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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."
"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."
AMEN!
Since I seem to have gotten to the article before it was hit by the rest of you, here you go, in plain text (warning, it is pretty long):
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It's time for another interview here on Curmudgeon and this time we have with us Brian Hook, president of Pyrogon Games and former developer at id Software and Verant/Sony Online Entertainment. Before working on the seminal shooters Quake 2 and Quake 3: Arena, Brian was the original architect of the Glide API used by the 3dfx Voodoo line of video cards. After departing id, Brian worked as a Senior Technology Architect at Verant, concentrating on development of technology for next-generation massively-multiplayer online games (MMOGs). After founding Pyrogon in 2000, he created the puzzle game Candy Cruncher, which we reviewed earlier this year. Two additional Pyrogon games have appeared since then, NingPo MahJong and Letter Linker, both available for Windows and MacOS X. (A Linux version of NingPo MahJong will be shipping in the near future.)
This interview covers a wide range of topics: game design criticism, OpenGL/D3D, making money as a smaller game developer, and the importance of porting software to different platforms. Indeed, something for just about everyone. It's quite long, so you might want to bookmark it and consume it in more than one reading.
The interview questions were prepared with the assistance of regular CG authors ruffin and michael.
jvm: What kinds of games do you enjoy playing the most?
Hook: That's a tough question. I guess in some ways I just have very high expectations about software these days, so most games pretty much turn me off within the first 5 minutes when I spot egregious design flaws.
That said, the games I've played and enjoyed the most recently have been No One Lives Forever 2, which I felt had some of the best production value I've ever seen in a game, and Ghost Recon, which is a hoot in multiplayer.
jvm: So you play mostly on a PC, as opposed to a console?
Hook: I should really get some consoles and play console games, but it's hard to justify the time.
jvm: Could we get an example of a game with these egregious design flaws, complete with a breakdown of those flaws? The more popular the game, the better.
Hook: That's dangerous ground =)
But a typical example I have is what I call "simulations that think they're games". To me, a game should be fun and exciting, which means that I should be making interesting decisions that lead to success based on the data I have at that time. Too many games today STILL punish you by just killing you because that's "realistic".
Hitman 2 is a good example of this. Starting with the very first mission, you can pretty much expect to go through and play that mission 20 times before you complete it, because there are timed events that you don't know about a priori. Which is a shame, because the actual mechanics in Hitman 2 were extremely fun. It was probably the one game in recent memory that I really wanted to like but which ended up being so frustrating and tedious that I couldn't enjoy it. Obviously it's a popular game, so I'm in the minority on this.
I think the games that really got a lot of this down were the 1980s LucasArts adventure games like Loom and Secret of Monkey Island.
Those games were fun. When you were frustrated it was because you couldn't figure something out, not because you felt the game was just arbitrarily screwing with you.
Another example are games that go into "inverse feedback loops".
Hitman 2 does this as well. The better you are, the more cool stuff you get, and thus the easier the game. If you make "Silent Assassin" on the first mission, you get some really nice weapons that make much of the rest of the game easier.
But the problem is that if you're a good enough player to get those weapons, you don't need the bonuses as much as the guy that was struggling like mad to complete the mission at all