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."

Comments

modern trends are too predictable

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:modern trends are too predictable

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that's why other genres like the life-building Sim City games have become so popular. Killing monsters is getting old for sure.

Someone is gotta do them

[curtisk]

Candy Cruncher isn't cool, but it makes us money.
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

Any word on Stellar Deep?

[eddy]

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.

Re:Any word on Stellar Deep?

[BHook]

Stellar Deep really does require a certain amount of financial and time committment we can't justify at this point. We're not particularly interested in finding outside sources of income for this, since the whole point of being independent is so we can pick and choose what we work on.

So with that in mind, we're trying to build up a revenue base so that we can take 6-12 months to sit down and do something with Stellar Deep. It was originally mentioned on the Pyrogon site when we launched because it was a "Wouldn't it be cool if?" type of thing. Unfortunately it came off as a product announcement, and I hate vaporware, so we pulled it but kept it in the forums.

We think it'll be a fun game, with all the aspects of Elite, EV:Nova, Subspace, et. al. that people really enjoyed, and hopefully with an added social and strategy dynamic lacking in those games.

One day...

-Hook

Article Text -AC

[Anonymous Coward]

You should always post article text AC, otherwise baby Satan cries! Karma whores! - AC

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 Lo

Brian Hook Speech

[MrCode]

I attended a speech by Brian Hook at the University of Florida a few years back. He had once been a student there before dropping out to work at 3Dfx. As I recall he was still at 3Dfx at that time (which was well before 3Dfx melted down.) It was an interesting speech, relating how he went from a student half-way through his studies to the creator of the Glide API.

One thing that is interesting is that I think has become much less arrogant as he has gotten older (he seems quite humble in this interview.) I mean he did create Glide almost single-handedly. Of course I imagine that getting humble with age is a pretty standard trend, especially among software developers. How many developers in the audience remember how arrogant they were when younger? I know I was. Ah, the ignorance of youth...