Programmer Joe

I’m old. Well I’m not really that old in the grand scheme of things, I just feel that way when I hang around game developers.

I got my first real computer time in the fall of 1982 by hanging around after school and hacking some stuff in BASIC on the Vic-20 in the library.  I was in 5th grade at the time, and was by far the most computer-obsessed person I knew. That christmas my parents bought me a TI-99/4A and a little black and white TV to hook it up to. Technically the computer was a present for “the family”, but in practice it didn’t really work out that way. I was obsessed with the TI, and wrote all sorts of little games and other programs on it.

A few years later I spent all my accumulated allowance and paper route money on a Commodore 64. The C64 was a big upgrade, and included such advanced features as a floppy drive and a 300 baud modem. It also had the advantage of having a manufacturer that was still in the PC business. (TI abandoned its home computer line shortly after we got ours.)  I spent quite a bit of time on the local BBSes, much to the delight of the other 4 people I shared a phone line with. Once I had a car began participating in one of the staples of the personal computer revolution: the computer club.

The local commodore user’s group met once a month in one of the classrooms at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley. It was a group of 20-30 people, many of which came from the university or worked at the local Hewlett-Packard site. Computer enthusiasts were pretty few and far between in those days, and this was one place where we all fit in. Just about everybody in that room was a geeky, sci-fi reading, D&D playing male. Everybody could program to one degree or another, and more than a few knew their way around a soldering iron. Despite all the other things they had in common it was those last two that brought this group together: everyone wanted to do cool stuff with computers.

I don’t know if that kind of community disappeared or if I just fell out of touch with it. There are millions of programmers these days, and they are usually specialized enough that they barely speak the same language let alone program in it. Being a “hardware guy” now means that you are comfortable plugging together prebuilt components and hunting down device drivers online. The inexorable march of progress has pretty much made the computer itself disappear as something people get excited about. Nobody cares enough about specific platforms these days to even have the sort of trash-talking arguments Commodore and Apple fans used to have with each other.

Does this sort of passionate niche club still exist? The Seattle Robotics Society might fall into that category. They spend their meetings talking about various components to build robots from and what sort of code to put on microcontrollers to make their robots do interesting things. The meetings feature lots of teenagers learning things about robots that they would never have any exposure to at school. There seems to be the same mix of Boeing engineers and college students that the computer clubs had.

What about others? Are there clubs for wearable computer enthusiasts? People who design programming languages? Quantum computing fans? Or are we nearing the end of the innovative period for computing and somewhere there are developing pockets of interest around nanotech or some other technology that doesn’t really exist yet?

It’s funny that I’m so nostalgic for something that was already going extinct by the time I got involved. My experience with the computer clubs was 10-15 years after the Homebrew Computer Club spawned Apple Computer and others. The people I met in the clubs were not entrepreneurs to be, they were more like fans and maybe the occasional shareware developer. It’s been twenty years, and I’ve never seen any of those names show up as leaders of industry.

What about you? Are any of you old enough to have belonged to a computer club?  :)

At ION I gave a talk on our development process for Pirates. Darius Kazemi has posted a transcript of the talk. It’s also up at the Vault Network. I wonder how much buzz it’s going to get.

I’m giving the same talk at AGDC this year, so if you missed me at ION you can catch it there.

While we were at PAX Rick Saada (of Castle of the Winds fame) and I sat down with Tom Kim from Gamasutra to record an interview. It covers the history and development of both Pirates of the Burning Sea the game and Flying Lab Software the company. They’ve posted the podcast over at Gamasutra.

The Pirates interview starts about 10:30 into the podcast.

(You may want to read parts one or two first if you haven’t already.)

In spring of 2001 I went down to San Jose, California for the Game Developer’s Conference. In the car rental terminal at San Jose airport I was in line next to a couple guys who were obviously coming into town for the conference. We made small talk while we waited our turn and then once we got our cars we went our separate ways. Meeting game developers is hard not to do in San Jose during GDC, so this was a pretty ordinary encounter.

We were staying at Motel 6 that year in an attempt to save the company money, so after I made it to the motel I had to spend a hour or so yelling at the clerk to get them to actually set aside the rooms we had reserved. The rest of the company was flying in the next day, so I wanted to make sure there would be someplace for them to sleep. Once the rooms were set, I went off in search of dinner.

2001 was a bad year for California electrically. Enron, wildfires, and record temperatures where conspiring to cause rolling brownouts for about a year, and this GDC was in the middle of that. None of the businesses in the state had their external lights on to conserve power. After driving around for 45 minutes, I still couldn’t find any place open to eat, or at least any place that had their lights on, so I ended up at the Denny’s out in front of the Motel 6. Staying at Motel 6 and eating at Denny’s. Boy that was the life.

Well it turns out that these two guys from the airport also ended up in the same Denny’s. They were just about finished, but didn’t have any place else to be so I took a seat at their table and ordered dinner.

We got to talking about about games we had worked on, and when I mentioned Middle-Earth Online, one of these guys got an excited look on his face. His name was David Michael, and he was a founder at Samu Games. Samu had a game out called Artifact, which is a 2D online strategy game. It seems that about a year earlier, in the spring of 2000, Sierra had approached Samu Games about doing a version of Artifact with the Middle-Earth license. They paid for Samu to add a few new features to their game and reskin it with hobbits and elves so they could show it off as Middle-Earth Online.

It seems that the licensing agreement between the Tolkien people and Sierra specified certain milestones at which Sierra had to show forward progress on Middle-Earth Online. One of these milestones was in 2000 and they needed to show something to Tolkien’s estate or they would lose the license. They laid off the entire Middle-Earth team in the fall of 1999, so they obviously had nothing internal to show, but by throwing a few hundred thousand dollars at Samu Games, they could get their hands on an online game set in Middle-Earth.

Samu used the money to build this reskinned Artifact and then after delivering the Middle-Earth game to Sierra, pulled all the hobbits and elves out and changes it back into Artifact 2.0. I don’t know if Sierra ever showed the result to the Tolkien estate. They certainly never released the game. They eventually lost the license, and after a few years it made its way over to Turbine. Samu didn’t know why this strange project had fallen in their laps until that dinner at Denny’s… they just knew that Sierra wanted a vaguely Middle-Earthy game, but didn’t seem to care at all about the gameplay or anything else about the game.

What a bizarre little industry we have.

If you haven’t read part one yet, start here. It will get you up to speed.

When Middle-Earth was in Oakhurst its producer and the general manager of the studio were both big supporters of the project. They were on board with how much work it would take and what the game would be like when it came out. Unfortunately neither of them relocated to Bellevue so after the move we didn’t have either of these champions to make sure the game was well received in its new home. This was the first, and arguably the biggest, of our problems once we made it to Washington.

The general manager part was played by the manager in charge of Sierra Studios. Both Middle-Earth and Babylon 5 were put under him. Let’s call him Sam, even though it is not his real name. He immediately started looking for a producer for our project, and a couple months later hired a guy that we can call Boromir. Now Boromir had two big problems: he didn’t like our game, and he was a lousy manager. Boromir spent all his time on the project traveling to conduct focus sessions at conventions so that he could use the resulting data as a tool to convince Sam that the Middle-Earth Online that was underway was not worth making.

My visibility into these events was somewhat limited. I was a worker-bee programmer on the team, and not invited to any Big Important Meetings. What I can tell you is that I never saw any scheduling effort from Boromir (and we desperately needed a schedule.) When I tried to get us access to the bug tracking tool from QA, he wasn’t interested enough to rattle any cages. The time he was in the building, he never came out of his office. I doubt he knew the names of any of the people below the lead level on his team. As far as I could tell all he did was disagree with everything that was coming out of the design team.

Not that everything that came out of design was golden. Some of the ideas actually survived into the game that Turbine eventually shipped, but some were what I like to call “crazy.” The biggest of those was perma-death. The high level design here was that any player would be able to work up the nerve to commit murder by way of lesser crimes. Eventually they would be able to permanently kill another player’s character. Certain high level monsters would also have the ability to perma-kill a player character. To be fair, this was 1999. Everquest hadn’t launched when we relocated, and things like perma-death were considered debatable. In retrospect, though, that one just seems crazy.

The other two big points of design contention were player psychology and player capture. Psychology was the solution to newbie ganking. Whenever you were threatened with a fight that was far enough above your level, your character would automatically run away. Player capture was the notion that certain creatures would capture your character in such a way that they would need to be rescued by other players. Neither of these was nearly as crazy as the perma-death, but taking control of a player’s own character away from them is always a risky thing.

After management infighting, the other big problem we had was actually that we had too little management. Our lead programmer, who we’ll call Frodo, was also our lead designer. Each of those is more than a full time job on a game the size of Middle-Earth. Trying to put both duties into a single person is just silly. He didn’t have the time to devote to either so both halves of his job suffered because of it. This one guy had 7 programmers and 2 designers reporting to him. About 4 people of any sort is generally considered to be enough to keep a manager from getting any non-management work done. And at the same time he was interviewing producers and then, after Boromir started, fighting constantly with him over fundamental game design.

About six months after our relocation to Bellevue it was clear that things were not going well. Sam called a meeting where he told us that there would be another meeting one week later to announce our fate. Apparently the Babylon 5 team had a similar meeting. We spent our week playing Re-volt and Rogue Spear. Nobody was interested in working on a game that was about to go away. One week of later he announced that both projects were cancelled and that we were all being laid off. To the public they said the development was being “restarted”, but the truth was that Boromir was the only person left on the Middle-Earth team, and no one was left on the Babylon 5 team.

It sucked to have the project cancelled, but there was a big silver lining. While we were deciding whether or not to relocate to Bellevue one of the artists on Babylon 5 asked, “So what happens if we relocate and then you just lay us all off anyway?” He was assured that wouldn’t happen, and to back up that guarantee they offered the existing severance package plus an additional three months of severance if we were laid off within a year of the relocation. In the 9 months I worked for Sierra I made about two years worth of salary between all the bonuses and the huge severance package. Sam did not look happy when he had to tell us they would be honoring the deal and giving us all that extra severance, but after all the crap Sierra put us through, I think we deserved it.

(You might think this is the end of the story.  Well not quite.  You can find the end here.)