Outwars
When I was at SingleTrac, Outwars was probably the single largest project we'd ever worked on. And it was PC only. We negotiated the deal with Microsoft - the idea was to make a game that was "two generations removed from Doom." Quake - undoubtedly the "next generation Doom" - was looming on the horizon but we weren't sure exactly when it would be released. We wanted to leapfrog it.

The project was also inspired by an offer to do the videogame based upon the upcoming movie adaptation of Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers. Ultimately, that deal didn't pan out (and I personally thought the movie sucked). And they never revealed to us (well, at least not to me) any of the details about that proposal, to keep us completely untainted. But the idea of doing a game about powered armor with massive vertical movement sounded kinda cool. As research, I re-read the book Starship Troopers, as well as John Steakley's outstanding book Armor.

So the game was about taking a team of soldiers in jetpack-enabled battle-armor and fighting aliens across four different "planets" - though one planet was actually the giant alien mothership. That was basically so we'd have four different environmental "themes."

While we were in development, Looking Glass Studios produced the very under-rated game Terra Nova, which scared the crap out of us briefly because we feared they'd made our game. As usually happens with these things, playing the game revealed that it wasn't actually all that similar. That happens a lot. You hear something about a soon-to-be-released competing game that at first sounds like they bugged your office and beat you to the punch with your own game. But then, upon release, you realize it's not even close.

Although, to be perfectly honest, Terra Nova (which I understood was kind of a flop, too) was closer to the game I wanted to make. While it wasn't ever going to take its place among my all-time favorites, it was more of the combat-jumpsuit-SIMULATOR that I'd had in mind. But I wasn't the guy in charge of the design of the game. One of my many sins was probably pushing the sim-like elements too hard into a game design that hadn't really called for it.

A third of the way into development, we experienced a pretty major rift within SingleTrac. It was a rift that was never healed. It partly came about because we were being sold to GT Interactive (which was, not long afterwards, absorbed by Infogrammes, which then became re-branded as Atari here in the U.S.). ALL of our senior people on our team - all of our leads, our producer, designer, etc - ended up away much of the time (meeting with lawyers, etc), and even when they were there they didn't quite have their head in the game. At least not our game. As one of the lowly peons, I was never quite sure what was going on there. I had (and still have) a lot of respect for those folks, and a dozen years later I bear them some sympathy for what was going on. But at the time, I was pretty annoyed.

During the final third of the project (which by this time, was plunging relentlessly into delayed and over-budget territory), management finally made official what had been going on unofficially for months - our senior people were gone, and the rest of us now had authority to add to our responsibility for making the game fun and getting it out. We did what we could.

But as the sale of our company was done, Outwars was in a strange limbo. As we owned the intellectual property rights on the game, our publisher no longer saw much value in it - it could no longer be turned into a franchise. And GT Interactive was annoyed that we were still contractually obligated to finish a game for their competitors. Both sides were pretty much of the opinion that we should just get the game out the door and meet contractual obligations. At least, that was my own take-away from it.

But while Outwars didn't meet with great marketplace acceptance or critical acclaim (one review called it a "Nightmare in a box"), I still feel some pride in the game. It was wildly ambitious for our company, sort of a mission-impossible thing... and we pulled it off. There were many decisions I wish we could have changed. And I will forever be apologizing for that final alien boss battle - it was (almost) all my fault, and I knew even less about game design than I do now.

Labels: game development, retro

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