X-TrekandNet Hackand things, but I hadn’t played a PC game in five years or some-
thing. So we just said, “Let’s do a really cool dungeon game in 3D, let’s go.” It’s
interesting, because a lot of people talk about how we were doing such aDungeon Mas-
tergame, but as far as I know none of us had ever playedDungeon Master. It was a very
much “Hey, let’s go for it.” We didn’t have any idea that we were doing anything that
wasn’t just obvious in some sense, because we had no context and the last time any of
us had played a game was back when we were fourteen. We played games in college, but
they were very different; you’re playing networkedX-Trekor something, it doesn’t feel
like a home computer game. ForUnderworldwe wrote four movement systems and we
wrote three combat systems, because we’d just write something: “Oh, this seems cool,
let’s go for it.” We’d get it half done, and we’d say, “Eh? That’s not working.” Which is
nice in a lot of ways; it let us do a lot of things we probably wouldn’t have done other-
wise. But it also meant that we worked a lot. All the time, basically, for a long time. We
spent a lot of time and a lot of energy to make it work.
Given all that, it is pretty impressive it turned out as well as it did.
It was kind of amazing it ever got done. I remember my first thought when I saw it in a
store was, “Don’t they know we’re not professionals? We never got a license to do this!
If people buy that, they’ll realize...”It’s pretty weird to see your thing shrink-wrapped.
It’s just very odd, you get that moment of, “Wait a second, I guess I just go do what I
want to do with my life.”
It’s interesting. Paul was very day to day at the beginning of the project. Later he
got more involved in running Looking Glass, which was Blue Sky at the time, starting
up new projects and dealing with business stuff and money and all that. But I have to say
he was a huge help at the beginning, just giving us a grounding framework that was very
open. He was very good at painting a picture of where to go. He brought this idea of
games as this awesome, creative, open thing and you can do all these amazing things,
and what do we want to do? And I’m not sure it would work right now with an
eighty-person for $12 million or whatever we do games for these days, but for three,
four people in a tiny rented office space in New Hampshire, most of us twenty years old
and not particularly being paid piles of money, it was awesome.
Paul set a very good example by finding the right staff. And a bunch of us had been
at school together, so we had that “You’re in college, and you’re an engineer, and you go
figure things out.” Which, once again, often leads to a lot of thrashing and hard work and
trying and retrying. It’s sort of like we were always a preproduction team, because at
our largest we were five. I knew every line of code, I knew every level, I wrote conver-
sations, I wrote a bunch of the editor. You could hold the whole game in your head and
that let you iterate and improvise in a way that’s a lot harder now. So I think Paul set a
really good agenda of “You’re a programmer/designer, you’ve got to care about creativ-
ity, you’ve got to get it done, you’ve got to know your computer, you’ve got to be smart,
you’ve got to write fast code....” And for thefinal part of the game when Warren got
really involved, not only was he great creatively to help us put finishing touches on it
and clean it up and make it real, but he also knew how to finish projects and keep us
motivated and on track. He had that ability to say, “Guys guys guys, you’re focused in
totally the wrong place.” Working onUnderworld IIandSystem Shockwith him, when I
was project leading more full time, it was nice to have Warren there to say, “Hey
Chapter 26: Interview: Doug Church 503