OF ALL THE MONUMENTAL HURDLES in the Xbox team's path to launching a game console, producing must-have software took a close second to sorting out hardware manufacturers to create the box itself. Ed Fries put together a slate of launch titles using the same method he applied as general manager of the PC games group. First, he wanted games to meet a certain quality bar. Second, he wanted a diverse lineup to satisfy players interested in all types of games, from shooters and platformers to sports and party games.

For this chapter, I spoke with developers behind four of the Xbox's launch titles to learn about their game's design process, and to gain insight into how their teams readied for release--not only to release their games, but to become a part of Xbox history by being among the first (and in one case, the very first) game available on a brand-new hardware platform.

Fuzion Frenzy

PHILIP AND ANDREW OLIVER, KNOWN as the Oliver Twins among industry peers and fans, had made history before they signed on Blitz Games to develop launch software for the Xbox. Through pair programming, a method whereby one developer codes while the other advises, they had become famous for Dizzy, a series of platform games starring the titular character who was as well-known in the United Kingdom as Nintendo's Mario.

By the time they partnered with Microsoft, Blitz Games and the Oliver Twins were known as much for family-friendly multiplayer games as they were their Dizzy franchise. Enter Fuzion Frenzy, aptly described on the front of the box as "non-stop party game action" spanning 45 unique minigames suitable for up to four players. This introduced another parallel between Blitz Games and Nintendo: As Dizzy is comparable to 2D Super Mario platformers, one can draw parallels between Fuzion Frenzy and Mario Party, Nintendo's own button-mashing series of party games that started one hardware generation earlier on the Nintendo 64.

Here, the Oliver Twins share how they built their reputation for the type of game Fuzion Frenzy became, why the final title came as a surprise to them, and the creative process they orchestrated to encourage their teams to submit only the very best ideas for minigames.

"A Mass Market Audience"

Andrew Oliver: We'd fallen into doing family friendly games because we'd started on the ZX Spectrum, and that seemed to be the sort of the majority of the market, kids around 12 years old. We find that most developers were writing action games and then it became sports games and races. And that market didn't really appeal to us that much creatively. I didn't think I'm very creative and there were a few people making really good ones. The same as sports: We're not really into sports. We could see they were successful, but then we know that those developers have a real passion for it.

When it came to shooters, we actually love playing them, but it's all a bit violent, and, finally, other people are doing it. So we just thought we'll stick with the family friendly games. We also love the idea that we might one day work for companies like Disney, proper big entertainment companies, and we were always worried that just wanting to go around shooting zombies or aliens was never going to be--in fact, it's funny to say this now--never going to be that mainstream. So we thought, let's avoid it, even though we were playing them ourselves and loved it. We were there for Wolfenstein and Doom and everything. Those are the games we were playing, but other people were making them.

Philip Oliver: I think another point, and Andrew, you can disagree with me if you like: With hardcore games, we were late to the market, and when we came to the market as school kids, thought we couldn't make anything like that. So we aimed lower, and the lower level originally was educational games. They didn't sell at all. Nobody buys educational.

The next low-hanging fruit for us was budget games. What we discovered by writing budget games for Codemasters is that it's a mass market audience, and that mass market audience is happy to pay a lower price and is more lenient on the quality they expect, because you're not going for the hardcore who, who know it all. So what we found was that going for the mass market, we actually sold a lot of units at a good price, and we did quite well.

"They're Probably Drunk"

Philip Oliver: We had an agent who got us in with people like MGM. She knew everybody, including lots of people in the games industry. Microsoft approached her saying they needed some games for their Xbox. And it was just a PC box running DirectX, hence the reason they just called it Xbox and it stuck. They basically said to our agent, "Look to all the companies that you're representing, and ask them if any of them are interested in producing some games." Our agent, Jackie, said "These guys like doing family friendly stuff. They've got a reputation for that."

Microsoft wanted something a bit like Mario Party. We were called Blitz at the time. So automatically got called Blitz Party. and we knew what the brief was. it's got to be sort of Mario Party. But we knew the game had to feel more American and it had to appeal to an older crowd.

Andrew Oliver: They said that they wanted to aim at more of a 20-year-old market, targeted mostly toward lads.

Philip Oliver: They came to the office and they gave us this big presentation saying, "Here is the ideal person. They go to the Pizza Hut and they drink this and talk like this, and afterwards, they might go back to their flat with a couple of mates and play on a console. They're looking for something social, they're looking for a bit of a laugh and they're probably drunk. What can you give them?" So it was Mario Party, but that kind of target audience.

It was called Blitz Party right into the very end. In fact, we thought it was going to get launched as Blitz Party. We were very surprised when they renamed it to Fuzion Frenzy. They had access to all the graphic files and the spreadsheets of all the text like game names. We produced the master copy, and then they changed names and such. So all the game names, we know under different names. When the game got mastered, it was like, "We didn't call them that."

Ed Fries (vice president of Microsoft Game Studios): At that time, it was very common for Microsoft to come up with names for games. Our online group had worked with a company here, really small at that time, to help launch their first game, called Bejeweled. So it was pretty common for game names to come from marketing.

Andrew Oliver: I do remember the fact that they wanted everything on a spreadsheet for localization purposes and all of the graphics and the textures all have to be accessible and in a certain directory. They said, "Whatever the name is, we might call it different things in France and Germany, so we need to be able to put a logo and it be accessed from this spreadsheet."

Philip Oliver: That was the only time we've ever done that sort of process, but it's Microsoft: They know what they're doing and it clearly worked.

Andrew Oliver: They knew proper software development and they seemed pretty serious. We'd already gone through, five or six years beforehand, everyone criticizing Sony, saying "Why don't they stick to just making TVs and Walkman?" So when people were at all, "What does Microsoft know?" It's like, "Well, you said that about Sony and they did pretty well, didn't they? Let's not knock the new guys." And, really, it's Microsoft. They do know software. We were very positive, like, yeah, this is clearly gonna work.

I remember one story that I'm not sure exactly answers your question, but they said they were very serious. They were targeting next Christmas [2001] and we'd have about 10 months development. They would immediately give us like exacts spec and we just develop on a PC and they said, "A couple of months before you master it, we'll give you the real console." They wanted, at launch, at least eight really strong titles in each genre. And I remember them saying, "We've got shooting sorted and we've got racing sorted."

Philip Oliver: They knew they had shooting covered with Halo.

Andrew Oliver: They were saying we're a really big studio, and wanted us to fill a slot. That's why we ended up with the party game. We were discussing what slot we could take, and they were saying, "You've done quite a few licensed games, but we don't want it to be licensed." Then we were talking about platform games, but for some reason I can't remember, they didn't want us to do a platform game. So this is when we came up with the party game now. They said, "That's really cool because that will get help mass adoption when you get one guy coming back from the bar with his mates to come and play his brand-new Xbox. They're going to play a party game and it's going to support four players."

"Back to the Spreadsheet"

Philip Oliver: Microsoft were more the suits and more the professionals, and they tackled everything from a professional point of view. One of the things that was slightly annoying was that Microsoft kept trying to analyze all of our budgets, saying, "It'll only take a coder three days to do this" and "You should only be paying this guy within this salary range." So we're looking at these figures and it's like, "Stop it. We're not overcharging you, and we're going to make the very best game we possibly can because we're motivated to make the best possible game. The bigger budget you give us, the more we will spend on making the game as efficiently as possible to give you the best game possible."

They really didn't get it. Then they just kept coming back to the spreadsheet. We're like, "We've got to actually master this thing. We know how to make games. Could you just leave us to it?" We had lots of situations trying to rescue our games from Hollywood people who helped fund publishing. You get halfway through a game's development, and guess what? It looks like rubbish because it's all in pieces; that's because it's in development and things don't work. And they're like, "You've had a half the time, so I expect half the levels to be looking amazing." That's not how it works. Everything builds up in layers and comes together at the end.

There's a funny story not about gameplay. Microsoft wanted us to have a private meeting in Seattle. it was all cloak and dagger that they were going to be producing this console and you have to sign confidentialities, et cetera. it was all cloak and dagger that they were going to be producing this console and you have to sign as can confidentialities, et cetera. And they wanted us to go to Seattle to basically meet the head honchos. And I can't remember the names of the people, but to basically sit down and we were going to be doing a game for them. and so I've got a job title of CEO. They've just awarded us this contract. I'm going to fly all the way for a single meeting, UK to Seattle. And then back again. And they've requested it and it's to meet the head honcho.

Now, the problem was that this was days before we had decent internet. I think you just about had something ropey or you had to ring in through dialup. I have problems finding a hotel. Everything seemed booked up, and this was before Google Maps and all that kind of stuff. I reached out to our contact and I said, look, I'm having real difficulties finding a hotel. They all seem to be booked. There's must be some conference zone or something. They said, oh, yeah, there is. We'll get the head honcho's PA to book you into a hotel. I'm like, Oh my God, I wonder who's paying for this because this person is it Robbie Bach or somebody if somebody like that. But it was some head honcho.

That kind of solves a problem, but now you've really worried me because we're on a budget. We're not the richest people, and he probably only stays in six-star hotels or something. And so I was really nervous about this, but equally I couldn't find a hotel, so I didn't want to say no. I was actually quite scared. He was picking up the bill. If we're lucky, they'll pick the bill up. They're booking it. They'll pay the biller and then I'll be all right. It'll be fine. Anyway. So we just had this name and address of this hotel, me and another guy. we flew in, got to the airport, got the rental car, drove to this place. It was worse than Bates motel. And I'm talking about the 1960s Bates style.

It was horrific. We feel scared. We feel really scared. This is horrible. That there's stains on the wall, the curtains hanging off. It's one of those ones where it's like a side corridor motel type, like so bad, and we're quite scared. And then we're like, what do we do? Do we just check out again, we're not worried about the bill at this point. I had a business card that said CEO on it. We had a company of over 100 people, and that's what the PA checked us into? We only had to stay there one night, but I was still surprised. And there was no apology. What were they thinking?

"Mixture of Influences"

Philip Oliver: You have to have nice-looking characters. There was a lot of work spent on what are the characters going to be that will appeal to this 20-year-old lad who likes hardcore games, but he and his buddy like casual games too. Eventually it was decided that it had to be these kinds of hyper-cool humans, and that was influenced by Jet Set Radio where you were skating and tagging buildings.

Andrew Oliver: It was a mixture of influences. I remember we were saying that characters would be a surfer dude, a skateboard dude, and make it all a bit sci-fi, because 20-year-old lads like sci-fi.

Philip Oliver: Remember that old film Rollerball? That was another reference point as well. It got brought up as we've got to do these slightly futuristic sports, which can be quite aggressive.

Andrew Oliver: There was a Schwarzenegger film that had just come out that was like a film version of Smash TV. Criminals would get the pardon if they survived the game show.

"Really Quite Ropey"

Philip Oliver: We had a team of around 18 people. We broke them into six teams of three. In each one of those little teams, they had a programmer, an artist and a designer, and they had three or four days. By Monday, they had to present this kind of concept, just, and it could be really quite ropey. The graphics didn't matter. It just had to be fun and playable. It was a pretty tall order, but by the time you saw something, you knew whether you had something that might work, and so they were then given another week. If not, it was killed. And I think we had a statistic where as long as something like 60 percent of concepts make it to week two, we'd be on time. Then we'd kill another 50 percent of them at the end of week two, ultimately ending up with approximately 50 minigames. Some assets were recyclable, like the big, rollie ball. Several of the minigames work like that, where it's one idea spawned several others.

Each team will have this brief that their game has to be multiplayer for four players. We decided that really early, just make every game four-player just keep the rules really simple, and we'll use AI to substitute for any human that isn't there.

Every mini game has to be focused on one minute of gameplay and it has to be immediately obvious what you have to do and how you control it, and it has to be a futuristic sport. Anything less than a minute, and players are still saying, 'Wait, what? What are we doing?' But anything more than two minutes and it gets boring and repetitive, and you know who's going to win. If you already know who's going to win, just call it. I believe we wanted all the minigames to last between one and two minutes, and to make sure that within the first five seconds, you have the hang of the controls.

Loading screens were helpful. Whilst the game loads, it's telling you, "Here's the game, and here are your controls." Within five seconds, you know what you're doing and haven't been killed. That's a good general rule for any video game: Don't kill players before they've worked out the controls. It's a really good way of covering up loading time as well. Players want to read those screens, so they don't think about the fact that you're covering up loading at the same time.

Andrew Oliver: It was 10 months of development, so we were up against it.

Philip Oliver: We had to make sure that after the first month, you're just trying to figure out what the overall concept is: futuristic sport, zany characters, et cetera. So you lose a month there. And then at the back end, you have to give yourself about two a half months of alpha-beta master where all you're doing is adding polish. So in the bit in between, you've got something like five months, and you have to make sure you're going to end up with 50 finished games. I think originally we were aiming for 60 or 70 finished games. You knew you had some redundancy in the system as well, and some had to be killed.

You had the team lead and the manager overall, Darren Wood, who we called Woody. He'd come in with the team of three, then they pitch it to us and we then just have a conversation. We'd never just say no in the meeting. That's a quick way to upset people. It would always be a discussion and, if I remember, we might have had a scoring system and been like, "That's a seven. We'll come back to you on this one." I think people say we were a bit soft because we always ran the company like that. But equally I think that if you ever get told no in a meeting by your boss and you don't know why, and you don't understand it, it just really irritates you.

Andrew Oliver: We were working with passionate, creative people who were doing their damnedest. and it's very difficult to say, "Come up with a really wacky, original game idea. You've got one week." Who's to say if the idea is right? We'd have a discussion and we come out with a score out of 10, and then other games get high scores. That's not to say yours isn't interesting, but it's not high-scoring.

Philip Oliver: We did our monthly milestone build, something we did the entire period of Blitz. And in fact it would still be going on to this day. And it's still happening in the industry. You do monthly milestones and we turned them in, but you didn't expect with Microsoft to get much feedback at all. And that was fine. Them approving the milestone is all you need.

Andrew Oliver: Yeah. Just pay the bill. The people who interfere like crazy, saying, "I don't like this. it had the problems that I'm not paying the bill until it's fixed. Well, we're halfway through the next month. Then you've taken two or three weeks to get back to us. And then you say you don't like one or two little things and you're not going to pay the bell. We've had some nasty producers like that.

"Something's Happening!"

Philip Oliver: Fuzion Frenzy had the most basic controls possible. When you're playing with a bunch of mates, you don't want someone who's already played the game for a couple of evenings to just trounce you because he knows the controls better than you do. We needed a system whereby you jumped in, and even if it was the first time you'd seen that minigame, you stood a good chance against someone who'd already played it a bunch of times.

We started with home computers, and home computers have a keyboard. So people kept coming up with more key combinations: 'Press this and this to do that; now press that and that to do this.' You're trying to play the game, and it's like, 'Oh, something's happening! What key do I use for that?' We were always trying to get our games down to four directions and one action key. As you went into consoles, that was natural. We did lots of NES games, and you only had two action buttons. If you look at our NES games, you'll find that quite often we didn't even use the second button.

"Premium Pack"

Philip Oliver: I believe that we went into store and Andrew, you may have been there as well. We went into a store and the Xbox was supposed to be launched soon. It wasn't on the shelves, but there was Fuzion Frenzy. So you could buy Fuzion Frenzy, but you couldn't buy an Xbox. We thought that was pretty cool.

Xbox was perceived pretty well in the UK, actually. It was like, "Hey, we're fighting back against the Japanese consoles" kind of thing. Remember, we didn't see how big the controller was or the box until the consumer saw it; we'd been working with dev kits, which was just a big PC with a cabled controller. And we were just told, "Don't worry, that's coming. As long as your game's buttons map correctly, it will be fine." Our buttons did map more or less accurately. The PlayStation had already been active for a few years and everybody basically ripped off the PlayStation controller and made similar PC gamepads.

Andrew Oliver: Actually, they considered releasing a budget console pack and a premium pack.

Philip Oliver: The premium pack was going to be to two controllers and Fuzion Frenzy boxed in free.

Andrew Oliver: We were quite excited that we were going to be in that promotion. Unfortunately, towards the end, they decided not to do that. And I think that's because they worked out the controllers were so expensive that the premium pack would be obscenely expensive. The $35 each, but it did slightly hobble our game because it comes into its own when you have four players.

Philip Oliver: That decision to not release a premium pack was made in the last couple of weeks. Right up until the point we were mastering it, we thought, We're going to be in that premium pack. We're going to get like all this focus. And then the people that didn't bother me in the back could buy the game separately, if they want, and then it just didn't happen. And it's like, oh. That's really disappointing. But we were the very first Xbox game. Fuzion Frenzy has the serial number 0001. Ours was the first one to be produced: It was on the shelf a week before the Xbox.

Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee

IN A PARALLEL UNIVERSE, MICROSOFT positioned Munch's Oddysee as the crown jewel of the Xbox instead of Halo. It's fair to say players more interested in narrative and theme may have gleaned more from Munch than from Bungie's futuristic shooter. The Oddworld series originated on the first PlayStation as a platforming series as heavy on storytelling as on running and jumping.

While Halo: Combat Evolved defined the Xbox for consumers, the games press, and Microsoft, Munch holds a special place in the console's library. Namely, it was a visual treat for 2001, and that had much to do with the collaborative effort between Oddworld co-founder Lorne Lanning and Farzad Varahramyan, senior production designer on Munch's Oddysee and the first two Oddworld titles: Abe's Oddysee and Abe's Exoddus.

Varahramyan spoke with me about the culture at Oddworld, how Lorne Lanning encouraged his artists and designers to take agency over projects, and the process of designing an appealingly unappealing protagonist in Munch.

"So Charismatic"

Farzad Varahramyan: I got my Bachelor of Fine Arts in Canada. I moved down to Pasadena, California, to attend ArtCenter College of Design. I got my Bachelor of Science in industrial design there, but I always wanted to get into movies, so I did concept art on my own and worked with any of my teachers who were willing to kind of teach me about concept art. Just before graduating, one of my instructors, Stan Liu, he had a company called Kronos Digital Entertainment. It did a number of games, some of the first games on the PlayStation one, and he just got somewhere around 1.8 million dollars from Sony to make their first game. He wanted a full-time concept artist, so he knew me from school and he hired me, like, a month before I graduated. He pretty much locked me down, and that's how I got into the video game business.

I was at Kronos for about 10 months. After I graduated, and how this ties into Oddworld, is I lent some of my concept work in models and sculptures to a friend of mine who was starting his own digital animation studio and web services company. This was in 1995. At the time, it was called Dream Theater. He's still one of my closest friends. His name is Michael, and he and I had worked on school projects together. I helped him build a booth for E3 and had some of my concept art in there. We were like in one of the tiny little holes at the bottom somewhere in the bowels of the LA Convention Center.

While we were displaying at E3, Lorne Lanning along with Steven Olds, his then-business partner and production designer at Oddworld, were just walking through the halls, and they just happened to notice the models that I built at school and the concept art that I put up on the walls. They inquired about me, and later on I met Lorne, and he introduced himself, told me he was forming a company, and they're working on their first games.

Lorne is so charismatic. He is able to immediately kind of pull you into his world and what he's trying to do. I think this was later that same day, in the afternoon. He sat with me for about an hour, went through my work, gave me some really constructive feedback, and he basically planted a seed in my head and I told him, "I'm not available right now because I already accepted a position." But he contacted me about 10 months later and I went up to meet with him in San Luis Obispo. I got a tour of Oddworld Inhabitants. I saw the amazing work that he and Stephen Olds were doing there, and that was it. He locked me down.

When I walked into the lobby, I was absolutely blown away by the concept art on the walls by Stephen Olds. It was stuff I'd never seen before, and I knew that I had to move up there and learn from these two geniuses. It was mostly black-and-white pen and marker or pencil sketches, and they were beautifully done, just very clean, framed and pinned to the walls. There was some of Steven's oldest concept art, and they were for what became Abe's Oddysee. Before I walked in, I thought I'd seen some pretty amazing concept art: through school, through my instructors, industry people that I was kind of monitoring, and reading every mag. But when I saw Steven's oldest work based on Lorne's Vision, I was blown away by the world that he had created and the characters in it. The environments, the creatures--even though they were just simple pencil and pen and marker sketches, they were so masterful in their craftsmanship and in their communication that I knew, This is going to be the next place I need to be to learn.

As I often told my students later on: School will teach you skills, but you need to find a place and a mentor that will teach you how to take those skills and turn them into your craft. Steven Olds and Lorne Lanning did that for me. I was there for six years, almost six years, and Steven Olds taught me how to become a production designer, and Lorne took me under his wing and taught me how to become an art director. So those nearly six years at Oddworld were critical formative years for me and it all started by entering that lobby. 

"At 10,000 Feet"

Farzad Varahramyan: The culture really flowed down from Lorne, Sherry [McKenna], and Steven. The quality of art was incredibly high, and a lot of effort and and focus was put on creating the most imaginative and creative work at every stage, and that's just concept art. Steven, Lorne, and Sherry brought that over from their experience in the film industry. They came from Rhythm and Hues, a digital effects company in in LA, and that was one of the main things that Lorne wanted to do, was to bring that visual quality to interactive experiences. Sherry was executive producer and partner at Oddworld, but she was also executive producer in the effects company they were at, and she knew how to produce high-end cinematic experiences.

I have to be honest, Oddworld is one of the companies where I worked probably the hardest in my life. One of the things I learned from that culture is you will work incredibly hard if you have pride in what you're producing. At the end, the sense of pride we felt when we shipped Abe's Oddysee was incredible. We had no idea it was going to be a success or not, but we were extremely proud of what we'd produced and how hard we worked on it. One of the things Sherry believed in was, she didn't baby us, but she wanted to make sure we felt like we were cared for. We all had little vitamin boxes. and we had daily multi vitamins and echinacea and all sorts of things to kind of make sure we stayed healthy. She was a health nut, and she kind of passed that on to the rest of us as well as staying fit and healthy, exercising all that.

Lorne could be at 10,000 feet and zoom right down to one inch off the ground, right in the minutiae. He could cover all of that and that was an incredible learning experience and we all felt we had an incredible bar to live up to, but he also put that trust in us that we could, and he elevated us to meet that bar. We were a very small group of people. I was employee number 11, and by the time we shipped Oddysee, there may have been maybe another five or six people. So it was a very small group, tight knit. We all knew each other and we all hung out with everyone from the receptionist to Lorne and Sherry and Steven to our significant others. And San Luis Obispo was a very tightly knit community. We were the only video game company in town. I think there was a Web service company, but that was about it. If you've never been to Central Coast California, it's absolutely gorgeous. So we also lived in the middle of just beautiful hills and mountains and grasslands, ocean and cliffs, hiking trails… It was a wonderful experience, being there was six years. 

We worked our butts off every day, but we did that from the point of view of pride and camaraderie, if that makes sense.

"The Layer Above"

Farzad Varahramyan: At the time, PlayStation 2 had already come out. One of the things we were experiencing was, if I recall, we weren't getting a lot of attention from Sony in the form of dev kits and just support in general. I think our programmers weren't getting the type of support they needed to start developing a game for the PlayStation 2, especially a 3D game, which we were also transitioning to, since the first two Oddworld games were 2D. Munch's Oddysee was going to be our first, full 3D, real-time 3D experience.

And then the Xbox demo stuff looked great, and Microsoft was a lot more responsive to what Oddworld needed, what Lorne needed as far as support, as far as everything that would help us get a leg up on being like a launch title for that platform. I remember that seemed like it was a difficult decision to make. We had built a huge following on PlayStation. All the Oddworld fans were on PlayStation. I believe later on, we found out a large number of players who bought PS2s just to be able to play the next Oddworld game. There was a backlash from the fans, but eventually, Lorne and Sherry decided to go from PlayStation 2 to the Xbox platform.

After Steven left, I became the production designer. I was still doing all the concept art up front, then following through with the art direction with the rest of the artists. So I actually never had to do any programming or put assets into the engine. I was the layer above that. But I can tell you that whether it was PlayStation 2 or Xbox, it was wonderful to see like a much better developed 3D engine than the PlayStation one was able to run: A lot more polys, a lot more texture space. It was still not the integrated and immersive cinematic experience Lorne was always after, but it was another step toward that. Lorne always saw things in steps, which Lilypad to jump on next. Ultimately, he always was aiming for this fully integrated game design and cinematic experience.

"Another Piece of the Puzzle"

Farzad Varahramyan: Development on Munch did not start after Abe's Exodus [sequel to Abe's Oddysee] shipped or even a few weeks beforehand. Development on Munch had started before I had even been hired it development and Munch had started even before Oddworld was formed. Lorne had this huge story to tell, and that was already in his head in some shape or form, and Munch was always going to be the second hero of Oddworld. Within a few months of doing production work, Lorne was always constantly running ideas past me and Steven about what's next.

When we had free moments, we'd be working on snippets of those future ideas, so Steven had already done some incredible designs for what Munch would be. And then of course, over time, Lorne develops it. So by the time that I heard about Munch, the character, it was  some kind of animal that was being tested on horrifically. Lorne and Sherry have always been these proponents of how we treat the environment and that world we live in, the animals, the fauna in it, and how the industry has raped it and how we need to come back to that balance between us and the nature that we occupy and live in.

Munch was going to be another character that told another part of that story. He was a test subject for these evil Oddworld scientists. The same year I was hired, 1996, that was the pattern. Every time there was a lull in the in the production work, Lorne would come to me or I would go to Lorne and say, "I've got a few hours. What do you want me to work on?" A lot of times it was Munch.

Over the last two and a half to three months, he would have come up with another piece of the puzzle, and we'd sit down and I visually developed for him. Munch went through a lot of iterations. At first he was more of a rabbit-like creature, some kind of a land mammal. Then he became an amphibious kind of character, and there was a lot of iteration on that. I probably did a few hundred pages of designs and sketches that eventually led to the character, and of course that accelerated as it got closer to us actually doing the game.

If you look on the website, there's pictures of sculptures made for the final Munch. It was digitized, and so much was in development for years. Designing the character with Lorne was a wonderful experience, a lot of back and forth. I was always amazed by Lorne's ceaseless push to absolutely find every nook and cranny to exploit. You may have the perfect design in the first sketch, but we're not going to know until you do the next 200 sketches that, yeah, the first sketch was the one. When we had the time and the resources, we would delve deep and try to leave no stone unturned.

I'm paraphrasing Lorne, but he always said something like, "Oddworld is like if every character in Disneyland was abused in their childhood." That came across in the character designs. You know, both Abe and Munch had deeply abusive experiences. They were reluctant heroes. that were forced into these impossible situations, and somehow these less-than-heroic guys kind of made it through this incredible gauntlet because they possessed pure hearts, you know? There were good intentions and they had an innocence that, no matter what they went through, really wasn't driven out of them.

The majority of the video game landscape has always been populated by idyllic characters with some kind of flaw character flaw. Oddworld was really one of the first times the industry saw characters that were truly broken. Abe has stitching over his mouth, and Munch with the little port that was violently screwed into the top of his head and stitched to him, or bolted to him. Steven Olds famously designed Abe, and when you look at Abe, there's just this innocence, yes, but also an ingrained sadness. Somehow, he's able to rise above all of that and still be goofy and funny and just do his best. Neither one of these characters were geniuses or anything. They just acted on goodness. 

"Creative But Technical"

Farzad Varahramyan:I told you I wanted to get into movies. I did a couple of internships at Creature Shop and as much as I love doing those internships, I realized that wasn't enough. I didn't want to just go and design a creature and be done with it. I wanted to design everything from the creature, to the world, to the chair that creature sat in. So it's not a movie, but I still get to design the whole world. I realized it later, but the medium to me became a secondary impetus.

For Munch, I was able to design portions of Oddworld that hadn't been seen before or explored. That was sitting down with Lorne and the designers, like Paul O'Connor and the rest of the team, and throwing out ideas in these wonderful, blue-sky meetings. Then I got to explore those ideas on paper. I would show my drawings a few days later, a couple weeks later, and then that would start the next set of discussions. It was that wonderful back-and-forth tennis match.

Lorne had his own ideas, but he was so generous. If you had better ideas than his he'd totally go for it. That was sort of the other layer, the inner layer. My process was to go back and study Steven Olds' work because he really set the DNA for Oddworld and did such incredible things for the art direction. One of the things that I felt very responsible for and wanted to maintain was Steven's original look. I think Steven left at the end of 1996 or early '97, so I was there with Lorne now and was responsible to help Lorne bring to life what he was seeing in his head.

I always tried to go back to the grassroots visual development that Steven did and carry that forward. The other thing that I did was reference our own natural world. Oddworld was based on our world, so there's always this familiar link between the two. Across the street, we had a Barnes and Noble, so I would go to Barnes and Noble and spend an hour or two there and get books that I needed, or go to the library and make photocopies. I still have eight or nine binders full of photocopies. It was very analog, but I had it for when I was designing a character, a creature, a piece of equipment, environments, or objects.

The layer that Lorne added was he would look at my drawings and in his mind he would see it modeled and textured. He would see the whole process, so I would get feedback that was both creative but also technical. Sometimes he'd say, "That is really cool, but we're not going to be able to make that work in-engine." That was a great learning experience. Lorne had taken me under his wing and he was developing me into an art director. To be able get that kind of feedback was absolutely invaluable. As time went on I was also able to give him the most creative work that I could come up with that was also doable.

"Honest Conversations"

Farzad Varahramyan:By late in 2001, I had already started a couple things. Lorne basically told me, hey, I want to sit down for the next month, month and a half, whatever we have, and I just want you to just sit down and concept cool ideas and environments that tell a story. Lorne was all about story environments: They had to tell a story and have a personality and a history. That was a creative time for me to just sit down and relax my brain so I can tense it up again later.

That's what I was doing before launch on a day-to-day basis, plus handling any marketing materials that had to go out. We did a lot of Photoshop work. Lorne was a stickler for the marketing materials as much as the games, so we just made sure that if there was a promo piece, like a pose of Munch and Abe for a magazine, we would sit down and Photoshop on top of the cinematic asset renders, just clean those up and really make them sing.

At that time, I realized that I'd hit a certain ceiling at Oddworld, and I needed to direct my own project. I had a very frank conversation with Lorne, and that was one of the best things about him. You could sit down and have these very honest conversations, and you knew there would be no retaliation. The cold, hard reality was that Oddworld was going to be making one game at a time and were not going to have multiple productions going. Lorne had good reasons for that. I accepted that, but the moment that the last thing I was responsible for doing for Munch, I respectfully bowed out of Oddworld.

I didn't have a job lined up. I had nothing lined up. My wife was six months pregnant. It was the dumbest thing I've ever done. But the one thing I knew, and my wife supported me in that and my close friends supported me, the one thing I knew was that I was ready to assume more responsibility. And that's what I had to do. So I was there trying to remember. I think I left Oddworld in September or October. It was somewhere in there, so I was not there for the launch. But Munch means a great deal to me. Not to sound sappy, but I wasn't kidding about Oddworld being the place where I spent my professional formative years. I mean, everything else I've done since as a professional was because of those six years with Steven and Lorne's guidance. They made me who I am now professionally I couldn't be more grateful to everybody at Oddworld.

And to be credited for the design of Munch with Lorne is one of the highlights of my career. If I hadn't posted my work at E3, I have no idea where I'd be. Munch was the culmination of all of that.

NFL Fever 2002

A LONG TIME AGO, PLAYERS could buy NFL-licensed football games without Madden in the title. Whether EA's iron grip on the NFL license has hindered or helped pro football games is a topic for another conversation. With NFL Fever 2002, Microsoft held the proverbial double-edged sword: A pro football franchise it owned, and a competitor to EA's Madden, also due to hit the Xbox.

One of the many juggling acts Ed Fries had to perform in his role as general manager of Microsoft's games group was helping third-party developers like EA with their titles, such as Madden, even though bringing such a franchise to the Xbox would cannibalize sales of Microsoft's NFL Fever 2002. Microsoft couldn't show favoritism, at least not overtly. Development on the two licenses had to take place in separate locations. To avoid accusations of plagiarisms and sabotage, Fries had to make sure no information about one filtered to the other.

David Ortiz worried little about all that. He couldn't help focusing on how his two passions, video games and football, had collided like the most satisfying and bone-crunching tackle. As Fever 2002's designer, Ortiz focused on working with his team to create the best football game any of them had played. Ortiz spoke about the challenge of going up against Madden, how NFL Fever 2002 managed to present a deep football game that was accessible to players who normally stuck to more arcade-y fare like NFL Blitz, and the excitement they felt heading into launch.

"Take on the Incumbent"

David Ortiz: Before I got to Microsoft, I'd spent some time at Atari Midway. I worked as a senior tester on San Francisco Rush, Area 51, and Area 52. The game where I got to become a designer was on the Wayne Gretzky 3D Hockey series on the N64 version, PlayStation, and other platforms that followed. Sports games are my passion. I played football in college and I was a hardcore gamer, but really passionate about sports games.

When I went over to Fox very briefly, Fox was attempting to build a sports division and I shared an office with a guy named Randy Beverly. He was the original designer on Madden, and we would play these daily battles of Madden and we had this little duck trophy, a little rubber duck. Whoever lost had to put it on his desk. I don't think I ever had that trophy on my desk, by the way. So I would tease Randy all the time, man. He knew how to make a football game and he'd played college ball, but he didn't know anything about playing his video game. [laughs]

So we had this back-and-forth battle, and then I started getting recruiting calls from EA and Microsoft to come and work on sports titles place. EA was Madden and at Microsoft, it was, "We're going to do something new on Xbox, we won't have a football game." I talked it over with Randy: "I'm trying to figure it out which path to take." And he's like, "Well, I've been at EA and if you want to go work on my game, go ahead. Or you can try to make something to compete with it." So I said, "I'll go build something and we'll go ahead and see what the results will be." That was what motivated me to go to Microsoft. There's this ego thing of being able to work with a team and build something to take on the incumbent.

I went there and I interviewed, and this guy named Pat Cook, who'd been working on all the front page sports stuff for a long time at Sierra, just a super-smart dude—he was in my interview loop. I really talking to the guy. I was like, "Well, I know if I come here, we'll have a lot of really smart people, and they'll focus on either engineering or on production schedules." Kathy Flood, super-smart lady, she was our project manager. They all have passion for it, but they're bringing me in for a reason and they're going to let me do my job, which is design and create cool stuff to compete.

I loved that Microsoft had done a PC version of a Fever before I'd gotten there, so they were passionate about it. At the same time, no one was really coming at it from the perspective of, how do we build something that can compete against Madden and 2K's football game? How do we find new ways to innovate? It was just a really supportive team and one of those situations where they're like, "Hey, we're smart by ourselves, but with you, we think we can be better." I was excited about that. I was also young enough to think that I could really have an impact.

"The Smart Olympics"

David Ortiz: I was motivated and then of course I was sold when I went in there: It was like the smart Olympics. You walk around and everybody who was there was the smartest person from wherever they went to college or university. The energy and culture was around solving problems. So it was like, "Look, we're going to build something that's gorgeous in terms of the graphics, and we're going to build something gamers are going to enjoy." Dreamcast was the first one to deliver graphics quality that supported visions like that.

We had some really, really smart people on the Xbox side who were on the team. I'm just really interested in doing cool stuff with graphics, and most of them hadn't worked in games before. They'd either come over from other parts of Microsoft, or they were just really, really passionate about graphics. So they were able to do some really cool stuff. Because our team was so small, I was able to really work hand in hand with the art team all day long. We had a great art director. There was a guy named Ben [Cammarano] who initially was our head of animation. He's one of my closest friends; he's over at Wizards of the Coast now as a creative director. and in between that, I plucked him to come with me when I went over to EA to be our art director on the Madden franchise. Just a really talented dude.

Another guy, Darryl Lewis, who was heading up the basketball franchise, NBA Inside Drive, he'd played college ball. All these people were just so smart, but they were also so focused, and the majority of them had already made a ton of money working in other parts of Microsoft before I got there. So I was like, "This is going to be an amazing place to be." It felt like a college recruiting trip when you're trying to figure out where you're going to go to school or play ball or something like that.

At the top of all that for me was Ed Fries, who's a mentor and advisor to this day. This guy just was just super, super, super-passionate about games. When you're young, you just ask yourself, Am I going to work at a place where I can do my thing? I can work with other smart people who are kind of focused on the same goals. Microsoft's leadership really bought into a commitment to make really cool things.

We would kind of live at the studio, man. We were all pretty young. We had early marriages and people just getting married, that kind of thing, so we had a lot of time and no kids and we could just work. It wasn't one of those scenarios where we were getting pushed to ship stuff. We knew we had to ship, but it wasn't like other situations in my life where it was like, "We've got to get this product out the door, so everybody's on a death march." We were really enjoying what we were doing.

Obviously we had milestones and stuff to hit, but if I went home, I was still working on stuff. I remember one time I said I had a little bit of a cold and I went home for about four. days. I was calling in sick because I wanted to get through a chunk of design work, what ended up being our franchise mode and a lot of our player progress. I kept getting sucked into meetings being at the office. And so I just was like, "I'm sick." And I just went home and worked for like four or five days and got it done. There were times like that where you had a "break" and you should rest, but you just wanted to do the work because you couldn't wait to see people play the game.

And it wasn't like we were paid poorly. It wasn't about, "We're gonna make this game to get rich." It was, "I can't wait to see people open this thing." You don't want to miss Christmas, because when you ship sports titles, especially football titles, people get them as part of their Christmas wishlist. I would think about how many people were going to be on their holiday break, getting their new Xbox, and being able to play this game. Because I remember what it was like for me, man, when I got my first console and the games that came with it. That had an impact on my life: I spent a lot of good times with my brother, my friends, and my dad. I was like, "Man, if we can kind of give somebody that kind of experience, then let's do it."

"This Was Fun, But I Beat You"

David Ortiz:Everybody wants to work on shooters or fighters. There weren't a lot of guys who wanted to make sports games, so I got a chance to have a lot of responsibility on NFL Fever right from the jump. Those were already the types of games I played more than anything else. To have a chance to work on one and have an impact on exactly what it would turn into was just a really fortunate timing for me. Two of the reasons why I love sports games so much: one, it was always the easiest pick-up-and-play experience with another friend and just all the trash talking that goes on around it; and two, being able to compete. A sports game is a cut-and-dry, "I beat you. This was fun, but I beat you."

A lot of people say it's not that creative, it's just sports. It's the same thing every year. But those people don't understand that when you're making a shooter or RTS or action adventure game or any of these things, people can't really tell you that you're right or wrong because you have the freedom of your imagination. Making sports games is really challenging from an AI perspective, both to satisfy people's expectation--unless you do something fully stylized like an NFL Blitz or an NBA Jam--but also, it gives you a chance to really try to model behaviors that people know and understand. With football, you've got 11 people on each side of the ball running around the field with all these inner dynamics working. So it's a really challenging and complicated task to do it right.

"Pick Up and Play"

David Ortiz: They had done some work previously on the PC version of Fever they'd shipped. That was prior to my arrival. So they had some underlying base code of behavior, structure, stadiums, et cetera. We had a really nimble team that was focused on, let's make the coolest characters. We would work on all the little details we could to make sure we had different character types that we almost approached it from a superhero perspective. We'd find these prototype athletes for each position, like the receivers are gonna pretty much be the same guy; running back, linebacker, same guy; quarterback, and so on. We focused on that, and they were going to look great because we were going to nail it with these models.

The next piece was great stadiums and environments details, like the grass, the dimples on the ball, and uniforms. We got art to do that, and then it's off to animation. A few of us would go and do the mocap and all that with our actor. We captured the sickest animation we could, and then we had really smart engineers looking at all these pieces and figuring out how they could push things while managing the overall graphic budget—how they could put all these things in together so we could run as many animations and tackles and everything we needed to do visually. We'd solve that with this core team, and the engineers that we had working on it pushed 60 frames per second so it always stayed looking good.

One of the things about Fever that people either love it or they would knock it, saying it wasn't an accurate football simulation in terms of the yards per carry: You could rip off a longer run or different things like that. But we knew our game was fun. I wanted the running quarterback to be able to be a weapon, so if you play with Michael Vick or Steve McNair, you could do some really fun things. You could build a team around these guys.

But then the other thing that from day one that I thought that we could also do is, back then, most of the games were all about getting the sweep or a screen pass or deep pass. If you could get outside, you could outrun people and score, hit a screen pass, pick up some blocks in score, but there wasn't a good inside running game. We really focused on interior line play as well.

I wanted Fever to be a game you could play with a buddy who was not a hardcore and they could have some fun, but we wanted there to be enough depth where there was staying power. We didn't want to be all the way on the NFL Blitz or NBA Jam side. We felt like we found that balance. If you put in the time, you could really be able to dominate people and have some really intense match-ups. But we wanted a game that people were not intimidated by. It wasn't this exclusive club of, "Oh, I'm a gamer. And I played this and, and, and you don't know anything about it." It was, "I can have some fun with this. I can go back to being able to battle my dad."

I loved playing games with my dad. He started with Duck Hunt, and I got him to do that because he could point and shoot. The last sports game I was able to play with him was Tecmo Bowl. He liked it because it was easy to play. The NES had two buttons. He was having a good time, but I could never get him to play Madden for more than a quarter because he's like, "This is too much, dude."

A few of us focused on the gameplay, and so did our test team. We'd sit there and really dig into behavior. When we would hire people like Peyton Manning, who was our cover athlete for that whole series, he wouldn't just show up and take some pictures. He would dig in and we would sit there and we would really plan out exactly how the block is going to work, how receivers were coming off of their routes, everything we could do. You got Archie Manning sitting in your office, giving you parenting tips, priority birth of your first kid. That blew me away, man. That was like just an amazing experience. A lot of the Seahawks guys would come by, and many of them were the same age we were. They were just wanting to check stuff out, super-geeked about what Microsoft was doing, being able to see all this stuff got built. we'd have these tours with these guys and just kind of give them the inside scoop.

"Laundry List"

David Ortiz: Jonathan Cowles, our art director--he and the artists were probably ready to punch me in the face over the animated towel. I would geek out over the tiniest details and they'd be like, dude, do you understand those tiny details are going to cost us a lot of time? And I'd be like, yeah, that's cool. But then we're going to be able to stand there and tell sports games fans, we do this and this, and they're going to get it and appreciate it. And so we were the first ones to do the animated towel on the character.

There were some firsts with Wayne Gretzky 3D Hockey. I love watching hockey games on TV, and they would hit a slapshot and the Gatorade bottle would fly off. So we got to get that and it was really easy to do. But with Fever, we were asking a lot of those guys at the time to figure out how to animate a towel. How could we animate it and not have it look cheesy? I made a towel and so we were able to get that done.

There was no lack of a laundry list of everything we wanted to get done. We were able to reach out and talk to people on the platform side. They helped push the engine further so that we could really have the frame rate and graphics production we wanted. But honestly, after that long-winded answer, it really came down to good planning and the extreme amount of passion.

"I'm Faster Than That"

David Ortiz: I played all the football games and I would get something out of each of them. I'd get a lot of depth out of the Front Page series. Madden was the game I played with my buddies for fun or for money. The NCAA football game they made? I had so many versions. Just fun times around that content. With NFL 2K, I was just really impressed with what they were doing on the Dreamcast. And Tecmo Bowl was a game I was still playing on an emulator long after I packed away my NES. I never put that game down. In high school, I would keep my own stats.

So, I would look at all those games and look at the different pieces of what they had that got me excited. The biggest place that I thought there was room for growth was in character and player development. The year I joined Microsoft, Kurt Warner, who was the quarterback for the Rams, he was going from grocery store clerk to NFL MVP in a single season. But if you picked up any football game, he played like a grocery store clerk. I looked at that and I was like, man, it would be fun to be able to build out a system that as you played with your player, they would grow and progress, and the game would reflect how they actually played. You could develop them into a superstar. If you had a system where you picked a team, you could turn them into champions: Your players would progress.

A lot of athletes in the NFL, NBA, et cetera, are diehard gamers just like the rest of the world. No matter what company you work at, you get guys coming up to you, saying, "I'm better than this" and "I'm faster than that," whatever. That was really the key thing we did in Fever. I'm happy about having a chance to have created a dynamic player progression system, and that was the root of us saying, here's how we'll compete, here's how we'll differentiate. We're on the Xbox and we're a first-party team, so we're going to look amazing. But let's go further. Let's let someone get to the Hall of Fame. Let's let you retire a jersey, all these things.

That was really cool because I feel like we straddled this line. Games were becoming more mainstream. It wasn't just a bunch of nerds in their basement playing D&D and Nintendo. You could also reach this audience of sports fans as well as "nerds." They could all find something to love in Fever.

"Collaborative Conversations"

David Ortiz: I remember even back when we were pushing to get to 60 frames per second we were still fluctuating, but it was an Ed Fries mandate: "Hey, we're going to be at 60 frames per second." Everyone's freaking out. I remember saying, "I'm going to talk to him." People were like, "You can't do that." I'm like, what are you talking about? He's been at Microsoft a long time. He solves problems. He was great about it. He said, "Yeah, I'll tell you why we gotta be at 60." And he broke it down and explained the quality bar we needed to be at, the fidelity we needed to be at, the overall experience. So I walked away thinking, I get it. He was just open, and that guy had an open-door policy where aside from his super busy schedule would just have a clear conversation with you about goals and objectives. That, I think, was the biggest thing: We were all able to have collaborative conversations.

For controls, you want to try to lay things out where you don't try to reinvent the wheel just for the sake of it. So. if sprint buttons go on triggers and you know pass buttons kind of go this way, you want to make customers feel comfortable picking up your experience, not alienate them by doing everything new and different. But you also don't want to be a clone. You want to figure out ways to innovate that are fun and that are relevant and not just different for the sake of being different, but improve on what's there.

To be able to give your take on a console that everyone's gonna play was super cool. In terms of the hardware's processing power and other targets fluctuating, that stuff was happening constantly. We would get updates of our dev kits, which were really just really powerful computers. They were silver machines. Not the chrome X; just this tall, silver computer, and it would get updated as the console's specs got upgraded. So the targets had to keep changing for me. I got to kind of be a little bit of a spoiled kid where it was like, "Hey, something new is happening. We can push it a little further. Let's go. Now we can squeeze in that towel" or whatever it was.

"We Just Couldn't Wait"

David Ortiz: There was a lot going on. I just got married and we're getting ready to have our first kid. Our animation director's kid was coming. Our kids were born days apart. We're all thinking about all these things, but we're also already thinking about the next game and working on that, even though the launch of Xbox and Fever 2002 is on the way. We just couldn't wait for people to get it. By then, you've done the rounds of interviews and the press conferences and all of that. In terms of the console, we're just like, as a team, as a company it was just like, we just couldn't wait for people to get their hands on it.

I worked on some sports stuff before and I worked at a lot of sports stuff after, and it's funny: In recent years I'd beat more and more people who are just like hardcore Fever fans. Honestly, man, we drank our own Kool-Aid. We were geeked, man. We were just pumped up. We knew we could do this. We can't wait to sit back and watch people enjoy it--and then say, "Okay, how do we keep building?" That was really the mentality of a lot of people who worked at Microsoft at the time: You don't get satisfied. You celebrate the glory and you feel really good about it. Then, okay, cool. Let's keep going.

Amped: Free Style Snowboarding

SNOWBOARDING GAMES DON'T GET AS much attention in 2020, but in the PlayStation/N64 and Xbox/PS2/GameCube eras, they were nearly as popular among consumers as Activision's beloved Tony Hawk skateboarding franchise. Amped: Free Style Snowboarding combines the sport's best features: stunning vistas, cool tricks, and licensed gear that lets players live the life of a pro athlete earning big money doing what they do best.

Brenner Adams knows snowboarding and competition. He competed himself before moving to licensing deals, which is how he ended up at Access Software sorting out licensing deals for Amped and giving input into the title's creative direction. Amped is not without its share of controversy. I brought that up with Adams, and discussed the circumstances surrounding Amped's development and more.

"I've Got One For You"

Brenner Adams: Microsoft had a studio in Salt Lake City that was acquired before announcing the Xbox. That studio was called Access Software, and they made golf games, predominantly Links, but a bunch of different golf titles for the PC. I was a competitive snowboarder. I competed for years and then worked in the industry, and I had started a little startup around Internet dial-up. So, snowboarders tended to travel a lot. The professional snowboarders I knew were all traveling and had problems getting a dial-up number all over the US, really all over the world. I started this little startup as part of my master's program, and signed on probably 20 of the top snowboarders in the world to help me promote this little company. One of my class projects was with the wife of a software developer. This guy said, "Wait, you have a snowboard company and you are snowboard competitor? We're building a snowboard video game. Please come down and meet with us."

So I went down and met with two gentlemen. The first one was Nate Larson. He's creative director at our studio and it was his original concept for Amped. The other was Chris Jones, the guy who built the company and sold it to Microsoft.

They said, "We're doing a snowboarding game, here's what we're thinking, could you help us?" And I just said, "Why don't you put my little startup in your video game and I'll consult for you for $1000 a month. I know a lot of pros. I know a lot of resorts. I'm pretty well connected in the industry." That's kind of how it got started. That's how I got brought in within probably two months. They said, "Forget about your startup. We want you to come over full-time," and I got sucked in as it were. 

Not much longer after that, Ed Fries came down for a post-acquisition visit. This is before my time, so I wasn't there. And he said "Guys, we're going to be launching a revolutionary piece of hardware that is similar to compete with the PlayStation 2, but twice as powerful. We need some game ideas, so I'm going to come back in two to three months and I want your top five ideas for a console video game." Access had some new hires that had come from Microsoft, and they started throwing their ideas together: "What if we did a game about this?" All kinds of cool stuff. Nate Larson is a bit of a renegade. He was the creative director at the studio and had led the visual direction for all those golf games. He knew that the beauty of the golf course is the accuracy of the course creation. I mean, they were accurate on the greens, fairways, down to inches. It was ridiculous accuracy. So he has a personal snowboarder and a awake order and motocross guy. But he was also a golfer. He said, "Why don't we pitch a snowboarding game? Other consoles have had a snowboarding game at launch, so let's do a snowboarding game."

Nate took his idea to Chris Jones. Chris didn't want to be the studio president. He had sold his company for a significant amount. He's like, "Hey, Dave Curtin, why don't you be the studio president so I don't have to deal with all the bullcrap?" Dave took over, and Nate took the idea to him, and Dave said, "No." So Nate, in his own time and of his own volition, worked on a whole pitch deck. He couldn't put it on the computer because his boss said no. In fact, his boss said, "If you bring it up, I'll fire you" or something like that. He basically said, "Don't even bring it up. You're gonna try and overshadow some of our other really good ideas."

Nate went ahead and built a presentation and printed it, spiral-bound it. It was about 15 to 20 pages double-sided. You know, the best golf course design team in the world now making the best ski resorts in the world for the ultimate snowboarding game ever seen, which you could see was a good strategic move from a strengths/weaknesses/opportunities type of a scenario. So they have this big meeting. Ed Fries comes out, and they're giving their presentations. Two-hour meeting and they finish. It went from nine in the morning until around noon. They're about to head to lunch. All the presenters leave the presentation room so it's only the management team. Ed Fries says "Guys, I gotta level with you. I wasn't impressed with any of that. I don't like any of them. I would not fund any of those five projects. Listen, you guys kicked the crap out of me for years. You honestly can't look me in the face and tell me that you don't have a better idea than those."

So Nate, he's sitting there as the art director, right? And he's like, Okay, that's my opening. He reaches under the table and the studio president looks right at him. Like, You do not. Nate pulls out the printout. And he says, "Hey Ed, I've got one for you." Hands it to him. Ed reads the first page. Flips to the second, and says, "Guys, this is exactly what we need for a launch title. I haven't even finished reading it. Where have you guys been hiding this?" And he turned to the studio president when he said that.

Nate was in heaven. His boss, who tried to shut him down, is now getting lectured. It was awesome. The president, who's trying to be a pencil pusher and a fiscally conservative Microsoft employee that has zero creativity, is like, "Well I… oh, yeah, I know, we were kind of saving the best for the last." Nate played along and Ed finished the rest of the pitch. He's like, "Nate, why don't you, Chris, and I go to lunch? I want to hear more about how we build this and what we're going to do and what the budget is and everything that's needed. Let's go." That became the only thing our studio worked on for an entire two years. That was it. 

"Amazing Tricks"

Brenner Adams: I came on after they'd spent some time working on it. Nate went snowboarding, but he wasn't a snowboarder, like I play golf, but I'm not a golfer. He really wasn't deep in the culture or into the sport. When I came in and they hired me, I said, "Wait a minute, guys. Let's compare Tony Hawk and SSX and some of our direct and indirect competitors." We quickly realized that to make the original concept, which was career path to the Olympics, we'd have to either go get the Olympics license or the X Games license. That's not what snowboarding is about. That's not it at all. That's just what the average consumer sees on a Saturday morning commercial after cartoons, right? There was zero authenticity, and in fact I told them, "Guys, you realize that 30 of the top 50 snowboarders in the world protested the Olympics? The best weren't even there. They didn't go."

They had no idea. I said, "Tony Hawk is an amazing game. It has amazing tricks." When you see the detail from either the mocap studio to the positioning of the characters, the tricks they do were absolutely spot on. That's what drew me to Tony Hawk: My little brother was playing, and I walked in the room and I said, "That is the sickest frontside Smith grind I've ever seen not in real life." Any pro skater would be proud to have a photo in a magazine of them with that style with the wrist where it is, where the elbow where it is, with the knees and everything so authentic.

For the tricks, I said, all right, how should we do the tricks? Will it be mashing buttons? Something like that that has nothing to do with the sport? It didn't make any sense. There was a huge authenticity disconnect. I said, why don't we do this: Instead of chasing the career path of the Olympics or the X Games, let's be twice as authentic as Tony Hawk and be the diametrically opposed opposite to SSX tricky. I mean they're making fun of snowboarding. It's a racing game that just happens to take place on a snowboard. It has nothing to do with the sport or the participants of the sport or the industry or anything.

Let's make something that's authentic. I rewrote the vision statement. At Microsoft, you get one piece of paper, but that's all you get when you pitch a 65-million-dollar project. You get one piece of paper, so I rewrote our mission statement so it was all about an authentic career path, authentic mountains, authentic execution of tricks. I went up to Seattle and said, this is how we're going to pivot. This is the game.

My original job was just to be an area expert, but also a business-development person to do licensing: pro snowboarders, resorts, brands, all that stuff. I got co-designer credit because I pitched the second concept.

"Awe-Inspiring Freshness"

Brenner Adams: I could go on for five hours about this, but for the whole five years I was at Microsoft, there was a tightrope to walk between respecting the core of the sport and what I call the very-easily-offended opinion leaders of the sport without alienating the average gamer. We were constantly thinking about that. The analogy that we used to use is, imagine if you wanted to design an amazing hamburger. You wanted to add salt to it because it would add this nice little touch, but what you didn't realize is the 20 percent of the population that would buy this hamburger, that are on social media and the most vocal, they're allergic to salt. You can put different ingredients into your game and into your game design, but you have to put in ingredients that can be exciting and engaging. There's an element of discovery and awe-inspiring freshness to it for people who are used to completely different games and all different type of game archetype and control structures. So for the hardcore gamer, do something that's unique for them but do it in a way that speaks to people who understand the core of the sport.

When I was 19, nothing else in the world mattered except snowboarding. I competed. I trained with the best in the world. I traveled all over. There wasn't a world that existed outside of ski resorts. I'd drive down from the mountain and I'd think, What are these people doing? I was just so stuck in my own little world. People in a niche become very sensitive to the markers that are respected within that niche. So, yes, you have hardcore gamers that are used to playing 20 different genres of games, and you know they're all about, well, how do they display the leaderboard? And how do they manage the ability change the controls? And you know, there's so many little things: how they manage lag, how they manage the animations when you bump into physical objects in the Z buffering, you know, all these little things.

Snowboarders would be a vocal minority. We had to consider a control scheme that would be immediately obvious to them, yet still provide some level of replayability and discoverability for hardcore gamers. What we did is put a created a board-centric view of the controller. I was being really on my high horse about, "You gotta get your grabs right!" Then our project manager Carl Schnurr, who I think is now head of creative at Activision, said, "You know, Brenner, I was watching the X Games with my parents and my mom said aren't those snowboards attached to their feet? He told her yes, and she said, "Then why do they grab it?" So he said, "Brenner, why do we have to be so authentic with the grabs when you've got bindings on?" I had to explain that snowboarding tricks came out of skateboarding. There are unwritten rules to where you can grab and where you can't grab.

So, when you take a board and you put it over the top of the right thumbstick, you can very easily map a direction to a grab. Up is "nose grab," down is "tail grab," left is "indie," left-down is "indie," left-up is "mute." We could map those tricks specifically to a position on the thumbstick. We did those types of things try to keep some level of authenticity so that a snowboarder would instantly recognize it, whereas a hardcore gamer has discoverability: "Oh, if I push the stick in that direction every time, it does an indie grab. I don't know what an indie grab is, but I get extra points for an indie grab than I do for a crooked cop. It's graded higher, but I don't know why."

And they never will, right? It's these intrinsic metrics within snowboard culture that says, if you can do in indie on a backside lip, that's way harder than a frontside lean. And so we applied points based on working with our pro boarders to do reward players for what was considered cool.

Amped 2 did okay, but clearly not as well as Amped 1. But what we did in Amped 2 is we had a notion called style. If you went remember from Amped 1, you go off a big jump and you try to spin as far as you can to get points. Tony Hawk taught us that; so did SSX. Well, we said, that's not cool. I'm not a ballerina. What's cool in the latest snowboard videos is if you go off a 70-foot cliff, all you rotate is 180 degrees, because you have to spin so slowly that you're in exactly the right position when you land. It takes crazy awareness to be able to spin slowly. So we introduced this notion of style where you feather the thumbstick to rotate your character, and if you feather it at just the right speed based on your velocity and your vertical drop, you get these crazy bonuses for doing it stylishly.

It was a whole new spin on gaming. Most gamers believe, "mash-mash-mash, get points." No. This was saying, calm down and be Zen. It put a whole new spin on how to use the controller to maximize your experience. I became the champion in the state of Utah, and I did become a pro snowboarder. But to provide context I probably competed with 30 people to become the champion of the state. So I'm not anywhere near Shaun White or any of these other athletes that were in our game, so for me it wasn't as much referencing my snowboarding background to determine that style effect. It was watching the culture of the pros and knowing those pros and interacting with them and watching the content they were producing in their snowboard videos and saying, look at that shot.

One of the top three shots in this one video was a really slow, no-grab, backside 180. Having snowboarded, backside 180s are a trick where you're completely blind to the hill. To help you get your confidence and feel like you're going to make it, most people grab because that pulls your head down and you can look down. If you don't grab, that's just like riding your bike with your eyes closed as long as you can. I mean it is a really cool, scary, thrilling thing to do a big, blind, backside 180. By observing that in the culture, I would come back excited and say, okay, we can do this new trick. They're gonna go for the 70-foot cliff and only spin 180 degrees. They game designers were like, you're on drugs, right?

"Sore Spot"

Brenner Adams: Prior to joining Microsoft, I'd been sponsored by lots of clothing companies, goggle companies, retailers. Being in that industry gave me access to some of those people. When I started the dial-up company, I would go to the trade shows and I would meet with these pro athletes who had all of these sponsors. So, honestly, it was easy. Having worked with a very large influencer in the industry called Milo Sport, a retail store here in Utah. They make or break brands. It's a weird thing to say, but little brands will come in there, and if the guys sign off on it, and the people who work there will use the equipment, that's what makes a brand nationally and internationally. Milo has the most respect out of retailers in the sport, I would say. I worked with them and said, I want a game that's authentic to the current career of becoming the star of a snowboarding video.

Once I got at least five of the athletes picked and selected and negotiated, it was very easy. If I call up Salomon Snowboards and say, your top athlete, Justin Bennee, is going to be in a video game that is the launch title for the Xbox that will be on TV commercials. A million to two million kids will spend 25 hours playing. How would you like to be in the game for free? They just lost it.

This is kind of a sore spot. Those pro challenges were the hardest challenges. And so the game difficulty which included those pro challenges, was done by our quality-control team. Our project manager worked with the testers and said, hey, guys, you're pretty good. You're all over 100 hours into the game and you know the physics and the mechanics. Why don't we have you kind of set the difficulty levels? We didn't watch close enough to see if those difficulty levels were appropriate to a first-time player. We started out forecasting at a 98 percent rating on our game and dropped all the way down to an 82, I think is where we ended, because it was so ridiculously difficult.

We worked with the pros and said, for example: Bobby Meeks, we're gonna do one of your runs on Brighton because you run there all the time. Another will be in Switzerland. We'd try to provide some context: You've been there before. You been on a photoshoot there. Do you want your run to be on cliffs, rails, or halfpipe? We kind of set a general range for what they would do or where their challenge would be. But then, the testing team then set those challenges, and they were really hard.

I'll never forget I had two pros and three sponsors call me on my cell phone and say, dude, you've got to give me a cheat code for that. My son, my cousin, my neighbor, they hate me because every time they try to beat my challenge, I laugh at them—and it's my voice say, "Ha, ha! Try again next time, sucker!" They're having this visceral experience failing at the hands of someone they knew. The difficulty was kind of a black eye for us because we made it way too hard. But again, our target was hardcore gamers.

"ABC"

Brenner Adams: I'm an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Utah, and I tell this story in every one of my classes. Music was a big part of the design because it's authentic to snowboarding. I tell people, you know the old saying that necessity is the mother of invention? That's true--but then, who's the father? Well, the father's frustration. [laughs] At Microsoft, we had these huge budgets to license things and we're spending so much money developing. I asked how much my music licensing budget was. It wasn't even five percent of Tony Hawk's music licensing budget. I didn't have any budget. 

I struggled with that for weeks. We have to have a killer soundtrack that is representative of snowboarding culture. One day, I was watching a snowboarding video, and I realized, wait a minute, none of the songs in a snowboard video have been licensed. One video had The Jackson 5 singing "ABC." There's no way they licensed because it's so far under the radar. People just do it. They print 10,000 copies of the VHS and send it out and they get a cease and desist letter. Nobody cares, right? The other half of the music comes from independent artists, people who would gladly give their music away for free. I thought, Why don't we just contact these independent labels that are giving music to the snowboard videos?

I gave them the same pitch: "Would you like to have your music heard by a million kids playing this game for 25 hours." Their answer was not just, yes, it was hell yes. Within two weeks of coming up with that idea, I had 5000 songs from 25 labels to sort through. So, our game had 150 songs loaded on it. But one reason our game is authentic is because snowboarders like to brag about being in a dive bar in Portland and hearing new acts. Bobby Meeks got to hear Modest Mouse. Bobby was one of the first kids from Utah to ever hear Modest Mouse. He comes back and says, there's this new band. Check him out. He's sharing it with friends, and this is before Spotify and everything; he's just trying to share music with people through BitTorrent and other things, so that kind of music discovery of new music became part of our music licensing strategy. 

Then we very heavily promoted, "Don't just play our soundtrack." One of the complaints I've always heard about Tony Hawk is that it's the same freaking songs for 25 hours. If I have to hear TNT from AC/DC again, I'm just going to puke in my mouth. Rather than then destroy people's pleasure at hearing a song, let's give them enough diversity in a couple of different genres that they can discover something and then rip their own music to the Xbox. That's how it played into our strategy and still aligned with our overall vision of authenticity.

"You're a Media Star"

Brenner Adams: There's some pretty big differences in platform gamers or console gamers and PC gamers, right? And one of those, I would say, is the discipline around marketing assets. I think PC games have always kind of doctored things a little and said, well, you know that was on a higher resolution monitor. You could get away with a lot on a PC game right now, whereas with a console, no. We're all running the same minimum system requirements here, right? So one of our artists, Brian Johnson, we were working on some assets for a launch title event that Microsoft hosted down in Redmond, so we built 20 screenshots or something to be part of that presentation. We didn't intend for those screens to go out, but our marketing team got them in Microsoft's machine and next thing you know, assets are flying all over the place. So Brian had gone in and on one shot, we were trying to portray the fact that you're a media star. Someone is taking your picture. Someone is shooting video of you, so Brian thought it would be clever to portray that with a lens flare.

That shot got submitted in this packet that ultimately went out to the magazines, and sure enough we got roasted for it because someone went in and said, no, I've played the demo and I haven't seen any of that. They went back in and analyzed the screenshot and saw that in fact it was an artifact layered on top of the screenshot and then that called into question all of our screenshots. We had to come out and say, these are two shots that were enhanced to portray a story of photography, not to try and sell you on the visual quality of the Xbox itself. Remember, we're an in-house title from Microsoft, so the media thought it was just Xbox trying to fake the power of the Xbox. The game was being attacked and the console was being attacked, so we had to get very proactive about it and admit the two that were wrong and say, here's the originals. 

"Exhaustion, Anticipation, and Exhilaration"

Brenner Adams: In the weeks leading up, you've done your green disk, then you do your gold disk, and you pass all the certification. All the testing and manufacturing has already started, and the majority of the team took around a month, if not a month and a half off. I had the... I don't know if it was the fortune or misfortune of being the media representative for the game. As the co-designer, licensor, and snowboarding expert, I went on all the press junkets. Three to four weeks before the media flywheel started. I went out on the rand and played the demos for people and explained authenticity in the game and all that stuff. I got back and people were starting to filter back into the office, and the launch was about to happen. It wasn't just the launch of our game. It was the launch of the console. Which meant the success of Microsoft, the success of the game. We're part of this really big, two-billion-dollar rollout, but we're a really small piece of it and Microsoft never makes its money back if the games aren't profitable. 

The only way I can describe that is a combination of exhaustion, anticipation, and exhilaration. It was an extra Christmas, almost. We watched it closely and were excited about the launch and participated in ways that we could locally. I flew over to Tokyo with Bill Gates and was part of the launch in Tokyo, ran demos as Bill was presenting the Xbox and the business unit and everything, and it was super-fun.

Early on, because we had started to get good reviews and the music story was actually carrying; I got interviewed by the New York Times for the new music license, but it was smear campaign. New York Times said, "2 billion dollar launch and not a penny for starving [music] artists." They tried to paint me into a corner, and I just said, look, call Revelation Records. Call Lobster Records, call the labels we worked with, call the bands. We gave them access to a market that no one else would give them. Radio wouldn't give them any play, and the Internet [music scene] was just blowing up. I said, we gave them access to markets that they couldn't get anyway, so that article kind of helped people realize, oh we're getting some big attention, not just in the game magazines. 

One of the bands that we had in the game was a band called Yellowcard and they were touring in Salt Lake. They were on Lobster Records and I really liked their music. So I reached out to the label and asked if I could talk to the band, and I told them how much I loved their music and that I didn't want just the typical five songs. I wanted to do a spotlight with 10 songs. They called me and said, hey, you're in Salt Lake, right? Can we borrow $500 so that we can fix our van to get back to get over the mountain to Colorado for our next show? I was like, no, you can't borrow it. I'll give it to you. Here's $500, but, look, this isn't Microsoft paying you, right? There's no monetary exchange for any music. We can't do that. So I just personally gave $500.

Then we got the Taco Bell commercial. When we needed to pick music for our commercial, I called them up and said, I need a favor. Can I use your song? Three to four weeks after launch, they sent me an email: Thank you, we're the number-one downloaded song on the Internet. 

Not only did we have the press momentum going in, but we also had a ton from the snowboard industry. I mean a ton. Snowboard magazines, blogs, videos, everybody was fired up about it and talking about it. So a lot of the kind of younger, affluent crew that is typical in the snowboarding industry were all like, well, I'm getting an Xbox for sure. Once the sales numbers started to hit, it was clear this thing was going to break every budgetary expectation we had. That was awesome. 

Amped means a lot to me. But it's frustrating because it was the highlight of my career. I personally didn't make a crap ton of money on it, right? But it wasn't about that. To be able to combine a global economic movement with a global entertainment battle—I mean, it really was a war. Sony versus Microsoft. To be able to tell a story of the sport that I grew up loving and defending and protecting and propagating as much as I could, to be able to share that culture that I loved on the stage of that war of entertainment and electronics was very meaningful. Just yesterday, I spoke to a guy from Germany who helped us on Amped 2 and Amped 3. The friendships that were formed and solidified served as not only a catalyst for my career, but also as a highlight for being able to use the capital that was available to do something creative.

It's not like we saved the world or saved any starving child or anything, but to tell a story in a way that portrayed it with authenticity and being true to the sport itself, to know that corporate America could understand that and that some little dork from Utah was able to convince Microsoft, this behemoth, to tell the story from a purely authentic perspective, and to have it be widely received worldwide, that was awesome. It really was awesome.