David L. Craddock writes fiction, nonfiction, and grocery lists. He is the author of the Gairden Chronicles series of fantasy novels for young adults, as well as numerous nonfiction books documenting videogame development and culture, including the bestselling Stay Awhile and Listen series, Shovel Knight by Boss Fight Books, and Long Live Mortal Kombat. Follow him online at www.DavidLCraddock.com, and on Twitter @davidlcraddock.
Too often, the voices of developers most critical to a game's success go unheard. David L. Craddock's Dialogue Box puts designers, artists, programmers, musicians, producers, QA testers, and other developers front and center, giving readers firsthand accounts of how classic video games were—and still are—made.
With every book I write about video games, I look for angles that have never been explored, or haven't been fully explored, and I try to shake up the structure so information is presented in a way that best serves the information. Oral histories are one of my favorite methods of delivery: unfiltered, straight from the mouths of programmers, artists, writers, musicians, producers, and other developers. -David L. Craddock, curator, StoryBundle
"The scale of this is amazing. Holy shit, seven months of interviews, and it just shows everywhere."
– 2018 Kunkel Awards Nominee: Excellence in Feature Writing"The master of all things documenting video games."
– Shacknews ReaderWAR. WAR NEVER changes. Neither do the fundamentals of game development.
In March 2015, Obsidian released Pillars of Eternity as a love letter to the lineage of Infinity Engine roleplaying games of the late '90s and early 2000s. Technically, Fallout and its sequel do not belong in that lineage, but the post-apocalyptic franchise's influence on Baldur's Gate and its ilk is inarguable. Many developers who worked on Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale, and Pillars of Eternity had worked on Fallout and Fallout 2 first, bringing what they learned to bear on those later projects.
That makes the Fallout games distant relations of the Infinity Engine RPGs, and worthy of closer examination. What follows is an oral history straight from the mouths of several of the pioneers who entered a veritable wasteland of computer RPG (CRPG) development and made that fallow ground fertile once again.
Brian Fargo founded Interplay Productions on the foundation of a simple yet powerful creed: That the people he hired should be as passionate about making games as they were about playing them.
Background, experience, accolades—none of those mattered in Interplay's early, most humble days. Fargo created a workplace that blurred the line between office and home. Anyone who wasn't writing code or pushing pixels could be found holed up in an office or in an open area playing a board game. Interplay's culture was a siren's song answered by developers who, like Fargo, were eager to make their mark.
BRIAN FARGO [founder of Interplay Productions]
When I was in junior high school, they had a mainframe computer. People talk about the cloud now, but everything was in "the cloud" back then. You just had a dumb terminal talking to a mainframe. I was fascinated by computers even though there wasn't much in terms of games. The coin-op business had just gotten to the point where games like Pong and Space Invaders were emerging, and it was those games that first got me interested.
Then my parents got me an Apple II in high school, and that really opened my eyes to how you can make games, how I could go beyond just playing them. I played a lot of the older titles. I remember there were some old strategy titles where you would make a move and the computer would take two to three hours to process its turn. You'd go crazy when a game crashed halfway through because that meant you just lost three days of playing.
So I really discovered games through those means. I always had a background in reading a lot of fiction: comics, Heavy Metal magazine. Playing Dungeons & Dragons was a big part of high school for me. But the thing that I think led me to create games, which I think most people would give the same answer to, was, I looked at what was out there and thought, You know, I could do better. That's what sent me down my course.
CHRIS TAYLOR [designer at Interplay, lead designer on Fallout]
I met some people working at Egghead Software who played Dungeons & Dragons. I was looking for a roleplaying game, so I hooked up with them to play. One of the players worked for Interplay. After a few months, he told me they had a job opening, so I went down and applied.
BRIAN FARGO
One of my high school buddies was Michael Cranford. His parents wouldn't get him a computer, so he used to borrow mine. We made this little adventure game. I'd give him the computer over the weekend, he'd write code for a section, then he'd give it back and I'd try to finish his section and do my part, then he'd go through mine. We'd go back and forth. We did this all summer. We made this little game called the Labyrinth of Martagon. We actually put it in some baggies and probably sold five copies. That would be a very obscure, technically speaking, first game. But one that really got into distribution would be The Demon's Forge.
I was a big fan of adventure games. I loved all the [adventure games developed by] Scott Adams, all the Sierra adventures. I also liked Ultima and Wizardry, but from a coding perspective I wasn't strong enough to do that stuff, but I thought I could do an adventure game. It was a category I liked, and I liked medieval settings. As far as attracting attention, I had a budget of $5,000 for everything. My one ad in Soft Talk [magazine] cost me about 2,500 bucks, so 50 percent of my money went into a single ad.
One of the things I did was I would call retailers on a different phone and say, "Hey, I'm trying to find this game called Demon's Forge. Do you guys have a copy?" They said, "No," and I said, "Oh, I just saw it in Soft Talk. It looks good. They said, "We'll look into it." A few minutes later my other line would ring and the retailer would place an order. That was my guerrilla marketing. I was selling to individual chains of stores. There were two distributors at the time that would help you get into the mom-and-pop places. It was a store-by-store, shelf-by-shelf fight.
CHRIS TAYLOR
I interviewed well, I guess—well enough—and I beat out one other guy because I had a pickup truck, and they needed someone to take packages and stuff like that. So, I got the job because of my pickup truck and my love for D&D. I started in customer service and technical support.
BRIAN FARGO
There were some Stanford graduates who wanted to get into the video game industry, and they bought my company [Saber Software]. They paid off my debt and I made a few bucks, nothing much to brag about. They made me the vice president and I started doing work for them. It became one of those things where there were too many chiefs and not enough Indians, and I was doing all the work. I was with them for about a year when I quit and started Interplay in order to do things my way. I'd gotten used to running development, so that seemed like the next natural step.
With Interplay, I wanted to take [development] beyond one- or two-man teams. That sounds like an obvious idea now, but to hire an artist to do the art, a musician to do the music, a writer to do the writing, all opposed as just the one man show doing everything, was novel. Even with Demon's Forge, I had my buddy Michael do all the art, but I had to trace it all in and put it in the computer, and that lost a certain something. And because I didn't know a musician or sound guy, it had no music or sound. I did the writing, but I don't think that's my strong point. So really, [Interplay was] set up to say, "Let's take a team approach and bring in specialists."
