Warren, here’s what I’m thinking, I’m trying to do this, this, and this...” in ourweekly
phone call, or once a month when he would come down to Boston. His ability to say,
“Yeah, Doug, I hear all that stuff you’re saying, but fifty percent of it you shouldn’t even
care about now. And twenty-five percent of it will be fine however you go; just pick
something. The other twenty-five percent is pretty scary; we’re going to need to figure
that out. And you know there’s this other twenty-five percent you’re not even talking
about and I don’t know why. To me that’s the scary stuff.” He had that ability to help me
and the rest of the guys reset, from the big-picture view of someone who has done it
before and was really creative, but who also understood getting games done. It was a
huge, huge win.
So we got really lucky, between Paul and Warren as our two experienced vets. The
other programmer who wasn’t from the school gang was an ex-Infocom guy who had
done a ton of tools programming, and he just said, “Hey guys, come in to work and do
the work, and get it done.” So we had a decent balance early on to learn from, so that we
didn’t just get obsessed and be college kids flailing forever and trying to be super cre-
ative. But we also had enough pushing us that we didn’t just try to get the code written
as fast as possible and call it done. So we got pretty lucky in the people we had around us
to learn from, look up to, and get ideas from.
Was there ever a worry from Origin that theUnderworldgameplay was too
much of a departure from the previousUltimas?
I would say for the first
year they didn’t really
think it was ever going to
get done. They didn’t pay
any attention at all,
frankly. We had two pro-
ducers, one of whom quit
without anyone there tell-
ing us. We called the
switchboard after two
months and asked, “Hey,
we haven’t heard from our
producer in a while.” “Oh,
he doesn’t work here any-
more.” “Awesome. I’m
sure that’s good news for our project.” And then the next producer didn’t really get it
either. I think we were very lucky to find Warren who was like “My God, first-person
3D immersive play simulation indoors! This is totally new and amazing!” Warren really
believed in it. I think we had the advantage that our inventory panel looked very much
like anUltimainventory, and on some level things were just simpler then. There were
fewer products and you collected swords and your points went up and you had some
skills and, you know, rock and roll! That’s somewhat glib, obviously; it was something
we worked on for twenty hours a day for two years. Paul had done a couple of games
with them, they were busy doing their games, and they thought the demo looked cool,
and “Oh, you can move around and it’s textured!” The first demo they saw had no
504 Chapter 26: Interview: Doug Church
Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds