I’ve worked on a lot of games, mostly just for my own amusement or for shareware in my college days, but these are the ones that shipped to retail stores (or at least got so close that they had a box cover made).
| Box Cover | Year | Comments |
|---|---|---|
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1999 | First game Surreal shipped. Hot chick riding a dragon. Who wouldn’t want to play that? One of the first PC games to *require* 3D Hardware (i.e. a 3Dfx or RIVA128 graphics card). Even so, it was super low-poly. In fact, the entire world had the same number of triangles drawn per-frame as Rynn (the main character) had in the sequel on PS2. Creatures and characters were primarily designed by the incredibly talented Hugh Jamieson, who also painted the box cover art. I wrote a detailed postmortem for Drakan that was published in Game Developer Magazine. You can find it online here. |
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2000 | Technically I didn’t directly work on this game, but I managed the team that made it, and it used my RIOT engine, with a rather hacked-up software renderer. The idea with this PC game was to build it in 3 months and sell it for “Deer Hunter” prices. It sold terribly! But I got a really cool free Mountain Hardware jacket out of it that i still use over ten years later for hard-core winter outings! Plus, my picture is on the inside of the box as one of the mountain climbers! I also got to meet Ed Veisturs, who managed to climb to the summit of Everest a handful of times more than I have (zero). |
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2002 | This is my favorite game that I’ve made. Sony bought Psygnosis (publisher of the first Drakan), so of course this game was a PS2-only release). Everyone at Surreal called this game “Drakan II.” It’s the sequel to Drakan with the dumbest subtitle evaar. Only because some marketing person game up with it, and not us. We had some ancient portals in the game that you could activate and fly into, which would transport you to different parts of the world. So they insisted the subtitle be The Ancients’ (plural possessive) Gates. Why wasn’t it just “The Ancient Gates?” I have no idea. Postmortem. |
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2002 | This was the BOOK license of Fellowship of the Ring, not the movie license! Get it straight! It was hard to make into a game because the book was mostly dudes singing songs and walking from place-to-place. We made this game in 8 months and shipped it a week early. It was our best-selling game by far! We used the same tech from Drakan II, so development was very predictable, since we didn’t create a lot of new tech. We shipped this on PC and PS2. We could have done Xbox as well, but another studio named WXP had already started that one. Surreal was hired by Vivendi Universal to make the PS2 and PC versions, given our success with Drakan. |
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2004 | From the disturbing mind of Richard Rouse and Ben Olson, one of the best designers and concept artists I’ve worked with. You play a prisoner who has no memory of your crime. Are you innocent or guilty? A freak earthquake sets you free from prison and you start seeing strange creatures and horrific flash-backs. Are you going crazy or is it really happening? Dudes with swords for hands, walking on the ceiling like spiders, and creatures throwing needles at you! As cool as it is, unfortunately, this is a game that my 4 year-old son will not be playing for quite some time. Design Postmortem. |
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2005 | The first of this epic shooter series sold well enough (over 500,000 copies) that we made another! Even more sick and twisted than the first one. This was the last RIOT Engine game ever made. So sad. But it got some good use! The engine tech was pretty good at this point, but we just didn’t have the tools to compete with the sexy draw of engines like Unreal 3 or CryEngine. Tools are not everything, as we soon found out… |
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2010 | This Is Vegas is the largest project I have ever worked on. I managed 30+ Engineers in a team of 120 people for 5 years. We successfully converted Unreal Engine 3 (a first-person shooter engine) to be an open-world streaming engine at 30 frames-per-second, but it took much longer than expected. When Midway Games went bankrupt due to a 240 Million-dollar debt, WB purchased our Seattle studio and eventually integrated it into their Kirkland offices (formerly known as Monolith). They decided that the game wasn’t fun enough to compete with Grand Theft Auto, so, since they purchased our studio “on the cheap,” they decided to cancel the project. Damn shame. The game looked AMAZING. |
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2011 | Just after my fall out with corporate inefficiencies and mismanagement, plus the Midway bankruptcy, I decided to go small again. I had an awakening – that you can make small games, incrementally developed, with immediate player feedback. No spending $20M only to find out the game sucked at the start. Social, free-to-play games were an opportunity I had to try. Electrolab was tight – only 3 developers, and we were efficient, experienced, and able to build some great server tech that competed with the best social developers out there. I solved a ton of great problems working on this project, and got to do a lot of Game Design, which I found really rewarding. |
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2012 | Unannounced game, but I can tell you the following technical facts:
…and some brief information about the game:
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I re-read your Drakan 1 postmortem. It was probably one of the first games using C++. I’m curious: did the first RIOT games followed the then (90s) popular OOP trend, with deep hierarchies and lot of inheritance? If so, did you change your opinions i.e. did you embrace the component-based approach?