Does Irrational Games have a mission? Can there possibly be any methods to its well-documented madness? We’re ringing in the new year with an attempt to answer those questions, viewed through the lens of an employee who joined Irrational just four months ago. Discussions with studio members of all stripes–ranging from other relative newcomers all the way to co-founder Ken Levine–reveal that nothing is certain in the world of game development. And that’s just fine.

• Part 1: The Co-Founder – Ken Levine
• Part 2: Immigrants – Don Norbury, Jeff Seamster, Josh Davis, Murray Kraft
• Part 3: Gatekeepers – Bill Gardner, Shawn Robertson, Robert Tzong, Chris Kline
• Part 4: Natives – Alexx Kay, Nate Wells, Scott Sinclair, Shawn Robertson

Going forward, Irrational podcasts will continue to release once a month, but our plan is to alternate Irrational Behavior with Irrational Interviews. If you already subscribe to the individual podcast RSS feeds, please replace them with this new combined feed that incorporates both Behavior and Interviews.

Direct Download Episode 8

Irrational Podcasts RSS Feed

Irrational Podcasts iTunes Page

Podcast music provided by:

• George Glass (Theme music)
• Spirit Kid (Part 1 intro)
• Permafav (Part 2 intro)
• Patrick Balthrop (Part 3 intro)
• Walking Sleep (Part 4 intro)
• The Monolators (Ending music)

It’s not a “top ten” or a ranking. These are just a few of the games that have special significance to Irrational team members, from mega-hits to some more obscure titles. Share your own favorites in the comments.

We’ve also updated our Now Playing list over on the Studio page–and two of the games featured were also singled out here.

Ian Davis, Rigger/Technical Animator
Diablo II (Blizzard North, 2000)

It’s gotta be Diablo II. The first Diablo got me thinking about being a game artist in the first place, then Diablo II refined all the goodness in Diablo and made it better.

Justin Pappas, Level Designer
STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl (GSC Game World, 2007)

After System Shock 2, which is probably unfair to call out on our own site, my favorite PC game is STALKER with the Complete mod or Redux mod. Mods make this game, and mods are exclusive to PC gaming. STALKER creates a world that feels very real and very scary, while providing the player with interesting choices and simulating most accurately a desperate survival situation.

Alexx Kay, Senior Designer
Minecraft (Markus “Notch” Persson, 2009/2010)

Minecraft stitches together a huge, powerfully expressive sandbox world with just enough gameplay to encourage the emergence of player goals.

John Fuhrer, Quality Assurance Tester
Baldur’s Gate II (BioWare, 2000)

This game excels in pretty much every area, but what keeps me coming back are the customization options. With tons of class options, a huge gear selection, and the ability to customize your biography, portraits, and choose companions and romantic interests, every character in BG2 feels unique. The ability to make my persona my own got me invested and in the role-playing mood, and made each playthrough special.

Forrest Dowling, Principal Level Designer
Deus Ex (Ion Storm Austin, 2001)

The depth and breadth of player choice was groundbreaking, and allowed for an unprecedented level of expressive play, invention, and player discovery. Also, it had inventory Tetris.

James Bonney, Audio Director
The Dark Eye (Inscape, 1995)

I’ve never forgotten this game based on Edgar Allen Poe stories.  All the characters’ faces were modeled out of clay, with creepy stop-motion animation, so the entire game had a very unique look. Naked Lunch author William S. Burroughs was one of the voice actors, and the music was by Thomas Dolby (“She Blinded Me with Science”)…how could it lose?  Well, I guess it did, because I’ve met very few people who have even heard of The Dark Eye.  And for better or worse, I’ve never seen a game like it since.

Adrian Murphy, Associate Producer
World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004)

This is still a game I find has no end between the constant content updates and personal attachment I have to my characters. WoW has moved past “game” into “hobby.” It’s constantly giving me returns on my time investment, no matter how little or how much I play.

Kayla Belmore, Personal Assistant
Team Fortress 2 (Valve Software, 2007)

Each class plays very differently, accommodating just about any play style or mood–though, I confess my mood most of the time is “kill it with fire.” The character videos and frequent content updates keep me playing despite having a short attention span. Also: HATS!!!!

Chris Remo, Community Manager
Far Cry 2 (Ubisoft Montreal, 2008)

An impressive simulation of being totally screwed in the middle of a gorgeous, sprawling savanna. If you can invest yourself into an experience where your weapons will fall apart, careful plans will blow up in your face, and you will contract malaria, Far Cry 2 can give you some of the most surprising, memorable, and triumphant FPS experiences you’ll ever have.

Shawn Robertson, Lead Artist
Silent Storm (Nival Interactive, 2003)

A turn-based RPG set in an alternate WWII universe featuring Nazis, robots, and robot Nazis.  All environments were destructible–if you don’t want to spend action points running down the stairs, just blow a hole in the floor.  The best part is that the AI would understand these new routes and use them against you, and bullets had ballistics and would bounce or go through walls. If anyone knows how to get this game running on Windows 7, I will love you forever.

Alexx Kay, a.k.a. ‘A-kay’ or ‘AK-47,’ has been a fixture at Irrational for many a console generation.    His ascent to greatness began in the pits of QA, where his prolific bug-finding skills on Thief and System Shock 2 were unmatched and unrivaled.   His keen mind for game design and his near-neurotic attention to detail led him to become co-Lead Designer on Freedom Force vs. the Third Reich, where he helped bring life to the Freedom Force universe – and not just with his design skills.  Alexx also boasts an impressive set of pipes, and so lent his voice-acting talents to a variety of characters including the devious Mr. Mechanical.   Just ask him to “do the voice,” and you’re guaranteed a chuckle.

Most recently he worked on BioShock as a level designer and all-around smart guy.  His technical acumen makes him a natural liaison with the programming team, and he now plies his trade as a Senior Designer and general font of wisdom.    We hope he fills the hallowed halls of Irrational with his jovial laugh and design insight for many years to come.

Also, his beard kicks ass.

Your title is ‘Senior Designer.’  What does that mean?

I wear a lot of different hats, depending on what needs to be done during different phases of the project.  The job of a Designer is, broadly speaking, to make sure that what we’re building is fun for the player to experience.  Being a Senior Designer means that I’ve got enough proven experience that people trust my ideas and instincts.  It also means that I sometimes get given responsibility for entire systems at once.  (What those systems are remains, sadly, Top Secret for now.  I really wish I could talk about them!)

I hear that you do some acting every now and again. Would you like to share anything about that?

I did some acting in high school, and then later as part of the Society for Creative Anachronism.  Last year, a friend of mine talked me into participating in his production of Shakespeare’s Henry V, which was lots of fun.  Well, at least up until the point where, during the preview performance, there was an error in the fight choreography, and I took a sword blow to the head.  Head wounds bleed like nobody’s business, but my costume had a red hat, so it wasn’t immediately apparent to the audience.  As soon as I got offstage, I got it quickly bandaged.  I’m very proud to say that I finished the performance before going to the ER, and most of the audience never realized what had happened.  The show must go on!

What games have you worked on?

I started in the industry doing QA on Thief: The Dark Project.  Then I did QA on System Shock 2, but by the end of the project had moved onto ‘Additional Design.’  I was an Associate Producer during the early days of the (never-completed) Deep Cover and The Lost, and did some voice acting on the original Freedom Force (“Tremble before the might of MISTER MECHANICAL! AHHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!”).  I parted ways with Irrational for a time, and did another QA gig at Impressions, working on Zeus: Master of Olympus.  Did some contract work designing an educational MMO for a dot-com bubble company that has since vanished into the mists of history.  Came back to Irrational to work as a Designer on The Lost, and then Freedom Force vs. the Third Reich, where I got promoted to Co-Lead Designer.  Then I was a Designer on BioShock, and the BioShock DLC for PS3.  Since then, I’ve worked o– mmmmph! Mmrrrgg! [further sounds of struggle, as the powers-that-be keep Alexx from spilling secrets...]

Describe life at Irrational in three words or less.

Always challenging

What is your favorite game of all time?

Measuring by sheer quantity of fun, it’s got to be World of Warcraft.  Though I think the most concentrated fun I ever had was in Thief: The Dark Project.

Name a game everyone should play once in their life.

Passage, by Jason Rohrer.

What are your hobbies outside of work?

Gaming, naturally.  Reading, in a variety of genres.  Comics.  Theatre, Elizabethan and/or experimental.  Maintaining The Dragaera Timeline, an obsessive cross-referencing of the fantasy works of Steven Brust.

What is your favorite movie?

Time Bandits.

You’ve been in the industry for a long time. Do you have any design wisdom you’d like to impart to  aspiring game designers out there?

Decide first if you want to go big or go small.  Do you want to be part of a team making huge games of astounding scope and spectacle?  Or do you prefer the purer artistic vision that can be achieved by smaller teams?  If you want to go big, learn to specialize.  Having knowledge of lots of disciplines has value, but big companies are rarely looking for jacks-of-all-trades; they want someone who can deliver high-quality work in a tightly-focused specialty.  Conversely, if you want to go small, learn to do as many different kinds of tasks as you can, because there may not be anyone else to do them.

Learn enough discipline to bring projects to completion.  This is a skill that will serve you well in every aspect of the gaming industry — and in life outside the industry.

What’s your favorite Irrational story?

While we were working on Freedom Force, we were approached by an outfit called Electric Playground, who wanted to do a preview story about it.  EP was a cable-based TV show about gaming, sort of like XPlay these days, only with a much smaller audience.

Their shtick was that they liked to stage live-action versions of the games that they reported on.  So their reporter came in a superhero outfit, and they brought another one (mostly in white) for Ken Levine to wear as “Captain Irrational”.  Being well-noted for my super-villain hamminess already, I got to wear a mylar cape as “Dr. Sno-cone”.  A couple of our more ethnic-looking employees were chosen to be my minions.

This was when we still had the South Boston office.  There was a dilapidated garage next door that was the scene for the epic battle.  Ken and I pretended to toss power beams at each other, and the actual beams were Photoshopped in (badly) during post.  They even did some filming from the roof of our building, to get the “isometric top-down view” thing going.

After the fight scene, they interviewed me and Ken, still in costume, and in character.  (Fun fact: in early builds, Ken Levine recorded temp voice for Minuteman.)  It was a wonderfully silly day, though Ken was embarrassed by the whole thing.  Years later, I actually ran into someone who recognized me from that show, so I guess it did get on the air.  Sadly, it doesn’t seem to have made it onto YouTube.  Ken’s probably just as glad

Blogs, Facebook, forums and search engines didn’t exist fifteen years ago, and the primary tool to communicate with your fan base was the local bulletin board system (BBS) or Usenet and newsgroups services.  “You could go through Usenet groups such as comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg or rec.games.computer.ultima-dragons to find fans of your game,” remembers Kay.  “The web now is fragmented with dozens of places to find discussion about a specific product or subject.  Usenet provided a very specific location for fans congregate to talk about a product.”  Reading a long list of discussions and replies provided an experience similar to the on-line communities of today, but on a much smaller scale.

The tools to create games have changed dramatically in the last decade, as have the responsibilities and sizes of departments.  “Photoshop didn’t have layers when I started,” says Lead Artist Shawn Robertson.  “3D Studio was a program in DOS and no game required 3D acceleration.”  Most games at the time were still being done in 2D, but everything started to change with the releases of Wolfenstein 3D and Duke Nukem 3D.  This change accelerated rapidly with the release of 3Dfx’s Voodoo 3D graphics cards at the end of 1996, and glQuake in early 1997.  “As an artist I did everything when I started,” Robertson adds.  “I modeled, textured, animated, rigged, and did FX for those first games.  Now everyone is much more specialized and focused on a specific role. We shipped SWAT 4 with five people in the art department.  We now have over twenty-five artists working on Project Icarus and we are still growing.”

As games evolve, their budgets grow. They require more staff, more assets, and more time to complete.  “My first game was made for the astronomical sum of one million dollars,” Director of Product Development Tim Gerritsen remembers.  “It was considered a AAA title at the time and we had a staff of 12 people to work on it.  Many of us were kvetching over how unbelievable the development budgets and the team size were.”  It isn’t uncommon today for games to have staffs of well over 100 people working for two or three years on a single game.  “We had to change the way we worked and some of us had to become managers,” says Gerritsen on how growth has changed roles for people on the team.  “We had to learn how to be a business.”

It wasn’t long ago that games were shipping on 3.5” floppy discs.  “I worked on a game that fit on three floppies,” says Gerritsen.  “That is a whopping 4.32 megabytes of compressed data.  We’d have programmers working on fancy animation systems for weeks to cull every extraneous bit of data to fit our game into those 4.32 MB.”  For perspective, a typical mp3 file is around 5 MB.  Games today can ship on a dual-layer DVD holding 8.5 gigabyte (8,704 MB) and sometimes even using a 50 gigabyte (51,200 MB) Blu-ray disc.  The amount of data is staggering, and all that data needs to be processed to fit onto that disc.  “The build process on The Lost took about 20 hours to complete,” says Lead Programmer John Abercrombie.  “It was a ridiculous setup that included a script that automated mouse movement and button presses since the application didn’t have a command line interface.”  A build process involves taking all the raw assets such as models, textures and sounds, and converting them to a format the game understands.  Depending on the game, this could be tens or even hundreds of thousands of assets.  “There is nothing worse than going through a 20-hour build process to find a blocking bug once you load the game up,” says Abercrombie.

As the amount of data in the final game grows, so does the revision database.  “I had a meeting with the IT department to discuss how large our Perforce server should be for our first next generation game,” remembers Senior Technology Programmer Steve Anichini.  Perforce is a program that builds a database that stores every revision on every asset in the game.  “We estimated it would take one terabyte (1,048,576 MB), which at the time was unheard of.  The IT department was rather skeptical the project would need that much space, especially compared to games from the previous generation which were only a couple hundred gigabytes.  By the end of the project the Perforce database was well over two terabytes,” says Anichini.

As for my own experience … when I started as a game tester back in 1998, I had to write all my bugs on sticky notes, as the company didn’t have any extra computers for the testing department.  The sticky notes were handed to the test lead, who would then add them to the bug database — which at that time was an Excel spreadsheet.  Compare that to the 35,000 bugs written up on BioShock, which would span 1.5 miles if they were to be written out on sticky notes!

Irrational was once a tiny team that made games on miniscule budgets. Today we’re much, much bigger and the budget’s grown along with the ambition of the group’s games. This month’s episode of Irrational Behavior explores what these changes have meant for the studio’s culture and the individuals who’ve been on board as the industry itself has had to adopt the professional practices of big business. Episode highlights include an insider take on the making of Thief, designers Dorian Hart and Alexx Kay waxing nostalgic on the days when they were allowed to do voice over work for Freedom Force, as well as the story of a mysterious onanist who secretly used artist Shawn Robertson’s office for forbidden self-pleasures.

Stay tuned to IrrationalGames.com for more content related to this months podcast.

Discuss this episode of Irrational Behavior over in the forum.

iTunes Link

Direct Download Episode 2

Irrational Podcasts RSS Feed

Podcast music provided by:

• Josh Rathbun
• Matt Grimm
• Geoff Graves
• Rich Vreeland/DisasterPeace
• Signal Hill

Apocalypse Shock?

“The original story had the player going to a spaceship to assassinate a character similar to Colonel Walter Kurtz from Apocalypse Now,” says Creative Director Ken Levine. “We pitched the game to Paul Neurath at Looking Glass Studios based on a story outline I wrote and they gave us access to the Dark Engine which was used to make Thief.”

“We took the concept around to all the major publishers of the day and we ended up talking to Electronic Arts, who held the rights to System Shock,” Levine adds.  EA eventually did sign the project and the original story outline quickly emerged. As Levine puts it, “you can’t have a System Shock game without SHODAN, so I wanted to rewrite everything.  I was such a System Shock fanboy that it was a dream come true to create the sequel.”

Zero-G vs. Technology

“Originally, the level that would become The Many had the player traverse from the Von Braun to The Rickenbacker on the outside of the hull,” says Levine. “We thought it would be a really cool mission because it would change everything the player was used to by introducing a zero gravity environment as well as changing the behavior of all the monsters.”  The technology in 1998, when System Shock 2 was in development, really didn’t allow for such grandiose ideas unless it was a major feature in the game.  Levine remembers chatting with Lead Programmer Robert Fermier to discuss the level and being told, “Dude that is going to be a huge amount of work for it to work properly.”  A feature specific to only a single mission of the game didn’t fit into the schedule. Levine adds, “It was good that it got cut. If you don’t have the resources for it, you can’t make it that good.”

F’ing with the Player

“To fuck with the audience was a new concept in video games,” says Levine on creating the plot twists in System Shock 2.  “It was a bit of an experiment and it had some resistance from the team, but once I had the idea I really wanted to run with it.”  With the help of Randy Smith, who was on loan from Looking Glass Studios, the script that Levine wrote was built into the sequence in DromED (the tool used to create levels in System Shock 2). Levine remembers, “That was a very challenging task and ended up being the most complex sequence in the game to script, with the multimedia presentation where the player finds out that Shodan has been posing as Polito the entire time.”

The End?  Rewrite.

“Due to miscommunications or differing ideas, a different cinematic video was created from the one that I originally scripted,” says Levine. “It had this elaborate sequence where Shodan would attempt to kill you in a double-cross, as this ‘cyber stinger’ that was in view provided tension of your impending doom.”  Upon getting his hands on the video for the ending sequence, Levine didn’t see anything that he wrote in the script.  “We didn’t have much to work with.  It was like when you look in the cupboard and you’re trying to make soup, and you have a bag of salt and couple of pinto beans.”  Working with fixed assets can be extremely challenging especially with limited time and resources as well as fighting the technology back then.  Levine remembers, “We had to write to the assets we had at that point, and all we could do was edit it.  We completely ran out of time and that cut scene wasn’t the right ending for the game.”

900 Square Feet of Amateurs

“System Shock 2 was made in single room, which was around 900 square feet,” Levine recalls of the original office space that Irrational Games called home.  “We didn’t have any money and didn’t have a lot of experience shipping games at that point.  We lucked out by hiring some newcomers like Nate Wells, Ian Vogel, Michael Swiderek, and Mauricio Tejerina, as well as being loaned some guys from Looking Glass, including Dorian Hart, Alexx Kay, and Randy Smith.” Working in such conditions on a project that lasted 11 months lead to many sleepless nights and likely some foul body odor.  “If we knew then what we know now, we probably would have just stopped in our tracks petrified, and not have been successful because we wouldn’t have thought we could pull it off,” remembers Levine.  While conditions were cramped, there was a great deal of optimism while working on System Shock 2. “I remember getting that first milestone check for around $75,000 from Looking Glass and thinking, ‘OH MY GOD! WE CAN DO ANYTHING!’ We made it happen.”

*These aren’t hard figures. Include them in your school papers at your own peril.

System Shock 2’s missing log

“One of the most controversial design decisions in Shock 2,” says designer Dorian Hart, “was to have the weapons degrade with use, and so be in regular need of repair. From a pure design standpoint, the goal was to ratchet up the feeling of constant tension. Part of what made Shock 2 such an emotional experience was that we never let the player get comfortable; having players know that their guns could jam in the middle of a fight played straight to that goal.

“There was, and continues to be, backlash from the fans about that system — and a majority of that criticism comes as complaints about the realism of the system.  In real life, weapons don’t noticeably degrade with each shot fired, and so it angered players that the Shock 2 weapons had that behavior.

“The maddening truth about that was, at least once during development, we talked about having an audio log in the game that talked about why that was happening — enough so that some people on the team thought we actually shipped with it. The log would have explained that as part of their takeover, the Many had released a special corrosive gas into the Von Braun that damaged weapons but was harmless to organic creatures.

“Of course, in hindsight, the team has been kicking themselves for not including that audio log. In one fell 30-second swoop, we could have prevented about 80 percent of the complaints, or at least redirected them toward Xerxes and the Many, and away from the development team.”

BioShock’s atmospheric pressure system

BioShock was slated to simulate deep-sea atmospheric pressure changes. In fact, the feature was functioning when the game shipped.

Technical Director Chris Kline explains: “Any area in BioShock could be associated with a ‘pressure region.’ Machines in each region allowed players to change the local pressure between low, normal, and high parameters. For each room in the game, there were entirely different light, fog, and HDR rendering setups, and when the pressure was changed, the whole atmosphere in the room would smoothly blend from the current setup to the new setup. In addition, every AI responded differently to pressure, meaning that, depending on the current pressure, the AI would have different animations, vocalizations, appearance, speeds, vulnerabilities to different damage types, and damage bonuses.

“The system was originally designed so that the player had an additional way to manipulate the world to his advantage ,” Kline adds. “For example, perhaps one AI was immune to fire in normal pressure but susceptible to it in high or low pressures; or an AI had poor perception in low pressure.”

“In practice, the system was a disaster because it caused several gameplay and production issues:

• The amount of work that artists needed to do in each room of the game tripled, because each pressure needed its own lighting and fog settings.
• It was impossible to control the mood of any given space, because changes in pressure resulted in changes in lighting and fog.
• Designers needed to plan for every permutation of pressure settings for every single room. QA then had to test these.

“Most importantly — and this is the issue that put the nail in the system’s coffin — was that we never found a good way to clearly convey the effect of pressure through audiovisual changes.”

Creating feedback to communicate the state of an environment, and the ways in which environmental changes affect characters, without resorting to clunky and/or abstract user-interface cues is one of game design’s central challenges. And when a state such as barometric pressure is invisible to those few senses that videogames stimulate — sight, sound, and to a tiny extent, touch — that task grows ever more time consuming. What does pressure look like? How does a Big Daddy behave under high pressure? Can players correctly interpret that behavior? How do they know that flames shoot farther under reduced pressure, or that bullets are more likely to blow things apart when pressure ratchets up?

Interestingly, some remnant of this system shipped with BioShock. “While  we ‘cut’ pressure from the game,” Kline says, “the portion that controlled lighting and fog changes was left in the code. At one point, I discovered (to my horror, because the code hadn’t been tested in ages) that artists were hijacking the pressure system to script lighting and fog changes — most notably in the Arcadia level when the trees die and are brought back to life. So I suppose that the code was solid.”

Biomechanical emphasis in BioShock

“Early on during BioShock’s development, we went through a phase that placed much more emphasis on biotechnology,” says designer Alexx Kay. “Audio logs, instead of being tape recorders, would be squishy, organic things, with lips and ears. Machines that seemed mechanical on the surface would actually have mutated humans operating them behind the scenes — something that players would only come to realize partway through the game. There is a small remnant of this notion in the hacking mini-game; originally, the fiction behind it was that you were increasing the flow of Adam to this addicted, mutated slave, and he was giving you extra benefits in gratitude.

BioShock’s insect-based ecology

According to designer Alexx Kay, “One of the original inspirations for BioShock was Ken Levine’s belief that it was getting too hard to create meaningful human interactions in games.  His first take on a solution: model meaningful insect interactions, like you would see on a nature show. BioShock would feature a complex ecology of creatures that interacted in simple, easy-to-get ways. Harvesters would gather resources and bring them back to Queens. Aggressors would attack the Harvesters, Protectors would guard them. (The Queens were large, immobile creatures, with lots of Adam, who could summon Protectors if attacked.) There would never be any speech, or any indication of higher intelligence.

“Ironically, we did a 180 from that, ending up with creatures that were very strongly human, if twisted, and who spoke all the time.

“Even the basic functionality of the ecology was mostly cut. We kept the fiction that Splicers would attack Little Sisters, and get into fights with Big Daddies — but except for a few scripted sequences, they actually wouldn’t.”

BioShock’s navigation robot

During the middle stages of Bioshock’s development, the team realized that due to the complex connectivity of Rapture, players needed assistance in order to navigate the city and complete quests. Technical Director Chris Kline says, “We wanted a map, but were concerned that this would take too much programming and design/art time to implement. So I came up with the idea of Nav-Bot: You could press a controller button to summon your Nav-Bot, activate him with another controller button, and then select from a list of destinations in a 2D user interface. You could then follow him to the designated location.

“There were a number of problems with this concept. The biggest one was that, while following Nav-Bot, the player would spend the entire time looking at the floor as Nav-Bot shuttled along (I pitched him as something akin to K-9 from Dr. Who). But there were other concerns:

• What if the player gets distracted while following Nav-Bot?

• What if Nav-Bot gets stuck in the middle of a brawl?

• How does Nav-Bot go up stairs? Elevators?

• If the player wants to remember a particular place and come back to it, how do players “mark” the location?

“Another hurdle to overcome was the fact that, unlike maps, Nav-Bot was not a familiar concept in first-person shooters. In the end, someone (maybe Jon Chey at Irrational Games Australia) made the executive decision that we needed to suck up the extra work and make a map. Thus died Nav-Bot.”