Also known as…
This blog grew out of my livejournal account – which has its archives before 2010 and also contains unedited braindump on many other topics.
On Google+ I’m +Richard G, available for constantcon games during the day in France, and therefore inconveniently early for USonians. Over there I have run Carcosa Wacky Races (a PbP hallucinatory Mad Max game) and a couple of sessions of Tartary.
I’m old school just because I’m old – so culturally rather than politically. Been roleplaying since 1982, with a brief hiatus from 1996 to the present. I was also a professional (video) game designer for some years, but I think I’ve finally clawed clear of that rubble. Now I’m making a nuisance of myself around the OSR blogs until such time as I grow up and put aside foolish things.
I’m mostly a Call of Cthulhu head with occasional forays into DnD, but my favourite flavour is Flash Gordon/Barsoom anything-goes lunacy.
Thanks to Zak I now know I’m a wannabe sociable, usually straight shooting, guiltily expressionist, would-be sneaky, queasily greedy, strongly curious, mildly fancy and frequently laid back garage rocker/scrambler. And I care about WOTC exactly to the extent it affects the player pool. On the new/old axis I think I could enjoy both styles but I’ve never actually tried playing Forge or Turku. I can see things about all of them that would prevent me wanting to do them long-term.
I’ll add that I am interested in theories of roleplaying as a kind of useless diversion – they interest me in so far as theories (and rules) always embed philosophies or opinions about the world. But when it comes to actual play I prefer as close to rules-free as possible. So no complex ruminations on edition-dialects or initiative here.
When I’m not writing about games I’m an architectural historian, sometime museum exhibit designer, husband, father, reader and gin enthusiast.
I want to get a game going. I live outside Paris and speak halting French. If you’re interested, drop me a comment on my latest post.
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AKA richardthinks
Telecanter
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JOESKY
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Out of curiosity, what’s your PhD in?
History of architecture, which usually raises a few eyebrows, but the thesis is on the architecture of ships of the Dutch East India Company, which raises eyebrows even among architectural historians. How the arrangement of space interacts with society, how places make part of the environment in which social stuff plays out.
…and I have at last finished it. So now I’m merely unemployed.
Greetings, Richard.
I registered on the WordPress just now with one (and only one) specific purpose. To express my deepest gratitude to you for being a vital part of creative process behind two games, that happened to be very special for me recently. These games are Azrael’s Tear and Battlespire.
I’ve completed Azrael’s Tear not a very long time ago (in January, if I remember correctly). I honestly think it’s an extremely well done adventure game with great amount of thought poured into it, decent longevity, solid puzzlework (very intuitive; despite me being prone to get kind of stuck in it quite often, I ultimately needed only 2 hints to complete the game [one - because of my own mistake, another - to pixelhunt for the ring needed for the optional puzzle]), lush and detailed graphics (as for 1996 standarts), some very good music, lots of nonlinearity and c&c, interesting story which really benefited from the non-linear structure of the game, extremely well done voice acting and, finally, suprising yet really fitting ending. I’m not saying it was a perfect game. The engine could use some polish, the last third of the game left a slight impression of being kind of rushed (although not _nearly_ to the same extent as the last act of Grim Fandando, Full Throttle or Last Express), the cinematics music and the in-game music were obviosly written by completely different people and contrasted with one another quite distinctively, the interface could be more intuitive and the intro could make a better job of accustoming player to the game. But overall it was a solid, really well designed and thoroughly enjoyable adventure game, which, come to think of it, is one of the best adventure games, I’ve ever played (not THE best, I’m sorry, my favorite adventure game is and, probably, always will be Riven; but definitely in top10).
It’s really surprising (and saddening) to me that the game THIS good didn’t have any impact at its time, didn’t sell at all and doesn’t EVER get mentioned anywhere (other than some occasional and really underground forum discussions). Was it due to the bad luck, Quake release, lack of promotion or the fact that Intelligent Games wasn’t known to adventure gamers at that time and didn’t have any reputation among them? I don’t know. But I really do think that if some things turned out to be different, this game could be received VERY differently as well (and to be considered an instant adventure genre classics, which it kind of deserves).
It was also quite interesing for me to notice some similarities between AzT and the first Tomb Raider game. I am not talking about some distinctive similarities or borrowed elements – no, it’s more about overall mood of the games. But I really DID find the sense of desolation and the soundtrack/sound_design of first Tomb Raider to be extremely reminiscent of the desolate atmosphere of Aeternis and the AzT’s ingame music, made by Gentle Giant. Moreover, the mood associated with the whole Atlantean theme in TR1 (especially – in the cutscene with the imprisonment of Natla in cryogenic cylinder) again reminded me vividly of the mood, conveyed by the cinematics of AzT (especially, the outro of the game with its descriptions of the new utopic/antiutopic [or even slightly libertatian] society). Again, there is nothing in those games so similar, that I can put my finger on it. It’s more like intuition there. The games really do feel very-very similar to one another in some places for me. Guess the similar moods and ideas really floated in different heads simultaneously in 1995-1996.
I also have some questions about AzT for you. I would be really grateful, if you found the time to answer some of those.
1) I can’t find neither any information about Quake UK release date nor any information about AzT release date on the Net. Could you clarify when exactly was it released?
2) Is there any particual story behind the box art fo the AzT (in particular – the story behind the version with the guy in a shiny blue suit and the Holy Grail)? Why is it so… how do I put it… strange (and uninteresting, and unispiring, and doen’t correspond to the ingame Raptor suit design at all, and so forth)?
3) What was the creative process like? I take it you and Ken Haywood played the main parts in creating the overall concept of the game. What influences came from him? What themes and details own their exitance to you? How long was the game in development? What was cut from it in the end? How much was the concept of sequel developed at the time it was decided to drop it? Was there a complete script ready?
As for Battlespire, I haven’t completed the game as of yet (the last save was in the middle of the 4th level, if I remember correctly). I thourougly enjoy it, but I have Just The Right Mood for it extremely rarely, maybe once per 3 or 4 months. It’s actually more than a year since I’ve started playing it. The game has really good and interesting levels, challenging, very dynamic and satisfying combat, an AMAZING, absolutely breathtaking ambient soundtrack, interesting puzzles. At the same time, it is still buggy (even with the 1.5 patch) – with bugs affecting both exploration (“additional chests” bug, which can potentially corrupt your save file once a certain threshold is overcome; I don’t use advantages – additional arrows, for example – which that bug provides, as I consider it to be cheating) and combat (with two or more enemies in close proximity, the enemies cannot effectively strike while moving, which makes combat with them a lot simpler); also the visual style of intro movie doesn’t correspond to the ingame visual style very well (if I remember correctly, Mark Jones wrote on his homepage that the decision to use external company for those cutscenes was made quite unexpectedly); and the ingame dialogue texts could be more… stylized in order to better correspond to the ingame atmosphere. But, then again, I consider all of these to be minor quirks and I really enjoy playing the game (regardless of how often I actually play it). Moreover, Battlespire is actually the ONLY game in the all of the “Elder Scrolls” series, that I really like. The games for main TES series are just too freeform and casual and unfocused for me (never played Daggerfall though). And Redguard I played for a really short time and didn’t find it to be anything special (then again, it’s possible I was wrong). But the Battlespire… The truth is that this dungeon crawling format is EXACTLY my kind of game. With complex interesting levels, awesome combat, complex leveling system – AND with distinctive unique looks and mindblowing soundtrack as a bonus. It’s a facinating example of a really good game created by a small team of really dedicated people. And AGAIN I just don’t understand, why is this game so obscure (and, moreover, surrounded by such controversy in TES community). OK, it did step on some toes and fan expectations in its time, it did have some bugs also, it came nearly… Oh no, it was released exactly the same day as Quake 2, and with much less sophisticated engine… Anyways, I strongly believe, that on its own, this game has all the rights to be recognized as equal to Ultima Underworld, both System Shocks and Arx Fatalis (though Ultima Underworld has a clear advantage of being revolutionary for its time).
Anyways, that’s what I think about AzT and Batlespire. I want to sincerely thank you once again for being a part of development teams for both of them. It also turned out to be quite a lengthy post (not something I’ve foreseen), so I also thank you for taking your time to actually read all my ramblings.
Also, there is one last question. It could be quite an ill-posed question (if you consider it to be that way, just ignore the question altogether), but I feel I just HAVE to ask it. I also need to say, that I am just a fan and not affiliated in any way with anything I’ll mention below.
Is there any chance you could consider returning to game industry? I can think of only one development studio right now wich does things similar to the way Battlespire was done. It’s Arkane Studios (Arx Fatalis, Dark Messiah of M&M, Dishonored). So the question goes like that: is there any chance I will see your name in some credits (be it Arkane game or any other company) some time in the distant or not so distant future, or are you really, really, really done with videogaming industry for good?
Thanks for your attention and time,
Alex.
Thank you very, very much for the kind words. I’m frankly amazed anyone is still playing Azrael’s Tear – I’m amazed it’s even playable on current machines. I guess there are emulators that slow the clock down to an acceptable rate for the engine?
I’ll answer your questions as well as I can – although I see reading over this that I haven’t answered them in order…
It was a huge pleasure and challenge to work on both AT and Battlespire, although my input on the latter was much less: Ken Rolston’s the person to credit with any and all design cleverness there (and also, I think, the voices of the minor daedra).
Ken Haywood came to Intelligent Games with the core story for AT written, under the working title “Raptor;” with all the elements inspired by “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” and the idea of Aeternis and the mixture of Templars and dinosaurs and the switch ending in his original design. But he was quite sketchy at that time about what was actually in the temple. Over about a year, he and I worked through that together, developing a very deliberately non-linear plot (or, rather, a series of parallel plot options: IIRC there are 4 mandatory “gates” in the design that you have to work through in sequence, so it’s a limited kind of non-linearity, but still a huge headache to design, despite its limitations).
Ken may remember it differently, but my sense is that during that process you really couldn’t have said who designed what – it all came out of conversation and back-and-forth creation, which extended to the whole team of artists, programmers and dialogue writers.
We were lucky to have such good artists and sound people – we were all just starting out, but there was a lot of talent to draw from… and 3D graphics were then still at the stage where you could learn to do cutting-edge stuff quite quickly. Once we knew what had to happen in a room and where it had to fit in the map, we’d hand it over to a single artist to develop (Doug Telford and Andy Grove did standout work), which I think had the advantage of making each room quite individual and cohesive, rather than enforcing a consistent art style too strongly.
Music was down to Harry Holmwood, who had a lot of very innovative ideas, which have since become quite widespread – he was a real enthusiast and a pleasure to work with.
The engine could use some polish
Yup. And IIRC the game came out in the same week as Quake. Despite having really smart engine and tools programmers, we just didn’t have the resources to improve the engine significantly – it was pushing what machines could do at the time, but still not getting anything like the framerate or polygon counts of… well… Quake, which became the de facto industry standard overnight.
a slight impression of being kind of rushed
That’s true too – one of my jobs was managing the schedule, and that seemed often to come in direct conflict with polishing up the design. We slashed out big chunks late in development and had to close up some plot plumbing to make it work. And some of that’s down to my inexperience at the time: I had some ideas of things to do with the player character but no very clear idea of how to communicate them (with the drop into the grail chamber I can see I was thinking like a film director, not a game designer, for instance).
the intro could make a better job of accustoming player to the game.
…and I think that’s down to a shortage of outside input: it was one of the last things to be done, by which time everyone looking at it already knew what it was trying to do – it needed fresh eyes.
one of the best adventure games, I’ve ever played (not THE best… Riven
You’re too kind. Myst set the pace when we started development, and over the next few years after AT, I worked for several game companies that dreamed of replicating Riven but lacked the capital, which for the state of the industry at the time was enormous.
bad luck, Quake release, lack of promotion
some of each, I imagine. I was never happy with the marketing Mindscape gave it, but that was entirely outside our control (like the box art that you mention, which made a lot of folks on the team angry). If I were to work in the industry again, I would pay a lot more attention to that interface between marketing and game creation. At the time I confess I didn’t see how important it was (I heard that was also pretty much the year that overall marketing costs for games outstripped production costs across the PC industry: a sea-change was happening in retail, and we were busy dealing with the sea-changes in processor speeds and graphics).
similarities between AzT and the first Tomb Raider game
We were very conscious that TR was in development because of their much smarter marketing presence, doing previews through the magazines. I think the similarity in mood is coincidental, though… maybe we were watching the same movies.
How much was the concept of sequel developed at the time it was decided to drop it? Was there a complete script ready?
Not at all. Ken had some story written, but the rest of the team immediately went to work on another game using the same engine, to try to develop more than one property. That game was never finished, though a bunch of levels were developed for it. It aimed for a lot more running and jumping and combat, and frankly the engine just wasn’t competitive.
Regarding Battlespire, it sounds like you’ve been enjoying Ken Rolston’s sensibility. I’ve been a big fan of his for as long as I can remember (he co-wrote Paranoia, and I think something of his sense of humor shines through in everything he does, even Battlespire). I like the idea of the Elder Scrolls games, as computer equivalents to the old DnD sandboxes, but I’ve never been satisfied with the execution. And Daggerfall has/had the same bug-ridden trouble as Battlespire, only scaled up, together with the complexity of the game.
It’s a facinating example of a really good game created by a small team of really dedicated people
That’s certainly true, although I couldn’t fault the dedication of the Redguard team, who were in the next room over – they had real faith in what they were doing, and Todd, who I see is still there after Oblivion, was a great team leader.
…it was released exactly the same day as Quake 2, and with much less sophisticated engine
John Carmack, my nemesis. Well, me and the rest of the games industry through those years…
I want to sincerely thank you once again
Thank you, for writing this, for taking such an interest, and for trawling through these really quite elderly games!
Is there any chance you could consider returning to game industry?
If my son had his way I’d be back there right now! I still think about it from time to time, but I’m working on very different stuff now – architectural and maritime history – and I’m eager to see where that takes me. What I’d really like to do is marry the two – the 3D technologies from gaming and the educational content of my historian work, but that’s a topic for another day/post!
Thanks again, and I hope this was of interest,
Richard
Richard, if you ever consider doing a sequel with independent funding, please consider kickstarter(ww.kickstarter.com). Lots of inactive developers are making a comeback through fan funding.
I’m also a huge fan of Azrael’s Tear. There must a few hundreds of us around the world willing to pay big bucks for a sequel, and if the pitch is done right certainly people who never played the original will also support it.
I miss games as well written and as well designed. There aren’t many such games out there.
You’re very kind, thank you.
I got out of the industry partly because I saw that it was pretty unlikely that I’d ever get to work on something as creatively unfettered as Azrael’s Tear ever again – don’t get me wrong, there’s lots of creative work going on in the industry, but it is for the most part creativity directed into certain channels, and I wanted to get out of those channels.
What I would be interested in kickstarting is the use of gaming technologies to present realworld data – archaeological sites, reconstructions – a sort of “real Tomb Raider” (or maybe “ancient site explorer”… must work on the title). I’m thinking about that at the moment.
…and then, of course, when one has built up some scholarly credentials for careful, exactingly-researched work, one can then kick them right over again by setting a potboiling fantasy epic atop the same material! Perhaps.
Thanks for the reply! Are you still in contact with Ken Haywood? Is he also interested in coming back to gaming? You should all give it a try again someday. The gaming industry right now is much bigger than it was back then. There are many niches to fill and there is a lot of room for innovation. As someone who enjoyed AT so much, I can only see it not doing well back then as some kind of accident or coincidence.
One thing about the game that always fascinated me is that it had a rich backstory and setting that was not out in the open, not explicitly presented at all. The player had to read between the lines and put together information to understand a lot of what was going on. That was a very brave design choice and I don’t know of any other game that has tried it.
I wanted to make you a few short questions about the game before buzzing off. Once in every while a thread about AT pops up in forums like rpgcodex and adventuregamers, It would be interesting to share such information. I hope you remember some of it.
- The ending is somewhat of a heated topic.Many consider it a “bad” ending(it is certainly far from a happy and conclusive one). I was wondering if you guys planned alternative endings before or if that ending was planned from the start as a cliffhanger for a sequel.
- Also, the ending was ambiguous because the grail did hell to the templars. I guess if the effect of the grail is to cause evolutionary adaptation(it seems so) then that is the reason why the templars became monsters after inhabiting Aeternis, and using it on the outside world would have a benefic effect. If the grail is just pure evil though, was the ending supposed to suggest that all survivors of the plague would eventually become insane monsters themselves?
- Also, in the game, the templars referred to the civilization responsible for the grail and ziggurat ruins as “ancient byzantines”. Some people make a mess of it. I didn’t see nothing weird about it, the limited medieval knowledge of the templars would explain such confusion. There is also the site of ancient Byzantium in Greece, the original ruins could have been found in that region. Am I right?
- The civilization responsible for the ziggurat ruins and for crafting the grail, was it supposed to be left off as ambiguous and mysterious or did you guys had a specific civilization in mind? Atlantis or some other lost civilization perhaps? That zyggurat was a piece very unusual archtecture. Would the player find out more about it in the sequel?
- People wonder why the game isn’t avaiable on http://www.gog.com . It should be patched for newer systems and made avaiable, there is interest in older gems(as the success of GOG itself proves). I suppose you guys don’t own the rights and it is possibly into some publisher limbo, but if you do, it is a swell suggestion.
Thanks again!
Thanks for your interest. I haven’t seen Ken in years – he might be able to answer some of the questions that I can’t.
The ending was in there right from the beginning, although we had originally intended to make it more game-like: it wound up being presented a bit perfunctorily. It was in Ken’s original story document and We talked about it several times, but we wound up agreeing that: (a) it sets up the sequel (alas never realised) and (b) mystery is a better reward than congratulation. I don’t know if I’d do it the same way today…
The grail is supposed to be ambiguous and that was going to be played on a lot more in the sequel. As for whether it’s evil or not – my answer is it just is: the Templars have their interpretation and you’re free to come up with your own. Again, there were going to be all kinds of implications explored regarding two-edged swords and tough choices and political changes wrought by the grail in the sequel, but Ken knows a lot more about that than I do: we really concentrated on developing AT itself and mostly left some suggestive strands in place for the next step, rather than working everything out in advance.
Regarding ancient Byzantines, IIRC we never really stated whether the whole of Aeternis was Geoffrey’s design or if there was a pre-existing ziggurat when the Templays arrived. In either case, the Templars would have seen everything from a Crusader’s perspective, and Byzantium could’ve been a figleaf for some other less approved group of ancients.
Ken and I might differ on this, but I saw the “Byzantines” as perhaps related to the Sea Peoples who toppled the Old Kingdom in Egypt, or the Minoans – a group older than Constantine’s move to Eastern Rome. This was all going to be explored in the sequel.
Regarding putting it on GOG – that’s a great idea. Matthew Stibbe would be the best person to contact regarding who has the rights these days – he’s on Facebook (I’m pretty sure he’s the only Matthew Stibbe on there). If you write to him, send my regards.
Thanks again
Richard
Thanks a lot for taking the time to reply Richard. Please do reconsider giving gaming another try, the truth is that we could all use more games with the depth and originality of Azrael’s Tear.
best regards,
Sergio