hard to use as proof now. And maybe that means you should have a year of pre-
production with a small team where you write tons of stuff, but most publishers aren’t
thinking that way at the moment. It’s more, take an engine, add a couple of features, and
then you’re safe and can go forward. And that’s certainly more stable. I think you want a
lot of that, but you certainly don’t want all your products to be like that.
Aside from the publisher side of it, with a truly innovative game, how do you
convince the development team the game is going to work and how do you
keep them on track with the vision?
Yeah, that’s a super hard one. Part of it is you’ve got to get a team that’s comfortable
with the degree of ambiguity. There are some people who are comfortable in that envi-
ronment and others who aren’t. And it’s not good or bad in either case; it’s just how
people are. But I think that’s a huge part of it right there, whether you get people who
say, “OK, that sounds kind of interesting. I’m not sure I get it, but I think I get it pretty
well so I’ll go off and start trying to figure it out.” Or whether you get people who say,
“I’m just not seeing that, and I’ll have a hard time building it or doing work toward it
until I really understand it.” So I think the attitude of the people you have is a huge
piece of it, and I think that’s where minutes of gameplay and storyboards and trying to
describe the experience is so important; ways to communicate what you’re trying to
build before you’ve built it. ForThiefwe had a huge advantage because at the end of the
day we could say, well, is it making the character more thief-y? Hmm, that looks like it
makes him stronger and brawnier, probably don’t need that. Hmm, that looks like it
makes him cooler and stealthier, let’s do that. Not all games that try to innovate have
such an easy focus, but I think that was a crucial part ofThief. You could always go “Is
the thing I’m typing going to make him stealthier?”
Did you use game minutes on the project?
Yeah, we definitely did
some of that onThief. Not
as much, I think, because
we did a couple at the
beginning and then it was
pretty clear that, OK, we
want this idea of guards
trying to find you but not if
you’re hidden in the shad-
ows and not if you’re
sneaking up behind people
and conking them on the
head. Once again, the idea
ofThiefis a lot more trans-
parent than the idea of
System Shock. The name
System Shockdoesn’t tell
you what the gameplay is like, whereasThiefdoes. Now that certainly leaves you with a
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Thief