self-delusion that most of us in the software industry indulge in just to get ourselves
out of bed in the morning. Even games that take two years to develop often start out
with the producer and the marketing department telling each other that it can be done
in a year and be out by Christmas. The more technically ambitious the project, the less
you know what you’re getting into.
The film industry, by contrast, is relatively good at budgeting and scheduling
shoots and doing them in just as long as they’re supposed to take. The trade-off there is
that they’re not often trying things that are really new. When they do, like using a new
technology for the first time, or filming on location in a war-torn country, or filming out
at sea, they often experience the same kind of budget and schedule overages that are
common in computer games. OnLast Express, the whole production hinged on our
development of this new rotoscoping process, so to a certain extent, at the beginning
when we said, “Yeah, we’ll develop it and it will take x months and cost this much,” we
were basically operating on blind faith, going forward assuming that we could resolve
whatever problems there were and that it would work — which it did, eventually. It’s
very hard to make accurate time and cost projections when you are doing something for
the first time. OnLast Expresswe were doing maybe ten things that had never been
done before, all at the same time. That was probably unwise.
Overall, unrealistic planning is not a good thing for developers; it doesn’t really
help us. One of my regrets about this project was that we were under so much financial
strain from day to day that I was spending half my time worrying about the game and
half my time worrying about raising money. That’s the situation I put us in by undertak-
ing such an ambitious project.
Last Expressis the first of your personal projects where you didn’t do any of the
programming. Do you miss it at all?
One great thing about programming is that, when you’re really on a roll, you can lock
yourself in a room and have the satisfaction of making progress every day; it’s just you
and the machine. The times when I would miss that the most was usually when I’d just
spent two days in back-to-back meetings. Why did these meetings have to happen and
why did I have to be in them? OnLast Express, we had four programmers working on
the project, and although I often envied their lot, I had my hands more than full with the
game design, script, artists and animators, casting and directing the actors on the voice
recording and film shoot, working with the composer, sound designer, and editor, to list
a few things that I actually enjoyed doing. At various points I did offer my services to the
programmers, but since my last area of code expertise was in 6502 Assembly Language
[on the Apple II] they decided they didn’t really need me.
Last Expressis an extremely unique game in both setting and design. In con-
trast, most of the rest of the new games coming out seem to be set in either
fantasy or science fiction settings, and are all based on last year’s big hit. How
do you feel about the industry’s trend toward “me too” games?
With the occasional magnificent exception, I think you’re right about the majority of
games. I don’t know if the “me too” problem is primarily in terms of setting. I guess I
feel it more in terms of genres. You can takeDoom, and change the textures so that it’s
342 Chapter 18: Interview: Jordan Mechner