at a company called Softdisk...

'You're making video games.'

And I remember saying, 'Video games?'

We had a game, you know,
room with metal blasting out of it

and all the lights are off in there,
and that's kind of how we started.

So, we made a whole
lot of games for SoftDisk.

We were working on two games at a time.
We made twelve games that year.

Romero had done this game, Dangerous Dave,

and it was extremely popular
all over the world to this day.

But, there was nobody that
had figured out how to do, like,

fine pixel scrolling and really a smooth
movement that we were used to on consoles,

Where is that on the PC?

Carmack, he came up
with a little prototype,

a little Dave character
bouncing around on the screen,

but it could do the smooth scrolling.
The thought came to me,

'You know, hey, wouldn't
it be funny if we made

the first level of Super Mario 3
with Dangerous Dave tonight?

Dangerous Dave in "Copyright Infringement."

Yeah!

Tom copied it onto a disc
and just put it on my desk.

I came in and I was like,
'Ooh, some kind of cool demo, '

and the screen comes up, the screen
scrolled, and I almost have a heart attack.

'Are you serious? Like, this is insane.

This doesn't exist on a PC.

We got in late, and Romero
just closes the door and says,

'This changes everything.
We need to start a company now.'

I was making these games called
that was sort of rogue-style games

but more arcade-y.

I decided to break them down into episodes,

release just the first episode
as a free Shareware game

and, at the end of that episode, I would
have a splash screen pop up saying,

'Hey, if you liked this, there's
two more episodes you can buy.

Send me $30, I'll send you the games.'

And it turned out, that first year, I
made over a hundred thousand dollars.

So, I quit my daytime job as a computer
consultant and started up Apogee.

I had gotten letters over probably a month.

They all had different names,
and I thought I had some fans

and I was reading PC Games magazine.

And there was an article
about a guy named Scott Miller.

I get to the very end, and it has
his name, and his address. I'm like,

'I know that address.
How do I know that address?'

And I just, like, look over at the wall.
I'm like, 'No way.'

I came across John Romero's
game, and I had to write him, like,

I think, three letters total,
and I was using different names

so that he wouldn't think it's the
same person writing him the whole time.

And he finally figured out that all these three
different letters were coming from the same address,

and he wrote me back a
very nasty letter saying,

'Are you crazy? You know, are you some sort of
weird fan?' You know, 'What's going on here?'

We got on the phone, and he's like,

'Oh, this is so great. You know, the reason why I
wrote all those, those letter under different names

because I'm looking for programmers,
and they look at the mail at Softdisk

and, if I'm trying to steal people,
they won't even give you the letters.'

That was right after we finished
the Mario demo. I sent it to him,

and he was just mind blown.

I said, 'Look, you guys
are onto something here.

Is there any way I can fund the development of
a game that we can then release in Shareware?

We were brainstorming a bunch of stuff, and
I went back to my office for 15 minutes,

and just typed it into Apple Writer, and I came
back, and I read it in a Walter Winchell voice,

like 'Commander Keen, Defender of Justice!'

and that's how Commander Keen was born.

Well, the Commander Keen games
really sort of blew open the doors

for both companies to grow at that point.

It just really coalesced them as a team.

It proved that these guys could
bring a compelling Nintendo-like

experience to a personal computer
which was absolutely revolutionary.

In January of 1991, John
wanted to make a 3D game,

and we're like, 'Are you sure? Because

that's going to be hard
to do in two months.

We had all played games like
Wizardry and, like, Ultima III and IV,

Bard's Tale and stuff, and
those were our first instances

of 3D experiences.

It was really cool, because I had not seen
that perspective on a computer monitor before.

I had one important book on 3D
graphics that I had gotten when I was

maybe 18 from a university bookstore.

It was a big fat book, and
that was my Bible for years.

John Carmack wrote a rotating cube demo

in EGA, and it was really cool.

There were a lot of, like, to
be, to make that cube rotate.

The trick was figuring out, 'What's the first
thing that we can do that has a fun factor to it

while still taking a step forward
into a new technical level?'

In 1982, a guy named Paul Edelstein made
a game called Wayout for Sirius Software,

and you could move on any
pixel and rotate at any point,

and that was really impressive,
but nobody followed that up.

But, when we did Hovertank One,
you could kind of move on any pixel.

It's the first game I'd ever seen
where you could actually just

freely move around a room.

The simple Dungeons and
Ultima ones were just colored

lines drawing the hallways.
It wasn't free-moving like Hovertank, but

that's the simplest way you can do it is

just to palace colors on the walls,
the two shades of it create depth.

You know, there are large characters.
You say it's very low detail

but, back then, it was pretty impressive.

So, I made up a silly story about
you rescuing people in this maze

and, if you rescued enough of
them, if the monsters didn't get them,

then the guy's all happy
and giving you money.

It was a very new experience,

and I remember pushing hard through it.

He was up all the time
like, if he was awake, he was

he was, you know, coding and eating.

Things were still glitchy, and
things were not quite working

as well as they should,
going a little over time budget.

One important thing to understand,
I think, about John Carmack,

he was always interesting in creating

a virtual world. Hovertank
was a first step in that direction.

It was our first 3D game, and

and we knew that there was going to be more.
You know, he wanted to get better at it.

Romero had talked to a friend of
his, Paul Neurath at Looking Glass.

He said, 'We're working
on a really cool game,

and we're using a really cool new
technique called texture mapping,

and I'm like, 'What is that?'

After he got off the phone, he turns
around and looks at John Carmack.

'Can you do that?'
He said, 'Yeah, I can do that.'

And Hovertank, the walls
were still solid, flat, shaded.

You know, I honestly still hadn't worked out some
of the issues with perspective texture mapping.

That was obviously the next thing
that I wanted to do with Catacombs 3D.

So, they were still making Ultima Underworld for a
whole year while we did nothing about texture mapping.

And then, we made Catacomb 3D

with texture mapping half a year
before they released Ultima Underworld,

because John Carmack's first
game that he wrote at SoftDisk

was Catacombs, we knew what
the levels looked like and everything.

We just had to make
textures and just do it all in 3D.

From an artist's perspective, it was really cool,
because you could do larger pieces of artwork

I really liked the hand, which is
actually my hand, my own hand model.

Having the hand present, it serves
dual purposes. It's both an indicator

of what your current weapon is, and it's at least showing
you the center of the screen as a partial aiming help.

You know, it took us a while to get,
have the debates about whether you have

an actual aiming dot or reticle on
there, and there were arguments about...

'Is it more realistic if you don't have that? Even
if though it's more frustrating for people to aim.'

Some of those debates
continue to rage to this day.

Because it really is as though
you're reaching into this space, right?

And there's a part of
you that's in that world.

And I also like the game mechanics of it
where you hold down your mouse button

for more power.
It was actually a pretty fun game.

You know, in both cases, neither one of those games
got to the absolute sort of rock solid perfection

that I was very proud
of in, in our later games.

But, you know, we still got them out under
the gun with really high time pressure

and they were fun.

There are a lucky few who get
to play at work and make it pay.

Now, a similar story may
be unfolding near Dallas.

At the beginning of 1992, we had
just come back from Christmas vacation,

and we started working on Commander Keen 7.

We spent six months

last year in 1991, we spent six months
making three Commander Keen games

and now we're going to, what, spend
another year or something? I was like,

'I can't. I can't do it.
I am just sick of making Keen.'

I was like, 'We should make another
3D gun; this time, with guns in it.'

I said, 'Why don't we just make a
3D version of Castle Wolfenstein?'

And they're like, 'Oh my god,
that's exactly the right idea.'

All of us had very fond memories
of Castle Wolfenstein on the Apple II.

Castle Wolfenstein was super unique.

There weren't any other games, even on the
Apple II, that were set in the Nazi dungeon.

It was the first stealth game. You're trying to see
if you can hold up guards without them making noise,

shoot 'em, search 'em,
put on their bulletproof vest.

Or you could drag bodies around corners, and guards
could site on corpses and go into alert states.

But, it was so obviously more fun to

whip around a corner and
just unload the machine gun.

While we're making a game, we're playing the
game hundreds of times a day, like it is nonstop.

You're, like, running it
to see how it feels and,

'Did this thing that I just
made look good in the game?'

So, like, we're used
to the basic core loop,

just shooting people and
making 'em lay down and

opening doors and just,
like, running through the thing.

Designing something truly elegant
is one of the hardest things to do.

Once you pare things down
to only what needs to be there,

it becomes something much
purer and more enjoyable.

Wolfenstein 3D presented a first
person perspective with a very fast action.

John had programmed the engine so well that

on a CRT monitor with a VGA card,

it went 70 frames a second.

It was super fast, and then we
put mouse movement in there

and, holding the second mouse
button, you could strafe unbelievable fast

faster than in any game.
Still, it was insane.

An idea that you were running around
shooting Nazies, that there were guard dogs,

you know, eating and bowls
of food and, like, all of this stuff

that nobody had really
ever seen before in a game.

You know, actually being able
to record sounds was exciting.

The German death screams

or alert screams of the
people coming at you.

Castle Wolfenstein on the Apple II was one of the first
things that had any kind of voice output on the game.

Those scratchy, awful Nazi voices...

But, it still made a difference,
and it's stuck in everyone's memory.

And then, very much with Wolfenstein 3D,

having the German voices
which was largely Tom and John

just kind of saying things
into the microphone.

Mein Leben!

Here's the sad story: I
had a Webster's dictionary.

College dictionary.
In the back of it were, like, really thin

language translation dictionaries.

So, there's one for Spanish, you
know, Italian, and one for German.

My sister took German in high
school, so I'd heard some of it.

That's about all the German
knowledge we had in the team.

So, I just went through that whole dictionary,
and I just found all the interjections.

'My life!' Okay, 'Mein Leben!'
'Okay, they'll use that one.'

And I just wrote all the interjections
down, and we just recorded those.

Mein Leben!

What really stood out was, instead
of just showing just a conventional

energy meter at the
bottom to show your health,

you'd actually see the character's
face starting to bleed and cause damage.

He just popped into my head
like Keen popped into my head.

It was just like, 'His name's, bleep, B.J. Blazkowicz'
and now, okay, 'He's probably William Joseph,

Blazkowicz sounded blasty', you know?

It was fine to bloody up a bunch of Nazis.
That was...

...that was kind of cool.

Those zombie guys with the
gun in their chest was pretty silly.

The hardest thing was the German Shepherds.
I love German Shepherds,

so that was really tough for me,

drawing the German Shepherd
getting shot and dying. Well, that sucks.

I only have to draw that once.

With Hitler, we wanted to
have a multi-stage character.

We wanted him to be, like, tougher than
just one of the other guards in the game.

So, 'Well, why don't we put him in a mech
suit? Like he'll be gunning you down with

two Gatling guns at the same time, and now
you're going to be hiding most of the time.

And then we thought, 'You know what?
Let's add another layer to this.

Let's make ghostly Hitlers
that you see beforehand.'

So, you're trying to shoot these other Hitlers that you
see kind of floating above the ground with the robes on,

and, when you shoot them, it's like Obi Wan
Kenobi just falling into a pile of nothing,

right? He disappears.

And so, you're basically destroying
all of these ghost Hitlers that are around

until you finally see, you know,
'Die, Allied Schweinehund!'

Die, Allied Schweinehund!

At the very end. And then, when
you shoot all the mech stuff off of him,

now, he's running, shooting at
you, you know, because his suit just

you know, just came apart,
and then you finally kill him there,

and he just dissolves in a pile of gore.

Auf wiedersehen.

I decided, 'Alright, I'm just
gonna turn Hitler into this

disgusting pile of goo.

You know, intestines
and everything just pfft.

Auf wiedersehen.

And we thought it was a really good
ending and, plus, you're like, 'Yeah!'

Yeah!

Yeah, that was good.

When we were making the levels for Wolfenstein,
and we're blowing stuff up and, like,

'Okay, well, guess what? We removed
all this stuff to make this game really fun

and to focus on the core but,
now, it's missing something.

And, when we had made all
these Commander Keen games,

These games had Easter eggs in them.
They had secrets, and it was missing that.

What I really most in those
guys was the fun and the,

the kind of games within the games
like, for example, about the push walls.

You know, this little Easter egg
that you could walk up to a wall and,

if you pushed in the right spot,
it would reveal a secret room.

So, he told John, like, 'Is there
any way that we could push the wall

and it reveals a secret area?
That would be really cool.'

John didn't want to do it because, the way that
he had written the rendering engine, was, like,

very clean, and to do that would be a hack.

They wouldn't work well
with the code that he wrote.

One of the most valuable
and hardest things for a

systems architect level
programmer to do is say no to features.

In the end, it's not about having a clean
code base or having high frames per second.

It's about delivering value to the users.

I'm willing to go make a mess in
the code if it's gonna really pay off.

The secret rooms in
Wolfenstein were, in hindsight,

way more important than we thought they
were gonna be before the game was released.

You know, they added
a ton of replayability.

You know, this gave you the sense that there
was more of a world out there to explore.

People now totally expect all
FPS games to have secret areas,

and it all started with Wolfenstein.

We really felt like we had
a major hit on our hand.

We had, literally, the
big bags full of fan mail.

Three episodes, we sold for, like, $35.

Six episodes, it would be a $50 package.

95% of our sales was
for the full six episodes.

To pay for the games, people had to
write checks, and they had to mail them.

Commander Keen sold really well.
He got our first check.

It's $10,000. 'We can live on that!'

It's sort of, like, 'We'll buy a bar together!'
And Wolfenstein sold ten times more than that.

What!?

A quarter million bucks the first
month on a Shareware game?

Um...

I dropped out of college to make video
games, and everybody thought I was

absolutely fucking insane.

'You're moving a thousand
miles away to play video games?'

'No to make them.' 'That's dumb too!'

Ahh!

It absolutely blew my mind seeing
fully textured environments and to,

to see down the barrel of the gun.

The intensity of the experience of fighting the Nazis and,
of course, their dogs and then, later on, Mecha Hitler

just completely changed me, and I think it
completely changed an entire generation.

I'd never seen a PC game like this that
was in 3D where you moved with the walls

and guys came at you and shouted in
German, and it 100% changed my life.

Before Wolfenstein 3D, I would've branded myself
as only interested in, like, role playing games.

I became a big fan of
shooters after Wolf 3D.

My all time favorite FPS is Doom.
That's easy.

Doom just hit like a freight train.

When I played it, I just
remember thinking, 'Wow!'

Playing that networked
was just mind blowing.

It's fast, it's violent, it's kinetic.

Doom was such a statement
that, 'This is something different.'

It is the foundational DNA
from which everything descends.

I still think people will be
playing it 20, 30 years from now.

Great game design never goes out of style.

This is Doom. No, this is the renaissance.

This is the renaissance, and I just kept
saying it over and over like a madman.

Doom is eternal.

Wooahh!

We put out this press release in January

before we even started
programming the thing saying,

'This is gonna be the
biggest PC breakthrough ever,

this game, when it comes out.' And we
didn't even know when it was gonna come out.

Unbelievable, like no one
would ever do that now.

John Carmack spent several months with a
post-Wolfenstein technology that he had developed,

and he decided, like, 'We can't use a 2D matrix
to make a next gen, really cool looking game.

It'll be too Wolfenstein-like.

I remember, as a teenager,
when Steve Jobs had left Apple

and, of course, Jobs and Wozniak
were superheroes to me in my youth,

being an Apple II fanboy and all this
and seeing the, the drama of Steve Jobs

being kicked out of Apple and
going to found a new company

building this absolutely
state-of-the-art system.

In the spring of 1985, he lost
the power struggle inside Apple

and left the company that he had created.

He spent the summer
considering his next move.

In 1988, we have developed supercomputers

that are capable of performing
two billion calculations per second.

But it was $10,000 plus.

At that time, I couldn't
even $300 for a hard drive.

But, once we got to the point where
Commander Keen was doing quite well,

Wolfenstein 3D was ready to go
out, it looked like we had traction,

we were heading towards
success, I had $15,000 or something.

Available to me, and I went, and I
bought one of the next computers.

Two billion calculations
per second, second, second.

It was a great example of just
being excited about technology

leading us to some tools that helped
us make significantly better products

for a couple generations after.

I immediately knew, when Doom came out, that
I needed to get into the gaming industry.

The advances just in one year that
they did, they had the ceilings and floors,

the steps you could go up and down.
It's just amazing.

I had been working on the Doom editor
for a while making little pieces of levels

and, really, Tom Hall, full on
making stuff, like making levels.

Not even full levels but just like, you
know, trying to make something that was cool

and, because we had never seen anything

other than 90 degree wall
mazes with fixed height ceilings,

John said, 'Why don't you get
books on military construction

and use that as a guide
to figure out the spaces?'

So, Tom did that, even though
it wasn't what he really loved.

My vision for the whole arc of the game was

you are in sort of science
base on a moon, and then

you go through a portal for the
second episode, and you're in hell.

I might add, like, realistic
kind of senses of place like,

'Oh now, I'm in, you know, the control room' or,
you know, 'I'm here, and so I can get my bearings.'

Tom was going through these military books
and starting to make some levels like that.

Nothing interesting. Nothing that, when you
go through, it goes, 'Wow, this is amazing!'

And so, I told Tom, 'I'm gonna
try and figure out if I can, like,

come up with the look, like,
'What is it that we're doing?

If a room could have been
made in Wolfenstein, we failed.

So, we need to just,
like, change everything.

What's gonna really stand out?'
To me, it felt like

it was gonna contrast: contrast in light,

contrast in space, and
contrast in gameplay.

I started to make a room that had scale

that was, like, 'Forget that ceiling
that we were using for Wolfenstein.'

So, I made a room that was really
high, side areas that were really high up

that have light in them and
really bright, so the room's dark,

these really high, bright areas have
monsters up there throwing fireballs

down at you, so we're not on
the same plane being attacked.

But, I needed the player to see it, 'cause it would
look really cool to see something that high up.

I had the light going and
the monsters and the scale,

angled walls, all these things that, like,
this room could not exist in Wolfenstein.

So, I was very happy that I was
able to make something that was both

faster and, in some ways, higher quality by
making a slightly different set of trade-offs

while still getting all this new
flexibility with the angled walls

which really defined the
Doom map-making space.

So, the artist came in, and Tom came in, and they're
just like, 'Yeah, that's what we're talking about.'

And, like, 'That's how we
need to make this game.'

Doom is as much of a horror
game as it is an action game.

It scared me. It, it actually had
moments in it that would make you jump.

We always talked about how the
two cinematic influences for Doom was

Aliens and Evil Dead II.

They were about these moments where the lights
are flickering, you can't see what's going on,

something's coming out
of the darkness at you.

And that was what we,
we really wanted to capture.

When I was coming up with a style,

I wanted something that was different
from what you generally saw in video games,

at the time, which was
pretty clean, bright colors

and I wanted something dark and grungy.

That was the grunge era:
music, the clothes, everything.

I want to hear the monsters, not just hear
the doors. I want to hear them looking for us.

I want the player to be terrified. This is
a dark game that needs to be suspense

with diminished lighting going from bright
to dark automatically in the distance,

It's, like, automatic scary engine.

You'd be going around the corner, and then you hear,
like, some monster breathing or something, and you,

you know, it gets to you. You're very alert.
You're very on edge the whole time you're playing.

So, when I was making E1M3,

I got all the way to the very end. I'm
like, 'What am I gonna do at the very end?'

Like, 'Put the exit there? No?'

So, 'I think we should make the
player go back through the whole level.'

When they see the key card, it would be
boring if you go up to it, and you pick it up.

Everything's dead all the way all the way back
through the level. Everything's already been killed.

So, it's like, 'How do I, like,
terrify the player right then?'

Lighting was a super critical aspect of
the technical evolution of our products

from Wolfenstein where
everything was all kind of fully lit.

For Doom, what was really critical is
we could change the lighting dynamically.

So, all of the things that people still resonate
with, like the flickering lights going on,

those were very, very powerful.

I thought, 'Why don't I hide a bunch of
demons in a room and turn the lights out

when they go to pick up the card and, when
they pick up the card, it opens the door.

People played it, they were
just like, 'What?' You know?

You don't have to have
a deep story to a game,

but you can frame the action
with just a couple sentences, right?

Something messed up happened so, now as you're
going through all the jump scares and crazy action,

you have a reason you're going
there, and you're getting more and more

dread as you go there.

The environmental effects were great. Sometimes, you're
in a brightly lit room and then, all of a sudden,

you're just walking into darkness. It's just
scary as hell. It's great at making people jump.

Running around this massive
sprawling, hellish environment

and so, the lights were part of that.
I mean, that was essential to

a lot of what made it so scary.

Those were some of the moments in Doom that, you know,
made people's guts clench and really made a difference.

The boss level of the first episode, E1M8,

that was made by Sandy.

A lot of the things that I put into my
levels were things to make you scared.

So, we're like, 'Let's make two
bosses and make a baron of hell

that has a ton of hit points,
like they need to be a tank.'

You're many hours into the game,
you've got your instincts ready,

and then, to hear that sort of T. Rex roar,

'Oh, shit. I'm in for it now.'

And you hit them with rockets, and they're
just coming towards you. They just keep coming.

When you get to E2M8,

you are seeing barons of hell
just destroyed, hanging on the wall

and you're like, 'What did that?'

Of course, when you walk into the back area,
suddenly you hear the cyber demon roar.

That sound, that machine
sound, it's stomping around.

'Oh, shit.'

Then you know you're in for it.

We like scary games.
We like having something that

makes you jump, makes you feel alive.

Even if you're out of ammo and you're
down to nothing but brass knuckles,

you're gonna punch those demons in the
face. You're gonna do anything you can.

I mean, who goes around punching demons
in the face? Well, I'll never forget that.

For me, I love the shotgun.

Boom!

Fires at 187 beats per minute, I
clocked it with a metronome once.

When you shoot a shotgun, then you have the
animation of it going up and cocking like this

and you feel really manly, like Arnold
Schwarzenegger, because that's a manly thing to do.

Kevin created all the weapons,
and John had this video camera

and we used props. You just hold a gun up in
front of the camera and get that perspective.

I would say the chainsaw is pretty fun.

He doesn't like that.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Doom chainsaw.

This was the actual chainsaw
that we digitized for the game.

I felt like I should keep the grunge
on it that it had back in the day.

So, it's just got that, you know,
nasty look to it, and here it is.

I just remember the first
time I heard about the BFG,

my friend's dad who
installed it on his computer.

Then, he said, 'Oh, there's this gun in
the game that just obliterates everything.

It's called the BFG.' And then, the dad
goes, 'You know what that stands for?'

And we're like, 'What?'

Big fucking gun.

And we're like, 'Oh shit, your dad's cool!'

I remember the BFG. We're trying
to decide what it's gonna shoot.

So, John Romero set it up where
it shot every sprite in the game.

Like just these balls of colorfulness
going everywhere. It's like,

'Oh my god, it's vomiting Christmas.'

So then, Kevin just sat
down and drew a nice

green fireball that you see now.

What really made Doom was the whole game.

The fact that it had those
really awesome levels,

great gameplay and, of course,
how well the net play worked.

Um, 'Oh shit, it's October, and we don't have
multiplayer like we said in that press release.'

I was like, 'Alright, well, now we're starting
on multiplayer', you know, 'in October.'

I do clearly remember the early days of
getting multiplayer working at all in Doom.

This game's already great,
but that's, like, the next level.

I remember the magic of
that moment of just, like,

pressing the arrow keys on
one computer, it moving forward,

and then, on the other computer, watching
the victor's feet run back and forth

in front of you there.
This is just deeply, fundamentally cool.

Seeing that for the first time on a
screen, I was just like, 'This is so good.'

I would play Romero, and
he'd get so damn mad at me,

because he would run around
and collect all the damn weapons,

and then, I'd just run forward with the
rocket launcher and just get in his face

and just kill us both.

I'm the reason you get a negative
frag if you go up and kill yourself.

Stupid shit. Watch him die, he's dead.

It's one of my biggest
contributions to the gameplay.

Oh, bit. Oh, give me that shotgun, boy.

We want this to be, like, a thing that, you
know, you go to this number, and you win

or you go to this time, and whoever has
the biggest score wins. That kind of thing.

So, I came up with those parameters
immediately, and then I was like,

'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.

But, I went into the art room, and I said,

'So, I named this mode Deathmatch
and, every time we kill each other,

you get a point. What do you
think would be a good name for that?

'Cause I don't want to use
'kills, 'cause that's lame.'

Kevin thought for a second, and
he's just like, 'Why not use Frag?'

Year, I've never actually beaten Doom in single
player mode. It was exclusively multiplayer.

I guess there's people that dropped out of
college for it too, so I feel bad about that.

Early on, even when we were
doing the Commander Keen games,

it was clear we were small fry
but, by the time we got to Doom,

it was clear that we were
defining the state of the art.

We were doing something like
nobody had ever seen before,

and we knew it was gonna be a big deal.

The very end of Doom, we
had worked 30 hours straight,

we were at the end, Sandy
was asleep under his desk,

it was about 2:00 in the afternoon, Jay
is in his office in the biz, the biz room.

He's on the University of
Wisconsin's FTP server,

and people are sitting there waiting in
that directory, and they're creating files

that are, like, questions.
'When is Doom gonna be here? I want Doom.'

Jay went to, to basically upload the game,

and then more people flooded in
because they saw, like, it was happening

and the server just basically
blew up and stopped working.

And so the, the upload stops, and
Jay gets on the phone, he calls them up,

and the guy's name is
David Data, which is funny,

calls up David there, and he's
just like, 'Um, the server went down,

like, there's too many people
on it, and, and David's like,

'Okay, let me see if I can fix it.
I'm gonna clear everybody out.'

So, he clears people out, and we start
uploading, and then everyone rushes back in,

and it blows up again.
And so, we're just like, 'Oh my god.'

I think Doom is, you know, clearly
one of the best games ever made.

Doom is popular for two things:

one is the primal nature of
taking a gun and shooting demons,

which is obviously super fun.
The other is that

Doom hasn't added any
other storyline or anything on it.

It is pretty much just taking your gun and
shooting demons and solving simple puzzles.

Here was a game that had
blood and had heavy metal

and had, you know, these
monsters and dark humor.

So, when you start to put
your life to that to such a degree,

and you start finding
other people who are into it,

it becomes a part of a
growing up experience.

Microsoft had done a study that
showed that more computers at the time

had Doom installed on them
than the latest version of Windows.

The community has kept
Doom alive this whole time.

There are yearly awards given
out to people for the best levels

and the best content released by DOOMWorld.com
which has been around for 20 some years.

Doom started speed running, and it

it created high speed multiplayer co-op and
Deathmatch and free distribution with Shareware,

modding an open game
that everybody can modify,

and you can actually make levels
and sell them and make money off them,

and it was just, at its core,
a really fun, solid game.

You really can't talk about FPSs and,

and the history and legacy of
FPSs without talking about mods.

They've kind of been inseparable
since the very beginning.

To me, mods really spring
out of the Shareware culture

of, you know, early Doom and that whole
kind of spirit of just sharing in general.

At the company I was at, a friend came in with a thing
called the DEU which is the Doom Editing Utility,

but this was actually a
full-powered level editor,

and I took the floppy, not believing that this
is gonna work, 'It's too good to be true.'

And then grabbed the first
level from Doom One, E1M1,

and loaded it up. I don't know if everyone
remembers that first level, but you,

you start, and you come out, and you turn to
the left, and there's the very first stairway,

and then, there was this window that it
was too narrow for you to get through,

but I went ahead and pushed the, the one part
down and pushed the other, other part up,

went in to do with this, and there's...

The opening has changed, and outside
the window was this outside area with

you know, just a place you
were never supposed to be.

I'm just out here like, like,
like I just couldn't believe.

I still remember that day and, from
that moment on, every free moment I had,

I was making Doom levels and putting
them up on AOL and CompuServe,

and they were received quite well.
They, they got a lot of hits.

The first thing that you do
when you start modding Doom

is you create a level, which is a room.
It's a box, four sides,

and then you load it in Doom and, in fact, you've
made a cavern that's half a kilometer long.

But, it's your room, and you
made it, and now you're inside it

and, just being able to do
that, this was the first time

that anybody could do that.

This was something that you
can make into your own if you,

if you had the wherewithal,
and they were cool with it.

They weren't gonna come after
you and sue you which was also wild.

Ed knew all about it and from

I remember hearing that they actually helped by
sharing with the data formats of a lot of this stuff.

You had to download
them on, again, a crappy

56K dial-up connection.
You didn't know what you were downloading.

I remember downloading, like, the
Aliens mod for Doom back in the day.

Yeah, the moment that I heard
that you could change this game,

I started thinking of making
an Aliens modification for it.

I watched the movie so many times

for reference, because this was the '90s.

You, you couldn't go online
and, and look up images.

If I wanted to see what the
Weyland-Yutani looked like,

I had to stick a VHS in the machine and
fast forward to where I thought I'd seen it.

But, you can't just fast forward
through Aliens. You gotta watch it.

Fucking, hey.

The whole first level has
no enemies, and you're like,

'Have I installed this correctly?'
'Cause there's nothing on the screen.

I was quite uncertain about
how that would be received,

because, people could just think,
'well the first level is a waste of time'.

There is a lot of tension at the beginning of
the movie and, they are searching for the aliens.

So I, I thought, 'Well, can I...

Can I just have you hunting for them, and
they're not actually there in the first level?'

But, it worked out the way I hoped
it would. The tension would amp up,

and you'd be on edge and not
knowing what's gonna happen.

It's coming out of the wall!
It's coming out of the god damn wall!

I was trying to use Doom to
make a different kind of game that

it still had all the appeal of Doom.

I called it Aliens TC, TC
standing for Total Conversion

as a way to try and communicate that I was
trying to do something a little bit different

which was to convert
Doom into a, a new game.

It was a lot more
popular than I anticipated,

and that sort of changed
the trajectory of my life.

Carmack said to me at the time,
he's like, 'You know, it's almost like a

Doom mod is becoming a resume.

Breaking into the game industry
back in the '90s was pretty difficult,

and it opened up opportunities for me.

So, you had the FPS community out there,

they were rolling up their sleeves,
they were creating their own mods,

and then, this led to them using these
engines to put out their own games.

In the years, the decades of mods

that people have put out there
with levels and Brutal Doom

and, like, you name it, all the stuff
people have done has created something

that new gamers, when they
discover Doom and it's like,

'A universe has happened
before me before I was alive'

And it's so easy to be creative in it,

because the engine is so simple,
and people have put out so many tools

that are so good to make in, that
the community has made Doom.

Like they, they own Doom, you know, it is...
It's their game, and they have kept it alive.

Yeah, it was really great.

I have the power of God!

I was playing computer games obsessively, especially
the Ultima games that Richard Garriott made.

Just out of sheer luck, I got a
call from a friend who was working

at Origin at that point saying they
were looking for an associate producer.

And so, I went down there and got the job.

One of the first things I got to do was
work with Paul Neurath on Space Rogue,

his genre mashup of

space combat, role
playing, and arcade game.

When he came to Origin with his
first person perspective tech demo,

I, I went to my boss and said,

'I must work on this'
which, at that point, was

going to be called Ultima Underworld.

A game very similar to Doom in the
sense that you're walking through these

sort of very low resolution
environments that were texture mapped.

We had the idea that you
should be able to look all around

and it was an adventure game,
so it was very complicated.

I was there trying to recreate the feeling I
had the first time I played Dungeons and Dragons

where I, I got to tell
stories with my friends

and empowered to do whatever I want.

That was, uh, a real possibility
in a first person perspective game.

It wasn't true 3D, but
it let players decide

what was right and wrong in the world.
I find that much more interesting than,

'Hey, let's grab the biggest gun
and kill everything that moves.'

And so, System Shock was really the

chance that we had with some
understanding what the medium behaved like

to make some on purpose decisions

about how to change gameplay in response
to what the technology was good at.

I was sick to death of fantasy
games and, at the same time,

Doug Church, secret master
of gaming who should be

world renowned and famous,

he was also tired of
working on fantasy games.

He was in my office one day,
and he was talking about the

the game that he wanted to make,
and we just looked at each other and said,

'We should make this.'
You know? Paul Neurath was

intimately involved in that too.
He was running Looking Glass,

and we decided, 'Let's, let's do this.'

Everybody on the team
is a science fiction fan,

and there were all these ideas in
science fiction about what it meant to have

pervasive computers
everywhere because, remember,

System Shock and Underworld were written at a
time where the idea of a computer on every desk

was still strange, and so what it meant to
have pervasive computers around was powerful.

It was interesting, like,
'What's it gonna be like?

Are people gonna have computers in their minds? What
does that mean?' You know, 'What happens if AI wakes up?'

You are not welcomed here.

There's a reason why
the character has no name.

He's just 'Hacker.'

A lot of the early game is spent

creeping around and avoiding
conflict as much as possible,

because the Hacker wasn't a space Marine.

You know, he, he wasn't some warrior.

He could be a woman, actually.
There's no identity, there's no name.

There's no backstory, per se.

But, we allowed players to inhabit
that character, make it their own.

And, instead of doing what we told them to
do and feeling what we wanted them to feel,

we said, 'Feel how you want to feel.'

System Shock was clearly a cyberpunk game

and, at the time, everybody
was all about cyberpunk.

Including the System Shock team.

The freedom of movement in cyberspace
was pretty compelling, I thought.

'You're alone underpowered
in corridors that are oppressive.'

I think that, that was the heart of
the game, really, in cyberspace.

System Shock 2 was probably one of
the first horror games that I had played,

and I think I went into it, it's
like it was a standard FPS.

But, as the story started
to unfold, and I learned the

full weight of the situation
and discovered that

the only other person who I thought was alive
was just being used as a puppet by Shodan,

I mean, that's the kind of thing that still
gives me chills just thinking about it.

Looking back at the story of
System Shock, you know, it holds up.

It's, it's the kind of thing that could still
happen. It's still a very dangerous concept.

Who are you? Who are you?
My cameras and probes scan your body,

but you do not match any employee file.

I think getting to witness
Shodan's growth as a character was

one of the most memorable aspects.

She starts off as kind
of this childlike creature

with curiosity to, to begin experimenting

on things she sees as lesser.

I have complete control
of this entire level.

And, to see her slowly
grow into a character

where she's more omnipotent.

When my cyborgs bring you to
an electrified interrogation bench,

I will have your secret.

She's still beloved and
still comes up as one of the

great computer game villains of all time.

If you imagine a world where you're
seeing 3D games for the very first time,

you see emergent stuff
happen because, first, it's bugs.

You're like, 'Okay, well, I'm gonna put this
here and this here and the table here, '

And then, 'Oh, I can't get by the
table, 'cause the chair's in the way.

Okay, what if I make it so
you can push the chair in?'

You have to think about the
qualities of the things you're,

here are the air quotes, 'simulating"

and then figure out
how those characteristics

interact with other
things in the environment.

Now, the nature of the 3D world
has dictated a new type of gameplay,

and we would continuously have
this experience where the thing

that would happen in the real
world happened in our game.

There was a huge amount of emergent
gameplay just from physics like bouncing.

I remember people started to
bounce grenades around corners,

and that felt crazy because,
in the past, games were about,

'I'm in this room, and I can
shoot the stuff in this room.'

And, now suddenly, I can throw a grenade around
the corner to a place that's not being rendered,

and I can't see.
Is the AI even awake there?

That was a story that hadn't
been told by the game designer.

That was a story that was being told by the player
to themselves, and that was really exciting.

It has been a little
while since I've played

System Shock 2 or the
original, because we've been

playing the remake almost daily,

and I can say that, in the remake,
there is some emergent gameplay

that wasn't in the original.

We were watching somebody
playtest the game just recently,

and they threw a grenade, and it
went off, and it blew up a corpse

that hit a monitor hanging up above
that fell off and decapitated an enemy.

It was one of those moments
where it was like, 'Oh my god', like,

'I can't believe that just happened.'

These things sound really
dumb and, you know, really

just pedantic now,
but it was the first time.

Man, it was, like, so cool and, and
there were so many things in games

that probably happened for the first
time ever in Cambridge, Mass in our offices

or, you know, in Mesquite
with John and John

where there was some emergent behavior of a
3D world that, now, we don't even think about.

But, that was the first time.
We're like, 'Wow, we should...

That should be gameplay.'

At that time, we had to describe to people

that it was a 3D game,

and what 3D rendering
was and that, you know,

a lot of people still looked at 3D
games and were, like, 'Where am I?

Where's the character?' Well, 'No,
no, but you're in your own head. You're...

It's as if you're looking
through your own eyes.

We actually thought it was a good
idea to use every key on the keyboard.

So, you have two hands, one's
on the left, one's on the right.

'Hey, let's... Let's use the keys on
the left and the keys on the right.'

I, I don't know what we were thinking.

There was a, a Terminator game
that came out that used mouselook,

and I'll never forget. I, I looked over
one of my team member's shoulders,

and I just said, 'No one's ever gonna
use a mouse to look around in a game.'

I was just a little bit wrong about that.

You know, we were overthinking things.

We were making this very
complicated game with 3D rendering

with, you know, NPCs and
inventories and this big physics engine

and we were making the
game that we wanted to play.

The most exciting thing that
can happen in a game at any time

in any way is when

players do things that surprise themselves,

and even better is when they
surprise the people who made the game.

That's magic. That is what
games can do that no other medium

in the history of humankind
has ever been able to do.

There was a first person shooter
game that, uh, I didn't play back then

but, uh, while I was
doing the nerd episodes,

I played this Super Nintendo
game called Super Noah's Ark 3D.

How many Super Nintendo games
came out not licensed by Nintendo?

Just one, and it found the way.

By plugging an official Super
Nintendo game into the top of it,

it overrides the lockout
chip, and you can play it.

I had very, very little involvement
in that project. My involvement was,

'Hey, can you send a disc with the source
code of Wolf 3D for the Super Nintendo

to these guys?' And I said, 'Sure!'

It's the only game where you
can play as Noah going around

fucking up a bunch of goats.

I mean, he's just slingshotting all the animals
because, I guess, like the plot of the game:

the animals in the ark are
getting out of control or whatever.

So, Noah's got to, like,
put them in their place.

It's, it's hilarious.

Super Noah's Ark really
struck me as just being weird,

because it was sponsored by a company
that wanted to promote Christian values.

But, for me, the one that really made me just
roll my eyes was a game called Chex Quest.

Chex are fun, chex are high.

Now, you can get a free CD-ROM
game inside boxes of Chex cereal.

Chex Quest, a game
that came in a cereal box.

One green!

How is that supposed to be any good?
But, it was.

It was actually a pretty
good game, you know,

for something that was based
on a cereal and came in a cereal.

Chex Quest, a game
that used the Doom engine

to make a game where you're supposed
to be putting spoons inside of cereal.

It's a family friendly first
person shooter, an FFFPS.

You use, uh, zorchers which
are these remote control things

to zap these booger guys.

And it's, it's crazy 'cause my dream game

which was, like, really
stupid was Chex Quest.

The Flemoid menace is back
and threatening to turn our

snacktacular way of life into total chaos.

I always thought it would
never happen because it's like,

'How would I possibly get
General Mills, a cereal company,

to say yes to letting us re-release a
free packing cereal game from 1997?'

Join now and learn to zorch things

and then zorch bigger things.

And then, it just so happened that they
wanted to revive it anyway for '90s nostalgia,

and it was just like, 'Okay, the
stars aligned and made it happen.'

Chex Quest, still free, now in HD.

Join the Chex Mix Squadron today.

What I remember best about it
was there was a Brutal Doom mod.

Which enhances the gore and the violence.

Fuck!

How this takes the family
friendly aspect out of it.

When you have a game as
brutal, as Brutal Chex Quest,

you gotta have a brutal
cereal to go with it.

So, we did this skit at
the end of the episode.

Brutal Chex! It's Chex on steroids,

illegal steroids

made from broken
glass, rusty fucking nails,

and whole grain rice.

This cereal will start your day,

if it doesn't end your life.

'Have some Chex!' 'Okay, okay.'

Brutal Chex turns your
milk red from your own blood

pouring out of your
fucking screaming mouth!

50 free hours of America Online included.

Michael Abrash and John Carmack are doing
Quake, and so it's left to me and, uh,

John Romero and, later on,
American McGee to do all the levels

and the idea was, 'Well, we'll just do a
million billion levels that are fun to play

and then, we'll sell
this, and it'll be fun.'

At that time, you know,
I was 18, 19 years old,

and, a few doors down from me,
there was a guy who was driving

to and from work in a, in a Ferrari.

His license plate said, 'ID TECH,'
and that was John Carmack.

He let on that, 'Hey, I'm
actually the boss at this,

this game company down the road here.
Would you like to come and beta test

some of our games in the office?'

And he took me out to dinner one night and
said, 'Would you like to come work full time?'

We kind of could do whatever we wanted,

so everything was very experimental.

I'd say that the genesis of the
outdoor levels came from E3M6

in the original Doom.

Interestingly, that was the first
level to have a rocket jump in it.

But, that was a really, very
unique level where you were,

you started outdoors
and going into buildings.

It was really cool. I love that.

And so, when we were
starting to make levels like 15,

it was a huge, huge outdoor area.
It was the biggest, probably, I'd say.

And then, like The Citadel, MAP18,

Sandy had a lot of really cool
outdoor stuff in the center there.

So, yeah, it was really
fun making those levels.

It was really different, and it was us

exploring, 'What else could we do
with this game to make it different?'

Well, I did the Doom level Downtown

which I, I know a lot of
people hate, but that's the one...

That's the first level ever
done that was a big, open city.

The way that Sandy made
that level, it felt mysterious.

It felt like, 'Do I even
know the whole level?'

There are so many secret teleports
and all kinds of crazy stuff going on.

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

that, then, he did his city
level which was even better.

So, we were doing a lot
of playing off each other.

You know, we had American McGee making his little
tight levels where everything went in circles around.

You know, I was 20 years old at the time.
'Hey kid, go and

start building levels for these
games that are hugely popular.

I, I felt a fair amount of
pressure to do a good job.

You'll see a lot of my maps
have a sort of central premise

that's built into something
larger, and it's because

I felt, 'Alright, I've got
enough of a core here

to make that the theme for a larger story

that is this whole map.'

People are always asking me about
the crusher and it's funny, you know,

for maps like that,

there, again, were a lot of little
experimental rooms that were created.

It was a bit of a challenge sometimes
to design a map around the experiments.

Basically, I had a bunch of ideas
for little set pieces that I hadn't

found a space for in the other levels.

I think I actually had six ideas.

So but, of course, the level has
eight sides, 'cause it's an octagon.

So, I had to make up two new ones.

Another level that was super
fun to do was Barrels O'Fun

I decided I was gonna have a level where
I was gonna have a million billion barrels

and just let the players go nuts with
barrels, and so that's where that came from.

We did not think about more weapons.

We knew we needed to
have a, a cooler shotgun

for closeup stuff, because we just knew, in
Deathmatch, this was gonna be so deadly.

There were seven bullets that
were fired by the old shotgun.

There was 20 in the new one, so
you could really blast something.

Doom is all about timing, like reloading
your gun, reloading that shotgun,

you know, like it was really
important that you got the timing down

because, if you're alternating shots
with an enemy, and you're not dodging

behind a wall or whatever,
you're gonna take it in the face,

and it's, like, classic.
Everybody's used to that.

The icon of sin, that was basically
the name of the final boss in the game.

So, I went to Adrian Carmack and said, 'Give me
the biggest most impressive demon face you can get,

and we'll put it on the wall.'

And the idea was: I was basing it off the, the
legend of Baphomet and the Knight Templars,

and we'll have to shoot it to kill it. Meanwhile,
other monsters are gonna spawn and try to kill you.

We could have a really great sound

that you just dread when
you hear that cube come out,

And the sound is... It's called Fireball.
It's a really unique sound

that, like now, you can
hear in everything, this sound

and it comes from the movie Backdraft.

Some entity has to take
damage from the rocket launcher.

Usually, an entity always
looks like something,

but this is something you're never gonna see,
'cause you can't see where the brain thing is.

It's in the back. It didn't matter what it looked
like. It just needed to be an entity taking up space

that had a certain number of hit points and,
when it dies, then the game's over, right?

So, we had a little blue thing.

Well, it was getting really close to the game
shipping. We were almost done with the game,

like it's about to ship, and this
is the time where you would stick

hidden shit in the game
that no one else is gonna find.

Kevin came up with that
idea of John's head on a pike

that was gonna be something
just hidden in there from Romero,

and he wasn't gonna find it until
long after the game's released.

It's probably 11:00 at night
or midnight or something,

and I am, you know, no
clipping through the wall because,

'Why would I try and play
the game to just kill the boss?

I'm just gonna cheat
to where the circle is.'

So, I go, I'm getting closer to it.

'Wait a second.
Is that, did I see my face in there?'

And so, I go into where the circle
is, and there's not a circle there.

There's my head on a
stake, and I'm like, 'No way.'

I just went to Bobby Prince, uh, he's
in the, he was in the conference room,

he was still making music
and sound effects, all this stuff,

and I told him the story really
quick and 'This is what I need'

You need to record me saying this.

To win the game, you
must kill me, John Romero.

'And then, you need to pitch shift it,
reverse it and, like, make it sound evil.'

So, when the icon of sin sees
you, it's like: me, the icon of sin.

And I'm like, 'This is so great. It's
like a two-layer Easter egg', you know?

Like, 'This is gonna be great when it
comes out', and they can go, 'Haha, '

and I go, 'Haha?' You know?

As soon as American
McGee comes in the office,

he runs the game, he's like, 'Ooh, scary
evil background thing, backwards thing.'

He reverses it and plays
it, and he tells everybody.

And so, the secret was instantly

out the day right after
putting this Easter egg in,

but everybody left it in,
'cause it was just hilarious.

To win the game, you
must kill me, John Romero.

Tom Hall came to us during Doom's development.
He ended up parting ways with his software.

They were very, very excited to
have Tom, 'cause Tom was amazing.

And what they wanted Tom to do was, like,
make another FPS but, like, 'Make it your way.

Do whatever you want', you know?
And so, Tom's just like,

'Okay, what would I do?'

Rise of the Triad is the most
violent video game ever created.

Rise of the Triad was
originally meant to be

an Apogee-developed
sequel to Wolfenstein 3D.

Apogee wanted, obviously, to continue to,

to build on the franchise that had

you know, made them a lot of money.

But, I don't think ID software liked some of
the directional calls that were being made.

Yeah, we wouldn't go in
that direction with Wolfenstein.

So, call it whatever you
want, and you have a new IP.

So, that's what they did.

We had all these assets
already made for the game,

and so we just dropped the Wolfstein
part and just called it Rise of the Triad

and kind of reformulated the story.

The story was that Hitler wasn't
actually the master running the show.

There was a triad, three new bosses.

That BJ would have to deal with.

We had, like, a sort of
a, a more junior team,

but we had a lot of cool ideas,
and we had gone to a bazaar.

This one guy had a booth
of World War II memorabilia.

So, we got people from Apogee, you know,

and then 3D realms to wear the suits.

We would take digitized
pictures of them facing the camera,

and then we would rotate
the board 45 degrees,

take more pictures of them,
rotate it a full 90 degrees, and

and so, we would get eight rotations,
you know, at each of the 45 degree marks.

It would take literally a couple
weeks just to do one character,

and, um you know, the game had over

probably two dozen characters in total,

and what Tom Hall brings, he, he's got a lot
of humor that he likes to inject in games.

So, almost all the humorous elements
in Rise of the Triad were probably

from the mind of Tom Hall.

'What's, what's this game's thing?
What can make this stand out?'

You know, like, 'What if we just
make this thing really violent?'

And I was just like, 'Well, if we're gonna
make it really violent, I'm gonna go nuts.'

It has to be preposterous
as the rest of the game.

I think the fact that it was funny, it was campy,
it was different, it didn't take itself seriously.

You know, stuff like
the Excalibat, dog mode,

the gibs flying at the
screen, ludicrous gibs.

When everybody else was
playing, you know, Duke and Quake

I was playing Rise of the Triad.

I had the idea that you could, like,

have different characters that
could actually have different stats

that kind of affected your gameplay.

'Do you want to run faster?
You want to cause more damage?

Do you have more hit points?'
You know, that kind of thing.

Rise of the Triad is one of
the earliest games to have

different representation of
other cultures and people of color

like you can sort of choose yourself,

and that's, that's pretty cool.

Everyone at Apogee was
really proud of Rise of the Triad.

It was, um, our first internal game.

It had a lot of firsts
in it, like mouselook,

I think it had 11-player land play.

The first FPS to actually

have specific maps made for Deathmatch,

and it opened up new frontiers
for how we could design maps.

People had been playing Deathmatch only maps
for a while just from community homegrown stuff.

But December 21st at the
end of 1994 is when the first

commercially-made Deathmatch-only maps

came out in Marathon and Rise of the Triad.

Really interesting design choices,
really over the top weapons,

it had jump pads.

We modified the engine
to, like, have very tall walls.

So, I invented jump pads.

It's something that made multiplayer
in the original Rise of the Triad so

so crazy and fun, because it was just

you could bounce around on bounce
pads, amazing rocket launchers.

We played so many hours of
Rise of the Triad. It was amazing.

The weapon choice, you know,
the drunken missiles and the staff.

Flame walls, and nothing that's
on the floor can escape you.

Turn yourself into a dog, like
all kind of just wacky stuff, like

the types of things you wouldn't expect.

It was a spectacle you
could watch as a player.

When we were making Wolfenstein,

we put in a noclip mode
so we could get through.

We didn't have to use keys, so
we could just test rooms and stuff.

John and I were going
through the rooms as if we were,

you know, immortal creatures and, 'Ooh,

I look down on these
poor beings', you know?

And so, that kind of inside
joke, I turned into God Mode.

It was a blast to see the enemies run

when they realized that
you had the hand of God out.

About like, 'Well, if we have God
mode, what's the opposite of that?

Dog mode!' So, dog mode,

where you go down, and you
just bite people to death and so on.

It's so much fun!
Yeah, Rise of the Triad was

it just took it to another level for me.

I got the opportunity to work on
Rise of the Triad 20 years later.

It was, it was a little kid's dream come true,
and I'm still working on Rise of the Triad.

I love ROT. ROT forever, man.

The characters were iconic,
the weapons were iconic,

and it was just a lot of fun.

All those things, that was all
Tom, you know, and it was great.

I love how crazy it is, and
it's just, it is a nuts, nuts game.

Tons of people write me every week just like,
'Oh, yeah I played Rise of the Triad again, '

and my nephew loves it, so
that's all that really matters.

The first FPS we played, oh, that
was back, uh, it must've been Marathon.

A lot of people who grew up
with a Macintosh in the household

rather than a PC, Marathon was a game
that ended up on a lot of Mac computers.

When they were doing the Macs, they were wanting to
first push it as exclusively a business computer.

If you thought a really powerful business
computer was way out of your reach,

we've got news for you.

Then, as years went on, people were
always playing games on their PCs.

Apple was like realizing,

'We need to change our image.'

There wasn't a lot to choose.
Some, there was some really obscure stuff

that I wish I could find again,
games like Damage Incorporated,

"..reporting. Check the friendly fire!"

Damage Incorporated actually
ran on the Marathon engine

'cause it was one of the only first
person shooter engines on Mac at the time.

So, Bungie was known
basically for being insane,

because nobody owned a Mac, like
nobody wanted to play games on a Mac.

People who had bought a
Mac because they were like,

you know, cool sound design
people or art authors or something

weren't typically the
guys we sold games to.

I was in the graphic design industry for about
10 years prior to even getting into games.

Marathon was the only game

available on the Mac platform
that was any fun to play.

And so, we would get together all the time

after work and play
that for hours and hours.

Marathon was the one that I got hooked on,

because I was in an office,

somebody installed it and, uh,

that's when we started Deathmatching.

It was so visceral and
addictive and, just this feeling that

you're chasing down this person in
your office on the computer screen.

And they let you rocket
jump which was really cool.

People ask, 'Which was the first game to invent dual
wielding?' And I go, 'Well, it was Rise of the Triad

but it was also Marathon,

because they came out
on the exact same day.

I loved it.
I mean, they made their own Doom engine

and they made it for the Mac,
and it was exclusive for the Mac,

and it had a story.

I thought Marathon
was, first of all, gorgeous.

It also set a bar of what
should be expected.

I got very deeply immersed in it.

It was an important sideways way of
thinking about some of these things that,

uh, were extraordinarily influential.

Marathon was all about the story,

even though it used 2D sprites
and really simplistic 3D interiors to

drive your characters
around, there was so much

lore and so much history

that that small team at
Bungie had put together

for this very simple but very effective

first person shooter.

There would be no Halo
without the Marathon games.

There's a ton of DNA there for sure.

It's interesting to see where Bungie is now

as, you know, where they came from.
Maybe one day, they'll go back to making

those kind of shooters, but I doubt it.
I think they're,

they're probably just gonna
be working on Destiny forever.

I mean, you think about the
legacy of Doom, and it's enormous.

I mean, everything in the
genre emanates from Doom.

I remember, when we first
formed Logicware in 1995,

we would be working for a while and, every
now and then, we would just all fire up Doom.

So, it felt like all of us who
grew up with Wolfenstein,

oh, then we all got Doom.
Now, we are all up to speed.

Now, we're all good at Doom.

Now, everyone gets Quake.
Everyone is good at Quake.

I recently read a book called Hit Makers

which basically was talking
about how to succeed in the era

where there's so many
different forms of entertainment,

so many different gaming options, right?

And, basically, the formula that they
made was to take something that feels

familiar yet different, right? You know, you
look at Star Wars as a film and as a franchise.

Star Wars was old school, you
know, Western vibe but taken to sci-fi.

So, take something that, you know, feels kind of like
a familiar formula and apply it to something new.

My dad had gotten a new, like, Packard Bell
that had a CD-ROM drive and everything,

and I managed to convince him to
let me get a game for it, and I picked

Star Wars Dark Forces.

I remember thinking like, 'Wow, someone's
finally built, like, the Star Wars game.'

There is a magic to

being in the world of Star Wars. These are
things that you just only dreamed about.

It blew my mind that I actually
got to be there, like, at eye level

in a Star Wars game and walked
through, you know, this imperial base.

It just kind of pulled me
into the world of Star Wars

like I'd never been pulled into before.

Dark Forces was a very nicely done game.

I remember Dark Forces
having a pretty fast frame rate.

And so, I was impressed with that, and I thought
their collision detection was pretty nice as well.

You would glide smoothly along the walls.

You there!

You actually had something
that you were trying to do,

and you were gonna accomplish
something, and you're enmeshed in a world

where you weren't just killing everything.

I just became obsessed with it, even
though I was really bad at this level

where you go into the sewers.

I had no idea how to play that,
but I would play that first level,

stealing the Death Star plans
over and over and over again,

like I probably spent 30 hours
just playing that level as a kid.

And that was kind of a formative
experience for me and really

got me into the genre.

I had loved it so much that I,
every time I went into a store,

if I saw Dark Forces, I bought it.

I ended up with a massive
stack of Dark Forces.

At this point in time, we have worked on

over a thousand different games,

stuff like Doom, Quake,
Turok, uh, System Shock.

I've gotten to do Star Wars games which
is kind of unbelievable to me as a kid who,

you know, really loved Star Wars.

Innovation only comes

from when people decide...

'I wanna make a game for myself,

I don't care about your opinion, '

and then present something that's brand new

and who knows?
You might create a new genre.

Very impressive, General.
The Emperor will be most pleased.

I was friends with Paul Neurath who

renamed Blue Sky Software to Looking Glass,

and Matt Toschlog and Mike
Kulas were programmers there.

They wanted to start a game company.

They had some technology that
they think would be really cool,

and so we're like, 'Hey,
keep, keep me posted, '

you know, on whatever you
make, and we'll, we'll check it out.

Descent was called Project
Inferno while it was in development,

and they kept on sending
me VCR, you know, "builds,"

you know, I couldn't run it on my computer,
but I could watch the video of it.

And, uh, and it was really cool.

Descent was awesome.
It had something different to it.

During that time, developers
were trying to find a different

take on first person shooters.

And this is like really cool,
six degrees of freedom rotating.

It looks really good.
The, the technology is beyond

the Ultima Underworld technology.

I would love to publish this game,

but like I, at the time,
was too busy with Raven,

and so, I couldn't take on another game
on top of everything that was going on

with all the business, because
Doom exploded the world.

And then they just, like, go to Interplay.
Interplay, boom, publishes it,

and the rest is history.

When Descent was first
presented to us, it was really crude.

I mean, it really wasn't a game.

It was just a simulator of a little spaceship
flying in an interior of an asteroid.

Matt Toschlog was in
touch with Brian Fargo,

and Brian was out looking
for a lot of different games,

and we also started working with
Parallax on the development of Descent.

And so, there was sort of,
like, our foray into that space.

In Descent, there is no such thing as down

so, therefore once you get vertigo,

you spiral out of control.

The 360 rotation; I think that's the
thing that really surprised everybody,

because I remember, when
we presented at different

trade shows and presented to different
editors and publishers, et cetera,

like PC Gamer, um, they looked
at it, and they were all shocked.

The interface really surprised them.

People were just overwhelmed with
the ability of moving in all directions.

There have been numerous
people at, uh, Interplay QA

who got motion sickness
from playing the game.

While it was a decent frame rate,

it was still below 30 frames per second.

The average hardware of the time,

it ran between 15 and 20 frames per second.

I never got motion sick.
I, I thought it was great.

I could totally handle that.
You know, Space Road was the same.

You're rotating in space
trying to dock with something

and having to get used to the
rotating perspective and all that.

But, no one was really
ready for the 360 rotation.

And I noticed a lot of people at, at first

were getting lost, and that was one of the
reasons the Guide Bot got put into the game.

But, it was revolutionary,

and the delight that we saw from
people's faces was absolutely a thrill.

This is gonna be a really cool game.
It's so different than anything we're doing,

which is, 'A dude with a gun runs around.'

We, at the time, thought, 'You know,
we gotta go head to head with Doom.

We gotta just make some
comparisons straight away.'

And Descent offers all these
different types of combat experiences.

It's a true 3D space, Doom is not.

We had to distinguish ourselves,

because it was kind of a
shooter, but it really wasn't.

It was mostly like this sci-fi exploration

with great controls and also
some combat experiences as well.

Descent was something that they
brought something different, new,

and fresh to the genre,
so I think that's the way

why it stood out amongst all the other
games that were being developed at the time.

High speed Deathmatch with ships
inside of tunnels was pretty cool.

It was also the first title at
Interplay that we had a CD-ROM.

That was a big deal. One thing that was really
important to us: the cover image of the box

had to be dynamic and incredible.

We spent just a lot of time on screenshots

really getting that right trajectory.

Those are all the
pre-Photoshop days, right? So,

when we did screenshots,
those were real screenshots.

We wanted to create the
dynamic icon in the front of the box

and just kind of really
own that space in a big way.

Back in those days, for PC games, you
could do things that were really unique:

pull-out packages, really 3D textures.

Part of the game experience
was buying that box,

going to the game store and
picking up that package and just, like, '

'Ah, I've really got something here.'

I look back at Descent as something
I'm very proud to be a part of.

It was the thing, for me, where I realized,

'I'm in the right place.'

This is just breakthrough technology,
a new potential for gameplay.

It was like that spark of innovation Descent
was pushing the hardware as hard as it could.

I am here to kick ass and chew
bubblegum, and I'm all out of gum.

They love that one.

Hail to the King Baby

Todd Replogle was the
programmer for all the Duke games,

and he was working on a game that
he was calling Heavy Metal at the time,

because he just wanted that sort
of, you know, heavy metal attitude,

and I said, 'Look, you know, why don't we
name it after a character like comics do?'

So, we started batting around names, and
I remember I came up with the name 'Duke'

because I felt like it was a
good, strong, powerful first name,

and Todd came up with the idea
for 'Nukem' as the last name, so...

Bitching.

Really, the Duke Nukem
look didn't come about until

my partner, George Broussard, he
changed the hair color from white to yellow

and made it a short military crop,

and he gave Duke this bright, white smile.

Damn, I'm looking good.

It just turned into a fun
little platformer with shooting.

He didn't wear armor, and we had him do

crazy flips sometimes when he
jumped, almost like he's showing off.

You know, that was really the
roots of his character that we

embellished with each game.

I was kind of creative directing
over development of Duke Nukem II,

and I said, 'What is the
big thing about Duke?

Well, he's really kind of vain.

What if he collected his own memorabilia?'

So, he collects his own
memorabilia in Duke Nukem II.

I'm back.

And, Duke 3, it kind of
went over the top again.

It all really came together
with Duke Nukem 3D.

The initial version of Duke 3D,
they were just doing a bunch of levels.

It just wasn't turning out fun.

Kill me.

At one point, like I was
watching the Duke team members

work on the game 'till 5:00 PM,

say, 'We are done with work, '
and then play Doom together.

I just, like, pulled George in a
room, closed the door, and said,

'This game is not turning out fun.
Everybody is

stopping working on it and playing Doom.

You have to intervene
and make this a fun game.'

And, to George's credit, he got rid of the
previous head of it and took it over himself,

and that was turning out really fun.

They kind of, like, used a bunch of known
movie lines as, you know, Duke things.

Groovy.

Groovy.

In 1990, I moved here to San Diego.

In 1995, Lani Minella,
the casting director,

was in my studio to record an
automobile dealer commercial.

And she came in, we're
setting up the microphones

and I turned my mic on, and I started
doing wacky voices and being crazy,

Just, you know, to kind of show off to her,

and she said, 'Wow!
You've got remarkable range!

How would you like to act in video games?'

And I'd played a few. 'There's no voices in
video games.' She said, 'Well, there's gonna be.'

And there's this game called Duke
Nukem that I think you'd be great for.

The very first game that I
auditioned for, and I landed it that day.

Damn, I'm good.

Lani Minella was with me
in the studio as the director,

and she dialed up George Broussard.

George gets on the phone,
and Lani says, 'George,

tell John what you think the character
should be like. What is he based on?

'He's a badass character.
Who's that badass you have in mind?'

For some reason, he
thought Charles Bronson,

and I went, 'Oh, Charles Bronson, you
want me to talk like Charles Bronson?'

He goes, 'No, no, no, that's not it.'

And Lani suggested that I imitate

Clint Eastwood from Dirty Harry.

'So, you gotta ask yourself, do
you feel lucky? Well, do you, punk?'

And George went, 'I like that tonality,

but Duke Nukem is a roided out
huge muscular dude, and I, I said,

'Okay, I'll just lower it an octave.'

Well, do you feel lucky? Do you, punk?

And that was it, and I've been talking like
this now for what? 30 years? You know?

We could not have picked a better
voice actor for Duke with Jon St. John.

He relished the role to this day.

He played it with gritty
enthusiasm and just embraced

the direction that George
Broussard gave him for the character.

Oh yeah, I, I get requests for these
lines on social media all the time

but, of course, I've
found a way to monetize it.

So, now I just send them to my Cameo.

Jason King is chewing gum and
kicking ass on Kung Fu Hotdog.

And, guess what? He's all out of ass.

Duke Nukem added a level of tongue in cheek

machismo to the first person shooter genre.

If the only thing you know about first
person shooter is Doom and Quake

and, you know, demons and hell
and, you know, blah, blah, blah.

And then, you have this, this
completely over the top character.

I think the biggest impression
that it made on me was

that a game like this doesn't
have to take itself so seriously.

You know?

I ain't afraid of no quake.

I mean that was the first time I think I'd play a
game where the character had like a personality,

more like a '90s action film.

You know, Last Action Hero, Demolition Man,

like all these movies had
a bit of, like, an awareness

and, like, a comedy factor.

Don't give up your day job.

The folks at, uh, Triptych
and at 3D Realms and Apogee,

they came up with all the lines.
Well, they stole most of them.

Obviously, Duke Nukem's
lines were mostly stolen.

I have come here to chew
bubblegum and kick ass,

and I'm all out of bubblegum.

I think what happened with, uh,
Scott Miller and George Broussard was

they clearly were big fans of genre films

such as Evil Dead, and They Live,
and they basically just ripped lines

from those movies that
are classic iconic films

and kind of introduced it to a new
generation of kids that didn't even know

what those lines were from.

Hail to the King, baby.

Hail to the King, baby.

Oh, there were some lines that I, uh,

I was triggered by Lani
during the recording session.

For some reason, I find
the captain's log somewhere,

and I couldn't stop thinking about

a turd at that point.

Huh? The captain's log?
I can't do it!

Every time I think about it.

I could never say it without laughing.

Rocking!

When I first joined 3D Realms and

was working on Duke
3D, it was, it was a joy

because Ken Silverman's
build engine was awesome.

It, it had a lot of advantages over Doom.

It was very extendable,
and, and it was easy

for designers and
programmers to play with it.

He put together a demo for the build engine

in a very short amount of time,

and it was just, like, very impressive.

Build, really, was started
from a public announcement

from mid-software announcing
all the features of Doom.

This was in early '93. So I would
read through the features one by one.

It was obviously really ambitious,

and so I started prototyping.
I knew about the angled walls

and the ceilings and floors,
but the important thing is

it was good enough to
get Apogee's interest.

Groovy.

I actually used the trick, the big feature,

the ability to look up and down.

Nobody really told me how I could do it,

so I thought to myself, 'Well, hm, I
could just shift the horizon up and down.'

It might not be correct perspective,

but it'll actually allow you
to still look up and down.

Due to the limitations of the Doom engine,

they really couldn't capture cityscapes,

because the game only allowed

flat ground and vertical walls.

One of the biggest things I added that
really changed the design of everything

was the addition of slopes.

Duke, because it had the
ability to do slanted walls,

was able to do slanted roofs,

dumpsters that actually
had the slanted roof.

It allowed them a lot more
freedom and level design.

We had contract artists
that would come and go,

but the core group that
was in there every morning.

Evening, night was 8-10 people

and, uh, for that whole game,
there's two level designers:

me and Allen Bloom.

Allen and I basically had our freedom to

I was never told,
'Do a sushi bar' or, or...

'Do a, this or that.'
Once we had gotten a level

started, you know like, 'Okay,
it's gonna be a sushi restaurant,

and, here, I fleshed out
most of the geometry, '

then a lot of input came in,
like we, we tested every night.

♪ Born to be wild ♪

The abyss, where it's a whole canyon,

it has an earthquake halfway through where

stuff comes down and everything.

This is a big hallway that goes like this

and then changes when,
when everything comes down.

Hollywood Holocaust, the, the opening map.

Now, you had memorable
locations, the, the movie screen

that you could discover
the secret behind and so on,

arcade games in there that you could play.

Hmm..don't have time to play with myself.

You know, it wasn't a big map, but it, it
just set the stage for the entire experience

and got the game off on the right foot.

It was the first time in a
first person action game that

we, as players, had a,
a sense of a real place.

You felt like you could actually go there.

Somebody's gonna frigging
pay for screwing up my vacation.

With Duke 3D, their environmental design

with interactive environments
was so important to FPS games.

They raised the bar when they did that.

That's one doomed Space Marine. Groovy.

That was the first FPS
where the world seemed real,

like Doom was all these
weird space stations and these

hellish environments, and then Duke
Nukem was, 'This is like a city street

and this is a store,
and this is a nightclub,

and there's a pool table,
and there's a bathroom.

I can't really remember seeing any game prior to that
that kind of nailed that feeling of authenticity.

We can't compete with what Doom does well,

and it's a very dark, gritty, very serious.

So, we decided to do a lot of
things that Doom wasn't doing:

gave Duke Nukem a voice.

Those alien bastards shot up my ride.

We added humor to the game.

Yeah, die.

Interactive environments.

It felt like you're a real character,
because you're in real world locations.

That's the first thing.

The second thing is that, because
the game was so heavy on interactivity

it actually felt like you
were a person, like a hero.

Not just a video game hero
but a real hero in the real world.

Let God sort him out.

Well, you're gonna go straight to
talking about the strippers in that game.

Because that was the main thing I
remember interacting with at the time.

Shake it, baby.

I love that the animators
took the time to show Duke

perched on top of an
alien neck taking a dump.

That is just the best thing ever.

'Cause he literally does it and read
the new newspaper at the same time.

When you add in that interactivity, you
add in the, the character of Duke Nukem,

you add in there over the top
mentality and, you know, the,

the weaponry in that, that was in
that game, you had an instant classic

with Duke Nukem that took first
person shooters to the next level.

I mean, back then when
you're making an FPS on the PC,

we felt like the rule was,

'Well, the keyboard goes
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0,'

so we're gonna get 10 weapons. It's
like the first weapon had to be a pistol.

Of course, Duke had its own twist,

but they were very much derived
from those first five weapons in Doom,

even the fifth weapon in
Doom was the rocket launcher,

and the fifth weapon in Duke
Nukem was a rocket launcher.

Once we got past those
give basic once, we felt like,

'It's on.'

Come get some.

And, of course, Duke had some
innovations with things like the pipe bomb.

And the trip wires and the freeze gun.

There's not really, like, a
bad weapon in that game.

Even a pistol, like, has its place.

My favorite weapon is the shotgun.

It's a Mossberg, and it just
looks so cool, and it sounds

insane when you shoot with it.

Probably a devastator being
able to bust those things out

and just clear out a whole
room is pretty satisfying.

But, they're all awesome,
man, even the shrink ray's fun.

Like it's, it's just so
creative for its time.

Shrink people with a shrink ray, you could

you could go up and stomp on them.
I just thought that was

I smiled and laughed every time I saw that.

Originally, it was my, uh,

combat boots that were used as the boot,

and then, of course Richard
Gray will tell you later,

one weekend, they needed
to make an art tweak.

He wore his own combat boots,

That's my foot. Those are my...
I still have the boots

right here in Texas. He has a pair too,
but I can tell those are my blue jeans.

And he loves to brag about how he stole
my glory by putting his foot in the game.

It's down to you and
me, you one-eyed freak.

When I recorded the first
Duke Nukem 3D game,

Come get some.

I did not know there was any
kind of following whatsoever

until 1999 or 2000

when I got my first
invitation to a convention.

I was flown across country first class,

put up in a really nice hotel

and they pay me, and the fans
acted like I'm some kind of superstar.

And I was baffled by it.

I was absolutely blown away
that people came out to see me.

At the end of the convention,
they said, 'Hey, thank you so much.

You helped bump up our attendance by like

5,000 people this year,
and I'm like, 'What?

I can't believe anybody
even knows this game.'

And they couldn't
believe that I didn't know

Duke Nukem 3D was a big deal.

Let's rock.

Duke 3D was a game that

kind of put us at the
same level as in software,

so that was like, 'Okay,
we've arrived with Duke 3D'

So, Duke turned into a fantastic game.

If I had to pick between doing
the first Quake and doing Duke,

I, I would pick Duke.

I feel more happy about what we did.

It was so fun. I had so much fun
playing through that entire game.

They did what they needed to do, right?

That's why you still know who
Duke Nukem is now, you know, 20

20 something years later.

Game over.

Duke Nukem and I share
very few commonalities

except that we both like bubblegum.
Other than that, we're nothing alike.

The question is, do you have bubblegum?

Oh, damn, and I'm all out of gum.

All the four build engine
games that we launched

back in 1994, they were
all very, very different.

Unless someone told you
they ran on the same engine,

you probably wouldn't even really know it,

because you've just got
those vastly different themes.

It's like Duke's, like, the action hero,

Lo Wang's, like the martial artist,

and then Caleb's like the
horror movie kind of thing

Blood looked a hundred
times better than Duke,

fantastic art and genuinely creepy.

Blood was really special.

The subject matter was very horrifying.

Seeing all the horror
references sprinkled in

is just a real treat for fans of the genre.

My slave.

What is your bidding, master?

Even the cover had blood on it.

It had a lot of themes that were

not popular with parents who were primarily
buying these games for their kids.

Occultism is really intertwined
with this era of FPSs.

I don't know if it's something about, like,
the Satanic panic of the '80s or '90s.

You know, you've got Heretic
and Hexen and Doom, obviously.

People are really
obsessed with this idea of

these evil folks in
subterranean layers doing rituals

and, you know, we have to go
down there and stop them, I guess.

The difficulty of that
game is pretty legendary.

It's not for the weak and, um,

I think that's one of its strong suits.

It has its own arsenal of
weapons which somehow

breaks the mold and, and seems completely
separated from what Duke and Lo Wang did.

I love the voodoo doll. That's classic.
I'd love to see more stuff like that.

The dynamite, of course,
is one of my favorites.

Mostly because I think I've killed myself
more times with it than I've killed enemies.

I actually borrowed the original disc off a
friend of mine and never gave it back to him,

so my copy of Blood is not my own.

It's a classic and rightly so, I think.

You no mess with Lo Wang.

Back then, the whole first
person shooter industry

was ruled by 3D Realms and its software.

Duke 3D really showed that

Apogee internally could develop a hit game

and, um, all the seeds were there
in the original Shadow Warrior game.

And it started as a concept.
'Hey, let's, you know, do a

ninja version of Duke Nukem.'
'Cool, use the builders and go for that.'

Once again, we had a character
with humor, a lot of crazy weapons.

The sticky bomb was a natural evolution.

I remember talking with about that with
Allen while we were still working on Duke 3D.

Better watch out. Boom, boom.

I mean, the real gun, what
was the movie we saw?

It was an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.

You've been erased.

Eraser.

We're like, 'That's awesome.'
We just stole that.

Shotgun was really important to me
and, you know, Jim Norwood wanted a full

automatic thing and,
you know to me, the dance

that was happening where two
players both equipped with a shotgun

were kind of alternating
their point of attack

while trying to hide during
their point of vulnerability,

I remember feeling like, 'Okay,

what if it went in the other direction?

You know, the thump,
thump, thump, thump, thump.

Back in the '90s, every game that came out

had a leap forward in
technology that people

would be blown away by.
You know, it was just a tough world

releasing a game like
Shadow Warrior with an

with an engine that was probably
four or five years old at that time.

Shadow Warrior is certainly a very worthy

kind of cousin to Duke Nukem, I would say,
in terms of its, again, sense of humor.

That's no ordinary ring.

Definitely elements of that
would, would be seen as, you know

inappropriate and, and, and sort
of, um, culturally insensitive today.

You look like a stupid.

You know, nevertheless, it
represents a snapshot of, you know,

the games that were being made at the time,

Shadow Warrior lives to this day.
You know, we sold the rights in

full to Devolver several
years ago, and they keep

releasing new Shadow Warrior games.

In the new Devolver reboot games,

Lo Want is clearly
younger, he's more realistic.

He's less of a caricature like
we had with our original Lo Wang.

You find out that he's
a big fan of comics and,

and he's got other sort of
hobbies on the side and, you know,

nowadays, characters are not as
one dimensional as they used to be.

You know, Devolver's just done a
great job modernizing the game and

and making it more compatible

with our current ways of thinking.

So, when we first went into doing Quake,

the idea was it was gonna be a
lot more like a role playing game.

Quake was originally a game
that we started making after the first

Commander Keen Trilogy in January of 1991.

We wanted to make a game called Quake,

because Quake was part of the D&D
universe that John Carmack had invented.

And we did get to go on
an adventure with Quake,

and it was like the coolest thing ever.

We even put an ad inside of Commander Keen,

and we said, 'Quake, The Fight for Justice is
the name of the next game that we're gonna make.'

We started making the
game, and we just were like,

'You know what? The technology's not here.
We do not want to ruin Quake.'

So, four years later, that's
when we really started Quake,

because the plan was to do a full 3D game,

and now, we can actually
have a hammer of thunderbolts,

the Hellgate Cube, and all the
other cool stuff that Quake has.

We're always trying to do new things,

and 'What is the gameplay that we could do?

I don't wanna make another clone of Doom.

Can we do hand-to-hand combat
type stuff from a third person viewpoint

and, like, maybe we do some
FPS every once in a while?'

But as time went on, it took a
really long time to make the engine,

and the team started getting burned out.

It was pretty hard.

That was the project
where I did really hit a wall,

and I think that's a useful thing for people
to find out that everybody has their limits.

All the technology was so new.

John Carmack was inventing the plane

while he was flying the plane,

and we were the
passengers outside the plane,

you know, building things onto it.

At the beginning, we had
designers building maps

that just had to be thrown
away over and over again.

At some point, my office
ended up being next to John's.

He chose to have it be me

that he would come to and
say, 'Hey, can you test this thing?

American was super valuable at that point.

It was completely cool with
him that I made him throw away

his work every time I changed something.

I did put a lot of people,

practically the whole company,
through the ringer with that.

We're just spinning wheels the whole time,

because the engine
took so long to get done.

Part of the company doesn't
want to explore anything.

They just want to make another
FPS like Doom and ship the thing.

'We're done, we're mentally drained.'

And I wanted to do the
new game design stuff.

It's like we just had this
meeting and, all of a sudden,

everything that we'd done went to shit.

They're, 'Yeah, screw
these medieval weapons.

I wanna get back to
shotguns and future weapons.'

I'm like, 'Oh, fuck, man.'

Quake was the first time where I
did have to really kind of confront

the fact that, you know, no matter
how hard I work, I can't do everything.

It was the hardest project
that we had done from

a development process.

People complained about the brown

and gray palette, and that was
because we had so many colors per light.

The amount of colors with the light maps

ate up most of that VGA palette
which only has 256 colors total in it.

So, yeah, we were limited,
because we wanted more lighting.

We picked the colors that best
make us a Lovecraftian, dingy, dark,

unsettling, violent, you know,

blast fest, and that's why
the game looks that way.

I've always been a big
fan of horror and, in Quake,

for the first time, I think, I
was actually able to sneak in

actual Lovecraft stuff.

And one of the ways I did that is I got
a copy of my book, and I gave a copy to

id and, specifically, Adrian
and Kevin Cloud were reading it.

So, a lot of the monsters are based
directly off images from this book.

And I like that world.

It was very inspirational with, uh,

many of the characters, and we

worked on the characters
in a, a very unique way.

Kevin would design the characters

within a, a 3D program

and splay out the characters
so I could draw the skin.

One of the things that was a big improvement
was the Fiend, the leaping Fiend.

The big melee monster in Doom was the

we called it The Demon, the pink-y things,

and they were actually a pretty boring
monster. They would run up to you

and bite you but, the Fiends,

you're actually afraid of, cause
they jumped into you like a bunny.

You know, we had basically
four level designers and

and each one of us, you know,
was basically kind of assigned to

to an episode, and, and all
the episodes are really cool.

You know, they all have
very unique personalities,

and they're all very different
which is something that, I think,

makes Quake as magical
and timeless as it is.

One of the castles, The
Ebon Fortress, is like

sunken half in water,

you know, swimming through half the
castle before you can get out of the water

and play through the
other parts, and then there's

even more water in
other areas, so it's like

a really cool half and half thing.

It also let us do a lot more things with

verticality, you know, there's,

there's that level I do where
there's the pool of water,

beams over it where you're clambering
up, and you're getting the high end.

You can look down and spot things.

And then, we soon realized that,

if we have true verticality in the levels,

then, suddenly, this gives
you a lot more places to lurk

when you're trying to snipe
someone in Deathmatch.

So, that became a huge thing.

I would sit there doing experiments,

and I would have boxes that
were experiments on high gravity,

low gravity, you know, I'd do boxes that
were experiments on super high damage.

There were a lot of weapons that I
built that never saw the light of day.

You know, Romero would get
really pissed, because I would

I would invite him into a Deathmatch,
and then we would start fighting,

and he'd find that I'd written in code
for, basically, Romero-seeking missiles

that would fly through the map

and avoid walls and hit him.

I remember Romero
being, like, adamant like,

'That's not cool. Don't do that.'

But, for some reason, everybody found

low gravity to be fun,

and so it was accepted that, 'Okay,
American, if you want to build a larger scale

low gravity map, go for it.'

The Wizard's Manse is another like,
'That looks like a giant castle, possibly,

you know, mansion thing, '
which is where I staged the

the dragon shot in the early
screenshots that I released.

It's funny 'cause there are two levels that have
Disneyland inspirations, and that's one of them.

Almost the very end of
the whole level, you finally

get up to the top bridge, you would, like,

'Oh, nice, they're giving me some health.'
You run over and you go inside

the elevator, and you press the button,
and the door Star Wars closes behind you.

And then, you go underwater.

You start burping, because
you can't breathe underwater,

and this thing's taking you on a ride,

and you're dying, but I
just terrified the player

with this long underwater ride.

That they can't do anything about.
They cannot get out of it.

It's, it was really fun.

So, one of the coolest things
about the original Quake was that

Trent Reznor, rockstar Trent
Reznor, you know, worked on

not only the music but,
you know, the sound effects.

Trent reached out. It was serendipitous,

because I was a huge fan,
and Carmack was a huge fan.

You know, we were floored.
we were, we were fanboying, you know?

Trent's music really gave
it this personality, this vibe

this, this, this setting, this feeling.

So, when you hear the

ambient sounds of a Quake map,

you hear the music in the background,

and you hear the sounds of the enemies.

It feels good together.

That grenade launcher was a
combination of several sounds.

Some of them had come from
the Nine Inch Nails sound library.

Some of them from me doing fully.

I went up on the roof at the id offices,

and I was blowing up
fireworks, and I had long

PVC tubing that was, you know,
probably about this big around,

and I would blow up a firework
on one end and record on the other,

and that would create this
incredibly satisfying 'pwong' sound.

There's a sound when you pick
up the Quad Damage in Quake

that unleashes your inner demon.

It skips all the way through

your conscious brain and
just, like, you turn into a

violent reptile at that point.
I love that sound.

The rocket launcher had its own sound.
That was really great too,

but the feel went with that
sound which is why it works.

My favorite weapon in the original
Quake is definitely the rocket launcher.

Just 'cause of the skill,

you know, shooting that rocket

and then timing it.

Boom!

The rocket launcher was
obviously the most dominant

weapon in Quake just because
you could use it at any range.

It was reasonably hard to dodge,

and it did a lot of damage, and it
also enabled a lot of mobility through

through things like rocket jumping...

Rocket jumping, what?

When we released Quake, we were like,
'Ooh, this is going to be really great, '

you know, to see people play
through and all this stuff like,

uh, 'Level finished in 11 seconds.'
We're like,

'What is going on?'

And then, we watch these demos,
and they just, like, rocket jump.

They're like, 'What is that?'

Oh my god, all the levels, all of them.

And we're like, 'We're not gonna fix that.'

You know, like, 'If you're
really good, you've earned it.'

It is hard to rocket jump and, in those
early days, it was hard to rocket jump.

Then, that fed into eSports.

I definitely think Quake popularized
eSports, certainly in the Western markets

certainly in the Western markets,

pretty much everyone that was into online
gaming at the time, they played Quake.

The skill ceiling in Quake

is higher than any game that I can imagine.

So, the reason that Quake is so popular

for decades after it was made,

was because it pioneered
so many things at the time

that the aftershocks of

Quake can still be felt
in the industry today.

For the first time, we have
3D mouselook for aiming,

you know, and moving
around and Internet multiplayer

and an in-game console
for the first time to type in,

you know, change variables and connect
to servers and all that kind of stuff.

If you want to make a
great first person shooter,

start doing exactly what Quake did.

Movement needs to be as accurate,
precise and responsive as possible.

Second part is shooting,

making weapons feel
really punchy and powerful,

and that's a hard thing to do.

Going to my first LAN party

you know, walking into this,
like, student house where

gamers had driven from across the country

with their own PCs, and they were

all wired together, and they
were having a tournament

between these two Quake clans,

it felt like seeing the future.

It felt like, 'This is how
people are going to be

entertained in the future. They're going to
actually form teams and play against each other.

Back in those days,

you know, LAN parties were
a very popular thing to do,

and, over time, you know, these
events started getting pretty big,

went from, like, dozens of
people to hundreds to people,

obviously, eventually thousands of people.

As they started getting to scale,
they started talking to sponsors,

you know, video card
manufacturers, CPU manufacturers,

some people made a business about hosting these LAN
parties and events at conference centers, right?

They would charge people
admission to be a part of it,

and they would use some of that
admission in the form of cash prizes:

50 bucks, a hundred bucks, to a few hundred
dollars, at least in the early days.

The moment that you are actively engaged

in competition, it changes everything.

There's a click, and then there's a
passion, and then there's an obsession.

They're here in Seattle for the
World Doom Championships.

Deathmatch '95 was essentially
the first worldwide tournament.

They held multiple tournaments
to find the local champions,

and then flew all of us to
Microsoft headquarters in Redmond.

These games are getting really realistic.

I might even play in the
Big Doom tournament.

It was really the first big eSports event.

There was cash as part of the
prize, there was like a $10,000 PC,

and a lifetime subscription
of id software games,

which, which they
never actually lived up to.

Uh, but it's, um, it's fine.
I, I owe a lot to id software,

going from playing largely at home to, you
know, a stage at Microsoft headquarters,

where there's like hundreds of spectators,

not just like any tournament, like a
real world championship tournament,

probably the first true eSports event.

ESports were happening
as we were making Quake.

We were, like, pulled into eSports
discussions with lots of people.

They wanted to, like, buy up a supermarket

and turn it into a giant Deathmatch arcade,

you know, like this stuff was
happening all over the place.

People were incoming, with all their ideas

'cause they see that the
intensity of Deathmatch is a sport,

and that sport can be monetized.

I had built up a pretty well
known reputation online

as being, you know, essentially the
best Doom and Doom II player in the world.

You know, I think I was
like 16 or 17 at the time.

One day, I got a, I got a call
from the Wall Street Journal.

He was writing a story about,
kind of, the rise of online gaming,

and then it ends up being on
the front page above the fold,

you know, like everyone started calling me:

CEOs of a bunch of different big companies.

I was being offered thousands of
dollars, tens of thousands of dollars

to be sponsored by these companies.

You know, that was literally
the day I became a, a pro gamer.

Everybody could kind
of see where it was going,

and this idea of the Red
Annihilation tournament

where I put up my first Ferrari,
turbo Ferrari, as the grand prize.

Some people got to see the real range
of skill sets that were available there

where it's a great thing when
you take your local badass

and then you put him in
with a world class player,

and you find out it's like,
'No, you're not the top level.

You're not even in the right ballpark.'

A big Quake tournament
featuring a red Ferrari.

Right, right, which you won.

I ended up winning. You won, and you were too
young to even drive it at the time, right?

And you started to see the PGL and the CPL

and all those early leagues
that were getting teams together

and having venues, like giant venues.

By 2000, you go to a
CPL event and there are

5000 people there that
brought their computers,

and they hang out, you know?

There's no physical limitations. You don't
have to be a certain size like basketball,

and there's no geographical limitations.
There's really no gender limitations.

My clan, PMS clan,

it became a home for thousands
and thousands of women.

It gave the opportunity for, you know,

maybe almost a hundred to compete, you know,
professionally, at professional tournaments.

It's literally something
that was like a culture

for us in a sisterhood that

of a sport that just drove
a passion in all of us,

There's a lot that you have to sacrifice
in your life to become a pro gamer,

because it's, it's a full time job.

The people who compete,
especially nowadays, it's insane.

Training's pretty intense, uh, for
any team going into competition,

and we, uh, take it seriously.

Playing eSports, you're playing
the same game for eight hours a day,

every day to stay competitive

and to not embarrass yourself
at a tournament, you know?

Strategizing, it's the same as any sport.

In basketball, you're going
to have your playbook.

The competitive dynamics
were such that it was very legit.

Your great players rose to the top,

you could appreciate the skill of
the people that you're watching,

which I think is a prerequisite
for any sport to thrive

and, you know, we saw that
from the early days of games.

Going to these events with just a
whole bunch of people who just want to

talk and play video games,
it was like my people.

I joined Rare fresh out of university,

and they had just finished Donkey Kong Country
so they were really famous and successful.

I, I couldn't believe I got a job there.

They were still doing a lot
of 2D sprite-based games

and, after about three
months, Martin Hollis,

the team leader came in and asked me
about working on a James Bond game.

Nintendo bought the license
and had given it to Rare and said,

'Would you like to do something with this?'
Rare weren't too sure

because, obviously, film license tie-in
games at that time were notoriously bad.

Martin had said to them,
'Well, I'd like to do it,

but I want to do it on the new
console that we know is coming out,

and, at that stage, that was Project
Reality which became the Nintendo 64.

Breathtakingly realistic 3D video
entertainment ever witnessed,

Project Reality.

Which we knew very little about other than
that it was going to be very powerful in 3D.

Project Reality will bring
to home video players

the same types of astounding
visual effects seen in movies.

I had just done a 3D modeling
course at university in Bournemouth,

the only course at the time
that did 3D computer modeling.

When I went to Bournemouth
University back in 1993,

I literally sat next to Karl Hilton.

When we graduated, he got a job at Rare,

and I said, 'Oh, is this something
I could do?' And he went,

'Yeah, we'll see if we can swing
you an interview.' So, he said,

'All you need to do is just tell him
that Virtua Cop is your favorite game.'

Help me.

So, that's what I did. I talked about Virtua
Cop, even though I knew nothing about it,

but he told me all the
stuff I was supposed to say,

and I got the job
before I left the interview.

The thing that was fun about Virtua Cop
was it set up all these great gun battles

where people would jump out from behind things and
try and shoot you and you had to react to it and

and the camera would narrate
you through the whole game.

You could set up really fancy gunplay

and so, we felt that
lent itself very naturally

to something like Bond
where he's, he's a great shot.

The on rail shooter was how we started.

If you look back now at the
original footage, it just felt weird.

It would make you look left or look right

whereas you actually
wanted to look the other way

because guards were coming the other way.

We weren't sure at that point if the

the console was really going to
be powerful enough to do proper 3D

where you could roam around, and we
wanted to keep the frame rate really fast

and, actually, the performance on the
early emulators that we had for Nintendo

was really good, so we got all enthusiastic and
decided, 'Ah, we don't need to have it on rails at all.

We'll just be free roaming', and I
remember Nintendo sending us a little

almost manual of things you shouldn't,
shouldn't do with the new console,

and one of it was, says, 'Don't
try and do 3D first person shooters,

because it'll be too much.'
But, we kind of just ignored that.

♪ Violin Concerto in E Major, "Spring" ♪

We were in this old farmhouse.

Some of the teams were in
what was called, you know,

the stables, because they
were converted stables.

We were all newbies, and we were making this
license game which wasn't typically Nintendo,

so no one was really interested in us.

We started just about the same time
the art department started on the film.

♪ Golden eye, I found his weakness ♪

So, we get chauffeured down to Leavesden
Studios in the back of this Mercedes.

They gave us full access, so
we walked around all the sets

as long as they weren't filming at
the time and took photos of everything.

We went round St. Petersburg,

we went round the airport set,

we went round the, the big end sequence set

where all the computers were and everything

because, at that time, we had
this thing called a digital camera.

Introducing the digital camera!

Which didn't exist in 1994.

It makes everything you do look better.

We had this massive, massive brick

and we used that to photograph everything.

Most of the textures in Golden Eye were

were just scans of the photos that I took.

I've still got the photographs that we took from
Statue Park which is one of the sets I built.

I come from an architecture
background so, suddenly,

it was not being, being a 2D sprite artist

but being a 3D thinker that,
that made all the difference.

Karl was the guy doing all
of the architectural elements.

I didn't move into doing
the background until later on.

I built the Jungle area and Statue Park.

A lot of that was left up to me
because we had a lot of photo reference.

So, I essentially had
a map and a floor plan,

and it was like, 'Right, just populate
this area and give it some blinds

and put some, lots of statues
in it that we have reference for.'

The dam's a perfect example
of how GoldenEye was

very, very random and badly planned.

Duncan Botwood, he wasn't
an artist, he was a designer.

He went and blocked out the dam,

the main masses of the dam and the
mountains and the road that led up to it

and sent it to me, and I
open it up, and it's like, 'Woah,

this isn't gonna work.'

Which is fair, you know, because, you know,
Duncan's job was to get the design of the level

based on the movie and
how we were going to use it.

So, at that point, it's
like, 'Okay, how am I...

How am I going to make this work?'

- I can do it.
- Then, get on with it!

When I was designing the
layouts, it was all based on doglegs.

So it felt like you were
looking at a lot but, actually.

What it was actually having
to draw wasn't much. We had a

system where I could put in elements that would, as soon
as it wasn't on the screen, it would get turned off.

So, you were literally just walking
around in a cone of what you could see.

The train depot is full of those big crates

because effectively what I was
doing there was creating another maze

where I could block off the views, so it feels
like you're in a big space with lots of things

but, actually, you're effectively in
an interior space without a ceiling.

I had a sort of, like, steep learning curve
because I hadn't done any of the levels at all.

So Karl taught me about how to make
the textures and how to make them work,

especially for things like the trees,

because you can only have so many polygons

and, if you've got a jungle level,
you're trying to make it out of

millions and millions of flowers
or trees or what have you.

If you look at GoldenEye, it's
almost a black and white game

because that saves us a lot of memory by using a lot
of black and white textures and then coloring them.

The archives in St.
Petersburg is a perfect example where

you see a couple of
corridors that he runs down,

and you see the main library where he swings
across and goes out the window into the tank area.

One of my favorite things in the world is
when you get into the tank on GoldenEye.

You know what I mean, right?

Suddenly, you're in the tank.
Suddenly, you're daddy? Yeah.

That's a great moment in gaming.

But, you weren't always
shooting in Goldeneye.

You were doing puzzles,

you were figuring stuff out.

GoldenEye was seen as
a Bond adventure game.

That was probably one of my favorite
bits that he comes in through there,

and there's a guard having
on the toilet with a newspaper,

and we thought, you know,
'It's funny to do those things.'

So, being able to recreate it was great.

You're late, 007.

I had to stop in the bathroom.

I was the character builder,
and I did all the animations.

I built Roger Moore, I built Sean
Connery, and I built Timothy Dalton,

because we had an all
Bond version at one go.

And we were told early on, you know, you've
got access to the whole Bond universe.

We discovered later, we didn't.

We only had the right for Pierce Brosnan.

Sorting out the permissions
with Sean Connery and his estate,

it became too expensive.

When they did some of the
playtesting, everybody would play a Bond,

and they did first one to 100 kills.

Martin won it by one kill, I think.

It was B Jones, the character artist, who

put the suit on.
At the time, it was a cutting edge suit,

and we weren't sure what we needed.

It was her and Duncan
Botwood that did most of it,

I would get him set up
in the motion capture suit.

I would run the actual system, and
he would become my body if you like,

and we had a magnetic
system called Flock of Birds.

The system would sit on a shelf

up on the side of the
wall and wires would run

to Duncan. So, if you can imagine,
we had to be extremely careful,

because the wires were only so
long and, if he wanted to do some

epic deaths, we had to sort
of, like, be very precise with it

because, literally, he would
yank the entire thing off the wall.

Ahhh!

And it was just sort of, 'Just capture
everything we can and just use it.'

Once we started going in and we
realized that it looked really good,

so it's like, 'Okay, well, what if we...

If we do the shooting body parts, we need
to do all the animations for that as well.

We had a list of moves
that we needed to capture.

So, it would be shot in hand
but recover, shot in hand and die,

because you could die
from a hand shot, obviously,

Grab your leg, grab your left leg,
grab your right leg, grab your arm,

you know, grab your head,

do a roll over, and then
come up with your gun,

and then shot, get shot
from the knee position.

So, all of these things
were considered as part of it.

If we wanted to do a body hit,

I would tell him to close his eyes,

because the last thing you want with
motion capture is for someone to tense up.

So, I was like, 'Just relax,
and I'm going to shoot you.'

I would sneak up behind him or
sneak up in front of him and literally

whack him in the shoulder,

and you would then get that
pushback or that push forward

and, sometimes, I would
literally knock him to the ground.

Ooh!

Yeah, he did suffer for
his art, that's for sure.

So all the main characters, we
had their photos, and we could just

scan them and stick them on the thing.
Obviously, we're very limited to how

complex the models could be. They
had to be very basic face shape and then

all the information on who the character was,
was done through the texture of the face.

And, at that point, it's like, 'We
need more characters than we've got,

because we've got to have all the guards.'
So, the obvious thing was,

'Well, we'll just use our own faces.'

We would take the photographs and I would

cut them in half and then split it over,
because all the promotional photographs we had

were all lit from one side, so I
would have to make them work.

But, because they
were only, like, this big,

you know, it was very, very forgiving.

B Jones who did the art got into the
habit of, you know, changing them a bit

so making them look a bit gruesome.

Ahh!

I'm on one of the guards, and
I've got a big scar down my face.

To have your face in the game seemed amazing,
because most first person shooter characters look

generally hand drawn or modeled
characters and, suddenly, you had photos.

We didn't just have Dr. Doak
and Martin and Karl and all that

we had the groundsmen,
we've got the kitchen staff,

we've got the kids from Rare,

we've got some random plumber...

Mamma mia!

That came in one day. That's why, when
you see on some of these, like, Wiki pages,

it's like, 'Who are these people?' They're
just random people that came into the building,

There was a point where we were wondering
whether you could be able to actually

scan in a photo and stick it in
GoldenEye for the multiplayer levels.

Yes, with Game Boy Camera,

you can turn pho-tography
into fun-tography.

That was a little beyond what we could do.
In the end,

Well, actually, Xenia Onatopp's breasts.

They were particularly memorable,
because we had to try and figure out

the best way of getting the best
shape out of the fewest polygons.

This time, the pleasure will be all mine.

All the hands in GoldenEye are, of course,
all boxes because they're all like this,

because they have to hold guns, but that
was the best way we could come up with that.

But, they still had six texture maps
on them that were all drawn by hand,

because you had this
one, this one, this one.

That was kind of modeled off my hand.
Everybody's got clubbed hands in GoldenEye.

So, we all had our favorite Bond movies

and I thought, 'Well, if I can build
anything from any of the Bond movies,

what do I want to build?' And it's like, 'Oh, I want
to I want to build the Moonraker set.' You know,

let's do that, and we'll turn it into a
multiplayer, you know? Great, fantastic.

We had this huge book of
guns at work which was basically

Jane's reference book of guns.
So, you knew the firing rate.

You knew how many bullets it would take,
you know, and all of these stats went into

making these guns work as you see them.

So, they are as real as we could make them.

I mean, the club's famous for
being horrendously inaccurate

and they actually give the gun some
character because, up until that point,

things like Doom, they'd had funny
names like BFG and they did things,

but here, you had a whole series
of guns which were just bullet guns,

because it wasn't a sci-fi thing.

It's James Bond. So, 'What do
you do to make it interesting?'

And it's like, 'Okay, well,
this gun has a higher fire rate,

but it's really inaccurate.
This gun, it makes a great noise,

But, we should have the golden gun. It doesn't
look great, but it kills with one shot.'

That's it. You know?

GoldenEye was the
seminal first person shooter

on consoles that kind of introduced
the idea of first person shooting

to a console generation of players as well as
multiplayer, four-player split-screen gaming.

The first FPS game that I
played was GoldenEye 007.

It was a game as I was growing up

and, right at the
college year starting out,

my friends and I would get drunk and

go home from the bar and play.

You'll sit down and play it with a
bunch of your friends and we would just

stay up for like 10 hours
straight just playing.

We wouldn't even realize that
we had stayed up through the night.

It was never planned.

We were playing a lot of
Bomberman in lunchtimes,

and we were just having so
much fun because it was four-player

and, in the evenings, we played a lot
of Doom on the Unix machines. We had

network Doom, then we just
thought, 'You know, we have to get a

a split screen shooter in on this,
because it's just too much fun not to,

and we didn't know if the, if
the console could handle it.

That was just around the time
that Steve Ellis joined the team.

Very, very quickly he
had it up and running.

Simon Farmer, who's a production manager,

came over one evening and saw us playing it

and asked, 'What's that?' And it's
like, 'Oh, it's a multiplayer GoldenEye.

It was, like, that was a surprise.

You know, you're supposed to be finishing
this game because it has to be launched.

Instead, we're busy
making a multiplayer version.

I mean, it's deeply unprofessional.

We were a bunch of newbies
who never made a game before.

So, the initial reaction to
Rare was, 'Can you please just

focus on what you're supposed to be doing?

Which was perfectly
reasonable on their part.

Nobody actually liked
playing slappers only,

but we love just running around
trying to slap each other to death,

like it was just the, just the
stupidity of the whole thing,

like trying to slap
somebody playing as Oddjob,

like, you know, they're out there all the way
on the ground, and you're trying to hit him,

like there's just something
appealing about that

to us, like, you know,
12 year olds or whatever,

whatever age we were
at the time playing it.

And it was just funny, because, you know,

'slapper' means something
else in England, of course,

so it was a kind of a play on words to
see what we could get away with, you know?

This is going to be, you
know, the new controller.

I wish I had it still, but we
got sent a prototype version,

and we're like, you know,
'What on earth is that?'

All first person shooters up to
that point had been based in PC,

and they've generally been mice driven

with the analog little stick. You know, we
felt that the shooting game was so important,

because you've suddenly
had fine adjustment.

The control was the number one thing
that really felt good. It was almost like,

'That's how you do it on a console.

That's how movement should work.

We didn't have too many
expectations, you know,

We had a great time making it.

We saw everything that was wrong with it,
like you always do with your own creations.

You know, we knew that the
frame rate was ropey in places,

there were bits that we wanted
to do that we didn't get to do,

lots of bits of narrative that we dropped.

And then, it wasn't until, I think,
it was the E2 show in Atlanta,

when we turned up with it almost finished,

Nintendo put it on a load screen,
and everyone was turning up playing it

and then, they were coming
away saying good things about it,

you know, and that was the first indication

that we had something
pretty good on our hands.

GoldenEye, load a Rumble Pak, and
see how it feels when 007 meets M64.

Well, there's that famous
quote from Miyamoto,

where, you know, a
delayed game can be good,

but a rushed game is forever
shitty, something like that.

You know the quote,
everybody knows the quote.

He wanted James Bond to go around

a hospital right at the end and shake hands

with all the people that Bond had shot,

which was just the most bizarre,

bizarre request of like, 'Why?

Why would you want to do that?'

And that's one of the reasons why
the bodies then began to disappear.

We did have a version right at
the beginning where we developed

this series of cards and what
they would do, they would

show the blood coming out of
the body, and it was hideous.

It was not a typical
Nintendo product at that time,

clearly, I mean, they've
tended to do, you know

lots of much more children-based
games, and this was clearly

not a child-based game, because you were
James Bond and James Bond kills people.

It was in the rental charts for two
years, which was absolutely stunning,

but it was such a slow burn, GoldenEye.

You know, it was never that, 'Oh my
goodness, we've had this massive hit.'

It was this very, very long,
slow burn which, obviously,

still is, because we're doing
an interview about it now.

None of us had made a game before,
none of us had worked together before.

I couldn't believe my luck.
My first job in the industry,

working on the cutting edge console
at a company that was world-renowned,

working on technology that everyone
was getting very excited about,

and almost no one had a chance to use it,
but I had two of them on my desk, you know?

And we were making a Bond
game, and I love James Bond.

So, you know, from my point of
view, I couldn't have been happier.

That was my first job out of college
after learning computer animation.

I was an artist, I managed to get
a job, I managed to join this team.

It's a hell of a thing to
suddenly just drop into.

It opened doors for me,
something rotten over the years,

to say that I worked on GoldenEye.

This is a good story, I
hope you have enough film.

Doom was just murder murder murder murder.

'Oh, I see something! Murder. Oh! Puzzle'

That was the whole plot

of pretty much every single game made that
is made in the first person shooter genre.

Go from Wolf, Doom, Doom II, Quake,

that's the plot. But, Quake II

opens up with this full motion movie

of you being in a drop ship.

It reminded me a lot of Starship Troopers.

Remember your training,

and you will make it back alive.

Flying around, getting knocked off course.

We'll see what we can do. Holy shit!

And then, when you get
into the very first room,

you see the debris of where
you came into the ceiling,

and you see your pod and it's like, 'Okay,

now I'm actually in a real environment,

and I'm the intruder.

By the time Quake II rolled around,

we're experiencing a sea change
in the people who made up id.

At that point, Romero had left.

Having people come in who had
significant development experience

led to this dramatic shift in

the way that the game presented itself.

We knew we wanted to do

something different. We wanted

themed enemies, wanted a theme world.

The idea for the story was

taken from The Guns of Navarone.

The Guns of Navarone.

It's this World War II story
where the Allies have to

take up the Nazi guns so that the Allies

could land on the shore.

You go to Stroggos in
the single person pods,

because you were too
small to be hit by the big guns.

And then, you had to land on Stroggos,

you had to find the big
gun, got to take it down,

so then humanity can
finally attack Stroggos.

We, the rest of humanity, wish them luck,

and Godspeed as well.

I'm pro Quake II, man.
I'm another one of those guys.

It's so funny that people hate
on it for doing something different

which is really odd to me because

do you just want the second game to do
the exact same thing the first game did?

I've never understood that argument.

I always like changing
themes from game to game,

generate new ideas.

I mean, it really should
have had a different name.

We knew it had absolutely
nothing to do with Quake One.

People outside the industry

do not have a good understanding of
how challenging it is to name a product.

Every word has been used,

practically every pair
of words has been used.

One of the guys came up with WOR, W-O-R,

which I, honestly today, think was
a way better name than Quake II.

You come up with a bunch of
cool stuff, you send it off to lawyers,

and they come back, and they tell you
all the dangers of using any of the things

that you put on your list,
and we just got frustrated,

and we were like,
'Screw it, it's Quake II.'

Looking back, probably not
the best business decision.

It was a lot of fun to work on,
not just a straightforward shooter

like we had done in the past.

We rarely interacted with each other

on the actual designs we were producing.

You know, 'This is your
Canvas, you paint it,

and each one of us put
our own individual stamp

on the areas we created.

We wanted to focus on a single experience

in a themed world with a unique look.

You play through it, it makes sense.

You're not just suddenly,
you know, off on a tangent.

You had an overall objective which

kind of helped the player immerse
themselves in the story and the experience.

We also had the ability to make

hub areas where you
could go into one level,

you could go out, you could come back.
We could tell a better story.

The one big secret area that I did

that kind of defined how the
game was supposed to work

which was I built a
tram car into that level.

If you rode it around 13 times,

there was a panel in the wall,

it opened up and showed you a
goofy looking comic book character.

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
kind of bubbled into my head

and, in that book, he had
the Bugblatter Beast of Traal

which is the dumbest
creature in the universe.

That kind of slammed
together with my sense of

characters being very
influenced by Chuck Jones,

you know, just kind of
ridiculous characters.

I think Doom, Doom II, Quake, Quake II, Quake
III, they were all like very different beasts.

Quake II was a slower game.

The railgun really changed
the dynamics of the gameplay,

because it did so much damage at
essentially, you know, infinite range.

But, the railgun was literally ripped off from
the movie Eraser with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I'm back.

You can thank Arnold
Schwarzenegger for the railgun.

A lot of people don't understand

the subtleties that make
weapons in first person shooters

feel really good and
really powerful and punchy.

Great shotguns usually have a little

clinky delay before they shoot

which makes them feel more powerful.

If you look really quick,

the weapon kinda drags along a little bit.

It feels a bit more floaty, but
it still feels as precise to shoot.

There's a lot of little details there,
screen effects and so on that makes

weapons feel really punchy
and crunchy and alive.

Plus, it brings back the BFG and it's
like a really cool version of the BFG,

you know, which no one ever talks about.

But, I'll talk about BFG and every
other Doom game, but it's like,

'It's right here, man, you
know, what about this one?'

We could, uh, create prettier areas
because we had coloured lighting,

which many people forget, but it's
the first game to have colored lighting

uh, which was very exciting at the time.

There's a lot of really cool elements
in that game that I think get overlooked,

like it's got some great body horror
stuff with this alien race that are, like,

harvesting every species they can find

so they can continue to survive.

It would've been nice to
have it actually be damaged

where you shot on the body but,

technically, we just
couldn't do that at the time.

So, yeah, just another
added texture of grossness.

I wasn't gonna complain.

I do feel that.

Quake II is more special than
I think people give it credit for.

You know, we did a lot
of things, again, that had

never been done before.

And with such a small
team to create such a unique

and different experience, a different
world, in a pretty short amount of time

was truly remarkable.

I do think it gets the short end
of the stick of the three Quakes

but, in some aspects, it's my favorite.

Well, I think Colony defined a lot of

what we think of in terms
of first person shooters.

That's one of the reasons
Tom Clancy got in touch with me.

David and Tom came up with the idea

that Tom would provide some IP,

and they would make a game about it.

Colony is the first time
he'd ever experienced

a story in a game

versus just playing Pong or something.

The first trial run we did was the game
called SSN. It was a submarine simulator.

A lot of the SSN team
wound up being the core team

that developed Rainbow Six.

And so, once SSN was a moderate success,

they're like, 'Oh okay, we should
spin out a separate company,

and that would, that was
going to be Red Storm.

So, the original idea for Rainbow Six

was created by a guy named Mustafa Famer.
He said,

'Why don't you do a game based
on the FBI hostage rescue team?'

We're like, Oh, that's kind of cool.
That's a neat idea.'

Tom started introducing
me to some of his friends,

and one of the groups he
introduced me to was the

FBI hostage rescue team in Quantico.

They took me to one
of their training facilities,

and they were going to
have a live training session.

I'd never see anything like that:

black helicopters that fly over these
buildings, all dressed in black ninjas

who repelled down onto the top of the
building, and they start blowing shit up.

It's an organization with the
resources and the authority

to fight terrorism wherever it flourishes.

So I call Tom up, 'You
know, we gotta do this.

It's the most amazing thing.
We have to do a game.'

He said, 'I like that.
I want an international force.'

It would be composed
of the best and brightest

counterterrorism experts
from every country.

And he said, 'If you do
the game, I'll do the book.'

It would operate in absolute secrecy,

its existence known only to the
most senior government officials.

Its codename is Rainbow.

The storyline revolving around,
like, these radical environmentalists

who were intending to destroy
all of Earth with a pandemic,

that was the original story I created,

and Tom decided he
liked enough to write it.

The Tom Clancy games were interesting

in that they were first person but the pace

was, like, very slow and methodical.

I wanted an FPS that I could win at.

I was 30 years old at the
time, and so my twitch reflexes

were not as good as they had been.

I couldn't beat the 18 year olds,

but I felt like I had, like, a
lot of tactical knowledge,

and it's like, 'I want a game
that rewards a player like me.'

You have to do the planning, 'I'm
gonna do this, you're gonna do this,

you're gonna do this' and spending

hours planning and minutes executing.

The intersection of one shot,
one kill and managing a team

intersected really, really
well and was a pure accident.

I didn't want them to be superheroes.

I wanted them to actually
feel like real human beings.

We wanted gunfights to be realistic and,

and, realistically, very few people survive

being shot even once.
You have your team has six,

and it's kind of like you have, you know,

six times you can get shot.

Tango down.

I think the biggest thing that we
added, I think, was the targeting reticle.

You had crosshairs before,

but I think that we were the first people

to ever have an expanding
and contracting reticle.

We kind of thought that, like,
the shooting would be the fun part,

and what we discovered by accident was that

it was as much fun to sort of
sneak around and spy on people

and plan out what you're going to
do as to actually do the shooting.

And so, all of the future
level designs we did were

based around having long approaches.

Your mission is to retake the
Belgian Embassy in London.

What I remember about the,
the embassy level was, um,

we demoed it at E3, and the lead artist,

a guy named Jonathan Peden, was

demonstrating and he was mic'd up.

He actually sent his team

upstairs to rescue the ambassador,

and he was just kind of
showing off to everybody

that you create this plan
and, you know, they would

they AIs would go off and execute it, and he
was talking, he wasn't really paying attention,

and his AI team actually
rescued the ambassador

and came back down the stairs,

and Jonathan was so surprised,
because this usually didn't work.

The AI was kind of shaky at this point

that he just saw some
bodies coming downstairs,

and he shot the ambassador
in the head and killed him.

And he's, he's mic'd
up, he's like, 'Oh, shit.'

And he's like, 'Oh, no, no' and...

But, I mean, that was the point we realized
we actually had something really, really cool.

We'd done this, like, little PC game,

and we didn't have a good
sense of how it was performing.

And then, all of a sudden, I was in all
these meetings where we had to discuss

how it was going to be migrated to console,

and I'm like, 'Oh, I
guess people really like it.'

Take them down.

So, that's where Rainbow Six came from.
It was literally that phone call.

We just had, like, a vision
and kind of stuck to the vision,

and it kind of worked out.

And I was like, 'Oh my god,
this is the best game ever.'

but I want you to know that you
deserve all that and more. ♪♪♪

You knew, when you
signed on with this crew,

there wouldn't be any
parades or medal ceremonies,

but I want you to know that you
deserve all that and more. ♪♪♪

For a short period of time,

Quake II was the

first person shooter
game that everyone played

until Unreal came out.

So, back in the day, a
gentleman named James Schmalz

produced a couple of games,
Epic Pinball and Extreme Pinball,

which were huge breakout hits
for Epic back in the Shareware

era in the 1990s.

James was a very talented
artist and programmer

who could basically do it
all, and he took kind of his

tremendous art skills and
started applying it to 3D.

Early versions of Unreal
were kind of terrain based.

James wanted to make a game
where you were mech in a cave

where, if you think about it,
doesn't make a lot of sense,

'cause there's not a lot
of room for a mech to go.

Eventually, that started transitioning
into Tim Sweeney's involvement

and development of the engine
and subsequently the game, Unreal.

We talk about FPS as a
genre that has, for decades,

always been a representation
of new technological features,

and Unreal was maybe one
of the best examples of that

id, back in the day, was infamous
for being Carmack's Studio.

You know, at Epic, we had a little bit
better of a balance, I'd like to believe,

of having design versus tech.

Tim Sweeney and the programmers
came up with an ability to make water

that looked glistening and
looked beautiful in the environment.

But, now, the player is
gonna swim through this.

Mark Rein, the very, very savvy
businessman that worked with Tim Sweeney,

cornered him. He's like, 'Tim, you
know, we should make our own engine,

and we can sell this.
Not only should we sell the engine,

we should also partner with
licensees, give them feedback,

and give them the actual support on the
engine, and then make the engine better

and work with them as partners'

which led to the burgeoning Unreal
engine business that it is today.

Unreal seemed to be that point
in time when it was more about

moving through a world, and it
just seemed to be that was now,

instead of running to the exit
sign and pressing that button,

it was like, 'No, you were, like,
progressing through somewhere.'

Prisoner 849 escaping.

You start off in a prison
ship, and then that level ends

but, then suddenly, you're
on like a giant alien planet,

and you're kind of running around for a
bit like, 'Oh, where am I supposed to go?'

And then, you find the mine entrance,

and you start going through all these
mines and you come out of the mines

on, like, the top of these mountains.

We didn't really have cutscenes.
We basically had the premise:

the player is a prisoner, they're on this
floating spaceship that's a prison ship,

crash lands in the Bermuda
Triangle of the galaxy.

All these different aliens and creatures
and spaceships and environments are there.

That tied it all together.

We'd let the player just kind of
find the story as they went through.

For me, pacing is everything.

Id's games were always at 11,

and I'm a big believer that,
if you're always at 11, like

it's like the person who
shouts all the time like,

eventually, you just start tuning them out.

You know, you have to kind of have those
ebbs and those flows of those moments,

and I did the very first level of Unreal,

and you really don't have any fights in that
environment. It's basically just setting the tone:

you're in this crashed spaceship,
and then you start getting

teasers of the monsters
that you'll later fight,

which was a technique I learned
from, you know, being a fan of the

first Alien movie where you really don't get to
see a good look of the alien until Act Three.

It just seemed to have, like, this dynamic

soundtrack at the time too.
The music in that game is still amazing.

That seemed to work in tandem
with what you were playing.

Like, it wasn't just like, 'Okay,
now I'm playing this level,

and it's playing that heavy metal
track that I've heard twice already.

It was like, 'No, this is like a
completely new soundscape.'

So, about once a year, when my wife and I
like to pick an actor and actress that we like

and burn through a lot of
their movies, one year, I'm like,

'Let's do Jean-Claude Van Damme.'

And so, I fired up Hard Target,
which I hadn't seen in years,

and there's a famous scene in there where

Jean-Claude Van Damme
doesn't just shoot a bad guy,

he kicks a gas can in
front of the guy's head

then shoots the gas can which explodes.

Now, I was working on Unreal, we had this

shock rifle with a primary
which was an instant laser beam

with a slow-moving orb that came up that you
could use as the alternate firearm, like,

'What if you could shoot your alternate
firearm and make a mega explosion?'

Your alternate weapon
mechanic does at least

allow you to kind of fold
two things together, right?

So, you have two ideas that you're
carrying around at any given time.

I can bounce a set of flat pellets
off the wall to catch somebody,

or I can lob a grenade a
longer distance on the right quick.

That's a form of player creativity, right?

So much of the first Unreal and later Unreal
Tournament were developed virtually right

in the early days of the Internet,
and I remember sitting in my apartment

in Southern California. I got a phone call
from Mark Rein. I'm playing Quake One, right?

And he's like, 'You need to download this
mod for this. It's called The Reaper Bot.'

Suddenly, I'm offline, but
I'm playing against opponents

that are as good as human players,

and I was like, 'What is this?'
And Mark's like, 'Yeah, there's this

this programmer, a network Programmer
out of IBM, this guy named Steve Polge.

He coded this up as a mod himself,
like, and we're going to try and

recruit them to do the AI for Unreal.

Years later, Steve came on board,
wound up doing really, really cool AI

for the Skaarj and all the creatures in Unreal
which later transferred over to Unreal Tournament

and the AI in Unreal Tournament,

and it's yet another
example of something cool

coming out of the mod scene that
winds up being massively influential

across the entire business.

Back in the 90s, when Unreal came out,

it was still on 56k dial up.

So, to be able to just play multiplayer against bots
that would still kick your ass was pretty appealing..

We had to manually path the environments.

We had to, like, run tests with the bots, follow
them to make sure they didn't look stupid,

to make sure that they were
playing as good as human players.

You don't really see bot AI in games
anymore, probably because it's too

time consuming to develop
and code, I would imagine,

but I know that a lot of the AI
that they used for the bots in

Unreal and Unreal Tournament was basically what
just got carried over from the single player

which, again, is probably why
that single player was so good,

because it actually had challenging combat.

I had all these crazy ideas for
what the game could be called, like,

in hindsight, incredibly generic names like
Dark Earth and things like that, right?

And, after so many email battles,
so many in person verbal fights,

Tim finally said, 'Look, this is it. We're
just going to call it Unreal, and then

the marketing came out where they're
like, 'It's called Unreal because it is.'

It just worked.

That was the game that cemented
myself as a creator in the business.

Not gonna lie, that was some
of the hardest years of my life.

I was 16 hours a day, just working.
It was sleep, work,

sleep, work, sleep work, pounding
Mountain Dew, cases of Mountain Dew.

I don't know how it
didn't get kidney stones

but, at the end of the
day, it was worth it.

Everything ultimately happened for a reason.
It turned out great, but it wasn't easy.

Die.

I'll tell you a story about Duke.
The very first E3 we ever went to,

the whole team went, and Duke has come out

as the hot game of E3 in 1996,

and we're walking around, and
we don't want to leave the hall.

We literally are still walking in
the hall after they're tearing it down,

and then these, these two
European guys come up to us,

and they ask us, 'Did you all create Duke?'
And we're like, 'Yeah', and he goes,

'Hey, we'd love to talk to you.'

They had built this spider to where
you could climb up this little ladder

and go inside its belly, and
that was the meeting room,

and on each of the legs is
a monitor from the games.

So, we're sitting there in a spider's belly

with six people in a belly
that's designed for four,

and they asked us, 'Have you ever
thought about starting your own company?'

And we looked at each
other, and we're like,

'No, we haven't until right now.'

Quake: Scourge of Armagon was my very first

game where I got to actually make the game

instead of market it, so I
designed the characters,

I designed the weapons,

but we added to the universe.

I loved it. We knew what we were doing.

Every time we showed him something they
were like, 'Yeah, that's good. Keep going.'

That team created some of the most iconic

levels and Quake to date,

including levels like DM1,

the very first space level ever.

It's not like I invented the
automobile, a very, you know,

somebody would have come up with floating,

you know, in the open, void space,

but I was the first.

I started it at the office, and
people would walk by and say,

'What are you, What are you doing?' And I said,
I've described very basically what I'm doing.

'I'm making this flat.' They said,
'What are you wasting your time for?

You're never gonna get the frame rate of
these people, you can see the entire level.

So, I stayed at home and, and
got it going to where it was playable

and then had people start
to play it, and they were like,

'Hey, this is a great idea, '
and I'm like, 'Hey, I know.'

Having made Duke and a Quake game,

we had a pedigree at that
point where, when we sat down

to decide what SiN was going to be about,

we had a history to pull from.

We wanted to change the way
video games stories were told.

Hostiles are armed and extremely dangerous.
Approach with deadly force.

We really want it to feel
like you're in a comic book.

Hey, that was a good shot.

And Joel Thomas came
in and started designing

the characters, and I was able to
direct Joel in the designing of the world.

So, it really shaped up to be

a great comic book-like video game.

Not so fast.

We had such incredible level designers.

We wanted to create more
experiences within that single level,

because most games, at that point,
once you run through the hallway,

there's no reason to go back.

And we thought, 'What if you made
it so that, depending on what you do,

there's a fork in the road, and you can't go
this way, 'cause you didn't do the right thing.'

But, you can do this one,
because you did that thing.

We decided to create action-based outcomes.

So, your actions in the
game really mattered,

and it changed the levels,
it changed the narrative,

it changed the outcome to change
whether or not you could find a secret.

If you want to live, get out of here.

It was really a way to create this depth

for the real fans who wanted to enjoy

a much deeper experience.

It sounds like a great idea
until you start having to playtest

all these different
permutations of the player path.

And it turned out to be a real nightmare.

Die, you ugly son of a bitch.

We thought players would
play the game more than once.

'Okay, now I'm gonna
do it and go this way.'

We never got any feedback
if that was any good,

because all they knew was linear,

and they went that way and not
thinking that you can go this way.

They just didn't think this.
So, it was a big waste of time.

The release of the original SiN is, has
definitely a lot of mixed, mixed emotions.

This incredibly big ambitious game,

and it had so much great content,

but it was also released with a lot of bugs

up against a titan like Half-Life.

It never would have beat Half-Life, but it
would've been the Pepsi to their Coca Cola.

Tell me, how do you expect this to end?

We had not revisited the SiN franchise

after the initial launch
and the add-on pack,

and I started designing
what would be SiN 2.

And I wasn't telling
anyone I was doing this,

just me and the concept guys.
I was doing it because I knew in my heart,

'One day, we're going to do this.'

Doug Lombardi, who was
the vice president of Valves,

asked me, 'Hey, how would you
guys like to reboot the SiN franchise

and utilize the Half-Life
2 engine to do it?'

'Yeah, I think we want to do that.'

Trust me, he knew
exactly what he was doing.

We knew we wanted to make episodic content

but, when you make episodic content,
we still need to have it at a price point

that makes sense for the
support of the developer.

And so, we said, 'How do we make a
$20 game that plays more than four hours?'

Well, we came up with
the dynamic difficulty system

so that depending on
how good the player was

determined the difficulty of the game.

The AI started responding
to how they played.

One of the coolest things
that we did with SiN episodes

was we sat a professional eSports player

down next to a person who had
never played a first person shooter,

and they finished within
60 seconds of each other,

and they both turned around and said they had the
best experience of their life playing a video game.

We were just doing these
things, because they made sense.

You know, we were fans
and gamers ourselves.

That's the great power of
being an independent developer.

We were doing things, because
that's what we wanted the market to do,

and we decided that we would be the example

within the market that made that possible.

I'm a visionary, Blade.
I will change the world.

My name is John Parker Hammond.

I was born on March 14th, 1928.

What follows is a record of
certain events in which I took part

between the years 1980 and 1997

on an island I'll call Site B.

The thing about Trespasser is
that it has a whole bunch of systems

that probably would have worked if we had
six months or nine months to finish them.

The project got started,

basically, because I became really obsessed

with locomotion and

modeling characters

dynamically rather than
as animation playback.

DreamWorks was trying
to figure out what to be.

Steven was really interested
in Jurassic Park at the time,

and so somebody offered me this
like, 'Hey, you can do anything you want

if it's in the Jurassic Park universe.'

Welcome to Jurassic Park.

The crazy son of a bitch, you're dead.

I was like, 'Okay, cool.'
So bipeds, quadrupeds,

got it, done, I could work on that.
That'd be fun.'

That was exactly how much
deep thought went into that.

Six left.

I remember the wavy the arm,

so you always have your arm extended

in front of you, and it kind
of just bumps into stuff.

There's some very, like, kind of
glitchy and funny physics to the game.

We went too far. We had it so
the weapons could catch on things

and, like, you really were
simulating all that stuff,

because I was trying really hard

to explore this idea of

really giving you the feeling
that you're somewhere.

Dropping the HUD was a
direct result of that Looking Glass

thought process of
simulating the experience.

Looks like 20.

I had this idea at the time
because I was like, you know,

an extreme young, like, art school idea

that anything you had to
put on a HUD was a failure.

It's like your high school
English teacher saying,

'You know, show me, don't tell me.

What is it like to be low on ammo,

trapped on an island with real dinosaurs?'

'Okay, it's not like
min/maxing like a number

in the corner of your screen, right?
We have to do better than that.'

Five,

Four.

The overarching story of Trespasser
that caused it to not be finished

was that we were at a brand new publisher

who didn't yet know that young
teams was something really promising,

needed to just be, like,
given the extra time to finish it.

Like, 'Well, you know, you reached the end of your
budget. And so that's it, we're shipping this.'

And I was like 29. I was like, 'Okay.'

So, there you go.

But, well hey, there
are a lot of ideas in there

born of the experience of trying to do

immersive storytelling of trying to tell a
story with an environment that lives on.

The main switchboard
is temporarily unattended.

You know, I always want to be that
guy who takes credit for that I was a

great genius, and I saw into the future.

Eh, no, I mean, like these
are pretty obvious ideas,

just I was lucky enough to be
one of the first guys trying them out,

and so I saw clearly what needed to happen,

needed to happen, needed
to happen, needed to happen.

Good morning, and welcome to
the Black Mesa Transit System.

This automated train is provided
for the security and convenience

of the Black Mesa
Research Facility personnel.

We started getting early
previews of the Half-Life content,

and I remember that having
a dramatic impact on my brain.

I was just blown away. I was like, 'Oh
my god, this is cinematic storytelling.'

The time is 8:47 am.

Honestly, Half-Life kind of made
everything else look lame to me.

Current topside temperature is 93 degrees.

It just took FPSs to a whole
different level, in my opinion.

No smoking, eating or
drinking are permitted

within the Black Mesa Transit System.

Half-Life, for the first time, it felt you
were kind of invested in a character and

and what happens.
It's not just killing the monsters.

There was the idea of,
you know, an ordinary guy

who isn't equipped to deal with
the problems he's forced to confront.

I mean, that's a really
compelling narrative.

More lives than your own
may depend on your fitness.

You've never played
this kind of game before.

This is something new. The quality

oozed out of every moment and
every image and every encounter.

Low clearance security, please contact

I remember there
was a, a load lifter, like,

that had four legs that was
picking up stuff like a forklift.

So you would see, 'Oh yeah,
there are people working here.

There's just...
This is a living breathing place.

I think what's so special
about Half-Life is its pacing.

You're on this train on your way into work

which is very different from

the shooter's that preceded it, right?

It's passive. You're just sort of watching.

Missing a scheduled
urinalysis or radiation checkup

is grounds for immediate termination.

The exciting part about that was just like
just showing people and setting a tone.

It's about storytelling where
you are the protagonist,

and you get to choose what to look at,

and you get to pick up on
what different clues there are.

You can play this again and see things
that you probably hadn't seen before.

Now arriving at Sector C test labs

you're already committed. ♪♪♪

But, what it does is it
sets up the character,

it sets up the world, and it just
immerses you in the experience,

and then, when the story
unfolds and the action starts,

you're already committed. ♪♪♪

Half-Life was a game that taught
everyone in our industry a lesson.

This story is, like, built into the levels.

It's built into what you're
seeing in the game.

It's always around you.

Weren't you supposed to be in
the test chamber a half an hour ago?

There was enough player freedom
that players could feel a sense of agency

and actually experience
agency to some extent.

Oh my god, what are you doing?

For me, the launch of Half-Life was
really when Day One was released.

That was a preview version that
had, like, the start of the game.

And that was when we actually
got to hear reactions, like,

from other game developers,
you know, from the press.

People saw that and were
just, you know, blown away.

Why do we all have to
wear these ridiculous ties?

You are not expecting
anybody to murder you,

you're expected to just
badge in and get to work.

Welcome to the HEV Mark IV.

Which is what happens to you,

and then you get to your job,

It seems to be...

you push the cart,

and then hell breaks loose.

Shall we begin?

Like, why does everyone
care about Half-Life?

And people say, like, 'Oh, the story!' and they,
they go and they look at the story, and they're like,

'That doesn't look like a
terribly interesting story.'

and it's like, 'It wasn't the story.
It was the way the story was told, right?'

Get to the surface as soon as you can, and
let someone know what stranded down here...

Black Mesa was really a coherent place
that you felt like you could understand.

It was a set of labs, you know,
you see scientists working in the lab,

you come back, there's an
explosion, and it's destroyed,

and the areas change, and you
felt like you really understood it,

and you understood the different parts.

So, it's really up to the level
designers to maintain that.

They wanted it to feel seamless.

Their ambition was that it
would actually be seamless,

that they would be able to load in advance,

and we wouldn't feel those
levels, but it never quite got there.

Input/output on the computers
was never quite good enough.

By the time we shipped
the PlayStation 2 version,

we did some nice hacks in there
where it was just like a brief hitch,

and then you're in,
because we were able to use

the fact that a PlayStation
2 had a PlayStation 1

basically living inside of it,

and we use that to do
that work ahead of time.

The cinematics if you
can even call them that

were always seen from your perspective.

I think the reason to not
have Gordon Freeman talk

was more of a stylistic
thing originally just to kind of

keep it more about what was
happening in the game world

but, definitely being put in that
dude's shoes the entire time,

that's the whole essence
of the genre, isn't it? ♪♪♪

The other thing I remember about
Half-Life is just its amazing sound design.

Gordon Freeman's silence makes room
for the audio in that game to really rise

and fill the space with
something memorable.

Cool little UI that still
has some of the most

iconic UI sounds ever as you
select your different weapons.

The health dispenser, the crowbar
when it's hitting different things,

the Headcrab. They really resonate.

One of the most exciting
parts of Half-Life is actually like

you've spent all this
effort battling your way

through these aliens to get to the surface.

The soldiers, they're
going to come save us.

But then, you get there,
they're killing the scientists.

They're cleaning up the whole place.

Oh, there's not just a story to this game.
That is a real twist.

Nothing is safe.

The first time I remember really realizing
that half life was something special

was the first level when you
encounter the soldiers, the Marines,

and I was hiding for a second and I
saw a grenade come flying over the railing

and land on my face, and
it blew me up and killed me.

That was the first time ever
in a game where I was like,

'Oh my god, like, AI can do that?'

Nice hit.

And then, you start playing it, you
can hear them like communicating

and talking to each other.

Which was just, like,
revolutionary at the time.

They would say what they're going to do.

Yes, sir.

They would say like
'Reloading' or 'Grenade!'

Grenade!

The soldiers, the bad guys, the
civilians, the scientists, et cetera

really made the game feel

like you're in a world, and Valve

successfully immersed you in that.

Half-Life said, 'This is
how it should be done.'

The way they taught the player

how to solve puzzles was
really, really interesting.

They'd always introduce an element of

the big puzzle to come in a
way that was accessible and

doable so that, when you
got to the bigger puzzles,

you already had a sense of,
'Oh, this is what I have to do, '

and I think it was just absolute genius.

We had talked to Valve about
the idea of an expansion pack,

because Valve was very of
the mindset of the mod mindset,

and Randy Pitchford, he was in
the process of forming Gearbox,

and they had been kind of
pitching to do some different projects

for Sierra, so here's a great
opportunity where we can take

an expansion pack and just kind of

start evolving and adding to the franchise.

Anyone out there got a
good view of the LC yet?

Here's the deal, we got
to make a game here.

Let's start with somebody else's IP,

'What's out there?' and we're
looking at Valves' game Half-Life,

and this looks amazing,
and I have this idea,

and the idea was to be the
soldier and the soldiers perspective.

Freeman could be anywhere.

We worked it out. I got really
specific and detailed in my budget,

my plan, and I was able to get
to a point where I could do it for

$750,000, and they said yes.

Randy Pitchford and I got along,
we've been friends for years.

I think they finally realized, like
many producers and developers did,

after they finally
listened to my demo reels,

that this isn't the only voice I do,

and so they were kind enough
to, to put me in that game.

Rise and shine ladies!

My name is senior drill
instructor, Dwight T. Barnes.

The first and last words I want
to hear out of your mouths...

What is your major malfunction, son?

Sorry to the audio guy for
this going all over the top.

Sound off like you got a pair.

And it began that way but
then, as we continued to record,

we toned it down into something different.

Mounted on the wall below
me, you will see a PCB.

But, the initial recording
sessions, when I was

screaming like R. Lee Erney, were hilarious

I wish I still had the tape.

Go, go, go!
Run up and over those platforms!

Move, move, move!

It was really fun to just kind of

experiment and allow them to add horizontal

story details into the Half-Life world.

That was really additive
and really exciting.

When I flew up there, I
think it was the end of January

of 1999.

I had a deal done, and it
was underway with the work

so that I showed up to the Electronic
Entertainment Expo with a frickin' disc,

and I had two maps that I
had built and some new guns

and some characters that Steven Bond made,

and we did a demo of
Half-Life: Opposing Force

at E3 of 1999 not even three
months after that first conversation.

I remember first meeting
with Gabe about Half-Life.

His whole pitch was,

'We're going to make
a first person shooter,

but it's going to have a
really compelling story, '

and that's why Half-Life will always
live as one of the classics of the genre,

because it's the first one where
they really did that and did it right.

And you can see the influences of Half-Life

in many games even to this day.

Gabe said once that Half-Life
was like his love letter to Trespasser.

That just made me cry.
It was probably the feeling

of having been on an Olympic team

that lost the medal last Olympics,

watching the team win the
medal at the next Olympics.

It was, like, awesome, but super painful.

I think that all of the things
that I felt were important

about immersive storytelling
and giving that experience of

being somewhere were there

and refined, so they really weren't.

Yeah, there are revolutionary games,

but all I think we need is,

'Let's do this thing a
little better each time.

Let's do it a little better each time.'

You know, 'Maybe we'll
fail but let's at least try, '

and Half-Life was,
'Let, let's do this better.'

It also had an interesting
effect on Deus Ex..

I am rather looking forward
to this analysis, aren't you?

Maybe you should try getting a job.

Did you understand that last announcement?

There are a lot of ways to define success.

One is turning every
player into an author of their

of their own experience.

The more you can do that,
the more game-like your game is

and the more you're
advancing the state of the art.

Warren had been in the game
industry already for a while

and, one day, I heard, 'Oh my god,

Warren Spector's team has
been let go from Looking Glass,

and I'm like, 'What?
Why would they do that?

He was making The Dark
Project which was actually Thief,

you know, so he was, like, making
this really cool new stealth game.

Warren Spector, one of the
most legendary guys in gaming,

and his team basically had two weeks
to find a new source of funding or job.

So, I called up Warren and said,

you know, 'Hey, so can
I, can I come down there

and try to sell you on Ion Storm?'

You know?
And he's just like, 'Sure, why not?'

So, John Romero and I

drove from Dallas to Austin
in his bright yellow Humvee

playing air guitar the whole
way down while driving.

When I am driving, and
I'm listening to music,

and it's metal stuff, I have my
hands on the steering wheel,

trying to play guitar while I'm driving,

you know, just, you know, whenever I could

hold onto the steering
wheel and do something.

Thrashing to some hair
metal for the three hour trip.

When we went down there, I told Warren,

'You can make anything you
want, use any engine that you want,

and take as long as you want, and

you can have as much
money as it needs to do that,

and he's like, 'What?'

Troubleshooter was a
description of the character

that you were gonna play.

Jake Shooter, the ex-CIA
operative who goes rogue,

Figured he was your type, a real hard ass.

I wanted to make a
game set in the real world.

It was a flawed concept from the start,

but what wasn't flawed was

the idea of player empowerment
and genre matchup.

So, to that extent, Deus
Ex was the logical outcome.

It was a pretty clear
expression of that hope

that we could let players solve
problems the way they wanted.

What Deus Ex captured,
for a lot of us I think,

was freedom and openness.

It was giving you gadgets
and tools and abilities,

essentially, to sort of
manage an environment.

It was one of the first games to give

the player agency on the
way they wanted to solve

a challenge in a level, like you
could just run and gun in there,

or you could sneak and
hack to get through a situation.

That would just really kind of opened
up what first person games could be.

You're not allowed to say the word
puzzle at my studios or on my projects.

You can say 'problem, '
you can say 'challenge, '

because, in my totally
arbitrary artificial way,

that means multiple solutions, you decide,

and the way I like to structure games

is you see a challenge,

you make a plan, then you execute the plan.

You see the consequences of that plan,

and you're now confronted with a challenge

driven partly by me, or
my team more precisely,

and partly by the player's action.

I remember a place in the
game that I had played 100 times,

and I knew there were
three problems in this space

that had to be solved separately,

and I watched this tester hiding here,

moving this object over there,

maneuvering himself
in a particular position,

so he couldn't be seen.
He got out the weakest weapon in the game,

took one shot, and solved all
three of those problems at once,

♪♪♪and no one on planet
Earth had ever done that before.

That tester created his own
experience, told his own story.

That was way more important
than any story I could ever have told.

That's the kind of empowerment we want.

I remember Warren's pitch for that game.
It was like,

'Everybody else is going,
you know, more broad,

like you need more levels, more monsters,

more of everything, show off the graphics.'

And he was, like, small
and deep was his game,

really intricate level and
world design without having

to worry about how many enemies
you're trying to throw on the screen

at once or frame rate or this or that.

In the immersive simulation
genre, when we're doing it right,

when we're doing our best I should say,

the game is tuning itself to
players, because the game is not

about how clever and
creative the designer is.

It's about how clever and
creative I am as a player.

If you're gonna dictate to
me, just go make a shooter,

you know? And there's nothing
wrong with that, by the way.

Shooters are wonderful. I love them.
I just don't want to make them.

You've got 10 seconds to beat it before
I add you to the list of NSF casualties.

Easy bro, just having us a conversation.

Five seconds.

In 2291 in an attempt to control
violence among deep space minors,

the New Earth government
legalized no holds barred fighting.

The classic arena shooter, I
think, is one of those things that

will always hold a place in my heart.

To me, in 1999, there is no

greater and more interesting
year to an FPS player.

That was the birth of modern
multiplayer in my opinion.

The time has come to
prove you are the best.

The big change in Quake III was

we exclusively focused on multiplayer.

Now, you could play by yourself,
but you played against bots.

This was at a time when clans,

multiplayer gaming, this was taking off.

No one has ever really seen that before, so

Quake III certainly just embraced that.

It kind of helped to popularize
that sort of fast paced

twitch competitive shooting
in the '90s and the early 2000s.

When you sit down and play Quake III

for the first time, it feels
so fast and so responsive

and, before you know it, you're
you feel like you're in complete control

of this character.

You are tied for the lead!

Quake II didn't feel like Quake,
and Quake III didn't feel like Quake II

you know, the physics were
different, like everything was different.

But, I have to start
thinking of what's above me,

I have to start thinking
of what's below me,

changing the verticality of the level.

What makes a good map
for an arena shooter is flow.

You get to the end, and then
there's a staircase going down,

and then you can loop back around to the
other part, and there's other little areas.

It's always kind of like
uroboros, like looping in on itself.

Every time I used to play it, because you
can select the different character models,

I'd always play as the Doom model,

which was obviously,
you know, the Doom guy.

You could download any
character you wanted to download.

It's, like, it doesn't
matter how stupid it was,

and there was just something
insane about how wild that is.

So, when we were
working on the Quake series,

our friends over at Epic
were working on Unreal.

It was nice that they took
things in different directions.

First blood.

Deathmatch, when it comes to
first person shooters is a no-brainer,

and then you start moving over to
more tactical and more team-based modes

such as Capture the Flag,
then eventually Domination,

and then kind of the crown jewel of
Unreal Tournament that helps separate it,

which was Assault.

Steve Polge wanted to create something that was
team based, but also something that felt like

you were there going
to an actual objective,

as opposed to, say, get a
flag or go stand in this location.

So, we wind up with really, really cool maps, you
know? Poncho made a map where you're essentially

on a speeding train. Dave Ewing made a map,

whereas it was essentially
a recreation of Normandy

where you're storming the beach.

Some of these maps, you
can sit there and you can, like,

use the Instagib and, like,
shoot your friend across the maps

that can get to the CTF flag faster.

Oh my god, for some reason, Instagib just,

'Oh, it was amazing.'

Steve Polge had the idea of mutators
that you can apply to your match

to make the game infinitely replayable,

and there's something to
be said about taking a game

that is so deep and just boiling
it down to its essence right?

And that's why Facing Worlds was
such a brilliant Capture the Flag map.

It was two towers.
Let's see how good you are.

I was so used to id software's
games, where you know,

the gratification and the feedback
were quintessential to their success,

and so I was thinking, 'Let's reward
the players', you know, good aim.'

If they shoot the opponent in the
head, like, let's let the player know.

And so, I told Brandon
this, and I went to his office,

and he had an AI just standing there, and he, he
shot in the head and put little text on the screen,

and said, 'Headshot.'
I mean, I'm like, 'No no, no.

Make it so, when it's
the final blow, that it, like,

pops the enemy's head
off, then it says 'Headshot.'

Headshot.

Then, you get that, you know, feedback that
hits that kind of dopamine of your brain, right?

Headshot.

And then, 'How can we
reward success with the player?

Success over a longer period of
time, success over a short time.'

So, we came up with a
system of double kill, multikills.

And it goes on and on and on to
ultimately wind up with 'God-like.'

God-like.

The announcer's voice is booming,
and you're like, you're shaking,

like 'I can't believe I
got one of these, right?'

First blood.

It sounded like the voice of
Satan coming up from hell itself.

Killing spree.

It wasn't really, I think, until

we were producing Quake III Arena,

and Epic was working on Unreal Tournament

where the true battle
of the religions started.

You've got Quake III, and you've got Unreal
Tournament releasing in the same month.

Dominate.

You've got Quake III, and you've got Unreal
Tournament releasing in the same month.

Monster kill.

To this day, people
still argue about it, right?

And each game, of course,
had its merits so, you know, UT,

you know, the bright more colorful one

with the wacky weapons
and the crazy movements

and Quake, you know, kind
of was a little bit more snug

in regards to the aiming and the feel.

My experience with Quake III was always just Team
Deathmatch, the most played game mode, but then obviously

in Unreal Tournament, you had like the Assault
maps and Capture The Flag and these giant maps.

I think what makes any game
great in terms of multiplayer

and competition is the old adage,

'Easy to learn, hard to master.'

You need a game that's simple in
terms of like the core gameplay loop,

the core gameplay mechanics
but allows a lot of versatility

to essentially that the
player themselves to express.

Perfect win.

Some players were really able to do both.

So, I do think that the team
at Epic really did the right thing

by not going directly against us

but going with us.

I think it worked out well.

Monster kill, kill, kill.

Robin and I grew up in the same town

in the far southeastern
corner of Australia.

You know, we're both kind of
studying but mostly playing video games.

All my memories of that era

are all very, like, LAN party-centric.

These guys, big Doom players,

they introduced us to this fortress map.

When you spawned, you would
fall down one of sort of three holes

in front of you and the
holes would give you one of

a couple of different weapon loadouts.

The fortress map and its structure,

even with just two-on-two,
kind of made us realize,

like how much more sort of excitement

and strategy you could have
with a team-based structure.

And that was one of the fun things about
that first year or so of Quake modding.

They released essentially
all their game code.

We've done a bit of Doom modding and
certainly a bunch of Doom mapmaking.

And so, we started thinking about

what kind of things we'd do
once the modding tools came out.

It was really just like, 'Okay,
what's that fun thing we can add?'

We we're actually playing Hexen
that had three different classes:

a warrior, and it had a
medic, and it had a mage.

Here's one piece of
gameplay we really like.

'Let's make that.'

You can tell the order in which classes
were implemented in Team Fortress

strictly by just the number
that you press to select them.

The sniper class was
definitely the most exciting.

We spent so many
hours, just like three of us

trying a different, like, mechanic.

'Okay, do you hold down to charge up?'
We just tried so many different ways

until we sort of settled
on the one that we wanted.

Hours of just laughing, running
around the map, killing each other.

The engineer and the spy,
the last two classes we did,

we had a bunch of different
people coming to our LAN parties,

and they were all over the skill spectrum,

and we wanted to all be able to
play the same game at the same time.

The engineer could really be more tactical.

We saw the sentry
guns and aliens were like,

'I want to play with those
in the game somehow.'

We did no marketing,
we didn't have a web page.

We just put the zip file on CDROM.com

and hoped people would find it.

Exactly.

After a few days, we
started getting some emails

from people saying, like, 'Hey,
like, we really liked this game.'

Like, 'What are you guys doing next?'

This is getting up
around the two year mark.

We got an email from
Scott Lynch over at Sierra.

He was wondering if we would be interested

in building a version of
Team Fortress for Half-Life.

We were like, 'Whoa,
like, shit's getting real.'

The modability of Half-Life was
something that Valve cared about a ton.

Like, the right strategy was really to

take Half-Life and make
it a great platform for mods

in the same way that Quake
was a great platform for mods.

I remember it being really
fun because I, you know,

there was no design to really be done.
It was just like,

'Make all that over there, '
like 'Make it work over here.'

But, it was also that it seemed
like there was a real opportunity

for Team Fortress to be
played by a bunch of new people.

Like, 'Let's get it out there.

Let's get more people
playing Team Fortress.'

A lack of optimism has
never been a problem.

Well, so you have to... You die.

You could, you could spawn, move forward,

and die in like 20 seconds, and
then have to wait three minutes

before you get to play again?
Like, this'll never be popular.

Negative.

Follow me.

Negative. Roger that.

Affirmative.

Headshotting Robin three rounds in a row

and having him yell out
from his office and rage quit,

I think, was really the time when I'm like,

'Okay, yeah, we need to, like,
spend more time with this product, '

because it was awesome.

I always remember
Counter-Strike as a lesson to myself

in my inability to
accurately predict what's fun.

The arena shooters that had
mostly preceded Counter-Strike

obviously have a completely
different sensibility when it

comes to map design and weapon sets.

You could actually, like, save
up your money from the kill,

you've gotten stuff and buy weapons,

and you got to choose the weapons you want.

One thing about Counter-Strike that's
interesting: it's not just one shot, kill.

It's really the level design,

you can position yourself, and
you have to have counter positions,

and you really, it is a really
more strategic multiplayer.

If I had to try and identify what
makes Counter-Strike so special,

it's both the counter
terrorists and the terrorists

head toward Bombsite B.

They'll reach a choke point
almost the exactly same time.

And that's incredibly
deliberate on the designers part,

that they want you to sort of
reach these jousting moments

where you come together with your opponent,

and what that does is
it creates this incredible

meta-game where you can play
off the expectations of that timing.

Enemy down.

When are they going to
come around this corner?

When do they think I'm going to
come around this corner? Which corner

do they think I'm gonna come around?

So, that sort of mind game of, like,
'When do I do something different?

And when do they think that I'm going to do something
different, and I don't do something different?'

Fire in the hole.

Know where to put your flashes,

because that was always a very important,

especially when you had
to rush to a certain spot,

you know, like long A
and Dust II or something.

You just had to know how to hit your marks
and to know when to buy and when to save.

If you buy too much ammo, it
could take up too much money.

And then, if you didn't
win that round, you realize,

'Oh man, I can't even get a
weapon for the next round.'

Up until that point, we'd
seen nothing like that, right?

Like, everything before
that was instant spawn.

When you die in Counter-Strike,
yeah, you had to sit there for five minutes

while the rest of the team either
won or lost and there was like

that excruciating pain of
being sitting on the bench

waiting and hoping you won.

I actually played so much Counter-Strike in high
school that I actually failed English one year.

I had to go to summer school, and I hated
that because it took up all of my extra time

I could have been home
playing more Counter-Strike.

It was such a fun time of
my life was Counter-Strike.

That really brought me into PC gaming.

I'm your man, homie.
Ah, I tried to sneak through the door, man.

Can't make it, can't make it.
The shit's stuck.

Door stuck, door stuck,

Terrorists win.

When the dark intellect escaped the fire,

man stood in the ashes of Mother Earth.

For 200 years, the immortal
emperor built Earth's armies.

But only Earth's.

For people who played
this game and loved it as,

as I did, they'll say, 'What do you mean?
This wasn't that obscure game,

like this was amazing for the time.

This is one of the best first
person shooters ever made,

and I agree. But, Tribes, for many people,

they'll say, 'Tribes? Like what
are you, what are you talking about?

Like, what do you, what,
what even is this game?

All of these first person shooters up
to that point were corridor shooters,

you know, you, you maybe would have kind of
like a large room where you could fight in.

Tribes basically said, 'What if it was all
terrain? And what if everybody had jetpacks?'

The only time I ever played a
Tribes game was at a LAN party,

never played it before,
and I thought my skills

from, like, Counter-Strike and Quake,

whatever, would carry
across, and I just got what.

It was very difficult to get into.

It was not user friendly.

It was this incredible, squad-based,

very large map competitive shooter.

You had jump packs, you had disc guns,

you had character classes,

and the draw distances were huge.

Starsiege: Tribes influenced Halo primarily

because it was in this big open setting.

Players had all of this freedom

to move around this enormous exterior

that we were just blown
away by at that time.

It had multi-person drivable vehicles,

height map terrain,

incredible mobility to rocket around

from one location to another.
It featured capture the flag

as its primary game mode.

It was super fast-paced, super fun to play.

It was one of those games that
I think captured our imagination.

Everybody remembers the disc launcher,

because it's kind of the most
aesthetically distinctive gun,

but I really liked the fusion mortar.
It's, it's got this,

you know, radioactive
green parabolic trail.

It's like a sniper grenade
launcher and, basically,

you're able to fling these
things incredibly long distances,

they have massive splash damage radius.

It had a dedicated grenade button.

In most first person shooters
you, like, switch to the grenade,

and then you can throw
it, and that's all you can do

until you switch to something else which basically means you never
use them. Whereas, Tribes, you could just one tap, throw a grenade.

Again, the movement style was so

challenging and interesting
and physics-driven.

In a way, that was very novel. You had players
writing guides online about how to ski,

how to manage their
jetpacks and battery level.

They stumbled into this idea of skiing

which was kind of like
strafe jumping in Quake,

all that kind of, you know, or lift
jumping in Unreal Tournament.

That's, you know, emergent game design
at its best in first person shooters.

It featured classes, premade loadouts,

Destroy the enemy general. Attack!

It just did so many things

that most shooters were not doing.

I mean, I remember going
like, 'Oh my god, like what?

What is this thing? This is amazing,'
and we played the heck out of it

at Bungie back in the day,

Tribes just deserves a lot of recognition,

and it doesn't get it.

I'm not sure what to attribute that to.

I think Tribes had a
difficult time competing.

It was very innovative,
but it didn't have the

marketing and sales attention at Sierra.

Half-Life had just consumed
all the oxygen in the room.

It was all just Half-Life and/or
Counter-Strike once Counter-Strike

became a retail product.

I think it's a very underrated game,

and I think it had a lot more
influence than people realize.

What I took away from it was

the fun of playing with friends.

First person shooters are way more fun

when you're all immersed in this world

together and working
toward a common objective.

PlanetSide was all about the, the scale

that we wanted to give people

an idea of what a planetary
battle would look like:

different continents, and we had vehicles,

you had infantry, and you
had flying vehicles as well.

The team was small. I think we were like

15, 20 people.

We didn't have the ability to have,

like, large scale battles

for a really long time in development.

We ended up opening
it up to the rest of SOE.

I remember that day and
it was just, like, insane,

I was working at SOE, and

I was just amazed at the scope

and the scale of that game.

That vastness and the, the chaos.

It was just something that I'd never
experienced before in a first person shooter.

The fact that they had managed
to do that was really mind blowing.

The game itself was more
about territory controls,

like a game of Risk, right?

Everybody's familiar with that.
We look at the map, and you see,

you know, exactly where

each one of the factions are taking over.

One of the things that was
most memorable for me,

was, you know, coming in,
being able to understand like,

what the factions were

and create three different
identities for each one of the groups,

specifically for the Vanu
Sovereignty, you know,

hence the purple tie today.

The big issue was, of
course, the, the competition.

Battlefield was a long-running
franchise at that point,

and there was just a market
share that we had to go after,

and we knew we had to
capture in order to be successful.

Luckily, technology, you know, caught up.

We spent a lot of time working
on the engine that we were building

specifically for Planetside 2

that would allow us to
put thousands of people

on 8K by 8K maps.

Often when you're
developing a game like that,

you've got blinders on,

and you don't understand

what it's going to be like
once the general public is in

and actually experiencing it.

And, yeah, that first time jumping in and,

and seeing everybody basically
do whatever they wanted,

coordinated or not, was a real trip.

It's just hard to describe,
like, that first time

you get that experience,

because that was really exciting to me.

It's like, for the longest, we were like,
'Oh, we don't know if it's gonna work or not'

like, because we were all
kind of working in this bubble

and then, once we hit that switch, and you
get all these people kind of running around,

it's just, it's just insane.

Let me now unveil Xbox.

Bill, you've certainly revolutionized
the technology we know today,

Super fast graphics, connectivity.

The Xbox is important to
the future of this industry.

This is Seamus Blackley, and he's the
Chief Technology Officer here at Microsoft.

He's making sure that this
thing gets completed on time.

'Do they even think it'll work?
Do they even think it's a real platform?

I don't know.'
We look back on it, it seems obvious

but, at that time, many
people were calling it coffin box,

like you don't want to get in the coffin.

'Don't work for Xbox.
It's going to fail, fail, fail, fail."

The Covenant believed that what
they call the silent cartographer

is somewhere under this island.

The cartographer is a Map Room
that will lead us to Halo's Control Center.

♪♪♪Touchdown. Hit it, Marines!

Could we possibly make any more noise?

I guess so.

Bill Gates had come to see
an early demo of Trespasser.

Because Microsoft was
an investor in DreamWorks.

He was super impressed and he said, 'You
should come work at Microsoft for Direct X.'

Forget progress by proxy,

land on your own net.

Welcome to the third place.

Around that time, Sony
was starting to do some

PR around PlayStation 2,

and I'm kind of getting excited
about the idea of defeating Sony.

The idea that occurred to me was that
it should be basically a hardware device

optimized for Direct X.

So it's a Direct X box,

and that was, like, a part
of the sales technique.

'This will get Windows in the living room.'

We had all these PC games in development.

We could just easily port our stuff over to it. Of course,
that was not at all what happened and was incredibly naive.

It was a pure game console, it was
always gonna be a pure game console.

I didn't even fucking care
if it ran Windows, okay?

But, that's not what we
told the Microsoft executives.

I wanted to show you something.

We told them that this
was smart, because it would

get the Windows operating
system into the living room.

It's going to use a PC
architecture and an Intel processor,

but it's not really going to run Windows.

So then, we were, went into a big meeting.

The room was full of vice presidents,

so many that they couldn't
fit around the big long table.

There were vice presidents
along the walls too.

And then, the last
person to come in was Bill,

and Bill was carrying our PowerPoint deck,

a printed copy of it, and he walks
in and throws it down the table

and says, 'This is a fucking insult to
everything I've accomplished at this company, '

and that was the start of the meeting.

I expected to be fired from Microsoft

and never be able to get another job again.

So, Bill would yell at us for a while

about the technology decisions we had made,

and we just kept saying, 'You know,
we've spent a year looking at this.

If you want to get into this business,

we're confident this is the way to do it.'

And then Ballmer says, 'What about Sony?'

And then, Bill says, 'I
think we should do this.'

Kevin and I were going
to the Tokyo Game Show.

We rode the train, and the subway
doors opened, we walked out,

and the whole subway station
was covered with Xbox logos.

It was so insane,

given the fact that, really, I
was just expecting to be fired.

He saw something in this group of weirdos.

I think they reminded him
of the start of Microsoft,

and that, that is should be made
to work, and he supported us,

and that was a really big deal.

♪♪♪That was February, 2000.
We were launching November, 2001.

I mean, that's less than two years away.

I was looking for anything I could get.

We were taking some of our PC
lineup and repurposing it for console,

and I was, me and my whole deal team,

we were out shaking the
trees all around the world

to try to find projects.

We are starting to see some
great games come back to the Mac,

but this is one of the
coolest I've ever seen.

Everybody on the team knew that
we had something special with Halo.

Basically, I was sitting in my
office one day and my phone rang,

and it was Peter Tamte on the line.

He more or less told me that things
weren't going that well at Bungie,

that they were going out of business.

When Microsoft bought Bungie,

we had some broad ideas about a story,

and a few characters, vehicles and weapons.

We had a really fun multiplayer
game that was like a 4 on 14 game.

We didn't have working AI.

We did not have anything
like a mission plan or a script.

The early iterations of
Halo were pretty hysterical.

It did not start out as
a first person shooter.

It actually started out as a strategy game.

It wasn't until we had built some

vehicle physics for a little
4x4 type vehicle that I had built,

and we would command it to
move from one location to the other,

and it was pretty cool to see the physics

and the interaction with
the vehicle and the terrain,

and we got to the point
where we're thinking,

'Why are we letting the AI drive
these around? Why don't we

start driving it ourselves?'

That was the very first
big step that we took

in turning it into something that would somewhat
resemble the Halo that we played in 2001.

We realized, 'Wow, it's...
It's way more fun to play on the ground

as one of these little tiny Marines

surrounded by all this
beautiful sci-fi landscape,

being as close as possible
to the, to the action.

That first person perspective
just touched a lot of those

bases for us.

What felt like a tight combat loop?

What felt super immersive
in the sci-fi world?

What made business sense? We

specifically wanted to create
a world that was beautiful,

a place the player would
want to stay and play in.

In Doom, they throw hundreds
of enemies at a time at you.

We could have, like, eight.

So, we had to have enemies
that would last longer than that

and could live longer and
were, you know, smart enough to

retreat and flank you.

There was outdoors and indoors

in the middle of this huge battle,

and then I can jump into a
Warthog somebody's driving,

and I can be running the chain
gun on the back, you know?

If it didn't feel as fluid as Quake

or if it didn't give you
the precision of Half-Life,

it wasn't good enough.

So, when it came to starting
to play with a controller

that had analog controls, and we
could creep along at our own pace,

we could do things that we just never

could do with a keyboard and mouse.

I saw every iteration of controller

that they were working on, and
some of them were pretty wild.

The Duke was just 1 of 30

wooden prototypes that
they brought by that day.

I remember the first time I held the
Duke controller. I remember thinking

I was holding a giant dinner plate.

Duke controller is so big.

I almost need a trailer to move it around.

Whenever I went to Japan,

constant feedback I
would get is, 'It's black.

Black is the color of death.'

'X, X is the letter of death.

Xbox, it's the death box.'

I'd be like, 'The PlayStation is black.'

They'd be like, 'Oh
well, that's, that's okay.'

The controller should weigh

the same weight as water in your hands.

'Okay, it's the weight of
water in my hands, okay.'

As a statement, as a
expression of the brand,

as Microsoft's first, you know,

foray into this world, it felt right.

It all felt part of a piece.

Sorry for the quick thaw, Master Chief.

People could not answer the question of,

'Would you like your
y-axis normal or inverted?'

So, we had to come up
with a way to get them

to choose entirely based on
what came naturally to them.

Just look at each of the
flashing panels to target them.

So, the chief waking from cryosleep,

it gave us this perfect opportunity

to get off on the right foot immediately.

'Okay, that looks good.'

Took quite a bit of time for us to kind of

explore some of the universe
and what we could do.

That was when we hired Joe Staten,

and we started really delving deeper into

writing the story.

The team had already done a
huge amount of world building,

character creation.
Joe brought a lot to the table

in giving the Master Chief a personality

without ever showing his face.

For me, the way into
Master Chief's character

actually wasn't through him

but rather through his partner,

through Cortana.

Sleep well?

No thanks to your driving, yes.

I firmly believe you can't
have Halo without Cortana.

One of my favorite cinematics
is where you return to

the Covenant ship that's
floating over the Halo ring.

Oh, I see, the coordinate
data needs to be...

Right, sorry.

Now, the chief didn't have to say anything.

He just had to react in an honest way

to this, this person inside his head.

Those moments showed players
what Master Chief's personality is,

The more we've pushed those kinds of
character interactions with one another,

the more kind of relatable
those characters became.

Now would be a very good time to leave.

She could crack Covenant security systems,

dive into ancient alien technology.

You all right?

We wanted to make sure that her personality

represented, you know, these,
these things that she was capable of.

A dozen Covenant superior battleships
against a single Halcyon-class cruiser.

With those odds, I'm content with three,

make that four fills.

So, from the very beginning,
Halo had multiplayer,

we could network our computers.

Our characters had vastly different
capabilities. We could do super jumps.

We used to spend, you know,

two hours every afternoon
playing multiplayer,

and that was before we had

anything working on the single player side.

I think it was two nights
before we went Gold Master.

Jason Jones, the creative director,

went into code

and, for the human pistol for multiplayer,

it just does, like, three
times as much damage.

It completely destroyed
the multiplayer balance.

Yeah, it was pretty effective, wasn't it?

Halo: Combat Evolved,

After Halo shipped, it became
the biggest Xbox game.

Incredibly successful.

Almost everybody on the team
wanted to go work on something else.

Jason Jones, who was really

the glue that was holding
all the different functions.

He wanted to go off and
work on a new franchise

and let the core team
keep going and do Halo 2.

We're going in!

Get tactical Marines!

Get aboard that carrier,
secure the Prophet of Regret.

We spent a good amount
of time at the very beginning

thinking about how we
were going to devise spaces,

how we were going to create
all of those characters and such

and what kind of
technologies we could utilize

within the engine to make
things look a lot better.

Also spent a lot of time
kind of figuring out what,

what direction the story should take.

The tasks you must undertake
as the Arbiter are perilous, suicidal.

You will die as each
Arbiter has before you.

If you're going to experience
the story of the hero,

well, what about experiencing the
story of the villain, quote, unquote?

Playing as the Arbiter

was one way to give you a lot of insight

into the Covenant that you
wouldn't have normally had.

All of a sudden, you got access to a lot of

cool weapons and vehicles that
you wouldn't normally have had,

and you got to see the
AI from the other side.

I love that they were taking risks

and letting you play another character

and dual wielding and, you know,

other super cool stuff that
they introduced in there.

And it just looked super cool

to run around with double SMG,

and it was one of the very first
things we showed about the game.

It was before we had actually finished

all the tech that would allow
you to actually dual wield.

So, in that demo video, when we switched to

dual wielding SMGs,
it's actually just one SMG

with another SMG stuck on
the side of it just floating there.

Lots of smoke and mirrors in announcements.

I and others

bled gallons of blood in order
to make sure an Xbox had

networking capability and a hard drive.

Halo 2 really defined Xbox Live.

Anybody owning Xbox had to have Halo 2.

Bungie was innovative and matchmaking.

You could just go onto Xbox Live and
find yourself in a match and minutes,

and the better you play, the more you were

getting matched with people of like skills.

For the first two years of

Xbox Live's existences,

I think something like 90% of

players were playing Halo 2.

I am your shield. I am your soul.

There was certainly
pressure with Halo three to

make that generational
leap, and we just tried to go big

with almost every decision.

Halo 3, we wanted to go epic

and make the world feel incredible.

I think Finish the Fight
might've been sort of an apology.

You mind telling me what
you're doing on that ship?

For kind of how Halo 2 wrapped up.

Finishing this fight.

Finish the fight was a rallying cry.

If you're with us, and
you played through Halo 2,

this is where we give you that
ending that you've been waiting for.

That you've been waiting for. ♪♪♪

The idea was: you have to
make the greatest game ever.

This is the only way this
is going to be successful.

It has to be extraordinary
on all sorts of levels.

The Prophet of Truth, as I'm
sure people realize, is in fact

is, in fact, the Prophet of Lies.

The classic dramatic tradition to

name characters the
opposite of what they are.

There was a sense of, 'I'm
gonna finish everything I ever

I ever wanted to do with the Halo series:

having a Scarab that could walk around

arbitrarily and react to you.

And the Covenant ships
flying overhead and such,

bigger and bigger and bigger and

really strongly integrating the

on foot combat with the vehicle combat.

For the look and feel of it
to the creative direction of it,

that was the vibe that I wanted to
push through to the rest of the game,

It's going to have to kind
of redefine Xbox Live.

One of the reasons why Halo's multiplayer

worked was because we gave
you so many options to customize it.

You could go swords-only,

you could increase the release spawn time.

You could really tailor it to
what you and your group likes.

Forge was kind of an extension of that.

Initially, it was just:
place a few objects,

move the weapons around a little bit,

change the spawn rates of
things as a modification to a map.

And then, a couple of the
artists looked at it and went,

'Well, if we can place objects,

we're gonna place a lot of
objects and see what happens.

Halo 3 was the victory lap

where we just wanted
to make the perfect Halo.

Oh, I know what the ladies like.

We never had any idea that Halo was
going to become a cultural phenomenon.

Halo was big, and everyone was playing Halo
and 'This is the future. This is awesome.'

Halo has a special place in my heart,
it was the game-changer

I remember doing LAN parties. We would system
link, like, four consoles together in a basement.

When we saw the lines for me
when we saw the fan reaction...

We were struck by it.

No one had seen
anything like it at the time.

The reason why I'm
sitting here 20 years later,

why we're still making Halo games,

it showed that you can create
a rock solid shooter experience,

but you can also create a
beautiful, mysterious world

that people want to spend time in.

It can tell a story with
characters, that, that matter,

It was just an iconic moment
in the history of games.

Wake me when you need me.

Don't make a girl a promise,
if you know you can't keep it.

There was a titanic problem that, you know

nobody under the age of
30 might even know about

which is hilarious
which is that, at that time,

a serious argument existed,
a religious war existed

that shooters could
never work on a console,

that, to play a shooter, you had
to have a mouse and a keyboard

because of the response speed of
the mouse and a bunch of other stuff,

and I know that sounds insane but,

at the time, you would
have tons of people tell you,

'You should not try to make a shooter on
a console, because it would be terrible.'

Yo, listen up. We will not
live in a two dimensional world.

We will take a look around.
We will not be confined.

Every single person that had an
N64 when it came out played Turok.

That's like an iconic N64 game.

The concept is just so appealing.
It's like you get to shoot dinosaurs,

like prehistoric world, like
the box art looked awesome.

One of the big parts of Turok
was he was a Native American,

and you didn't really see indigenous
people being represented that way

as heroes in video
games or just protagonists.

When I was a kid, and I was playing
it, the game was way too hard for me,

and it terrified me because,
like, the fog was so thick that it,

it felt like a survival horror game.

It didn't feel like a running gun shooter,

because you had to play it so methodically,

because you never knew when
a raptor was just going to, like,

bust out of the fog and kill you.

What amazed me was that Night
Dive's port, by removing the fog,

you actually get to play that game

the way the designers intended.

That opened up a whole can of worms,

because not only did
the original developers

implement that fog so that the
draw distance would be a lot shorter,

but they also did it so that they wouldn't
have to fully model the entire world as well.

And so, when we kind of pulled
back that curtain, we discovered

that the tops of the trees didn't exist,

a lot of geometry was missing.

And so, we had to bring
on a 3D artist to basically

complete the assets that were
now visible for the first time.

I am Turok.

Perfect Dark was created by

us taking a load of words,
describing words and verbs,

sticking them on the back of a door,

and then removing them one by one

until we came up with two
that kind of worked together.

Perfect Dark was all about stealthiness and going
around and trying to find out what's going on and,

and it's dark, both in sense of light
and also dark in terms of sense of the

conspiracy plot that we
were trying to follow up.

Hands up, and step away from the alien.

We'd watched a lot of X-Files.
X-Files was big at the time,

so there's darkness there as well.
So, the whole dark thing

just became sort of dominant for us.

Of course, we'd all seen
Lara Croft by that point,

and we wanted something more real,

something that we could aspire to

and still have her as
a, a, a spy character.

Half the guns come from
a book on Judge Dredd.

Quite honestly, if you look at them,
you can see that we've just stolen things

straight out of them and
adapted them for Perfect Dark.

Um, Joanna Dark's wetsuit

comes from an episode of UFO which
was an English sci-fi show from the '60s.

I mean, it's essentially
the exact same wetsuit,

but no one's made the connection yet.

You know, if you look at the graphical
quality between Perfect Dark and GoldenEye,

fundamentally the same
engine and the same console,

but it took a big step forward.

There were lots of good design
ideas that we didn't get into GoldenEye.

We thought, 'We should
definitely have bots in this,

because it opens up so much more.
It means you don't need to

have three people around the screen
and four people around the screen,

you can do it against the bot.
So, it was an early thing.

One of the first things I think we
worked on was some basic bot AI.

Gotta shoot.

There was a game called TimeSplitters

that had come out on the PlayStation

shortly before we started working
on the Xbox version of Halo.

That, it was not the default option,

but did have a very similar
two-stick method of control.

That two-stick solution
made a lot of sense to us.

I remember when we took the
first version of TimeSplitters to E3,

and we had four-player split
screen in the Egyptian level

with 12 characters running around it,

and it was running at 60 frames a second
and, coming from GoldenEye and Perfect Dark

which struggled, it's like, 'This
is, you know, wow!' You know?

We wanted to make a sandbox game,

different scenarios and different weapons,

and the way to do that, obviously,
was to have different time periods

and base it on classic film settings.

So, you know, you've got
the Egyptian adventurer thing,

you know, which is like Raiders of
the Lost Ark and that kind of stuff,

and then you had the classic
robot sci-fi movie set in the future,

and then stick a first person shooter
in there and have a bit of fun with it.

Oh yeah, that's right.

The world is full of stories

and, from time to time,

they permit themselves to be told.

What are you looking at?

Prey 2006 is definitely a game that

a lot of people would
love to see come back.

Tommy, a Native
American, is the protagonist

who's more or less thrust
into the situation against his will.

Redwater!

I did a lot of research
on, uh, different tribes,

and the Cherokee mythology lined up really well
with what we wanted to accomplish with the game.

The inclusion of the spirit world

and the spirit animals and diving more into

Native American culture,
I think, was a really

strong element of the game.

Uniqua whose breath gives life to all
growth will help us in our time of need.

There was an absolute intention to

not make a joke-filled
caricature of any sort of culture.

We really wanted to treat this
topic, you know, with respect.

Stop that thing!

Jen, I'll find a way to get you off that.

The big thing for prey was portals, right?

You have the ability to kind of put this
portal and see into a different environment

or shoot through it or transfer
through and things like that

which later would wind up being incredibly
successful Valve games of Portal and Portal 2, right?

We brought in Gary Whitta who used
to be the editor for PC Gamer magazine.

He wrote the full game script for us.

He later went on to write
the Book of Eli and, uh,

Rogue One so, you
know, he's done pretty well

for himself since doing our pre-script.

Hey, man, are you okay?

Shit, guess not.

Nobody threatens my planet.

Now, you see first person
shooters on consoles everywhere

and also even on mobile.

All those people who said a
shooter could never work on a console

because the immediacy
of the mouselook was lost,

uh, they were obviously wrong.

The amount of care
and design that goes into

both the controller itself

and the way that the signals
from the controller process,

that's an art form and,
when it's done well,

it is every bit as responsive
if not more responsive

than a mouse can feel,

and that controller is
specific to that console,

and every developer and every
player has the same one more or less,

and it gets really tweaked out
to be really, really, really perfect,

uh, and that's critical.

Ready for liftoff.

That's religion.

Sound the alarm! She's here.

Lights out.

When Half-Life 2 was in development,
Gabe had this vision of Steam

and what Steam would become
and how important it would be.

I remember him presenting to me.
He was thinking about,

'How could people be able to
play Half-Life without having to have

the CD or DVD ROM to play it?'

And he had pulled in a lot of

very brilliant people into
Valve about to start the, the idea

of how Steam could work.

They thought through a marketplace,
they thought through a world in which

PC games could become like the absolute

epicenter of all great
gaming entertainment.

We're super strong
believers that, like, platforms

have to become valuable
to everyone in the ecosystem

around the customers and to the developers.

Once they had sort of the
ability to manage their own IP,

then they were able to invest
in their own marketplace.

Valve had just a whole
head start over everybody.

Rise and shine, Mr. Freeman.

Rise and shine.

I think what made Half-Life
2 so special was that

it understood the legacy
that the first one had created

so well, and it had expanded
upon that the perfect way.

I think I remember that feeling
at the outset of the game of...

'We lost', which I think is
still so rare in games, right?

You know, Earth has been taken over.
There's an evil overlord.

You know, 'Who's The Combine?'
Oh my gosh, and like that suppressive

dystopian environment that
is so effective in Half-Life.

There's so much that happens in that game,
and it's kind of hard to pick a point.

I do find The G-Man
aspect pretty interesting.

I know a lot of the theories are that
he's like a future version of Gordon.

It's like Gordon Freeman, G-Man.

The inclusion of physics changed
everything about fps puzzle design.

They didn't just use it for feedback
that we way that everyone uses ragdoll.

They used physics as puzzles, and
I still have not seen any other game

do it to the level that
they did it in Half-Life 2.

We were always an engineering-focused
company and still are today,

so technology, to us, has always been.

Sort of in service of the game design.
If it's not interesting in and of itself,

it's got to have some applicability to the
game experience that's really interesting.

The most clever idea in
any first person shooter

was definitely the
gravity gun in Half-Life 2.

You can call it the zero
point energy field manipulator,

if you really want to. Give it a try.

It just added so much
fun to the experience,

such a simple and clever idea.
Genius, total genius.

We built the bulk of Half-Life 2
in the last, like, year and a half.

We go from a bunch of
bones to the finished game,

but the first sort of two, three years,

we're building a bunch of those pieces.

The gravity gun comes
out of that period of time.

That's the old passage to Raven Home.
We don't go there anymore.

I will never forget going to Raven home,

picking up those giant saw blades,
and cutting somebody in half with them.

I don't think any game had ever
done anything like that up to that point.

The storytelling of Half Life 2

is what expands its importance
over the original game.

If I'd known you were going to
come straight up to my office,

I wouldn't have bothered
hunting you in the first place.

It's just so good.
The Citadel, I mean, the whole

mythology around, and the story around
the game just became massive after 2.

I think about the expressiveness
of Alyx Vance's face.

Dr. Freeman, I presume.

As something that has
no business holding up,

you know, more than a decade later,

putting your hand on the
elevator door as I descend down

and looking up at her, and the eye contact.

The way Valve was able
to animate that character

holds up as just one of the greatest

characters, I think, of that era.

They purposely and consciously
designed that game to be a rollercoaster.

Gordon Freeman.

I had so much in it, It was, it was definitely unbelievable
storytelling, incredible environmental design, you name it.

It's a perfect game. I can't even
say, I can't even say more about it.

Sincerely,

We'd always sort of said to ourselves, 'We'll
never ship one more than one game at a time

because, every time a game got
close to shipping, all the other games

would sort of, like, just bleed on.
Everyone would work on it,

and then with The Orange Box
who are like, 'Let's build five games

and ship them on three different
platforms on the same day.'

Yeah, it's painful, but fun.

One of my favorite games of all time,

I still think it was just
absolute genius, was Portal.

Welcome to the Aperture Science
Computer Aided Enrichment Center.

Portal was really fresh, like,

'Here's another game that
uses the first person viewpoint

but uses a gun that's very
different than everything else.'

The Aperture Science
handheld portal device.

It was a super fun game to get through.

Portal was very
accessible to a lot of people,

because it wasn't violent.

You have a gun, so to speak,

but it's just meant for puzzle
solving more than anything.

There's these robots that are
shooting at me, and there's these turrets,

and you can't directly
destroy them or remove them.

You have to use your brain
and your problem solving.

At the very end, when you find the
secret passages behind everything,

so good, because they'd
like transitioned from

this really cool puzzler
to, like, the end of a story

and, like, what's going
on in Aperture Labs.

Eventually, we hope we're
going to be tied into Half-Life

because, at that point, I think the whole story
of Half-Life was still pretty much up in the air.

It was almost like the Marvel films, like,
back then when you just had all these different

storylines and all this stuff connecting,
so it was just kind of interesting

to see where they were going to take it.

Never mind, it's a
mystery I'll solve later.

The other thing was: Portal was hilarious.

Good job.
As part of a required test protocol,

we will stop it enhancing
the truth in three,

two,

GLaDOS and Shodan are
often compared with one another,

because she's literally the only
thing that you have to hold on to.

But, at the same time,
she's also trying to kill you.

You become so familiar with her that
you form kind of a relationship and a bond

and, when you do finally
meet her and you defeat her,

there's almost this
bittersweet element to it

where you feel like
you've lost your connection

with the world that you're escaping from.

It may be my favorite game of all time,

because I think it's just
so exquisitely well done.

Team Fortress 2 is such an
interesting animal in the FPS landscape.

It's been kind of a guinea pig for Valve.

We'd started building Team
Fortress 2 for Quake II at that point

which is what seemed like the
obvious next step, and our hope was to

build that into a retail
product of some kind.

Well, we were struggling to
find a really good sort of identity

for what Team Fortress is.

We had no idea what we're doing.
We're in that classic case of, like,

'You're so screwed, because you
don't even know what you don't know.'

It was so sort of open-ended that
we had trouble sort of finding, like,

sort of what the core gameplay was.

Team Fortress 2 stopped being in
development for a while during Half-Life 2.

Half-Life 2 really needs to ship,

and then we'll revisit
our options sort of later.

We start working on Team Fortress 2 again,

and we decide this time, 'We're...

'We're not going to screw it up.'

I'm not a crazed gunman,
dad, I'm an assassin.

It's a sound of progress, my friend.

We should be looking at
non-photorealistic stuff here.

It doesn't have to be the sort of
textured, you know, photorealistic world

where you're just taking the most important
parts, you know, just like any cartoon,

taking the most important parts, and blowing
them up as big and bright as possible,

and that really fit the
Team Fortress gameplay

in a way that we needed
and didn't know we needed.

I mean, look at it. It's just amazing.

Valve managed to tell a pretty interesting,

funny, engaging story
without any sort of campaign.

So, you have to ask yourself,
'How did they manage to do that?'

Like, every time we made
a video, we're like, 'Oh okay,

here's what's exciting about a character.

We can take that, and we can
put it, like, back into the game.

Sniper has his jarate, you know,

these jars of piss that
he throws at people.

Like that's, that's strange.
That's from the video.

Yeah!

I think we all understand,
as FPS players today,

the concept of the hero shooter, you know,

having interesting characters that
you can pick from, and they all have

an interesting hairstyle
and costume and voice,

and I'm gonna pick the one that
most appeals to me in the moment.

That idea doesn't exist in my
opinion without Team Fortress 2,

because, at the end of the day,
long as as two people left on a planet,

someone is gonna want someone dead.

F.E.A.R., when I first played
it, it was like at a, a LAN center.

Those LAN centers, the one I used to
go to, was dark, and it was, like, quiet.

Everybody's just click, click, click, away.

You're just sitting there, and you're playing
and, all of a sudden, like, someone, like,

goes to open a chip bag next to you.

Ah! Whoa, okay.

I'm still, I'm still in the real world.

We really pushed the envelope on graphics.

It looked amazing if you
had the right hardware,

and it was in a world that was
inspired by Japanese horror movies

which were just becoming
a popular thing in the US.

A remake of The Ring was coming out.

He shows me things.

The scary stuff is great, because
it kind of catches you off guard.

They just really seem
to know when to do it.

Alma was always scripted to
come out at poignant moments.

You had gotten through a hard battle
and you were, like, relieved and then,

'Oh no! There's Alma!'

That perfectly manages to
balance that horror element

with over-the-top gunplay in action.

Still probably some of the best
you'll get in the whole genre.

And could think for itself. ♪♪♪

As something that was really effective.

I wanted to create something
that was truly intelligent

and could think for itself. ♪♪♪

I just wanted to give the
building blocks to an AI system

that, in real time, could
say, 'Well, if this is the goal,

I gotta find a sequence of
actions that can satisfy that goal,

and I can search the space of actions

and try them out in different combinations
as fast as a processor can handle.'

Fall back. Do you see them?
Don't let it get away.

We made the environment
more interactive with

shelves the enemies could
knock over to get in your way

or cables they could flip to create cover,

windows they could dive through to
get away from you or to surprise you.

They sort of telegraph their movements, you
hear them sort of communicating with each other,

and that sort of conveys an intelligence

announcing to you what they
knew about what you were doing

and what they plan to do next.

You might be crawling
around through the air ducts

when you hear one of the enemies
look up and say, He's in the vents!'

He's in the ceiling!

And those kinds of
moments are, are possible

when you have characters that are

designed to observe and talk
about the world around them.

The other thing that holds up well
about F.E.A.R. is certainly its weapon set.

You know, I think
about the, the Penetrator,

just a fabulous name for a gun.

Best shotgun, and this is not up
for debate, is F.E.A.R. Shotgun.

If there's anyone who
argues it's just incorrect.

Apart from that, that lets you shoot someone,
and they will just turn into mist. ♪♪♪

So, Fear was supposed
to feel like an action movie

where things should be just happening
around you, bottles should be breaking,

and chandeliers should be falling, and it
should just feel like you're in, in a movie.

But, there are plenty of times where
things wouldn't work out as we hope,

like John Mulkey and I
worked for a long time on

what we called the
combat opportunities system

being like juicy opportunities
for, like, dramatic moments.

But, it was really hard to get the AI

to get the right balance
of thinking about those

versus thinking about
shooting at you, the player.

And so, we'd have these test
runs where you'd come into a room,

and the AI would come
in, and they'd go crazy.

They'd be shooting
chandeliers and bottles and, like,

shooting like ten different things, and
you're just standing there, and then like,

'Bang, bang, bang bang.'

Fire, give me some pressure fire.

There's always, like,
a tricky, tricky balance

of getting the moments you want,
but, but having that designer's touch

of doing them the way
you want them to play out.

Some games start with an art direction

or a story conceit. In the case of
Borderlands, it started with a design idea.

Before Wolfenstein came out,

I was a role playing gamer.

It's possible that, even to this day, that the
game that has consumed more of my play hours

than any other game is NetHack.

I realized that, what makes
a first person shooter fun:

the moment to moment dodging
and aiming and hitting the target

is a totally different thing that what
makes NetHack fun or Diablo fun.

What makes Diablo fun is becoming
more powerful, collecting loot.

And, in that epiphany, I realized
we can put these things together.

One game that stands out that maybe we weren't
anticipating to be as big of a hit as it was

is probably the original Borderlands.

We were still playing a lot of hyper
serious military contemporary games.

Today, it's absolutely acceptable

to have the biggest game in the world, Fortnite,
with this non realistic cartoon art style.

When we did it, it was scandalous.

This notion of, like, a comedic,
lighthearted FPS that was like open world,

we just didn't really
know what to make of it.

We were swimming around fishing for it,

trying to find how to put it all
together, how to make the Bible.

But I knew, I knew that RPG
and shooter could go together.

I love the Claptrap character.

Hello, traveler!

Claptrap wasn't part of the
plan, wasn't part of the design.

There was a concept artist that
was doing some interesting work,

and Brian Martel was walking by
and saw this guy was just doodling.

Brian's like, 'That's cool.'

It's a perfectly symmetrical
character, almost perfectly symmetrical,

but it feels completely out of balance.

How do you have symmetry and
off balance in one simple shape?

Buddy, what the hell are you do, doing?

He built a model of the robot,
and he did some monologue,

and then he would open the door,
and the door would start to open,

and then he ran, and he
would go towards the door,

and there was a bug where he was supposed to
wait for the door to open and go through it,

but he went too early, and he
bounced into the door and stopped,

and then the door went,
went open, and so I,

I had him add an 'Ow', like, we
bumped into it, and he said 'Ow'

and kind of stuck back
and then went into it again.

It was so fun to watch Claptrap hurt
himself, because he was kind of snarky.

And that's when it stumbled
upon me the secret of the character.

And, when he's up here,
he's an absolute jerk.

And he just, he's the
worst person on the planet.

But, something will happen
which will tear him down.

Right!
The guests should be arriving any minute.

Like when no one shows up to his birthday.

Feel free to mingle with nobody.

You're just like, 'Oh my
God, I feel so bad for him

and you want to help them out.'

In Japanese culture, they say
that everyone has three masks:

the mask that they wear
that everybody sees,

and then there's the mask that
they only let those people they trust

and care most about see,

and then there's a third
mask that no one ever sees,

and it speaks to how we tend to

feel afraid and uncomfortable
to be our true selves.

Tina, you know, there are,
like, other kinds of food, right?

You haven't seriously been living on just
crumpets for the last few years, have you?

Tiny Tina is a character
that a lot of people love.

The thing that makes her special:

she doesn't care about
how people judge her,

and she doesn't care
how crazy she might seem.

And I think all of us have
some of that, but Tina doesn't.

There's only one thing to do.
Kill the living crap out of him!

Tina is always her true self.

It's just really cool to play a game with a
friend, because I haven't really had one.

Whenever I go to PAX
or E3, I still see you know,

cosplayers and sort of people who
are outwardly fans of Borderlands

and its sense of humor and its place.

It really captured people's attention in
a way that we didn't necessarily expect.

The legendary video game financial analyst,

Michael Pachter, famously said,
'Borderlands is being sent to die.

It has no commercial hope whatsoever,

because you can't sell a
cartoon game in a world with

Gears of War and Call of Duty.'

I'm very glad they were wrong.

I think this happened
around the early 2000s

with every new first person shooter,
making the world became so expensive.

I think that you can't really afford
to make four or five different paths

that has as cool scripted events,

as big explosions and so on,
because it's just too expensive.

Then, you'd rather take your
resources, say, 'Okay, this is the path,

and then we can make this, you
know, feel like a Hollywood movie.

We make it feel like you're, you
know, in Saving Private Ryan.

Head for cover and get to the shingle.
I'll see you on the beach.

Allied Assault had an opening
D-Day mission which was unreal.

They did this Saving Private Ryan
moment where you're charging the beach,

bullets are whizzing by, people are
dying, and explosions are happening,

and you felt like you were in the action.

Call of Duty was birthed from that,

That group became Infinity War.

Call of Duty was one of the first games to

embody the sensibilities of film, I think,

in a way that was very successful.

You played Call of Duty,
and you had that mission in it

where you're playing as, like, the Russian
soldier, you don't have any weapons,

you've gotta run up this beach
for the first 15 minutes, no gun.

Follow behind the guy in front of you and,
when he gets shot, you pick up his gun.

That's how you get a gun which
is, apparently, historically accurate.

What must it have been like
to be one of those soldiers

in that experience crossing this river and,

and seeing the boats next to you blow up.

That's the first game that tried to
break away from the mold of like,

'Let's just shoot the same soldier over
and over and add to the production value

with the explosions and action scenes.'
It was out of an actual film.

The bridge between going into movie
theaters and video games are just...

So, the gap is closed.

You can still get a cinematic
experience and be attached to characters

in a video game just as
much as you can on a movie,

and I think Call of Duty 4 was one of those

first campaigns that
really had a heartfelt story

that you got attached to the characters.

To this day, like, if I've played
Call of Duty for a few hours

late at night in a dark room, you know,

I do feel like I've been
in some kind of a war.

While we might kind of bemoan how

scripted the Call of
Duty-style game is in 2022,

at the time, it was a
very intense experience.

Really, it's just easy stuff to digest,
like anyone can play those games, you know?

Run around and shoot someone with a machine
gun and then, when the game tells you to hide,

just hide behind something, you know?

A lot of those early military
shooters are still tough as balls.

The shooters that have
focused on spectacle and scale,

they resonated really well with audiences,

because there's something about seeing
everything together in one environment, you know,

tanks and aircraft and infantry
kind of all rolled together

and the shooting down
an air vehicle with a rocket

and watching it fall in
the sky and fall on a base.

The idea that you're
ants in this massive world

that's so much bigger
than you, that dwarfs you.

It is a really precious experience.

When the Battlefield 1942 came out,

we lived in that game.

The fact that you can, like, fly
straight down into somebody's tank,

that you could, like, have
Jeeps blast into each other.

We laughed so hard playing
that game, because it was so fun.

I find it silly that people argue, 'What's
better Call of Duty or Battlefield?'

Because they're completely
different playstyles of game.

People who want, like, a large scale game,

yeah, definitely Battlefield's the way to go.
If they want to fly planes and helicopters

and, you know, it's the map side. It's
just a different, different kind of beast.

When it went to World War II, it was like,

'Everybody understands this stuff,
all the vehicles, all the weapons,

the stories and the history and all this, '

so there's so much rich
stuff there for their IP creation

that they both knew that they had taken
advantage of something that everybody

still remembered as a thing and then, like,

they just raced each other, and everyone else
saw the race and how much money the race made,

and everyone else was making
World War II until it just became

a big World War II genre
for a really long time.

There's certain games that
just take the air out of the room.

So, when you get a game like Kai,

and you get a game like Battlefield

where the majority of people are
gonna go, regardless of your game.

It's kind of hard to penetrate that market.

They keep the game plan nearly identical

but add new elements to
each iteration of heroes.

It doesn't alienate the previous fans.

The big AAA first person shooters

are sort of trapped in that
same world as Big Hollywood.

They're not really going
to be that original and fresh,

because they don't have the
freedom to take those chances,

because it has to be a mainstream hit.

Well, Call of Duty has
almost become lifestyle today

in console games, right? That,

that's why they sell so
massively and broadly,

because that can easily
be part of your lifestyle,

and you don't have to
play for 20 to 30 hours

to really make progress you
can just play a little bit online

and have an incredible experience.

The audience is kind of
only used to one thing now

you know, so I think it'll
take something that's really

innovative that's going to steal those
people away from that experience.

I think people were just
getting over playing games

that are just generic
regenerating health shooters.

I think we really got to that point where

that was just all that
was coming out for a time.

If you're gonna do a first person
shooter like a hero shooter,

you need abilities, you need
unique characters, unique movement,

you know, unique environments, and then you're
introducing a new hero once a quarter essentially, right?

That arena shooter kind of dueling

1v1-type of game has
sadly fallen out of favor

to team-based games like PUBG
and Apex Legends and others as well.

There's a lot of focus on the technical
aspects of first person shooters today,

where I wish there was a little more
of the personality-driven side of it.

Oh, in my opinion, there's still
a lot of gas left in 2.5D games.

Indies offer something
a little bit different.

They're not trying to compete in
the space that you're normally in.

You know, you get that fatigue, where you're just
playing the same old thing over and over again.

If you're trying to recreate the past,

that same sense that

gamers got when they
played a game for the first time.

You know, it was long enough where
we hadn't really had old school games,

and then you just had all these
new people coming in and saying,

I want to make a game that plays like
the games I played when I was a kid,

and that's why we've got that resurgence

which we're still seeing,
I mean, it's still going on.

So, I'm friends with this guy, Dave Oshry. He's
over there a company called New Blood, and they're

the ones responsible for the
games like Dusk and whatnot

that are what are referred to lovingly
or begrudgingly as Boomer Shooters.

People were craving a return
to old school level design

or return to speed and
skill based-movement,

fun weapons that were just fun, not
necessarily realistic, ridiculous, ludicrous.

People wanted the fun
back in first person shooters.

The F stands for fun, fun person shooters.

David Szymanski tweeted at
me, I had no idea who he was,

'Hey, I think you should
check out my game.'

It was called Dusk, and
it was the best feeling

first person shooter I
had ever felt in my life.

The movement, the sliding,
the shooting, the interactivity,

you could turn the sinks on
and off, you could break the sinks,

you could throw stuff around the room.

Dusk was pretty cool.
It was actually one of the first games

I think I really kind of like fought
to cover on my YouTube channel.

We put out the original trailer
for Dusk, and it went huge.

It was everywhere.
It was on, like, CNET and stuff.

'90s-style shooter copies Doom
and Quake and stuff', and we're like,

'Oh, shit.' We had a lot of eyeballs on us.
They were like, 'Yeah, this looks cool.

The graphics look like shit' I'm like...

But I really wanted people to
see that it's not about the graphics.

It's about the gameplay.

Looking back, Quake still looks
great even though it's got that

low poly style, because
great game design doesn't age,

and I think we proved that
all over again with Dusk.

Ion Fury was a project that

started off with a much smaller
scope just sort of a prequel,

a quick prequel story that was supposed to
be tied to our original Bombshell release,

but, as it went along, it
became very clear that Voidpoint

was sort of taking this
game to a whole other level,

really making something special.

The idea with Ion Fury was to,

to create this kind of alternate timeline.

What if, instead of 3D Realms making Duke
Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior back in the day,

they decided to do something
with the Bombshell character?

Bring it on.

And the first 3D shooter that came
up was actually with this character.

Well, the guys that were
hired, several of them,

were from the Duke mod
community and had worked

with the buildings and code,
upgraded it in its abilities,

like added lighting
effects, voxel technology.

That game in particular has just shown

that engines can have an aesthetic,

a world that is unique to them and kind of

timeless and should be preserved.

You don't have to spend a half a
year making 100,000-triangle character

with motion capture faces and so on.

You can make beautiful pixel art and then
be more efficient and still make fun games.

Good morning.

We needed the new Wolfenstein games,

we needed the new Doom games

to show people that this old style

of game design isn't actually old.

MachineGames took Wolfenstein within
the direction that I would have taken it.

I love the gameplay.

I think they're the
company to keep it going,

because they just have
done such a good job.

It had been a while since I had been

into the FPS genre until Doom 2016,

and it completely blew
away my expectations.

Just like, this is exactly Doom.

This is totally, like, the essence.

Burning through Doom Eternal a, like, 100
million frames per second, and it's awesome.

This is the attitude of Doom.

It feels like you're Doom
guy for the first time.

I mean, the glory kills,
adding that whole element,

turning the weaker enemies
into walking ammo boxes

and bed crates was just

a symphony of violence that you just

can't experience any other way.

Great game design doesn't
age, it doesn't go out of style.

It just needed a fresh coat of paint,

but you could keep your Call of Duty
Warzone, I'm playing Doom Eternal.

What makes a great first person shooter?

That's deep.
You're asking the tough questions now.

Oh, you said we have another hour?

A great FPS, above and beyond
anything else, gives you a sense of flow.

First person shooter is just
the magic of pulling people in

and you being the character.

How it moves, how it turns,

how it reacts to damage.

You need to be in a world that

sucks you into the experience.

Obviously, the weapons, your arsenal

have to be finely tuned.

If you have 100% mastered something,

you're done with it,

but any shooter that has

close to that mastery level
but never lets you have all of it

is something that will
make you play it forever.

Bringing what was great about old games into the
present, and that's what's really interesting.

We made a dent in the world of gaming

here with what we did,
and it continues to be there.

I'm proud of that.

There's more to be done out there for sure.

I think the FPS genre is...

It helped build gaming. I don't feel gaming would ever
jump to where it is without first person shooters.

Video games and first person shooter games

are just more than games.

They're, they're a community.

The first person shooter

genre is filled with rich stories,

it's filled with rich characters, these
memorable novel gameplay experiences.

It's not about just running
around shooting stuff,

it's about feeling like
you're in the shoes of

the character that you're playing.
That immersiveness

makes you want to
revisit it day in and day out.

When I started, all we
were lucky enough to do was

to make it look like
you're inside of a maze,

and you have a first person view.

But, once the technology started improving,

what people did was kind of amazing.

If you can get involved in
something where you personally

have the opportunity to make a difference.

That's the key.

It's, it's wonderful that people
still want to talk about GoldenEye.

We were all massive James Bond fans.
It was a real passion project.

Lots of people really love that
thing you made. It's very humbling.

No one I knew was doing
this for fame or fortune,

like we were just playing
games and having fun.

People who have been inspired by

the products that we were
building back in those days.

I think, perhaps, too much
about the word 'legacy.'

I want to leave something behind.

We built a good foundation,
but people have gone

above and beyond everything that we did,

and the world's better for it.

The thing I wanted to leave behind
was not fame or fortune, it was influence.

One developer said to me,

'I started my studio because of your game.'

And what I want is for my teams to
feel the same sense of pride that I do.

20 years after their next game comes out,

I want them to, to sit
down and shake their heads

and just go,

'Damn, we did that.'

You know?

There's, there's nothing
better in the world.

There's nothing better.