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Bill Dugan - From Wasteland To Spiderman 2
jvm writes "Curmudgeon Gamer has posted an interview with Bill Dugan of Treyarch, producer of the new Spider-Man 2 console game, due to launch alongside the movie of the same name this summer. But, that's really just his latest project in an 18 year career in the video game business. During that time he has designed maps (for classic PC RPG Wasteland), programmed (Out of this World), designed a manual (Dragon Wars), voice acted (Stonekeep), and been the producer for several games (No One Lives Forever 2, Descent 3). In this interview he discusses the precise role of a game producer, the history of Wasteland, and perhaps most interestingly, why the game industry is making better games today than it was twenty years ago, despite the complaints of the nostalgic to the contrary."
He makes a good point about the quality of games today versus classic games. I would disagree that the ratio of good to bad games is the same today as then, however. It's probably higher today.
These days, games have to go through a great deal of tweaking and whatnot just to work, much less be playable and fun. So for a game to even be released, there has to be a huge time investment for the corporation.
Bad games back in the day had major bugs, some of which made the games almost impossible to play.
In Downtown Needles, then, the howitzer blew up building walls, but in the end, doing this was not terribly meaningful to progress in the game. I think the only real reason to fire it was to get a little loot that was exposed when you blew up one wall over to the west. In retrospect the whole map should have revolved around the howitzer.
I'm glad it didn't. The howlitzer was one of the highlights of the game, because it didn't have anything to do with the overall story... it made the Wasteland game world more realistic and added to the "anything can happen" mentality.
As I recall you could blow up half the Hobo Dogs stand, permanently. That's so cool.