fun right away and could clearly distinguish itself from the rest of the market right away.
In practice I think we are going to make games that are easy to get into and I think
almost everything will get to the point where people can just pick it up and play it and
have fun. The question then is how you distinguish which has more depth and if that is
the depth that you as a player are interested in. And that’s where at the moment as an
industry we have no real way of communicating any of that. If it was five dollars a game,
who would care? You’d just pick it up because it sounded interesting and you’d see if
you like it. But at fifty dollars a pop, we have a bit of the McDonald’s syndrome where
people say, “I’ll go to McDonald’s because I know what it tastes like even though maybe
it’s not the best food in town, but I don’t have to risk seeing if that sub place on the cor-
ner is any good.” We get some of that in our industry, where it’s “Well, that sounds
interesting, but I don’t know. I’ll just go buy that game I know about already where I
know exactly what it is and I won’t be disappointed.” The answer is changing. Fifteen
years ago something likeUnderworldsold pretty well but it was selling to a very differ-
ent market than the console market. People were going into that with expectations
about role-playing and how much time they were going to have to invest to get a handle
on it. Whereas now there are still some games like that but in general most people are
thinking more about entertainment and a little less about a challenging mechanic.
I’ve always thought it was pretty impressive that Looking Glass had such a
good success rate with some pretty innovative titles.
It’s kind of weird. The thing about Looking Glass is that Paul and Ned had obviously
done a few games each before, but in a lot of ways the bulk of the company over the
years was always new to games. A lot of people were just out of school, even on the
design and programming side of it, and there were a lot of people who had an interest in
gameplay and game mechanics and hadn’t been at a lot of companies. We didn’t have
much context I guess; we hadn’t worked other places. There wasn’t anything to com-
pare it to, so it wasn’t “Hmm, how are we doing and how are those other guys doing?” It
was more “Well, gotta make some more games, let’s go!”
The fact that you were all so green makes your success even more surprising.
Sort of, except the advantage there is that you have a lot of people who believe they are
going to work really hard and make it work. As opposed to “Oh, I already know how to
do it, we’re just going to do it the same way” or “Oh, that will never work, we don’t have
time” or “Oh, it should have sold better so now I’m disappointed.” Instead it was just
“Let’s go!” Which is nice. Projects were smaller, budgets were smaller, which makes it
much easier. I’m not sure how you get that vibe on a hundred-person team.
Were you sad to see Looking Glass finally go under?
Obviously, yes, in some sense. It had a pretty good run. I left five or six months before
Looking Glass went away, and I had a degree of frustration with how things had gone
over the last couple of years. And some of the changes, some of them were inevitable I
think given the scale the company had grown to. And some of them were probably not
inevitable, but hey, they happened, so be it. At some level I had personally been like
“OK, well, that’s over.” I obviously wished those guys the best and would have liked
524 Chapter 26: Interview: Doug Church