Hitting for the Fence

Multimedia Reporter , May 1994

If there are any Type A personalities to be found at LucasArts, they are locked away behind closed doors. There's an air of relaxed confidence about the place. Huge cartoon cut-outs of Sam and Max greet you as you enter the front door. There's a love letter to Lucas from a seven-year-old posted on the front door of a music production room What, me worry? President Randy Komisar has a cardboard cutout of a young Elvis in full wiggle on the wall behind his desk. A sense of humor is obviously a job requirement.

There are no signs calling attention to the building. It's located in an industrial park near the canal in San Rafael. The entrance is in back, through the parking lot. The receptionist directs me to a seat on the overstuffed sofa next to a pile of cardboard boxes. While I'm waiting for PR Director Sue Seserman to appear and show me around, Producer Casey Donahue and Marketing Director Mary Bihr both happen by and say hello.

Sue arrives and walks me across the parking lot to another building and a small conference room and theater where she has arranged for me to see some games and meet some of their creators. I'm impressed with her efficiency. Everyone I've asked her about is scheduled to meet me, in order, and her cohort Camala is seated at the game console behind us ready to punch up Rebel Assault.

Waiting at the conference table is Vince Lee, the young whiz who dreamed up the project and acted as project leader. I take a seat and soon we're behind the controls of our own starfighter en route to a mission. Camala quickly works her way up through the levels of the game. She has obviously played it before.

Assault was the biggest-selling PC CD-ROM game on the market last year. A lot of the imagery on the screen is borrowed from Star Wars, but the team has created new situations and characters, Vince says, to make it different. The faces on the screen are borrowed from people who work at Lucas.

Digitized sound effects and music from the movie add a dimension most gamemakers couldn't afford. The music is a rearrangment of the original Star Wars music by John Williams. The game may be the first to use a 4-channel soundtrack, with music, ambience, voice, and effects all on separate channels.

The programming for Rebel Assault was mostly done in C, Vince tells me, with some Assembly used for low-level graphics. A proprietary streaming process he developed means you never have to sit and wait for the program to load. Except for the 2D faces supered onto the screen, the imagery was all created 3D on PCs using Autodesk's 3D studio.

There were also no female pilots in the original Star Wars, but in this game you have the option of picking the gender of the pilot. I ask Camala if she enjoys playing this kind of high-flying shoot-'em-up adventure game, and receive an affirmative response.

"A lot of people say there is too much violence in video games," I note. "But there is no gratuitous violence," I'm told. "It's all Star Wars fantasies, an integral part of the story. There are no violent pay-offs. No blood."

Watching the action unfold on the big screen, I find I'm a little disappointed at the lip-synch problems and pixelation. I guess I'm expecting it to look as clean as a movie. Vince tells me it looks great on his own 486, but designing for a mass market means it's going to suffer on the mish-mash of platforms it will be running on.

I ask him what's ahead.

"I think we'll see more and more movie-like imagery appearing in games," he replies. " Right now games are made by people like me, programmers, and are very technology-based. Kind of like the early movies. I think you're probably going to see, after the technology wave goes by, the creative wave, with people from storytelling backgrounds, movie backgrounds making games."

"You don't see yourself as an artist?" I ask.

"I see myself as a technical-type person with creative abilities," he responds. "I don't see myself as a filmmaker. Here at Lucas is kind of the best of all possibilities, with creative surroundings, creative energy, the artistic side here, and people like Hal Barwood from the film group, good storytellers. I can pick up so much from people like them."

Vince leaves and Steve Purcell and Mike Stemmel enter. It's time for the Sam and Max show. Released on floppies in December, Sam and Max Hit the Road is about to come out on CD-ROM. It's very different from Rebel Assault.

Steve created the characters Sam and Max in an underground comic book by the same name he published, and the game looks and feels a lot like a TV cartoon. You control Sam. Max just comes along for the ride. He also gets in trouble, and gets in your way.

Sam and Max are freelance police officers," explains Mike, one of the team leaders on the project. "They've been sent by the Commisioner to investigate strange goings on at the Carnival. It turns out that Bruno the frozenest Big Foot. has escaped, or been kidnapped....and they have to go find him. They soon discover that Big Foots all over the country have escaped from their shackles. You have to find out what's going on."

You accompany the dynamic duo as they criss-cross the country in their quest for justice and hamburgers, adventuring along the way, and collecting the clues you need to solve the mystery.

"It was a design that pretty much was kind of a no-brainer for us to do," says Mike. "We all had this idea doing a road trip, and it just made it very easy, because first of all we liked the idea of Sam and Max out on the open road going to all these weird road side locations. But it also from a design side made it very easy, very modular. So if we decided 2 months down the road that, "Gee this location really isn't working", we could dump it, or fix the design to work around it. Or if we really really needed to add something, we just throw someplace else on the map...

"Or occasionally we gang 'em up, and get multiple uses out of one place," adds Steve. "We had a dinasour park that happened to be at Mount Rushmore where we also have bungee jumping from the president's nose. It's a way to raise money to pay off the national debt.

Mike and Sean Clark led the team that produced the project. "We handled the day to day management of the program from, and wrote 90% of the programming. We found ourselves wanting to do it."

Steve Purcell too got totally immersed. "I was actually expected to come and work part time on it, but it turned out to be impossible. And so I just ended up coming in the whole year. I slept here at nite. Tried to be involved in every way I could." He did the initial design work helped write the script, and created many of the backgrounds and some of the animation.

Steve has been around the company for many years doing illustration and animation, according to Sue Seserman, and Sam and Max were already well loved characters at LucasArts. It was only natural they should become characters in a game.

"We've kind of mumbled about it for years," Steve adds. "The characters are actually used by the programmers when they're trained to use our in in-house scripting language, SCUMM." (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Maniac.... Maniac Mansion was the first game written with it. )

The LucasArts gamemakers test their products at a "Pizza Orgy", according to Purcell, where everybody in the company is invited to stuff themselves with pizza and spend hours playing with new games. The idea is to put the characters through their paces and get some feedback.

Oops. We're getting behind schedule. It's time for me to talk with Randy Komisar, the new president of LucasArts. Returning to the first building, I follow Sue upstairs to the second floor, passing through a larger room with a cozy, almost living room atmosphere. Big comfortable sofas are arranged for conversation. Floor lamps provide soft illumination. No one is sitting on the sofas at the moment, however. They're at work at their desks, which are scattered around the perimeter.

Randy has a corner office with a view, and another comfortable couch, where we wait for him. He soon strides into the room wearing a striped-T shirt and a big smile and offers me his hand. In the other he's holding one of those jogger cups, from which he occasionally sips his soda through a straw. He's a happy man, full of energy. And why not? What's not to like about his job....

We talked about the advantages of being one of the Lucas companies, the current CD-ROM boom, and the future of interactive entertainment.

"CDROMS are just the tip of the iceberg", Komisar predicts. "The delivery platforms are going to get much more robust, so you're going to be able to have much more realistic, more life-like animation, video, sound and put that together in a way that really makes a much more interactive, compelling environment, experience.

"I think interactive entertainment is going to have as many different faces as any other form of entertainment you can imagine... You'll have titles that are directed towards people who want to spend a lot of time learning, you'll find people who want to play twitch action games, you'll find people who want to sort of enter a movie experience. And we'll be designing for all of those areas as they become viable.

The company is watching interactive television, says Komisar, but not actively working towards it.

"I see interactive television first as a delivery medium," he notes, "...as a way of delivering information right to your doorstep. The next step is to try to understand what can be uniquely done on that platform, in that environment, that can't be done in any other environment. And I think that is the convergence of a tremendous amount of information into one node.

"You think about your television set with it's computer, a little set-top box as your node in this universe. You have the opportunity to take in a lot of information simultaneously and interact with it. You can be playing a game, for instance, with a variety of different people on different continents at the same time.

"More importantly you can have new information coming down that may change the information that you're working with. Let's say you're in a Star Wars universe, and you've got intelligence coming in about what another player is doing. You can interact with that real time. That creates a lot of interesting opportunities that you can get through interactive television that you wouldn't necessarily get through a PC.

LucasArts has been contacted by people involved in interactive television trials, Randy notes, but is not in a hurry to jump in. "Nothing so far has led us to change our current strategy, which is just to create wonderful content. If we can create great content with lasting value then no matter what twists and turns the technology takes, we'll be a player.

"At this company, what management does is build a support environment around creativity. I consider one of my principal jobs here to make sure we have the right resources, the right relationships, the right business processes in place, to take advantage of the creativity of our design talent and our programming talent, and our art talent. ...It's not a place where I sit up here and say we should be doing a game about A or B or C, or we should be moving into the interactive television business.

"We create an environment where creative people feel appreciated--where they are supported in following their own vision. It's a highly productive solution to what a lot of people see as a highly complicated problem, which is to figure out what the next great hit is. I can tell you for sure, I don't know. But somebody here does. And I just want to make sure we support them in getting their idea out there.

"It's a very different model than most of our competitors with their portfolio management model, where you're pretty much hedging a lot of development done on the outside, and studio financial style plans. We're much more betting on ourselves, which is pretty much the Lucas philosophy. We're not going to take a strategy and hedge it. We're going to hit for the fence with every title."

 

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