Slashdot Mirror
Brian Hook Interview
A reader writes:"I just read this very in-depth interview with Brian Hook on a site called Curmudgeon Gamer. Hook used to work for id Software (Quake 2 and 3) and later for Verant (Everquest) and he apparently worked on Glide for the old 3DFX cards. Now he runs his own smaller game company called Pyrogon. In the interview he talks about development styles of Q2 and Q3, MMORPGs, the lessons of 3DFX, and development of cross-platform games like his Candy Cruncher (which is available for MacOSX and Linux!). He even gets into some criticism of modern games and the life of a smaller game developer. Lengthy read, but lots of stuff to think about there since he tells it like he sees it."
The first 3d games were new and revolutionary and such, and the first 3d accelerators were something big. Modern "innovations" like, ooh, new 3d games, and games over the Internet, seem pale in comparison.
Give me a new game genre. Frankly, I'm bored with what I can get today. It doesn't cut it in the modern world. Why spend my spare time shooting people up when I can turn on the tv and see it for real? I'd rather do something peaceful to reinforce my feeble humanity.
Innovation in games is a great thing; has been a great thing in the past. I don't think you'll see it from Brian Hook, though. Technical advances, sure. But for something new and better we'll have to look elsewhere.
If you like puzzle games, Candy Cruncher is worth checking out. There are demos available. It's kinda like Sega Swirl meets Connect Four. The Linux port is very well done. It was another excellent Icculus job.
why each file for each platforms are so different? windows 2.6mb osx 2.0 and gnu/linux (don't blame me but rms) 4.2mb?
[self dealloc];
Thats one of the best lines in the article...it really speaks alot about entertainment industry, gaming in particular, sometimes you gotta make the "turds" to make a living....
If the "cool" games are the ones with the millions of $$ budgets and overhead, thus they have to sell outrageous amounts of product just to break even ...someone has to make the budget titles, and the smaller titles are alot less risk...a friend of mine works in such a studio, when he they first went down that path they were all like..."ugh! F-ing budget games?!?" But they quickly realized that they can still work at them to make them as cool as possible, and they're not sweating about whether more work is coming....it always does. Simply because if one of their titles bombs completely, they're only out $100k as opposed to $2.5M....alot easier to re-coup, and alot less sour taste in the publishers mouth
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
The article is thoroughly slashdot'ed now. Any word on their Stellar Deep and why it's been "hidden" on the site? I get the feeling that maybe they announced it a little too early.
Follow the link and you'll see references to other games that may or may not be in production.
Personally I didn't find Candy Cruncher all that fun.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
He started making games he likes. He also went from being a bachelor to someone married with a kid. And, being an owner of Candy Cruncher, it's as addictive as Tetris ever was. Personally I play games because they're fun, not because of eye candy . . . which means it'll be a while until I get DoA Beach Vollyball ;-)
Kylix supports OpenGL on Linux out-of-the-box. Of course there's no law that says you have to use OpenGL (or D3D); you can always write your own custom renderer. They're much harder to write and I get tired of writing graphics code as, frankly, graphics just don't impress me anymore. It's the physics and scripting that are the interesting part of newer games.
I know this will come across as sour grapes, but if there was ever someone in game development who made a name for himself without much to back it up, it's Mr. Hook.
He worked at 3dfx in the early days, and hats off for the Glide API (RIP), but that's not a game, of course.
He wrote a book about writing game engines in C++, but hadn't actually written a 3D game when he wrote it.
He worked at id for a bit, but he never shipped a title while there, and he never worked on a project start to finish.
Then he worked for Sony Online, but never shipped a game there either.
Then he started a little bedroom company--good for him!--and finally wrote a game: the 2D puzzler known as Candy Cruncher.
Surely there are some more illuminated people in the game industry that are more worthy of interviews? Take away Spector and Meier and Wright and all the usual gods and there are still oh so many brilliant people out there whose names aren't even known. Who worked on Metroid Prime (hint: one of them is also ex-id)? Who worked on Splinter Cell? Who worked on GTA 3? You never hear about these people.
I have worked in games at various points in my career. One of the reasons you don't hear about a lot of game developers is that the bulk of people writing games are the same sort of professional developers who could just as easily be writing Oracle or Windows. In fact, it is not uncommon for people to migrate between such assignments.
The idea that game programming is somehow a different field run by rock stars or teenage geniuses is largely an illusion. It is like thinking that the film business consists soley of small quirky indie filmmakers.
Brian Hook, for better or worse, is a personality. That is why he makes a good interview.