me. Let’s just say some people want to claim
Interplay was a one-person show and I’m saying, ‘No,
there were four founders’. When people rewrite history,
that’s a problem for me.You seem to have mixed emotions when you look
back at your time at Interplay.
We grew slowly for the first five or six years and it
wasn’t till we made a lot of money from Bard’s Tale II
that we really started our growth. After that, it felt like we
moved the company every two years because we were
growing so much but you know, I did hide away in my
cubicle a lot.Were you at least making good money?
No. When I asked for a raise, they’d tell me I had stock
in the company. I said, ‘Yeah but I still have to eat... and
I’m sick of cold burgers from my desk drawer because
I can’t afford a fridge!’ I did get more money after I
threatened to quit but I don’t think they should have
made me fight for it.You eventually left Interplay in the Nineties after
more than 11 years there. What had changed at
the company over that time?
Everything. It wasn’t the company I’d jointly founded.
I’d meet someone in the halls and try to be friendly and
say, ‘Oh you must be new here, I’ve never met you’ and
they would reply, deadpan, ‘I’ve been here a year.’ Then
there was the constant knowledge we were being run
into the ground. I would see all these games greenlit, like
Stonekeep, which they said would take nine months [to
develop] and I knew that would never happen. It ended
up taking over five years. I was called a naysayer and not
a team player – but I was right.In the second half of the Nineties you worked on
many first-person shooters. Was it good to have
a change from all the adventure games you had
coded in the preceding decade?
Well, at Interplay, I’d worked on Descent and on the side
I’d done Wolfenstein 3D for the SNES, so it was a genre
I knew about. Later I’d work on Quake II, Half-life, Medal
Of Honor and lots of others...Including the 3DO port of Doom, which sounds
like being handed a poisoned chalice.
It was but 3DO were lied to as well. This guy was telling
in the press about how Doom for the 3DO was almost
done and it had new levels, new weapons and
how it was going to be the definitive version.
I just had to finish it off. 3DO was of course
excited... only to discover the reality, which
was nothing like what was promised. It was
all lies. At least I got the game out...You also converted Wolfenstein 3D to the
3DO, which turned out much better. Do you
think the 3DO could have ever really competed
with the PlayStation?
The hardware itself competed quite nicely. The memory
architecture was really quick, the multitasking operating
system was ahead of its time – at that level it was a nice»^ Rebecca has a brief stint with the 3DO
working on Doom and Wolfenstein 3D
por ts for the system.»^ [PC] Becky helped bring 3D space action to the PC with Interplay ’s Descent.
OFF WITH
HER HEAD
Rebecca has a long history of hiding Easter
eggs in her games, from text strings in the
code saying ‘hi’ to game hackers, to her
beloved burgers appearing in odd locations,
but we were especially intrigued to know
why an image of her being decapitated is
a recurring theme. “That wasn’t my idea,”
she assures us. “It was Brian Fargo. I’d been
annoying him and other people at work by just
shouting ‘burger’ when it was time to eat. He said
if he heard me saying it one more time, he was
going to chop my head off. I think he was joking.
Any way, he got an artist to do a picture of Mike
Boone chopping my head off with an axe and put
it on a floppy, so my computer booted up and that
came on the screen. I saved that image – and
signed every game I worked on by hiding that
picture in there somewhere! I had a feeling, even
back then, that people would tr y to take credit
for things they didn’t do. To ensure no one could
take away what I’d done, I’d put that image in so
people would know I was part of it.”The story behind a
memorable calling card94 | RETRO GAMER