Playing for keeps

when you're an independent video-game developer

hell-bent on creating the most innovative title

of the year, you'd better be ready to bet it all.

WELCOME TO THE BIG LEAGUES OF BIG FUN

£ t is July 13,2009 in an unassuming office space in San Francisco. The 74 people in this room are sup­posed to complete a video game in approximately two weeks. They work for a company called Double Fine, and this is the second game they have made. The first took them five years; this one has taken four. Most people could create an amateurish photo or movie or book if they tried, but only a rare few can make a game. The people at Double Fine get to do what they do because they are some of the only people who can. Everyone here was the smartest person in his or her high school. It's a murderers' row of low-key experts in disciplines ranging from physics programming to sophisticated computer animation to fine art. They

h.ive done an immense amount of high-lc work to get to this stage, sacrificing sun-t light, sanity and social contact to partici­pate in the high-stakes team sport that / "- big-time video-game making. And ' are okay with that. They arc doing esoteric and difficult thing they love

in one of the few places in the world they can be rewarded for it, both creatively and financially. As one programmer puts it, "It's kicking my ass, and I'm loving every minute of it."

However, there is a problem. They are lost in the wilderness. Or rather, the random civilian testers their publisher has brought in to play the game have been getting lost in the wilderness. This is not good.

The people at Double Fine are making a game called Brutal Legend. It's an "open-world" game, the kind that has a plot but that also allows you to roam the landscape freely and get pleasurably lost driving your giant hot rod, the Deuce. One of the wonderful, confounding and defining faas of the games medium

is tnat no two people ever nave tne same expe- ¦ rience with the same game. Double Fine's '< gift is not that it makes great art but that, it makes great worlds in which you can make great art, whether that's by jump-, ing your car over hot chicks on motor-* cycles while listening to the Scorpions'

or saving the world from the forces of hair metal. Or neither. Or both. Getting lost in Brutal Legend's world is great, as long as you can get unlost again. And people are having a hard time getting unlost.

It started with the best intentions. Manv

games rely on a mini-map in a corner of the screen to help you navigate. It's artificial, but it works. Briital Legend's designers didn't want to con­stantly remind you that you're playing a game, and they came up with an elegant solution: make the Deuce's turn signals flash in the direction of your next objective, as the crow flies. And this works fine, unless there's a mountain or a chasm between you and your next objective. In that case the sig­nals direct the player to turn into a rock wall or a ravine, and people get confused. If they don't stop being confused, they get frustrated, and if they stay frustrated they'll probably turn the game off. The people making this beautiful monster do not want that to happen. They want Briital Legend to

be a nonstop party for your eyes, ears, fingers and brain, something that sweeps you away on a cloud of awesome that lasts as long as you can maintain consciousness. That is not happening right now. And it is far from the only problem they have.

A month ago they were sued by the biggest video-game publisher in the world to prevent Briital Legend from ever coming out. They've also spent S20 million of other people's money. Those other people are counting on the game being so amazing that millions buy it and the money is paid back. And Eddie can't cry anymore. The game will not be amazing if Eddie can't cry.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Brutal Legend began in 2005, a few months prior to the completion of Double Fine's previous game, Psychonauts. Another wildly original and highly ambitious game, Psychonauts nearly crashed the company. After four years of development its

publisher pulled the plug, forc­ing Double Fine to scramble for cash to complete the game. It very nearly didn't. "We told the team that Wednesday was the last payroll," says Tim Schafer, the company's founder and lead creative. "My throat closed up and I couldn't get any more words out. It was the worst meeting we've ever had." Then an 1 lth-hour call from a willing publisher sparked a hasty deal, and work continued on what would become one of the decade's best games.

Development on Briital Legend started not long after the near closure. With the rest of the company slogging through seven-day weeks of 16-hour days to finish Psychonauts (game makers call this "crunch mode"), Schafcr and his inner

circle retreated into a back room to come up with the most baroque and insane heavy-metal fanta­sies they could. "We tried to list everything that would look awesome on the cover of a heavy-metal album," says Schafer. "Rivers of blood, chrome volcanoes, cliffs made of speakers, trees made of weapons, laser panthers." How did Schafer justify spending his top talent's time indulging their goofy fantasies while the rest of the staff broke their backs? He wanted to keep them employed. If you want to make a game and don't have $15 million to $30 million, you need to get a deal from someone who does. And no one will give you a deal without a demo. So the demo for your next game had better be finished by the time your current game goes out

the door. If it isn't, the money will run out, your talent will start to scatter, and you will be ever so slightly completely fucked.

The game was to start with brawling and adventuring and then build toward epic battles in which the player commands legions of heavy-metal beasts (using real-time-strategy gameplay, or RTS). With the main concepts in place, the team's production designer, Scott Campbell, began con­ceiving visuals to define Briital Legend's look and feel. "We start with the world, then make the sup­porting cast and then create the main character last," says Campbell. "He needs to mesh with the world because he's a stand-in for the player." At the same time, lead designer Erik Robson started blocking out the basic ways characters would move and be controlled, using cubes and cylin­ders. Schafer then had the team's animators mock up a 30-second movie and took it around to the

industry's top publishers to convince the suits to give him $20 million to make a strange, funny, heavy-metal RTS game about a roadie transported to the distant past to lead a musi­cal revolution against demons. His endeavor was only half as crazy as it sounds.

For one thing, Schafer has a 20-plus-year track record through seven games, most of them classics. Plus, he had entertainment powerhouse CAA on his side. Artist rep­resentation is new to game

makers, and Seamus Blackley, Schafer's agent, is one of only a few available. "The clients we represent never had agents before," says Blackley. "And the studios haven't had representatives involved in these big game deals." Schafer admits, "It's really hard to say i am the best! I'm the king of games!' But Seamus can make people feel as though they're getting a spe­cial deal just by talking to me."

Still, the rejections were legion. "When a successful game designer wants to do some­thing different, people who play games get incredibly excited. But the sales and market­ing people can't come back with any projec­tions for the business side," says Blackley. "People get scared they're going to bet their careers on something that doesn't work." Schafer had never done a multiplayer or RTS game before. "People were scared to death of it because it looked creative," 4 says Schafer. "Even- time they used the C word we knew we'd lost the pitch." Even­tually, however, Sierra Entertainment bit. Double Fine had a deal.

Thus began a solid two-year run of calm at the studio. A few months later, Jack Black agreed to voice the game's main character, Eddie Riggs. "I was a huge fan

of Psycbonauts," says Black, "and when Tim showed me some of the Frazetta-style artwork, the aesthetic really spoke to me." Black is arguably the biggest star to play the lead in a video game, and with him onboard Schafer was able to sign his personal metal idols Ozzie Osbourne, Rob Halford and Lemmy Kilmister. All that was left was making sure everyone didn't lose a year of their life to another epic crunch at the end. Which is why Double Fine has a Caroline.

Executive producer and chief operating

officer Caroline Esmurdoi is also Double Fine's ass-^ kicker in ¦

came to tne company a year Derore rsy-chonauts was finished and told people they were toast unless they started sprint­ing. Though unafraid to get tough—asked what she does at Double Fine she replies, "I yell a lot"—she didn't want to eclipse people's personal lives again. To avoid that, she adopted the Scrum system of software development, by which an entire cross-disciplinary team works on small chunks of the game at the same time, finishing them before moving on. Using Scrum, the game is playable much earlier than with typical development methods, and there are fewer surprises at the end.

And so with their money and their vision and their new kick-ass production system, y dig in. And two years go by and mas­sive progress is made and it's starting to look like a game in there. At which point, predictably, all hell breaks loose.

In mid-2008 game publisher Activi­sion merged with Sierra's parent company, Vivendi Universal Games (owner of Bliz­zard, the maker of juggernaut cash cow World of Warcraft). The deal was estimated at $18.9 billion and created the world's larg­est game company, Activision Blizzard. Any (concluded on page 120)

Playing

(continued from page 83) time two companies of that size merge, you can count on some carnage.

Suddenly Double Fine's formerly enthu­siastic publishing partners turned silent. And the monthly checks that kept their lights on stopped arriving. "I knew we were screwed when I heard about the merger," says Schafer. "Activision was one of the publishers that initially passed on the game."

It looked as though Double Fine had been dropped. Again. Only this time the company sort of didn't care. When Psy-chonauts had been kicked to the curb, it was in shambles, a mess of disconnected (albeit brilliant) pieces without much pol­ish. Thanks to the Scrum method, how­ever. Brutal Legend was not just a working game: large portions of it were almost fin­ished. "The game looked cool, and it had Jack Black and all this flashy action. We just inherently fell more confident," says Schafer. Sure enough, the fish weren't just biting, they were jumping into the boat and filleting themselves. Within weeks of being cancelled. Double Fine had a new deal with EA Partners, a division of Elec­tronic Arts, the second-biggest game com­pany in the world.

EA Partners is somewhat unique in gaming—an extremely well-funded studio that's willing to take risks and back even its strangest bets with tall marketing dollars. Most game companies favor safe choices over interesting ones. Did your space-marine game move a lot of units? Change a few guns, add some new enemies and call it Space Marines 2. The game business is lit­tered with the corpses of once-innovative franchises that met with success and were then milked to death by cheap repetition. Electronic Arts is not immune to this. In fact, entire wings of the company do quite well cranking out innovation-light unit shifters. It is precisely the stability of that business that allows EA to have studio-within-a-studio EA Partners, whose goal is to find the developers who are dreaming the biggest and pay them to dream even bigger. This is not altruism or public fund­ing for the arts. EAP sees innovation and creativity as a sound strategy for making a great deal of money. "For a time, the focus at EA was too much on engineering prof­its instead of creating great entertainment experiences," says David DiMartini, senior vice president and general manager of EA Partners. "If you start with game quality, the sales will come."

But once again, things at Double Fine were a tad too rosy for the gods of gam­ing. In June 2009, almost a full year after being dropped, the company received word that Activision Blizzard was suing it to prevent Briital Legend from coming out, claiming it had never dropped the game. Double Fine barely flinched. The team put the final polish on the game, and EA started flexing its focus-group muscles— which is the source of the data that have upset the applecart today, the 13th of July 2009, here at Double Fine's offices. People

are getting lost, you see. Lost in the heavy-metal wasteland.

Then there's Eddie's inability to cry, dis­covered when Schafer, Erik Robson and art director Lee Petty go to EA's offices to record a promotional video. When Eddie is moved to tears (well, to one tear anyway) by the plight of exploited headbangers, the tear is nowhere to be found, robbing the scene of its emotional heft. Eddie isn't sad. Everyone else is. To lighten the mood, Devin Bennett, an EA publicist, reads them the countersuit against Activision Blizzard, which has just come in on his BlackBerry. Filed that afternoon, its wording is defi­ant and combative and contains a zinger about Activision's aversion to new titles. This provokes several high fives, but it still does not make Eddie cry.

The man responsible for making Eddie weep is technical artist Drew Skillman. A typical Double Fine employee, he's young, geeky, brilliant and deeply in love with his job. "This company is like a giant brain," he says. "All the incredible artists and writ­ers are the right side, then all these gifted programmers and technical people arc the left side. And they're all working on this combined technical and artistic chal­lenge." Skillman is part of Double Fine's corpus callosum, the interface between the two sides that takes the artist's dreams and marries them with the programmer's capa­bilities. Eddie's emotional problems have to do with a concept called "occlusion,' which regulates how each of the game's objects cover up other objects. Eddie's tear has been there the whole time, but it's hidden inside his eyeball. It takes Skillman half an

hour at his workstation to figure out how to make the big burly roadie well up.

On July 30 an LA. Superior Court judge issues a tentative ruling on the law­suit, leaning toward Double Fine's side. By the time the actual court date arrives a week after that, Activision Blizzard agrees to a no-harm, no-loul settlement. Another week after lhat. the Double Finers put a bow on their game, including a modi­fied navigation system that still uses turn signals to show you where to go but also contains most of the intelligence of your real-life car"s nav system. Hddie's tear is flowing on command. A month later the game has gone through its EA, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 approvals and been pressed onto discs and shipped to stores. If millions of marketing dollars have been spent correctly, you should already have heard how great it is.

Where does Double Fine go from here? Much of that will be determined by how-well Brutal Legend fulfills FA Partners' vision of quality begetting sales. But given the relentless dictates of independent game development (i.e., the need to get your next demo done before your current project is out the door), we have to assume that in a back room somewhere a small group of strange, sweet and driven peo­ple is dreaming up its next set of insane, unexpected and emotionally resonant pos­sibilities for you to explore. Which is to say, let's hope this thing sells so Double Fine can once again earn the privilege of suffering for our art.

"PEOPLE GET SCARED THEY'RE GOING TO BET THEIR CAREERS ON SOMETHING THAT DOESN'T WORK."