incredibly shallow. Tons of scripting, tons of special cases, attempt to do conversation
and inventory and other things. And I think the cool side of that is it gave people a lot
more epic scale and a lot more possibilities and people who were willing to buy in, there
was a lot there. There was a lot to invest in and care about. And fictionally I think they
set it in a good timeline that people could get into pretty easily. Starting it out at a
destroyed Statue of Liberty was a nice way to set a tone early and connect it to the real
world yet give yourself enough freedom to do interesting things. I think they provided a
pretty accessible game-space, and they provided enough systems stuff that you could
play around but not so much that it was distracting. Personally, I thought maybe it was a
little too easy to find yourself poking behind the curtain, a little too easy to go “Oh, wait,
that wasn’t real, I can’t really do that.” They react to that in this one case but in these
other ten cases they’re not going to. But I think that’s fairly inevitable given the type of
game they did. I don’t think it’s because they did a bad game, I think it’s because they
took on an incredibly ambitious, hard problem. But I thinkDXwas a pretty cool
achievement, definitely. I personally feel that in the long run you’re more likely to get to
where we want to be ten, twenty years from now by doing aThiefwhere you make
something incredibly focused and small but it works. Then you keep growing and grow-
ing and adding to it, until you get the breadth you need but you keep the depth the whole
way. Whereas obviously theDeus Exapproach is to get all the breadth right away with
none of the depth but then go back and start adding the depth. Is either “right?” What-
ever, who knows. It’s just a different approach, and in practice I’m sure twenty years
from now is going to look different than any of us expect anyway.
So the next thing you worked on wasFrequency. What was your involvement
with that?
Greg LoPiccolo was the project leader onThiefand had done the music forSystem
Shockand had been audio director at Looking Glass for a while after that. Greg left to go
to Harmonix. And Dan Schmidt had done the music onUnderworld IIand was project
leader onTerra Novaand so on and so forth. Dan was onThieffor three or four months
but then decided he’d rather be at Harmonix. Dan’s double major had been computer
science and music and he was a singer/songwriter so Harmonix was a perfect fit for
him, and so obviously he was missed at Looking Glass but we all understood why he
had gone there. After I’d left LG and done some work onDXand was back in Cam-
bridge, obviously Looking Glass wasn’t around any more at that point and that was right
when the Harmonix guys were beginning to talk to Sony about movingFrequencyover
to PS2. So I said, “Hey, I’ve always wanted to write some PS2 code in order to under-
stand the system, so I’ll come in and write a little demo of what your game might look
like on the PS2 if you’ll let me play with your dev kits.” And they were all busy doing
their PC stuff to hit some milestones and get some stuff working, so I just came in for a
month playing around with writing a bunch of PS2 examples, getting up to speed on it,
and thinking what would we have to do and so on. And then when they got the deal and
decided to go ahead and make it a PS2 game, they asked me, “Hey, if you want to stay
around and write some code and sit in on design meetings and talk about games, that’d
be great.” Which is awesome. I really like the guys there, they’re some of my favorite
people in the industry, I think they do really, really interesting stuff. I think they have a
pretty strong vision for what they want to accomplish, which is great and which is really
526 Chapter 26: Interview: Doug Church