TCW 221 - North to Hellgate London

[Intro music -- Aprplane Mode - Josh Woodward]

Welcome to They Create Worlds. I'm Jeffrey and I'm joined by my co-host Alex.

You know, we could have easily done this as a two-parter where we just talked about Diablo and just talked about Diablo 2, but the reason I kind of wanted to do this episode is not so much to cover Hellgate London, though we are going to cover Hellgate London, but it's because with the insights that we have from Craddock's books, we have an unusual amount of insight into why this studio in particular failed, and a lot of that can be extrapolated into more broad kind of truths about why studios failed in this time period. Because there was a rash of company acquisitions in the 90s. Storied companies like Origin and Maxis and Blizzard itself, not just Blizzard North, but the parent company Blizzard and Interplay and all of these companies that had been cornerstones of the computer game industry in the United States in the 1980s and early 1990s, a large percentage of them failed for one reason or another after they were acquired. Gamers love to blame that on the suits, right? You know, big publisher comes in, snaps up scrappy developer or small-time publisher, imposes their corporate will on the company, and the company falls apart because of the meddling of all the suits, and this beloved treasure from my childhood is no more.

But as you go along, you're talking about bigger games, you're talking about better graphics, higher resolutions, which by necessity require more and better art, more and better animations. You're talking about much better sound cards, so you're talking about more sophisticated sounds, you're talking about more sophisticated music. Of course, as these games get bigger and bigger and there's more and more stuff being added onto them, there's just more and more code that has to be punched out as well, so there's more and more programmers. Then suddenly you're in a situation anymore where it's not just you and a couple of friends just having a blast together, it's now you've hired a team of a dozen people, two dozen people, obviously it's going to increase even more than that in the future into the hundreds. We're not quite there yet in this time period, but that's what we're looking at. It's not all just friends working together, it's a business where people are there because it's their livelihood, and of course most of them, I mean, they're there because they enjoy it, but they're not necessarily getting to just work on a game holistically and have that pure thrill, they're having to specialize, they're having to subdivide, and that means that you need structure, you need coordination amongst people doing different things, you need real leadership. This is where game development at a lot of these early studios just starts to break down.

Of course, there was an expansion that they were going to do, and we will talk about that expansion briefly here. It was Max, who was less burnt out than the others, that kind of took the lead in overseeing that project, with two people underneath him primarily. Programmer Tyler Thompson, who was leading the technical design, and an artist by the name of Phil Schenck, who was leading the creative and narrative design of the expansion. It was a pretty straightforward process, actually, of doing the expansion. First of all they did learn from the unrealistic expectations and ridiculous crunch on Diablo II. Initially, they were handed a plan saying that we want the expansion in six months, and Tyler Thompson, who was really in many ways the project lead, and this was another point of contention, because Max was the overall lead and had final approval. Tyler was actually doing most of the nuts and bolts running of the project. So again, there was a little bit of that tension there with this inability to delegate and just designate people as real leads, even if they had lead in their title. Giving them real empowerment to be leads was a bit of a problem here as well. But Tyler Thompson was like, oh no, no, no, no, no. Did you see what just happened on Diablo 2? We are not getting this done in six months. You can have your expansion in one year. You know by having the foresight to do that, they did not have to crunch on the expansion. Because they had realistic expectations based on past experience. Something that video game industry is notoriously bad at. But I think the success and longevity of Diablo 2 as a product that could continue to sustain itself over that time through Battle.net Play meant that the powers that be were willing to be a little more generous with the time, and so they got there one year, came out a year later. It was not a crunch experience.

Phil Schenck is the one that really came up with the story of it. He really wanted to get at kind of the larger picture. Even though there's lore behind Diablo, they're making it up as they go along. It's not like they really have an overarching plan for where the Diablo universe is going. He thought it would be very interesting to delve into what was the end game of heaven and hell, the angels and the demons. We know they've been fighting the Sin War. They know they've been at each other's throats. But what's the ultimate goal here? What do they gain by all of this fighting on Sanctuary? And so he came up with this idea of the World Stone and the idea that the barbarians were defending it and that hell coveted this World Stone in order to do what it wanted to do with corrupting all life and all of that. The villain of the piece being the Lord of Destruction was also very obvious because the game itself had led it in that direction through the cutscenes, though we didn't mention this last time. But this was again another example of Blizzard South doing a lot of story making that was not directly necessarily coming from Blizzard North, just as the case with the cinematics in the original Diablo, where that shock ending of shoving the stone in the forehead was not anticipated by Blizzard North and came out of nowhere. Now, there was a little more coordination this time. It wasn't quite as uncoordinated as back then, but you see, they knew they were going to have cinematics again. Once again, it was going to be Blizzard South doing the cinematics. Blizzard North very briefly tried to take control of the cinematics in Diablo 2 and put together some mock-ups, and stuff was okay, but Blizzard down South was basically like, yeah, that's nice, but really, we got a team for this, so yeah, they're going to do it.

You know, Diablo 2 did something that the original Diablo didn't, which was that it had a full paper doll, avatar, where every time you equipped a new piece of equipment, it would change the way your character looked. The original Diablo had a couple of layers of that. There was like a light armor, medium armor, heavy armor variation. That was it, and it wasn't down to the individual pieces of gear you were finding. So the cinematics team, when they saw that system, they were like, well, we can't do cinematics that feature the character, because there are endless variations on what the character might look like at any given time. The amount of cinematic work we'd have to do to support that would be nuts, because they just didn't have the tools and the technology to do that easily back then. Nowadays, that's not such a concern, but back then when everything was more pre-rendered, less in-engine, that was a really big concern. So they said, so we can't tell a story of your character in cinematics, so what we need to do is tell a parallel story to the story of your character, so that there's this, like, narrative thread that's kind of moving along and is showing the thrust of the story, but it doesn't directly involve your character, and so that's how they came up with the idea of this traveling duo, this mysterious cloaked figure, and this sole survivor of this massacre caused by the stranger, and--

You know, as we kind of said at the top, Dave and Eric were especially burned out. Even though it was inevitable that at some point, someone was going to do some kind of thing that was going to turn into Diablo III. The next project, which by next project I mean the project after Diablo II has launched, but while the Diablo II expansion is still under development, so there is still a small team focused on Diablo product. The next product has definitely got to be something else. Because they done. But what that something else is, is not entirely clear. It goes by the nebulous name of Project X, and it's going to be Dave Brevik that's in charge of it. They know they want to still do some kind of action-y RPG, because they know that that's what their bread and butter is. But they're not looking to just kind of repeat the Diablo formula, or do Diablo in another venue. They know it probably needs to be in 3D at this point, because 3D is very mainstream, by 2000, 2001. They just start slowly, over the course of a couple of years, just blowing through a bunch of different ideas without being able to settle on anything, which, again, all comes down to Dave Brevik at the top just being burned out and not being able to get excited by any of the concepts they throw out there, and he has the final veto power. He's still very much in charge. The first thing they kind of start on is a game that ends up taking the name Iron Monkey, which is a martial arts-focused action, RPG that has a real emphasis. It's not the entire game, but it has a real emphasis on one-on-one martial arts duels. It's primarily inspired by Jordan Mechner's classic 1984 game, Karateka, which consisted of a series of one-on-one karate duels. We've talked about that game before in our Broderbund episode or something like that.

They also had a couple of other projects going on that never made it very far. A couple of people thought it would be fun to do a Diablo game for the Game Boy Advanced. Management was like, oh, that's kind of cool, but why don't you target the Game Boy instead, because there's more of them out there, and they're like, okay, fine. So they started working on a game that would be a prequel to the first Diablo and would be a little more child-friendly, because it's on the Game Boy, that they were informally calling Diablo Jr. It never had a name, but they were calling it Diablo Jr. They got a ways through that, and then Blizzard in Irvine, main HQ, decided, eh, this seems like too big a risk, I don't think we're going to make a return of investment on this, so let's stop. So that was cancelled. They also made a deal with Capcom. Capcom wanted a console Diablo game, like a new one. The original Diablo had been ported to the PlayStation by Climax, Japanese company, but Capcom was looking for an original console game for the PS2. Again, a prequel, though this time in the way distant past, it was going to be a prequel when demons were first entering the world of Sanctuary and kind of the beginning of the conflict. That was going to be more of an overseeing project, like Capcom was doing the work and Blizzard North was just offering input. That project died when they got the first build back from Capcom, and it was absolutely terrible. Blizzard North said thanks, but no thanks, you know, as the license holder, as the IP holder. They're like, we're done here. So they had a couple of other things spinning along, but the the main things were project X, which was ever-shifting, and then Diablo 3, which was a little more concrete in concept, but was still ever-shifting in implementation. Though it was moving forward, I mean, they did finally decide on an engine. They decided to use the Axe engine, one of those two 3D engines that had been under development, and they were starting to get some basic ideas of how things worked. I mean, it was moving along, even if it was kind of slow and haphazard and politic-filled. You know, I'm talking about all these problems at the developer level, and I told you we'd get to the business side. The final death knell actually did come from the business side of the equation. Now, I think all of these problems were going to make it difficult for the company to continue to sustain itself anyway.

So what went wrong? Well, again, in a lot of ways it comes down to the problems of being an independent developer in this time period. They knew that they wanted this to be an MMO-like game. This required them to have a robust server structure, similar to a Battle.net. They are a small company. They have no plans to try to do something like that themselves. They're shopping around for publishers, and they have wide publisher interests. Because, I mean, these are the guys that created Diablo. These are big names in the industry. They get a lot of suitors. But they decide to go with Namco. Because at this point, Namco America is staffed by some very ambitious people who want to make Namco a real force in the PC space. So they're looking to build online infrastructure, and they need games to take advantage of that. Namco's like, fantastic, you're doing this thing. Come on, and we'll do it together and we'll take care of all the network infrastructure for you. That's great! Then in 2005, Namco merges with Bandai, and the entire priority of the company changes. All of those Namco America people with big dreams of a PC online empire are laid off or leave or whatever. I don't know the specific circumstances, but they're not there anymore, and Namco Bandai, Bandai Namco has no desire to do all of this craziness. Now, Flagship is going to have to do the online stuff themselves. They're going to have to build their servers and everything. In order to facilitate that, they bring in another publisher as an investor. A Korean publisher by the name of Hanbitsoft. Now, we have to remember that by this time, StarCraft has become a national pastime in Korea. Big televised matches and everything. Korea has become a big online market. They are big fans of Blizzard and Blizzard Games. So Hanbitsoft is very interested to get into business with them to create what they hope is the next online phenomenon. They found a subsidiary, Flagship does, called Ping0 which when spelled out is the word ping and then the number zero at the end of it. Ping0. In order to take care of the online portion. They also make a deal at around this time with The Nine, a Chinese company that's known for bringing Chinese games into that market. They get these additional investors and at some point Namco backs out entirely and EA, who had courted them heavily earlier, comes in as the main publisher. They have all of these publishers but the cost of the game are spiraling out of control. They are running out of money. They are constantly running out of money which is one of the risks of being an independent developer. They have trouble getting support from their publishers for more money because the problem is now that they have three separate publishers none of them wants to be the one that's taken advantage of and is spending all the money. According to interviews with Brevik and whatnot, this is not Craddock anymore because he didn't cover Hellgate London, but according to interviews in other places with Brevik and the like, no one of their publishers wanted to give them any more money unless the other two publishers also put in money. This basically created a stalemate where none of their publishers would ever give them the amount of money they needed to create this game.

This led them to do a couple of things. One thing it led them on was a fantastic misadventure of hiring a completely separate team to make a completely separate action RPG that they thought would just be, a little throwaway product that they could use to make a little money. They hired a guy named Travis Baldtree, who had made an action RPG called Fate that had very much attracted them. They created a satellite studio for him, and he started creating a game called Mythos that they thought would be a nice, fun game to generate some money while they were still working on this other thing. Then Mythos became a ballooning project with no end in sight. In large part because they're still having trouble building the network stuff, like having to do their own network infrastructure is a large part of their problem. Then they have to start shifting resources away from Hellgate London to work on Mythos, which was supposed to be this kind of throwaway game. That's draining more manpower and more money. So then they start getting all of these certifications. You know how oftentimes when you buy a game, back in the day they'd be on the box when there were boxes, but even today you'll get these a million logos on the opening loading screens where there'll be a Games for Windows logo and an NVIDIA logo and a this logo and a that logo.

Check out our show notes at podcast.theycreateworlds.com where we have links to some of the things we discuss in this, and other episodes. You can check out Alex's video game history blog at videogamehistorian.wordpress.com. Alex's book, They Create Worlds, The Story of the People and Companies that Shaped a Video Game Industry, Volume 1, can now be ordered through CRC Press and at major online retailers. You can email us at feedback@theycreateworlds.com Please consider supporting us on Patreon at patreon.com\theycreateworlds. If you do sign up, please do so through the website and not through the iOS app. This saves you from the 30% Apple markup. We understand that you may not be financially able to support us, but you can still support us by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or the podcasting service you use. We now have the podcast available on YouTube. Please like and subscribe. Intro music is Airplane Mode by Josh Woodward, found at joshwoodward.com/song/airplane mode, used under a Creative Commons attribution license. Outro music is Bacterial Love by Role Music, found at freemusicarchive.org used under a Creative Commons attribution license.