leader your job is to get the eight or ten managers all seeing vaguely the same thing.
Because what you have to do is get those eighty people to all act like they’re seeing the
same thing. That’s hard, because the fact that humans communicate at all is sort of
magical, as far as I can tell. And when you’re talking about creative collaboration, cre-
ative collaboration’s really, really hard. I really do think as a project leader these days
your job is to Vulcan mind meld your team.
How didSystem Shockoriginate? Did you have more of a formalized plan than
withUltima Underworld?
Probably a little. Under-
world IIwas initially going
to ship in February, but
then we all tried to pull it
in for Christmas. So inevi-
tably we signed off on
December 30th with
everyone working over-
time over Christmas, in
that classic, genius game
development way. So we
shipped that in January,
and I actually went down
to Origin in Texas for a
couple of weeks for that,
while the guys were still up in Boston. And finally the final two guys in Boston and I
would get on the phone and make sure I had all the new code and modem it back and
forth and all that kind of excitement we had back then, reading hex checksums of all the
files over the phone to make sure we were building the same thing. There’s nothing
like, three in the morning, reading off two hundred sets of hex numbers. Awesome,
totally awesome.Underworldwas at zero bugs for a week and a half,Underworld IIactu-
ally was at close to zero bugs for a while but there was actually one bug in it that we
failed to catch, so we were all embarrassed by that. Back then, your final couple of
weeks there really were almost no bugs, you were trying to be at zero bugs for several
weeks in a row with no new bugs found. So you had a fair amount of time, and you’d try
to play your game to break it, but really, with your own game, there’s only so many
hours you can spend a day playing it before you completely burn out. So we started talk-
ing then about doing an immersive simulation game but taking it out of the fantasy
space. We talked a little bit about going modern versus going sci-fi, but the only problem
with going modern is it will just beg so many questions: why can’t I pick up the phone,
why can’t I get on the train, and so on. So we did a bunch of talking, and we probably did
three or four high-level designs for sci-fi games.
Do you mean you and Warren?
Mostly Warren and I, but Paul Neurath back in Boston along with Austin Grossman who
was one of the writer/designer guys onUnderworld II. So we all bounced some ideas
506 Chapter 26: Interview: Doug Church
System Shock