PC Gamer UK 01.2021 @InternationalPress75

I

t’s hard to imagine a more prestigious PC

gaming university than Maxis in 2008. When

an industry fresher named Alex Hutchinson

joined the Spore team, he was introduced to

Civilization IV designer Soren Johnson,

SpyParty creator Chris Hecker, and producer

extraordinaire Lucy Bradshaw – who Fortune would

later name one of the ten most powerful women in

gaming. Presiding over it all was SimCity genius and

walking TED talk Will Wright.

“It was a very big learning curve, working with some of

the smartest people I’ve even seen,” Hutchinson recalls.

“There were all these luminaries from the business, which

for a 20-something Australian was pretty exciting.”

As it turned out, though, Maxis was a better

environment for learning than it was for building games.

Despite its acquisition by EA, the success of The Sims had

insulated the studio from publisher influence that might

have given it tighter structure and goals.

“There were endless fascinating discussions with people

about the role of videogames and the purpose of mechanics,”

Hutchinson says. “I was exposed to all kinds of new ways to

think about games. The downside was that getting through

those debates was time-consuming and exhausting –

everyone had very strong opinions, and a forceful idea of

where Spore should go and how it should be.”

notion that console players are stupid or impatient.

Hutchinson later took that perspective to Ubisoft,

where he headed up Assassin’s Creed III and Far Cry 4.

KILLING WITH COMEDY

“The one throughline of my career is the idea that the

player’s narrative is more important than the game’s

narrative,” he explains. “Allowing room for player

expression, making that as wide as possible and

celebrating their decisions. That was always something

that Soren and Will were excited by, and I think that

probably infected my thinking.”

With Far Cry, Hutchinson inherited a bleak message

embedded in the series by a fellow Ubisoft game director,

Clint Hocking: the idea that the player couldn’t really

change anything for the better with a loaded gun. “Clint’s

an old friend,” Hutchinson says, “and a very serious man”.

Hutchinson’s own instinct was different: to embrace the

black comedy of a man murdering his way across Kyrat so

that he could bury his mother’s ashes. For him, Far Cry was

best handled with a weary smirk.

“I’d become so exhausted by linear shooter narratives

about how shooting people is bad,” he says. “The only way I

could get through rewriting the script was to make it a big

joke – the idea that a person would fly to a warzone for any

other reason than to get involved in a war. I liked the idea

that we could make this big systemic soup, and then the

FAR OUT

How THE SIMS shaped the career of Far Cry director Alex Hutchinson

VACUUM DREAMER

Five features from

Hutchinson’s cancelled

Ubisoft space game, Pioneer

Wright wasn’t always around to

mediate, and the finished Spore bore

the marks of that indecision. It wasn’t

one game but several, of varying

quality, taped together. Ultimately it

hasn’t been Spore that’s defined

Hutchinson’s career, but his least

high-profile work at Maxis – working

to adapt The Sims for consoles.

“For a while they were trying to

make the brand more palatable for

what they thought a console audience

wanted,” he says. “They’d added

objectives and locations with fixed

characters. But when we got to The

Sims 2, it occurred to me that perhaps

we should try as earnestly as possible

to be true to the experience.”

It’s an attitude that’s since become

the prevailing one – to launch PC

games across multiple platforms

without compromise, eschewing the

narrative we did build would be a

commentary on how that narrative

was essentially farcical.”

Small wonder, then, that since

leaving Ubisoft, Hutchinson has

leaned into the systemic side of Far

Cry – rejecting story to focus on

discovery, aggressive wildlife, and

organic encounters between AI. That

was the pitch for Journey to the Savage

Planet, which Hutchinson built with

an independent team before joining

Google Stadia last Christmas.

“We’re working on new games,” he

says. “It’s the last thing I haven’t ever

tried, which is to be first-party. Google

is very new to the games business,

which is exciting. They haven’t got

any historical assumptions about how

games are made, so that can be

challenging, but also it’s a positive.”

Jeremy Peel

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NON-VIOLENCE

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ZERO-GRAVITY

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TRUE

3D SPACE

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REALISTIC

PROBLEMS

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SMALL, DETAILED STATIONS

INSPIRATIONS AND CONNECTIONS IN GAMES

Positive

Influence