[whirring]
[gun shots]
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.
[explosion]
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.
[explosion]
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.
[explosion]
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.
[whoosh]
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.
[lasers firing]
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.
[toilet flush]
recording whatever, whatever I get my hands on. That was a lot of fun.
[music intro]
[Alert]
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.
[whoosh]
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.
[Ahh!]
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
[guitar riff]
Uh
[Heavy metal music]
Um
[funky guitar]
This is gonna sound absurd.
The original games that I played of theirs were the side-scrollers
[beeping]
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.
[sinister laugh]
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.’
[laughing]
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.’
[gun shots]
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 [Aieee!]
or alert screams of the people coming at you.
[shooting]
Castle Wolfenstein on the Apple II was one of the first things that had any kind of voice output on the game.
[Achtung!]
Those scratchy, awful Nazi voices
[Ahhh!]
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.
[gunshots] 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.
[gunshots] 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.
[barking]
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.
[ghostly laughter]
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.
[gunshots]
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, [laughs].
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.
[Music builds]
[gun shots]
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
[keyboard clicks]
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.
[screaming]
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?
[gunshots]
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,
[roars]
‘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.
[roars]
That sound, that machine sound, it’s stomping around.
‘Oh, shit.’
[stomping] [woosh]
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.
[explosion]
For me, I love the shotgun.
[reload sound] 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.
[gunshots and gun reloading]
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.
[buzzing]
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.
[loud buzzing]
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.
[explosions]
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.
[gun blast]
[screaming]
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. -[laughing]
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.
[gunshots]
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.
[Startup chime]
[explosion]
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.
[gunshots]
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.
[Ahhh!] [flames woosh]
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.
[Ay yeah yer]
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?’
[AI] 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.
[AI] 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.
[AI] 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.
[zapping]
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.
[gunshots]
Fuck!
How this takes the family friendly aspect out of it.
[screaming]
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.’
[laughs]
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.
[blast]
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,
[Fireball sound]
And the sound is…It’s called Fireball. It’s a really unique sound
that, like now, you can hear in everything, this [whoosh] sound
and it comes from the movie Backdraft.
[whooshing]
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.’
[evil sounding reversed effect]
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.
♪♪♪
[gunshots] [dogs barking]
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.’
[ding ding ding]
It has to be preposterous as the rest of the game.
[Ahhh!]
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.
[zapping] [Oooh!]
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.
[laughing]
♪♪♪
The first FPS we played, oh, that was back, uh, it must’ve been Marathon.
[uplifting music]
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.
[gunshots]
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.
[dramatic music]
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 theme]
Star Wars Dark Forces.
[ Star Wars theme]
I remember thinking like, ‘Wow, someone’s finally built, like, the Star Wars game.’
[whooshing]
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.
[Stormtrooper] You there! [Blaster fire]
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.
[star wars music] [blaster fire]
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
[Vader] 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.
[Blaster fire]
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.
[whistling]
I am here to kick ass and chew bubblegum, and I’m all out of gum.
They love that one.
[Heavy metal track]
[Whoosh]
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
[Duke] 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.
[Duke] 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.
[Duke] 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.
[gunshots]
[Duke] 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.
[Duke] 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’l 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?
[Duke] 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.
[gunshot]
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.
[gunshots]
Hail to the King, baby.
[gunshots]
[Duke] 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? [laughs] I can’t do it!
Every time I think about it.
I could never say it without laughing.
[Duke] Rocking!
[Explosions]
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.
[Duke] 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.
[Duke] ♪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.
[Duke] 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.
[Duke] Somebody’s gonna frigging pay for screwing up my vacation.
[thunder cracks]
With Duke 3D, their environmental design
with interactive environments was so important to FPS games.
They raised the bar when they did that.
[Duke] 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.
[Duke] Those alien bastards shot up my ride.
We added humor to the game.
[Duke] 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.
[Duke] 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.
[Duke] 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.’
[gunfire] [Duke] Come get some.
And, of course, Duke had some innovations with things like the pipe bomb.
[explosion]
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 [crunch]
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.
[Duke] It’s down to you and me, you one-eyed freak.
When I recorded the first Duke Nukem 3D game,
[Duke] 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.
[Duke] 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.
[gunshots]
[Duke] Game over.
Duke Nukem and I share very few commonalities
except that we both like bubblegum. Other than that, we’re nothing alike
[Duke] 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.
[Explosion]
♪♪♪
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.
[zapping and explosions]
You’ve been erased.
Eraser.
We’re like, ‘That’s awesome.’ We just stole that.
[gunshots] [chuckling]
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.
[gunshots]
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
[explosion]
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.
[music builds]
[roaring]
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.’
[laughing]
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.
[roaring]
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.
[laughing]
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.
[cheering]
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.
[gunshot]
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. JB
[laughing]
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.
[Bond music]
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.
[gunshots]
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.
[Military music] [gunshots]
One of my favorite things in the world is when you get into the tank on GoldenEye.
[tank engine starts]
You know what I mean, right?
Suddenly, you're in the tank. Suddenly, you’re daddy? Yeah.
[heavy breathing] [explosions]
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.
[silenced gunshot]
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.
[heavenly choral music]
We discovered later, we didn't.
[Bond music]
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
[machine gun] [Bond music]
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.
[machine gun] 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.
[slap] Ooh!
Yeah, he did suffer for his art, that's for sure.
[gunshots]
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.
[shots] 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.
[gunshots]
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
[gunshots]
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?
[gunshots]
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.
[fast gunshots]
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.
[gunshots and ricochet]
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
[explosion]
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.’
[laughing]
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.
[explosions]
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.
♪♪♪
[record scratch]
♪♪♪
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
[screaming]
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,
[laughing]
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.
[explosions]
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,’
[gunshots]
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,
[explosion]
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: Tribesinfluenced 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,
[laughing]
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.
♪♪♪
[static]
Let me now unveil XBox.
♪♪♪
Bill, you've certainly revolutionized the technology we know today,
[static]
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 gamechanger
I remember doing LAN parties. We would system link, like, four consoles together in a basement
Wen 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.
[evil laughing]
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.
[explosions]
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
1 v 1-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.