Viridian Games

Today is the tenth anniversary of the release of the Sega Dreamcast in the United States.

In the end, I think there was one thing and one thing only that killed the Dreamcast: it didn’t play DVDs. Sony’s hype machine for the PS2 was absolutely incredible. If the Dreamcast had played DVDs it would have probably lasted until Sony’s hype wore off and people realized that the PS2′s “Emotion Engine” didn’t produce graphics significantly better than the Dreamcast’s. (Plus Shenmue II wouldn’t have had to come on four CDs.)

A lot of people don’t recall that the Dreamcast offered the first real console online multiplayer experience…unfortunately using 56k modems. Now, it’s not impossible to write online mulitplayer games that can run over a 56k modem…but it is hard, and “lag” wasn’t something console players back then were used to. Xbox Live’s success came from their willingness to explicitly state, “If you don’t have broadband, go away.”

So the poor thing was simultaneously ahead and behind its time. If it had played DVDs and been easily upgradeable to use broadband, we might still be playing it (or a backwards-compatible successor) today.

And now I’m off to play Jet Set Radio all day.

It’s been a while since I’ve done an in-depth story on a developer I admire. So let’s fix that!

Brad Wardell, as you probably know if you read this blog, is the president, founder and CEO of Stardock, a software development company that specializes in two different types of software: operating system customization software and games.

Brad’s entry into software development was almost accidental. His first serious business foray was into hardware – in 1990 he started building computers and selling them pretty much out of his house (a la Michael Dell). He called his company “Stardock Systems”. In 1992 OS/2 was released and Brad felt that he could gain a competitive advantage by preloading OS/2 onto the computers he sold. In doing so he became quite familiar with OS/2.

In 1993 he realized there could be a market for an OS/2 game. He had never programmed before, so he bought two books: Teach Yourself C in 21 Days and OS/2 Presentation Manager Programming, and using the information in just these two books, he wrote Galactic Civilizations.

As you can see, GalCiv was a bit primitive graphically. At the time, Brad only knew how to create windows and icons, so everything you see in GalCiv consists of one of these two features. But it was a critical success (and not just because it was practically the only OS/2 game at the time). It was well-designed and had some excellent AI. Now, I recall being at Origin at the time and watching GalCiv top lots of “Game of the Year” lists for 1994…a lot of us at the time couldn’t understand how Origin games had lost out to an OS/2 game that…well, looked like that.

But as good a game as it was, Brad made almost no money on it. He was ripped off by his publisher and couldn’t afford a lawyer to fight back. He learned a very valuable lesson the hard way – a lesson that almost sank Stardock.

But what the publishers couldn’t take away from him was the name Stardock on the box. While the success of GalCiv didn’t profit Brad, it did raise the profile of his company. Brad was able to profit by writing an expansion to his own game called Shipyards, which sold well enough to keep him going for a bit. IBM came to Brad hat in hand asking if Brad could create a special version of GalCiv for the IBM OS/2 game pack. Brad did, which he titled Star Emperor.

Brad had always been intrigued by the idea of customizing the OS/2 operating system, and in 1994 became convinced that an OS customization tool for OS/2 could be profitable. This lead to him teaming up with fellow OS/2 enthusiast Kurt Westerfield to release OS/2 Essentials, the software that would eventually become Object Desktop.

And Brad was also able to get the rights to the “Galactic Civilizations” name back and republish the game (with improvements) as Galactic Civilizations 2 for OS/2.

And at this point, he figured the game was over and he’d won. By twenty-four he was a millionaire and Stardock was not only selling tons of copies of OS/2 Essentials and GalCiv 2 but publishing other people’s OS/2 software as well.

And then he made his second mistake – he allowed his zealotry for OS/2 to nearly wreck his business.

IBM quietly dropped support for OS/2 in 1995, and Microsoft released Windows NT 4.0 (the one with the much more usable “Windows 95″-style interface) in 1996. Windows NT 4.0 quickly captured OS/2′s core market. There were lots of people (including some of my friends at Origin (Hi, J. Allen!)) who believed that even if IBM’s support of OS/2 was a bit spotty, the superiority of the platform plus user advocacy and support could make the platform a success.

Needless to say, it didn’t work. Soon Brad began to realize that something was wrong, but Stardock continued to release OS/2 software until 1998. This could easily have been the end of Stardock, but two things saved his company.

The first was an employee, Mike Duffy. Mike was the lead developer on Entrepreneur and decided he would write a low-level, cross-platform library that worked on both OS/2 and Windows. This enabled Stardock to finally start making the transition from OS/2 to Windows.

The second was customer loyalty. Stardock at this point had a whole bunch of customers who didn’t just buy their software – they were fans of the company. They wanted to see the company do well. So they actually bought subscriptions to Stardock’s online ObjectDesktop.Net service before it was actually ready. Because of this, while 1998 was the worst year in Stardock’s history they managed to pull through, and by 1999 they had begun to release Windows products.

By 2000 things were looking up again. Brad’s focus on desktop customization software was paying off, with WindowBlinds, ObjectDesktop and DesktopX all selling well. Stardock avoided the dot-com crash of 2001 by actually being profitable and having a business plan, and by 2002 Brad decided that the company was ready to get back into games again. The first had to be a version of the original Galactic Civilizations for Windows.

But development of GalCiv for Windows slowed when the launch of Windows XP approached. Because Windows XP had more customization features “out of the box”, Brad was concerned that people would feel they didn’t need Stardock’s customization software any longer. In fact, the exact opposite happened – Windows users who had never been exposed to desktop customization before saw it in Windows XP, experimented with it, and then turned to Stardock when they ran up against the limitations of what the built-in customization could do. Needless to say, this was a great relief for Stardock.

In 2003, Windows finally got a version of Galactic Civilizations. This edition included everything from the OS/2 versions of Galactic Civilizations, its expansions and its sequel (thus, GalCiv for Windows is equivalent to GalCiv 2 for OS/2). Plus it now looked like this!

At the same time, Stardock had been beefing up their digital content delivery system. Galactic Civilizations for Windows was available at retail and online on the same day. Retail boxes included a code that could be entered into Stardock Central, which registered the user’s copy and allowed them to download the latest version.

Stardock Central quickly expanded to allow digital delivery of any product Stardock published – and Stardock had gotten back into the business of publishing other software.

And in 2006, Stardock released Galactic Civilizations 2, and Brad briefly became the focus of the DRM debate when he stated that GalCiv 2 had no DRM and never would. This caused some criticism from DRM providers (indeed, a Starforce employee actually posted a link on their forums telling people where they could pirate GalCiv 2) but Brad’s decision does not seem to have affected GalCiv 2‘s sales, which have been excellent.

And in 2008 Stardock updated the perfectly functional but kind of hoary old Stardock Central with a flashy new version called Impulse. Impulse is quite comparable to Valve’s Steam in that it’s a system designed to allow people to buy and digitally download software from a host of different companies, but is different in that Impulse doesn’t require an internet connection simply to play games, but only when purchasing a new game or using other online features.

Brad long ago returned to millionaire status and has stayed there since. His strategy of cultivating a loyal fanbase and shipping excellent software while staying out of debt has allowed Stardock to grow into a major online presence and allowed him to overcome his missteps.

Brad has developed a rather…unique online persona. During his stint on the Poweruser.tv podcast, he effectively acted as the “comic” to host Kristin Hatcher’s “straight man”, saying and doing outrageous things simply to get her reaction.

Brad has also been at the core of several flamewars about OS customization, routinely insisting that the customer is not always right – especially when catering to certain customers would hurt his business. At one point he exclaimed in a forum post, “I’m too old and too rich for this shit.”

His political views seem to lean toward the individualist, and he has a particular hatred of taxes, seeing them as good money given to the government who will then give it to people who haven’t earned it and probably won’t deserve it.

Overall, I think Brad is a great guy who had to overcome incredible disadvantages to succeed. If I had the chance to work for Stardock I’d probably jump at it. Despite having to move to Michigan.

So. Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition has certainly raised some ire, hasn’t it?

New roleplaying game, roleplaying not included…

World of Warcraft Refit…

D&D for Dummies

This is NOT D&D!

D&D 4th Ed. is a travesty. It’s a terrible game with terrible mechanics.

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

D&D 4′s detractors tend to hammer on three points:

1. The new edition is inspired by MMORPGs, most specifically World of Warcraft.

2. The new edition doesn’t actually promote roleplaying (with some going so far as to say that it doesn’t even allow it).

3. The new edition isn’t Dungeons & Dragons.

How valid are these points?

While I haven’t had a chance to play D&D 4 yet (Hi, Tom!) I’ve read the Player’s Handbook and The Keep on the Shadowfell quite thoroughly. I’ve also listened to the complete D&D podcast where Scott Kurtz and Gabe and Tycho play D&D 4 for the first time. Gabe had never played a paper-and-pencil RPG before but is an experienced World of Warcraft player, and he was continually finding parallels between the two.

Gabe: I should have gone with “[Jim] Felmagic”.
Tycho: No, you’d get a call from Blizzard. “‘Fel‘ is our word for dark magic!”

Gabe: This reads very much like a [Final Fantasy] Tactics game.
Tycho: Doesn’t it?

Gabe: What did you give me?
Scott: I gave you a +2 against this target – so my attack gives an ally +2.
Tycho: He buffed you.
Gabe: Okay.

Gabe: I cast Arcane Missiles. I mean Magic Missile.
Tycho: Same thing.

(after several encounters in which his character is the only effectual one)
Gabe: I’m going to one-man this instance.

As an exercise, let’s compare a famous spell as it matured through the editions. Let’s use the classic first-level magic-user spell Burning Hands.

Here’s the description of Burning Hands from the first edition of the Player’s Handbook:

Burning Hands (Alteration)
Level: 1
Range: 0
Duration: 1 round
Area of Effect: Special
Components: Verbal, Somatic
Casting Time: 1 segment
Saving Throw: None

When the magic-user casts this spell, jets of searing flame shoot from his or her fingertips. Hands can only be held so as to send forth a fan-like sheet of flames, as the magic-user’s thumbs must touch each other and fingers must be spread. The burning hands send out flame jets of 3′ length in a horizontal arc of about 120″ in front of the magic-user. Any creature in the area of flames takes 1 hit point of damage for each level of experience of the spellcaster, and no saving throw is possible. Inflammable materials touched by the fire will burn, i.e. cloth, paper, parchment, thin wood, etc.

Here’s the description of the same spell from 3.5 edition:

Burning Hands
Evocation [Fire]
Level: Fire 1, Sor/Wiz 1
Components: Verbal, Somatic
Casting Time: 1 standard action
Range: 15 ft.
Area: Cone-shaped burst
Duration: Instantaneous
Saving Throw: Reflex half
Spell Resistance: Yes

A cone of searing flame shoots from your fingertips. Any creature in the area of the flames takes 1d4 points of fire damage per caster level (maximum 5d4). Flammable materials burn if the flames touch them. A character can extinguish burning items as a full-round action.

Sorry, but I don’t have a second-edition player’s handbook. But notice that the spell isn’t that different. The range has been increased from the first edition version and it does more damage (1d4 per caster level instead of one point per caster level) and the target now gets a saving throw. But the spell isn’t that fundamentally different.

Here’s the description from the fourth edition player’s handbook:

Burning Hands
Wizard Attack 1
A fierce burst of flame erupts from your hands and scorches nearby foes.
Encounter ✦ Arcane, Fire, Implement
Standard Action
Close blast 5
Target: Each creature in blast
Attack: Intelligence vs. Reflex
Hit: 2d6 + Intelligence modifier fire damage.

That’s a nice impenetrable description, isn’t it? It’s pretty much just a bunch of keywords. So let’s go over them.

Encounter means that the power can only be used once per a combat encounter. Arcane is the power type of the spell, so it can only be used by characters with access to arcane power. Fire is the type of damage it does and Implement means that if you have a wand, staff or orb that improves your rolls you can use it on this spell (for instance, Gabe could use his +2 Wand of Accuracy in conjunction with this spell). Standard Action means that you must have a standard action available to use it (every player gets a standard action, a minor action and a move action in a single turn). Close means that the area affected must be right next to the character. Blast 5 means that the area affected is a square five tiles on a side. The wizard then makes an Intelligence attack on all characters (friend or foe, PC or NPC) in the square, which is compared against the target character’s Reflex. Any affected character takes 2d6 + the wizard’s intelligence modifier in fire damage.

Notice how incredibly defined that description is. Notice also that it refers to tiles on a grid. D&D 4 completely integrates miniatures into the base game – it’s no longer possible to play without miniatures.

So the detractors’ first point is confirmed in my mind. The goals of the designers of D&D 4 were to make the game both easier and faster to play and they achieved that goal by studying how computer role-playing games had done just that. (I’ve no doubt that this will make Bioware‘s job easier when they make Neverwinter Nights 3.)

But does conceding point one prove points two and three? Is it such a bad thing that D&D 4 has stolen mechanics from computer RPGs? After all, computer RPGs have been stealing from D&D for thirty-five years – and I don’t mean “taking it as inspiration”. I mean directly ripping it the eff off. Practically every designer of classic RPGs says that they started by trying to program the Dungeons & Dragons experience into a computer and the entire industry progressed from there. What’s wrong with D&D finally taking some of those improvements back for itself?

I think the explicit definition of each power is what prompts comments like the “no roleplaying required” one I quoted above. Such definitions take away options from both the player and the GM.

But again, is that such a bad thing? Notice that the “sets flammable stuff on fire” part of the description for Burning Hands is gone. Why? Well, what GM hasn’t had a conversation like this?

Player: Okay, I cast Burning Hands on the enemy wizard.
DM: Okay, he takes three points of damage.
Player: And he’s on fire now, right?
DM: What? No.
Player: What?! He’s wearing cloth armor, right? He can’t wear anything else!
DM: Yeah, he’s wearing cloth armor.
Player: Well then I set him on fire! The spell description explicitly states that…

Et cetera. Another trick I’ve seen players use is to try to use Burning Hands to ignite any lanterns or flasks of oil an enemy character was carrying. The previous rule editions don’t say anything about this, which means it’s up to the GM. The only problem is, what does the GM do? Let the spell become horribly overpowered or piss off a player? This way no one gets pissed – but if the GM wants to allow the player to use the spell in a non-standard way, he still can. I can imagine a situation where a player needs to burn a rope and says he wants to use Burning Hands to do it, and the GM allows the player to do it if he can beat a target number on his attack roll and also gives up his use of Burning Hands in his next encounter. That’s the kind of flexibility that comes from both the players and the GM having the necessary imagination – and in the end, that’s the real component of roleplaying. With enough imagination and goodwill around the table, you could roleplay just with Toon’s fifty-percent rule (though I doubt my own roleplaying skills are good enough for that).

So while point one is valid, I think point two is very weak.

Which brings us to point three. Is this game Dungeons & Dragons? You’ll be casting Magic Missile on kobolds and using Great Cleave on umber hulks…is that enough? Wizards knows that the game is vulnerable on this front, which is why the first adventure they’ve released for it pays direct homage to the classic D&D adventure The Keep on the Borderlands. They also released a fourth edition version of the Forgotten Realms very quickly and are working to get Eberron upgraded, though that won’t be out until 2009.

But of course point three is all perception. Some people will say yes and some no. My opinion is that Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition is definitely Dungeons & Dragons. My only wish is that they hadn’t dropped the name “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons” with the third edition…I think it would be much clearer (and inspire less ire) if 3.5 were still Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and this new edition were the new “basic” Dungeons & Dragons. As for the haters…well, I’m reminded of one day back in the early nineties when I was in an arcade watching this guy play the Dungeons & Dragons arcade game. He cast Magic Missile but died before it hit its target. He sniffed, “I thought Magic Missile never missed and instantly hit.” At which point I knew I was in the presence of snotty geek greatness.

But I’ll leave the last word to Scott Kurtz:

Scott: I guess the guys I play with at home are idiots. I am having such a good time.

…no, don’t fill out your registration card and send it in. Brush up on your gaming history instead!

Read about the rise and fall of Mucky Foot, successors to Bullfrog and creators of Urban Chaos and StarTopia.

You may have heard about Ion Storm‘s spectacular flameout, but if you’ve never read the original Dallas Observer article on it, you should!

And you should also read Allen Varney’s excellent (if somewhat biased) article on how EA bought and then destroyed Origin Systems.

Enjoy!

Just as I’d hoped, the University of Texas is making all of Warren Spector’s talks available. Fortunately, you won’t have to buy a DVD – instead, you can just download them all from here (Quicktime format, large files). I would like to suggest you do so quickly, before they change their minds (or run out of bandwidth).

Edit: Well, that was fast. They’ve taken the page down. Turns out they made them available before all the legal stuff was handled. There’s an alternate download site here…but I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be available or an oversight.

Edit: Now the alternate site is gone too. I guess we’ll just have to wait and hope the files become available again in some form.

And here’s a new video blog!

I always liked the look and feel of this game. Syndicate Wars was the first Syndicate game I played, so I didn’t suffer from “It’s not as good as the original!” syndrome.

Of course when I saw it, my first thought was, “Bullfrog needs to make an RPG with this engine!”

Iffen you can’t stand the YouTube, here’s a downloadable version.

I finally managed to get to another of Warren Spector‘s design seminars last night. This one was with Richard Garriott.

Okay, I’m going to be up front here. Richard is one of my Favorite People. He’s the reason I moved to Austin – when I decided to leave home to get a game development job, I felt that my two options were to move to Austin to work for Origin Systems or to move to San Mateo, California to work for Electronic Arts (please note that this was back in 1990, before they became the Borg). So I’m not going to be particularly objective about his talk.

My one real annoyance was that while Warren started with Richard’s chronology of games, Ultima IV was the last game in the chronology they got around to talking about (other than Tabula Rasa, of course). This was disappointing because I wanted to hear more about the development of Ultima VI and VII myself. But at one point Richard answered a question about dealing with his staff by mentioning that he is very easily swayed by the last person who has talked to him. This neatly explains why he and Warren kept getting off-track.

As a result, the session was a mish-mash of Q&A and Warren and Richard discussing whatever came to mind – Richard gave no formal presentation. That doesn’t mean that the session was boring or pointless – quite the opposite. What it does mean is that the summary that follows is basically going to be as random and haphazard as the session itself.

Richard and Warren did start off with the chronology, with Richard talking about his upbringing. His father was a NASA scientist who later became an astronaut and was constantly bringing experiments and equipment from NASA home that Richard got to play with; he mentioned that one time he got to use a image intensifier tube years before it found a commercial application in night vision goggles.

His mother, on the other hand, was an artist. She was the inspiration behind the silver serpent necklace he now wears.

And in high school he was exposed to the three things that combined to lay out his future path – computers, Dungeons & Dragons, and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. He became obsessed with the idea of programming a computer to play a role-playing game.

The first computer he used was a PDP-11 terminal. The terminal was never used, and Richard really wanted to try it out. In the first of many benign cons, he actually managed to convince his teachers and principal to let him have complete access to the terminal every day as a school class. The class had no teacher, no tests and no other students – it was just Richard playing around with the computer unsupervised. All he had to do was show progress on a program at the end of each semester to get an easy A. Not only that, but he managed to con them into considering this his foreign language credit – that’s right, the foreign language Richard learned in high school was BASIC. This was what made it possible for him to write his first RPG.

Writing that RPG wasn’t easy. The PDP-11 wasn’t actually at his school; he had to use a terminal and punch paper tape in order to program it, and it took forty seconds for the PDP-11 to respond to input while the program was running. That gives a new meaning to “turn-based”…

The first program he wrote (which he simply called “D&D 1″) was effectively a Roguelike (and dammit, I meant to ask him if he’d played any other Roguelikes before he wrote it, but I forgot). It was so complicated that his father actually bet him that he’d never finish – if Richard did manage to finish the program, his father would split the cost of an Apple II with him.

Of course, Richard did manage to get D&D 1 finished, but it took a while for him to get the Apple – by the time he did he was up to D&D 28! He converted D&D 28 (which he called “D&D 28B”) to the Apple and continued to improve it. This led to him later publishing that same game as Akalabeth, which started his professional game development career.

Richard is pretty proud of his latest game, Tabula Rasa. Now, before I get into this, I just want to say that I really like what NCSoft has been doing in general…even though I don’t play any of their games. They are proving that MMOs don’t have to be fantasy-based and they don’t have to require subscriptions and they don’t have to be Everquest clones. Yes, it’s easy to snicker at the failure of Auto Assault, but NCSoft more than any other company is trying to break the mold of MMOs. And Tabula Rasa is the latest iteration of that. It’s an RPG, but it’s one where positioning is important, you can actually get behind cover, and you don’t roll for damage until you actually pull the trigger on your gun – there is no “auto-attack”.

Tabula Rasa also uses a very interesting system to handle instances and big events in the game. I seem to recall a long time ago mentioning that World of Warcraft would probably have been the best RPG I ever played…if anything I did in the game actually mattered. Anything you do gets undone five minutes later so that someone else in the game world can do it again. Tabula Rasa actually fights this by having things appear differently in the game world for different players based on their own actions. So instead of the world continually getting reset, it appears that the world is moving forward…just at different rates for different players.

But the strange thing is that despite the fact that it’s “Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa”, Richard deliberately pulled back from doing a lot of the design work. He described the backstory and game world and made a few key design decisions, as well as creating the Logos language for the game, but after that he mostly oversaw the design and kept it on track rather than doing it himself. He called himself more the “creative director” of the game, saying that Starr Long was the actual director and producer.

He’s actually very proud of Logos, which is a pictographic language (not merely a substitution cypher like the Runic, Gargish and Ophidian languages were). He wanted a language that was just as easy (or rather, just as hard) for an English-speaking person to read as a German-speaking or Korean-speaking person. He based the language heavily off of pictographic languages for handicapped people and considers Logos to be superior to many of them. And he showed us how to read it…it’s actually not hard. For instance, the Logos on this screenshot means, “the fight for control of the universe begins now”. Logos is usually read top-to-bottom rather than left-to-right, though.

It’s pretty obvious to me that Richard has a Reality Distortion Field. When he mentioned convincing his teachers to let him at the PDP-11, Warren interjected that Richard did stuff like that all the time…which jives with Mike McShaffry’s anecdote in Game Coding Complete where he and the other programmers on Ultima IX went into a meeting early in the project with the express intention of convincing Richard that an Ultima VII-style streaming world just wouldn’t be possible in 3D…and came out of the meeting convinced by Richard that an Ultima VII-style streaming world in 3D was obviously the right thing to do.

Then came the question-and-answer session. I asked Richard if he’d ever consider doing a single-player RPG again and he said yes, but that his next project would be another MMO. Much later I asked him if he ever thought we’d see MMOs with the deep world simulation of Ultima VII and he said that hopefully I’d see one when he made one, and that’s probably what his next project would be. So if Richard’s next project turns out to effectively be an improved Ultima Online, I am taking full credit. I put that idea in his head. It was all me, baby.

Let’s see…what else did he talk about…oh, he said that they put up with player-run Ultima Online shards until some of them started charging money, at which point he simply picked up the phone, called the FBI and had them arrested. It’s kind of stupid to do something like that when it’s so easy to find out through your ISP who you are.

Also, to his credit, he took exception when Warren called Ultima Online the first MMO, but pointed out that previous efforts were either very difficult to get into like textMUDs or were linked to proprietary online services like Kesmai and thus had very limited markets. Ultima Online was the first mass-market, internet-based MMO and proved that genre’s viability. Richard had been turned down by EA again and again when he proposed UO to them and was only able to start the project by cornering Larry Probst personally and applying the Reality Distortion Field, which got him $250,000. He was able to create a viable prototype with that $250,000, but in order to get beta testers they needed more money to duplicate and mail CDs, which they didn’t have. So Richard & Co. put up a web page, one of the first Origin and EA ever had, to tell people, “Hey, we’ve got this game and we think it’s going to be great, but if you want to get into the beta test it you’ll have to send us $5 to cover the cost of shipping you a CD.” All their co-workers said they were crazy, but within a week they had 50,000 takers – and this was when the biggest MMO in the world had 15,000 subscribers. That was the point at which Electronic Arts perked up their ears and actually started investing in the project.

He also said that one of the most touching moments he ever had was when he was GMing UO invisibly. He said he was near a player who was fishing (fishing being one of the most popular activities in UO) and was actually wearing shorts and a straw hat to look the part. The fisherman was approached by an adventurer who had obviously just come from a dungeon run and who said something like, “Ho, fisherman! It is obvious that you are poor – you have no armor and weapon! Here, take some of the spoils of my latest adventure!” and started laying money, armor and weapons out on the ground for the fisherman to take (player trading having not been implemented yet).

At which point the fisherman player said, “Stop! You misunderstand! I am a fisherman. I catch my fish, take it into town and sell it, and then spend the money with my friends at the pub. I like this life and desire no other. Be off with you, warmonger!” Richard considered it one of the great accomplishments of his life that he had created a game that people could get so far into.

And I think that’s all I can remember…for now, at least. Like I said, it was a great evening.

Squaresoft goes and fulfills one of your fondest wishes and you don’t even know about it until three weeks after it ships.

I’m a huge fan of the Front Mission series. The first one I played was Front Mission 3 (because that was the first one that was released in North America) and I am apparently one of about five people who bought Front Mission 4. But the game I really wanted to play was the original Front Mission, which was created for the Super Nintendo and was never released in the United States.

So I’m at Best Buy buying a new headset and guess what I see? Front Mission has now been released…for the Nintendo DS. Is that perfect or what? At last we have an official translation, and from the movies I’ve seen it looks like the game takes great advantage of the DS’s dual screens. These games are so information dense that it’s a natural to give you an additional data readout on the top screen while the bottom screen always displays the in-game view.

Hopefully I’ll be able to make that my Christmas present to myself. Now if they would just release Front Mission 2. And re-release Front Mission 3 (my copy recently bit the dust). And finally release Front Mission 5…

Last night I went to the second session of Warren Spector’s series of lectures on game design. The speaker was Mike Morhaime, co-founder and current president of Blizzard Entertainment.

Mike’s kind of a nervous type. Frankly I just wanted to go up there and shake him and say, “Mike! Come on, man! You’re a millionaire! You run the premiere PC game development studio in the world! You were on South Park! What could you possibly have left to be nervous about?” But I get the feeling that it’s just his temperament. Unfortunately it does impact his public speaking ability…as does the fact that he’s got to be very, very careful about how he answers questions.

Since Mike started as a programmer and is now a business guy, his talk wasn’t about game design per se, but more about running a successful game studio. And his main thrust was, “Don’t ever betray your principles. Ever. For any reason. If it’s not great, don’t ship it.” He talked about “brand withdrawals”, which is when a company effectively betrays its user base in some way to make some quick cash. Needless to say, he was against doing so for any reason ever.

He also talked a lot about “opportunity cost” and the projects Blizzard canceled over the years. In every case, the game in question could have been brought up to Blizzard’s standards and shipped, but the amount of work to do so could have been applied more effectively to another game Blizzard was already working on. Shipping Warcraft Adventures would have been a double disaster not only because nobody was buying adventure games at the time, but also because all the work put into finishing it would have been much better applied to Starcraft.

He talked about the South Park/Warcraft episode. South Park episodes are developed very quickly and in a fairly haphazard fashion, which is diametrically opposed to how Blizzard does things. So they basically had to dispatch a team to help Matt and Trey get the in-game footage they wanted and then just trust that the episode would come out okay. Which it did

He talked about the movie. They want the movie bad, and they think it can be done right. They are teamed with Legendary Pictures, the same people who did Lord of the Rings, Batman Begins, Superman Returns and 300. Now, I’m going to interject something here. Carmack famously once said that story in a game is like story in a porn movie – you expect it to be there, but it’s not very important. Most game developers have relied upon the interactivity of their medium to gloss over deficiencies in their storytelling, and that’s why most video game movies suck. The movies suck because the stories suck. Warcraft’s story doesn’t suck. It’s big, it’s complete and it’s incredibly detailed. Frankly, they could make a trilogy of movies out of it. If the Warcraft movie sucks, it won’t be because of the story.

He also talked about Blizzard’s popularity in Korea, and it became clear to me that they didn’t just luck out there. Gaming is huge in Korea. How huge? Well, there are about 20,000 “game rooms” in Korea. To put that in perspective, there are about 30,000 McDonald’s in the whole world. When people first started creating game rooms, they didn’t have the best hardware. They needed a game that was easy to start up, easy to get into, had network play, was very fun, and ran on older hardware. Starcraft fit that bill perfectly. If Blizzard had cut any corners on that game – if they had betrayed their principles in any way – it wouldn’t have been chosen as the standard “game room” game and Blizzard would have missed out on that huge market. Oddly enough, the original Starcraft was never localized into Korean; the Koreans just play the English version.

Of course, as Mike talked about the history of Blizzard, it became clear that at no point has Blizzard ever had to put up with publisher pressure. After Warcraft II shipped they were basically untouchable even though they are publicly owned (by Vivendi, at this point). And since Blizzard is the only gaming company Mike has ever worked at, he didn’t really have anything useful to say when asked how to prevent publishers from forcing you to betray your core values.

That aside, it was still a very interesting evening. Next week’s guest will be some guy named Richard Garriott. I’m not sure if I’ve ever heard of him before…

Warren Spector is hosting a series of master classes in game design at the University of Texas here in Austin.

Despite very short notice and a near lack of funds, I managed to squeak in. The first session was Monday night and it was with Mark LeBlanc, who is most famous for his work on the classic Blue Sky/Looking Glass games (Ultima Underworld 1 and 2, System Shock and Thief 1 and 2) and his more recent game, Oasis.

The session took place in a studio in the CMB building on the UT campus and was professionally recorded. Doubtless all the sessions will be available in some fashion after the series is over, but, having never had the opportunity to go to the GDC or any other game conference, I am very grateful for the chance to see them live.

When I got there I was surprised – for one thing, the studio wasn’t full to bursting, and for another, most of the people there were fresh-faced college students rather than the slew of industry grognards I was expecting. I found myself wondering if these kids even knew who Marc was…

The format was one I hadn’t seen before. Warren interviewed Marc for about an hour on Marc’s work history, then after a brief break Marc presented a lecture on his core design philosophies. Then Warren interviewed him again, this time asking Marc about specific games he had worked on or contributed to. The whole thing lasted about three hours and I was fascinated the whole time.

Now, I have to give Warren his props. I’d seen videos of him presenting at the GDC and he was very good there, but he also turns out to be an excellent interviewer.

But listening to Marc was a mind-expanding experience. This guy knows his stuff. You can get the gist of it by going to his blog and reading about the Eight Kinds of Fun and Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics, but the real meat of his talk was how he actually applied those precepts to the design of Oasis. You can get the slides for that talk at his site as well, but it was much better live (and the ability to interact was key).

And now I’m just going to throw out random things that I remember from the talk in no particular order.

Blue Sky/Looking Glass actually started as a group of MIT students, one of whom had an uncle who was working at Origin and wanted to start his own company (Paul Neurath).

One of the really odd parallels between Blue Sky and Id Software is that at both studios all the developers started off living and working together in the same house – the Blue Sky house eventually had ten employees living in it. This both facilitated the work and kept initial production costs way down.

Warren said that when he first came to the Blue Sky house (to produce Ultima Underworld) the guys there wouldn’t talk to him until he got his laptop on the network and named it. Apparently, having a machine that you could name yourself was a big status symbol at MIT, and the idea that you weren’t “somebody” until your computer had a name carried over to Blue Sky. Warren said he named his computer “Elmer PHD” and that he uses that as his online tag now.

Warren said that Marc has the ability to play your game for a short time and tell you exactly what’s wrong with it and give you a whole bunch of ideas for improvement. How I wish I could have him play Planitia…

Marc finally left Blue Sky during the development of Terra Nova after he got into an argument with Dan Schmidt, the director, over a feature Marc didn’t want to implement.

Marc said that he liked the fact that his involvement with System Shock 2 was purely technical and didn’t have anything to do with the design because he could then actually play and enjoy the game!

Marc is very big on programmer/designers. He said that if you want to work at Mind Control Software, you can expect to get grilled on game design even if you’re interviewing for an art position. Warren chimed in and said that they do the same thing at Junction Point. Marc also mentioned that at Valve, there are no game designers – they have “gameplay programmers” instead. This neatly coincides with my two favorite game postmortems.

After it was all over I went over, shook his hand and thanked him for the Looking Glass stuff. He said, “Hey, I was just on the team.” I said, “Well, you’re the member of the team who is here, so I’m thanking you.” He didn’t seem to mind that.

Frankly I think the whole thing was good enough to put on TV, and I’m hoping that’s where it will end up. Looking forward to next Monday’s session, which will be with Mike Morhaime, one of the founders of Blizzard.