Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 269: Command & Conquer with Louis Castle

Episode Date: December 30, 2019

The Retronauts East crew offers a (very) loose overview of Westwood Studios' Command & Conquer series as a lead-in to Jeremy Parish's interview with Woodwest founder Louis Castle on the creation of the original game (among other topics).

This week in Retronauts, we're going to space. Everyone, welcome to this. Everyone, welcome to this latest episode, of Retronauts. The beginning is a lie. We're not talking about Command and Conquer 3 and Tim Curry's amazing performance in that movie, or that game, movie, movie game. But we are talking about the Command and Conquer series. This is the fourth and final entry in our series of game developer interviews from Game Developers Conference 2019, wherein the Retronauts East Crew sets the stage for the interview. And then a cool, smart guy who knows a lot

about the game because he made it or helped work on it will give us the inside story on that game and provide insights that we are not able to provide for you, but we can provide the service of making his opinions available to you. So, you know, that works, I think, right? Yes, cool. Who's here in the studio today? Ben Jedford and. And Chris Sims. And I'm Jeremy Parrish. And later we'll be talking to Lewis Castle, formerly, I guess currently of Westwood. I can't remember, but he was kind of a big wig at the company and played a critical role in getting the Command and Conquer series off the ground. Although he will tell you himself, in his own words, later in the interview segment, he was not single-handedly responsible for Command and Conquer and creating it. He was just, you know, they're kind of as a facilitator.

It was a team effort, and I think that's great. Anyway, Command and Conquer is one of the most influential series of all time. It was really kind of, it wasn't the very first RTS, but it was really kind of the inflection point from which the real-time strategy genre sprung off and evolved. And as such, I think we should talk about it. If for no other reason, then we have an interview with the guy who worked on it. But I do not actually have a lot of experience with RTS games.

I did play the original Command and Conquer and realized I'm really terrible at Command and Conquer. So that's kind of the extent of it. What about you guys, Benj? I know you're a big computer guy. I prefer Warcraft. And in fact, I think Warcraft is more influential than Command and Conquer. But that's just me. Sorry, Lewis or whatever his name is.

Yeah, but, you know. Did the original Command and Cocker come before the first Warcraft? I think it is. Yes. Yes. Yeah. But it's also just because my personal bias is that I like to. the fantasy setting of Warcraft more than the military setting of Command and Conquer. But I mean, they're both the same.

They're both equally important. I'm just joking. But, you know, I have a good friend who loves Command and Conquer. In fact, Red Alert is probably like his favorite game of all time, which I believe is the sequel to this game we're talking about now. It sort of diverged into two different plot lines, like the more serious, like, Tiberium plotline, and then the Red Alert plotline, which is very camp. Yeah, that's where Tim Curry comes in

Yeah, yeah Yeah, so I think I liked the Tim Curry plotline better Had I played those games But I didn't And I know that these games have a cool Like a full motion video intro As we used to call it back in the day With like actors and things

Yeah, apparently the original one here They had like they had one actual actor Like playing the bad guy terrorist And like everyone else in these FMVs Is just guys from around Westwood Studio whoever they could rope into it. It was very kind of shoestring. But for this one, they kind of, they played it straight.

And then, like I said, it kind of diverged. And they took one set in the campy direction and one set in the, like, drama direction. I'm sure there's a lot of varying opinions on. None of us have played this game. I watched my sweet mate in college play some of these games. I watched my brother's cousin's uncle play this. I've played it.

Yeah? What's up? Tell us about it. You're holding out on us. Everybody else was talking. Command and Conquer was the first RTS I ever played, and I really liked it. And obviously, that then led me to Red Alert, which then led me to StarCraft, which then led to, like, Warcraft 3. And they are all kind of the same game.

And I think what distinguishes them in a lot of respects is the aesthetics. And I think Command and Conquer made the right choice going as far. full like campy going to space as they ended up doing because otherwise you're just doing like military stuff which if you can stop and think about it you're a lot closer to that being depressing than you are when it's elves like that which which is my problem with advance wars so many people die in advance wars gosh love that it's okay when they're elves I see how it is Apparently, the first command and conquer was, like, way early in its development. I don't know if you talked about this in the interview, but was conceived as a fantasy game,

and then they changed tack at some point, partly just because, like, the Iraq War was in the news and, like, terrorism and stuff, and they decided to hook on to that. Really, I would have distanced myself from that. Yeah. It was a different time, I guess. Well, I mean, it was going to be called Peacecraft. If you think about the culture and the news reporting around the first Gulf War, like, that was a it was very different than the attitudes that would come later so i can absolutely see why

they would do that and they also went with like and apparently this was one of the guys working on the game and they decided to go instead of being like a state versus state thing it was like a western society versus decentralized versus this like terrorist organization thing which it's kind of depressingly prescient um which was another thing that was really big in in games in the late 80s early 90s like uh there was that there was that there was that Ad, I believe it was a Konami ad with the newspaper headline, like terrorists go nuclear or whatever. And it's like, this is what happens if you fail. Like, that was the big thing. I mean, the idea of Iran becoming a nuclear power has been a huge fear for, you know, the Western governments for decades. Like since the 80s, that was that was a big deal. Like they were trying to de-escalate and prevent them from going nuclear. So, you know, it's a rip from the headlines kind of thing for sure. Yeah. And there's a whole weird cultural background of that stuff. Like how we never really talk about how back to the future has terrorism as a key plot point.

Like specifically terrorists trying to buy a nuclear bomb from Doc Brown, who sells one to them. But it's just a box full pinball parts. Terrorism is a complicated beast. I mean, we... It is. You know, post-2009-11, it became like a fetish of news organizations to talk about terrorism, Islamic terrorists. as the bogey man for all civil society. But it's been around since ancient times.

Like, I'm not going to name any names, but there's ancient religious groups who are now hailed as heroes were like sort of terrorists against entrenched power. And so my point being... Are you talking about the Norse worshippers of Thor, the heathens? Yeah, gosh, those guys, man. But what I'm saying is the terrorism,

at that point, like in the 80s and 90s, it was like more of a joke that we could play around with instead of like something that hit us directly and destroyed our lives and depressed everyone for a long time. For America specifically, it was a very abstract, bad guy thing. It was bad guys in rainbow movies, you know? Yeah, there were like hijackings every once in a while and stuff, and it mostly affected someone else far away and, you know, but I don't know what my point was. Yeah, I mean, terrorists were our pals.

We were helping out the Taliban, fighting the Russians out of Afghanistan. Yeah. Yeah. that's rough anyway but i did but getting back to the point i do think command and conquer like adding in those sci-fi elements and not going as far as a starcraft where it's full-on weird sci-fi with aliens and pylons and carriers have arrived uh like i think that's the right choice because that ends up making that game fun in a way that it is not... It probably would have been received very well otherwise, but I think it works a lot better. I like Command and Conquer.

I like the pillboxes. I like all the fun stuff. I think the little trees are like very... Owing to its vintage, they're very basic, but I think they're very easy to get a handle on as opposed to later games that get infinitely more complex in the name of, you know, doing something. You mean like tech trees and stuff?

Okay. Like there were little tree graphs. You can harvest the trees. The trees, but like the tech trees. Gotcha. Gotcha. They had good trees. I made a hand motion and no one listening to this can see that.

It's a bird flying away. Was that the Sephardic tree right there? Yeah. You start here and then you go here and then you get here. Yeah. It's a good hand motion. But yeah. And like the original command in Cocker, like so,

the roots of this RTS stuff have been around for a while, but this was really the point at which the formula was getting solidified as to the going through tech trees and building your bases and building your units and all these things that Doom moment of first person shooters like them coming into a really powerful genre

Command and Conqueror and Warcraft were like that moment they kind of created the formula they codified it I guess it's a building off of like Dune 2 which the same suit. did earlier. Or Hertzogs Vye.

Yeah, and Hertzogs Vy. Before that, we covered some of these in our Sega episodes. There were very proto-R-TS, but this is sort of where it all came together into something that stuck. And non-real-time strategy games, like civilization and all the other ones, I mean, tons of them before that. Yeah. And I don't know if you talk about this in the interview, but I think, to me anyway, it always

seemed clear that this has its roots in tabletop war gaming, which has always been. You know, like, that's a very old hobby that in the 80s and going into the 90s, was becoming increasingly big with stuff like Warhammer and other miniatures gaming that kind of had its own little boom in the 90s. And I think that is actually, I know a lot of people like tabletop board gaming and miniatures gaming, but to me that is the rare example of something that is a very physical, tactile tabletop game that is vastly improved by the transition into video games, whether it's turn-based or real-time strategy.

You don't have to paint all the miniatures yourself. Don't have to paint all the miniatures, and they do stuff. But I mean, some people like the painting part of it. That's fun. Look, if that's your thing, go for it. In the social aspect. But, like, if you think about Dungeons and Dragons is never going to be the same when you're playing a video game, because you're not, you can't make all the choices.

Monopoly is bad, but, like, Monopoly is terrible, but video game, Monopoly is infinitely worse. Wow. That could be a whole... It could be a whole other episode. Now I'm thinking we need like an RTS game or a tactics game or something that comes with this little scanner so you can actually paint your own miniatures and then scan them into the game. They probably did that already. Wasn't that like the...

I mean, there's all these toyetic ones where you buy the toys and put them in the game. Yeah, like amoevos. Right, that can't take... You can't customize it. Yeah, like a 3D scanner is what you're saying. Yeah, like a little desktop 3D scanner and put your own miniatures in. that would be fun. So any other thoughts on Command and Conquer

before we switch the table over to Lewis Castle? No? It's a fun game. It's a terrible game. What were you thinking? I'm just kidding. It was great. It was great.

I just ended up getting more into the real-time tactics with myth. It gets stressful when you try to handle too many units at once. That's why I don't play. I mostly watch other people play the art games. Kind of like livings, would you say? kind of like lemons all right so this was a hilarious episode apparently

yeah anyway thanks guys for setting the context for Command and Conquer did we actually talk about how you play the game nope maybe we should do that really quickly yeah I mean

it's kind of well established at this point but yes you you control units on a map and direct them to do things and build bases and expand them Yeah, it's 4X, right? Yeah.

Yeah. What does 4X mean? Expand, explore, exploit, explode. Exterminate? I don't know. Something like that. Something like that. We should look that up.

It means beer. It's Australian for beer, I think. No way that's Fosters, never mind. Yeah, that's actually what I spent more time watching. It was Mass River Orion, which is a 4X game. But anyways. What? Quotros.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So, I guess we don't have a lot to bring to this conversation after. But luckily, we have none other than Lewis Castle himself. So let's put the mic over to Mr. Castle. Please hear his thoughts. You know what I'm going to do. And so for I think the last segment I'm recording this year

here at Game Developers Conference 2019, I have one of the creators and designers of Command and Conquer, Lewis Castle. Hello. I'm very happy to be here. So, Lewis, what exactly was your role? on Command and Conquer? So Command and Cocker was designed principally by Brett Sperry, Joe Bostic, Edelier Moore, and a few other folks that put a lot of work into it.

So I wasn't one of the designers. I'm one of the founders of Westwood Studios. That's okay. I'm one of the founders of Westwood Studios, and I'm quick to tell people I was there. I helped contribute to a lot of things. But there were a lot of people who put a ton of energy

into Command and Cocker that made it very special. My contributions would have been in some of the low-level coding that built the foundation for compression and decompression. in some of the tools and technologies we use for production and in art direction and art guidance for a lot of our teams. So kind of a jack-of-all-trades a little bit,

just sort of all-rounder? Yeah, it gets a little deeper than that. My background started in architecture, which led to fine arts, which led to programming. Back in the 80s, that's how you did artwork on computers. You programmed. And programming led to constructing our company, which meant production, which meant design.

and when we sold the company somebody needed to be the finance so I took over finance so operations and finance are also in my background, C-O-C-F-O, C-O, C-O, C-O, C-E-O, C-O, C-O, E-P, producer, a bunch of stuff. So that's actually really interesting that you have an art background

and went into game design. Like, you know, I've talked to a few people who kind of come into games through art, but it doesn't always land them on the technical side So, yeah, you mentioned that was kind of how you did art on computers back then, was by programming. So what are we talking about when you say back then? Do you mean like, like the pre-DOS era? Yeah, yes.

So I start, my background in computers and games starts in sort of 1982 when I put my first games as type in games on magazines and I shipped them in. So I started probably a little bit before that, maybe 1980, maybe 79, something like that when I got my first Apple. and I was really intrigued by the ability to put pixels on the screen and the color and the richness, even though there weren't very many colors, it was really interesting, and to be able to move them around. And so I came up with all these crazy ideas about how I would do these wild and crazy animations. And of course, back then it's very, very difficult to do that. The CPUs were very anemic.

If you were working on Apple, too, then you had to deal with the kind of weird color matrix that Bosniak designed into that. Absolutely. So I would actually take a piece of graph paper because it came from architecture originally really millimeter level graph paper and I would draw a freehand whatever I wanted to draw and I would sit there and bubble in the graphics using the dots using the rules of the graphics for the Apple.

Then I would go and by hand by looking at the pattern of dots write down the hexadecimal and then type in the hexadecimal to get the graphics into my code. So that was before I wrote a little tool and let me move a pixel around and dot, make the dots and put them out. So right in the beginning, I was using paper and hand encoding all the assembly.

So the hexadecimal, this is kind of getting technical and the least, but I'm actually just kind of curious about how this works. Like, that didn't define a single pixel, right? It was like a space of pixels? Yeah. So for the Apple, for the Apple 2, there was one byte which would have seven pixels. And then one of the bits of that byte was a high byte, which would change the color of the bite. So in those seven pixels The even pixels would be one color The odd pixels would be another color And if you flip the high bit

Then the even pixels would be a different color And the odd pixels would be a different color So the exact colors were Orange and Blue Would if you put two of them next to each other Would look white because they're complementary colors And if you did every other pixel one would be orange If you did every pixel blue

I believe orange was odd and blue was even But it's because the bites were only seven If they were out on one thing there would be even on the other, so it just it alternates. And the other two colors were violet and green. So you had four kind of ugly colors that you had to be very careful about how you use them. And you got two different colors of white and two different colors of black that would interfere with the other colors if you didn't work careful as well. Right.

Yeah, I mean, that does help kind of define the look of the apple too. Yes, it does. You know, there was recently that little standalone Oregon Trail minigame, like the standalone mini-consul that came out. And, you know, just looking at that, you know, it's got that sort of pixel clash that you get with Apple 2, and it's such a distinct look. Like, you know immediately if you were around back then,

like, this is Apple 2. Yeah. Just the same way that, you know, British programmers or British gamers are like, oh, yeah, that's the ZDX spectrum, like the horrible colors, the way they interfere with each other. Yeah. A TRS-80 or Commoders were a little harder. Contro 64's had quite a bit of color variety that you could get.

And the early IBMs were actually pretty horrible. CGA was, you know, four ugly colors. Right. Not attractive. And they were at least the colors on Apple were good colors. I mean, colors you could do something with. The IBM, the early IBM had just horrible pallets. I think there were four pallets of four colors each, and they were all awful. so we got a little bit into the weeds and I kind of interrupted you but yeah like um so you

kind of came from an art background and had to work within these horrible constraints honestly for creativity but but at the time did you feel constrained or did you think like wow i i can put this stuff on a computer screen i can make things happen it's a great question you know people say oh my god you had all these constraints how did you get anything done but if you if your your insight's correct they didn't feel like constraints at all. In fact, my talk for Command and Conquer was all about these things that would nowadays be considered these incredible things to overcome, but they weren't really, we perceived it as all enabling, not disabling. So for me, the fun was, oh my gosh, I've always loved, you

know, visuals. I've always been a painter and a drawer. And so to be able to paint with light was just so fascinating and exciting and interesting. You know, we didn't, as kids, you don't get light brights and go, oh, oh, wow. I mean, it's so limiting. because you go, wow, it's so cool, I can put some pegs in here and get light. Isn't that neat? At some point you get good at it. Then you say, oh, it's kind of limiting. But in the beginning, didn't feel that way at all.

I mean, I'm sitting here, well, we're sitting here, and I've got basically a recording studio on a table that it took me about five minutes to set up and plug into a laptop. That's incredible. And I think back to, you know, when I got my, you know, 25 years ago, I got a Macintosh when I went off to college and, like, being able to record horrible little scratchy audio patches. To me, that was incredibly freeing.

I was like, wow, I'm doing this and I can do something with this audio that's not just like tape cassette. It's digital and I can do stuff. But now, like, what would that get me these days? That would be nothing. But, you know, it's very much a progression. So, you know, as someone who is kind of there in the early days of computing, I guess you sort of got to watch these abilities and capabilities expand and grow.

So, yeah, I feel like that must have been. kind of exciting to experience firsthand and to be part of. Yeah, in fact I would actually say that a lot of the things tools, certainly all the tools we made. We made them. We made the tools and we used them. So you're right.

It was a sense of, we kept adding functionality, adding abilities, and it was amazing. Now so much of the stuff just comes kind of in the can and you can do so many things. I see people go trying to do like pixel art and they go oh, you know, we're doing this, we're doing that.

you realize that nobody was trying to make it look like edgy, pixely. We were trying to make it look as close to good as we could. And that's what really informs the difference between a lot of people who understand or have more in the past versus people were trying to replicate it. Because you can kind of tell pretenders pretty quick because they weren't there and they don't know how it all came together. Right. Yeah, I mean, you see some people who just create like chunky pixel art

and then it doesn't really have any cohesion. And then there are people who say, well, I want to work within the constraints of those old systems and really, you know, try to truly, like, not just evoke the idea of retro, but to really, like, embrace what developers had to deal with 30 years ago. I think that's, you know, do you get two different results from that? Yeah, and people would see them as a constraint. I mean, you're exactly right on the audio, too. If you try to go get the look of the old, it's hard sometimes because the technology no longer has those. limitations it's very difficult to get that look yeah so you mentioned that you know you kind of poked around and created these you know graph paper visuals and created the hexadecimal code and got

things to move around from there you know like how did you get into actually making games uh well because i was doing artwork for games and because i had an art background um even my little eight by eight pixels or 32 by 2 32 pixels looked pretty substantively different than what most programmers would do for themselves. And so I worked at a computer store and I was doing graphics, doing artwork on the computers that were there, much bigger at that point. They were like Macintoshes and things like that. So I guess it was probably the Lisa and things like where they had big screens, but black and white but still. And I got to meet Brett Sperry who worked at a children's software company and he needed some characters, some monsters. So I

created some monsters for him. And he goes, well, those are really great. They, they somehow look like they have more pixels than they do, because the animations I would do, I would, I would try to do aliasing and things like that to just try to give them a little bit more character. So we started working together on a couple of projects, and I did artwork for him, and he was programming, and that's how we met and got to know each other. And ultimately, one time he's at my house doing a printout, because I had a printer, worked at a computer store, so I had all a good, good gear, and his printer had died. And so he's printing out this massive source code for his game. And we're talking about what we're going to do. I said, I just want to have fun.

I love this. It's just, it's just a neat little place to go play around and do graphics. He goes, I really want to create a company. I love to have you because the, you know, the programming you're doing and the art you're doing is really great, and it'd be fun to work together. And that's how Westwood was formed. Okay. So as Westwood, you know, I'm somehow with the history of the company, but I don't actually know what your earliest games were. familiar with, you know, the Command and Conquer and, you know, a few games kind of in that era. But the early stuff I'm not as familiar with. Sure. Well, Westwood started in 1985, March of 85. We shipped Command and Conquer in August, or October of 95. So it's 10 years before that.

And we started with a game called Temple of Abshye Trilogy. Okay. I didn't realize that was you guys. Okay. Yeah, it was, well, the original game, the Temple of Abshye trilogy was made by John Freeman and Annie Westfall, and Westwell, who were Free Fall Associates, and we did a port of that to the Macintosh. Okay. And so that's how we started, just doing ports. Then we did a port to the Amiga and the ST, and we did a good job on those games.

So we were approached by EA to do an original game called the Mars Saga on the Commodore 64, and we went on to do games products, winter games, world games. In the beginning, we were doing ports with the Commodore 64 and Apple, and after a while we actually started doing the, original games, and they got ported to other platforms by other people. We worked with SSI and did a lot of strategy games, Battle of Shiloh, Gettysburg, and I know there were a lot more.

Road War 2000, Questron 2, and then we did some D&D games. We did a bunch of the technology for the Gold Box games, but the SSI held those pretty close to themselves, but we did get a chance to do Hillsfar, Dragon Strike, which is a flight simulator with dragons. And it was just a lot of fun. In the meantime, we were doing things like for Disney. We did a bunch of games that were educational games. We did card games for Microalusions.

We worked for Infocom and did the Mech Warrior RPGs. So Westwood did a lot of games in 10 years. Ultimately, I had the beholder for SSI, which was a D&D game, was one of our really big hits and put us on the map as a world-class studio. Right. And that was a first-person dungeon crawler, right? Yeah, first-person dungeon crawler. beautiful art from Rick Parks and some of the other

talent drawings we had. I did not own a PC back when I was a kid, so that's one of those, you know, these are all games that kind of slipped through my fingers, but I think Beholder I know, like, there was a Game Boy Advance port that I've played a little bit of. It's kind of wild what they would put on Game Boy Advance, things that had no place being there.

But was I Have The Beholder, you know, wizardry style where it was kind of like step by step, or was it more of a real time? Yeah, so I The Beholder was. It was very much a wizardry style, but it was closer to the game called Faster Than by Faster and Light Studios called, it was called Dungeon Master. I'd have to go back and look. And they only made it on one platform.

And we were like, well, why would you put this on the other platforms? So we really inspire, very much inspired by it. And either of the whole, it looks extremely similar to that. But we had a different problem. We had the D&D rules. So we had to make a game that obeyed all the D&D rules and had these real-time elements. so it was much harder to do than just sort of adapting somebody else's work to a new platform

so it was a totally new original title plus we had to fit within the D&D world all the fiction all that and I had the beholder one eye with both really big hits which was set West went up for becoming acquired and we did the Chirandia games which we were shipping at the time but hadn't shipped

I think of some of the other games that were at that time. Like Dune 2, which we signed with the version before we actually built it. And I know I'm missing a bunch of them, but yeah, a lot of games. You've definitely named some very big games there. Like games that even though, like I said, I didn't have access to PCs back then, but I was certainly familiar with those. I would see them at the store and be like, you know, a lot of them had such great artwork.

You know, I had the Beholder and all the SSI games. I didn't even play dungeon in the Dragons, I had friends who did. Yeah. And so I would, you know, kind of watch them play these games. And, like, I kind of feel like that was sort of my introduction to strategy. Like, that and maybe, you know, like, Rampart in the arcades, which is a very different kind of take on strategy. But, you know, there's a very, I think, fine line between, like, true D&D rules and strategy gaming.

Because positioning, you know, especially in the Gold Box games, like, you know, pools of radiance or something, you spend so much time positioning your characters. And the sort of battlefield strategy really matters. So I feel like, you know, having that sort of D&D and SSI work under your belt, it's a lot easier to understand how you made the transition into real-time strategy with Dune 2 and with Command and Conquer. Yeah, in fact, actually the strategy games from SSI informed a lot of our interest in strategy games. And Joe Bostic had cited, you know, the games like, like Hersog Sveh and Military Madness and Rescue Raiders, Civilization, Populists,

all of those games kind of gave us inspiration for how do you make something that's really interesting, it's very difficult to do tactically and strategically, but at the same time there's an action component to it, a real-time component to it. All of that contributed to making Dune 2. And there were lots of innovations after Dune 2 about context-sensitive mouse-clicking, Dragon Select, a bunch of stuff that made Command and Conquer much more playable and much more mass market. I had never actually heard an actual line drawn between Hurtogs-Vai and Military Madness and Command and Conquer. But knowing that those were inspirations explains a lot.

Yeah, they were all, I mean, one person had asked me many years ago, they go, well, you weren't really the first real-time strategy. And there was Saitrein, there was military madness. And I go, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get all that. Or not military matters, this term base, but Herzog's why. But if you look at the way we balance the building, the resource met gathering, and the way to attack and defend your base, that was really Dune 2 as the very first real-time strategy game that we would recognize as a real-time strategy game today.

There were lots of games that helped get. More of the 4-X style. Yeah, lots of games informed the ideas, but they didn't put the pieces together in exactly that way. Right. Yeah, I think it's always kind of weird when people are like, oh, well, that was first because, I don't know, like video games build on each other. It's, you know, it's people coming up with ideas, pushing technical innovations, pushing design innovations, and putting things together. And I feel like, you know, everyone should, you know, say like, okay, yeah, like there's influences out there and you can still recognize what someone has accomplished by still seeing what's gone before.

And I think, you know, I think most, you know, any, any creator who's honest is going to say, well, yeah, like, this was a huge influence. Like, it was a great idea. I loved it. And I wanted to go one better than that. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, if you look at the history, Dune 2 creates, well, Warcraft and Command and Cocker, Warcraft 3 or 2, maybe, I don't know which one, gets modded to become a hero-based game, and that becomes ultimately League of Legends. And so, you know, there's a direct line from League of Legends back to Dune 2. Maybe it would have come aloud anyways, but probably not.

Let's talk about Dune 2. I mean, it wasn't the first license games you worked on because obviously you had some experience with D&D, but it was a different kind of license. Like D&D had this very richly developed world specifically for a video game or for a game, for a game context, whereas Dune was a richly developed world, but more for a story like a, you know, kind of a narrative that was sort of cohesive.

So how did you approach that? You know, to say, like, let's take these kind of allegorical novels and turn them into a challenging video game. Well, Brett was a huge fan of Dune. I think it might have been his favorite book. And Joe Bostic was a huge fan of these strategy games. I don't know how much he liked Dune's the fiction or not. But I'm sure I don't call the exact conversation.

but I'm sure that when they got together, it's like, oh, well, we have this license, and there was all these battling over the spice, and so let's go create the sides, the houses, and have them battling and make it a strategy game. Why not? Right. And there was already a Dune game that was under development, but we were told that it was going to be abandoned, and we would be the Dune licensed game. And we were probably only a couple months away from launching when we found out they had not stopped the original game. And in fact, the studio in Europe was going to ship it. So they shipped it as Dune, and due to a lack of time and maybe some intellectual creativity, marketing department decided to call Dune 2, Dune 2. But there's

no Dune 1 strategy game. Dune 1 is an adventure game. So you're right. The material for Dune doesn't immediately scream strategy, but we saw something there, I guess, as a creative team about how to use that rich world and set a battle within that rich world. Give a context. Right. Well, you know, a big part of strategy games, is commanding resources and claiming them and utilizing them against your opponents and the Dune novels, the Dune world, is very much about scarcity,

about the scarcity of water, about the importance of spice. So how much do you think like just the sort of connection to Frank Herbert's work shaped the entire genre because it is so much about, you know, commanding resources? I think that's spot on.

It did absolutely shape the genre because that was the thing, the economy is the thing that limits the growth for real-time strategy games. And I hadn't thought about this before, but I think you bring up a good point, which was our first strategy game that resembled real-time strategy games of today borrowed from a rich backstory, a rich Bible, and it was part of a big conflict. And so it gave meaning to these battles. So it wasn't just about, you know, beat the opponent and win and take over their base. was, oh, this matters because the Fremmen are going to be attacking

or we're going to beat back the Harkonans. And there was this really richness to it. And it certainly had to have an influence on us when it came to building our next strategy game to put some real effort into making a world that was, you know, I'm not going to say as good as Frank Herbert's world, but certainly a rich world that was interesting enough to create a meta interest in the game

beyond just the mechanics of building things, which is very different from a lot of other games that chose to be non-story-telling in there or open in their things. SimCity doesn't really have a story arc. Even civilization doesn't really have a story arc. But the Command of Conchers deliberately and quite strongly had a story arc.

Right. Yeah, that's the thing that really drew me to Command and Conquer. By the time the game came out, I had a Macintosh. I was in college and was kind of experimenting with CD-ROM games and being like, you know, this is, I've been playing on consoles for the past 10 years, now all of a sudden I have access to, you know, this whole new platform, what's out there? What can I experience? And I discovered, I don't actually like pointing click adventures that much. But I was really fascinated by, you know, first-person

shooters and strategy games. But I very quickly learned with Command and Conquer, I do not have an aptitude for real-type strategy. But I am a turn-based strategy game. or by heart. But I was really, you know, like, I kept throwing myself at, you know, the game because I just, it just seems so interesting. It was like this twisted version of the real world. Right.

And I loved the kind of, you know, the FMV introductions that kind of set you in this world and kind of introduced you to the twisted version of reality and set up the factions and everything in a very sort of almost like a diagetic way. Instead of being like, here's a scroll of text to explain everything, it was just like you're part of this world now

and, you know, now you're under attack, go defend your bases and that sort of thing. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's, I think one of the most important things about the games we made at Westwood was we always cared a lot about the backstory. And I would tell people all the time and get a lot of grief, you know,

why are you writing so much? It's like, well, we're creating so much. It's like, it's hard to explain, but all of these things in the backstories show, they bubble up inside the products that you build because they inform the characters and their actions. And I know it sounds like high art, and I think games have always struggled to reach that designation,

but the stories matter a lot. And it's one of the reasons that I've always felt that the Command and Conqueror, the Warcraft, Starcraft series, Age of Empires. I thought that was brilliant. I mean, I love the fact that my kids played Age of Empires because they learned a lot about history. And the fact they tried reasonably hard to make it at least representative of the kind of events that happened in history was really nice. It was super exciting to see that. So for us, it was about building those

worlds that were rich enough to make it worth doing. Like, why are you doing all these things? And that's why I read Alert and all these kind of varieties that we introduced as well. Yeah, I mean, I think if you have a story in mind, it's good to spend a lot of time developing, you know, sort of that, the unseen base for it. I think there's a tendency in games nowadays for, you know, them to develop a Bible for the story world and then feel like, well, we've done all this work on the Bible. We should show it to people. We should, like, give people, you know, indices and codexes and things like that so they can see everything. But it kind of takes the mystery away. I feel, you know, you look back at stuff like the Star Wars movies

and they were more interesting when you didn't necessarily know what happened to Anakin Skywalker. You know, it was like something bad happened back then and here's the result. So it, you know, I guess what I'm saying is Command and Conquer is still from that era where it was okay to leave questions unanswered and let, you know, gamers kind of make their own decisions about things and come to their own conclusions.

Yeah, I mean, I think it was, and not just okay, but I also think that in many categories of games, exposition wasn't really the point, and to some extent still isn't the point in games. Interaction is the point. So you have to be very careful about your spectacle and your exposition.

When you're trying to balance an entertainment experience, if you get too deep in the exposition, emphasize too much on the spectacle, you take away from the very thing that's making people's, take this type of entertainment over another. Hollywood's very good at spectacle, and games are quite good at it too. And it's good for bits and pieces, but if you take it too far,

you're not, unless you're doing something like an immersion or something like that, which actually makes the spectacle's part of being part of something, it's very easy to get lost in it. And I think the stories in the worlds are, origin used to say we create worlds. I mean, they weren't kidding. You know, the whole Ultima series were all about the story, the depth. Yeah, and there's nothing wrong with that either. I mean, I love RPGs and I love, me too, you know, just soaking myself in those worlds, you know, and really getting immersed.

But, you know, it's nice when they hold a little bit back. And you're left kind of like saying, hmm, but what about this other thing that they never really explained? Yeah. As long as it, you know, has sort of a logical underpinning that, you know, the writers can defend, then I think it holds up even if they don't tell you everything. You're reminding me, I can't remember the movie now, but it was about movie making. About movie making? The movie was about movie making. And there's a scene where the guy has got a sword and he's got another guy.

He's okay, well, here's the director. The director comes to, okay, what you're going to do is you're going to come in with a sword. You're going to take him and just whack his head off. And he goes, all right, so what's my motivation? And it's like, okay, wait. But it's important, right? Was that Hail Caesar? I can't remember now.

But I remember laughing and going, but of course, that actually matters because any actor, no matter what they're doing, even if it's something as base as lobbing a guy's head off, there's part of it is like, am I doing it out of vengeance? Am I doing it because I'm a fighter? Am I doing it? And that could inform. It could inform the body motion. It could form a lot of things. And even the simplest thing like that, where you're sure it could be exactly the same no matter what.

It actually could be pretty different. So part of what made Command and Conquer fun, I think, was, you know, here is Nekumba or what Nucumba. He doesn't agree with us. So we're going to deal with him. Go burn the village to the ground and kill him. And you're like, okay, well, that sort of sets up nod right off the bat. And I've totally butchered that pit of story. But it's the idea of like, wow, okay, that really, that stuff really matters because it really set the context for what this house where this side is about.

So when it came to Command and Conquer, what part did you have in developing this world and the story for it? Yes, again, you know, West was a very small place at the time. I was one of the founders. We didn't have a general art director. We would have lead artists on projects then. So I overall, I managed the art department kind of like an operations guy for the whole studio. So I had a lot of feedback on the art,

but not enough to call myself a director. I wasn't there from start to finish. And I had a lot of my core technology that I had done for compression was used in some of the compression technology we used to build the scenes, to do the cutscenes. From a technical point of view, it was really video compression, decompression, build systems. And from our point of view, it was overarching art direction.

Trying to keep people, so I would go in and say, well, it looks good, but I can't imagine that actually working. Can you do something to make it look a little bit more like it might fly in the next 10 years? And I would come in with Troser of Fortune magazines with pages all marked up and had them over to Aaron and say, this would be so cool if you could get it in the game. So really more of just one of the senior people in the studio that was super excited by the game. And that's actually why the post-mortem was all about the people who made the game, because I don't ever want to take Stolen Valor. I've got plenty of games I've driven and plenty of accolades to my name.

So I'm always very clear that being part of the first Command and Cocker was really more of a tangential thing. So did you have more of a role in some of the later? Yeah, I got to be a little bit more intense. and formalized in some of the later ones when it came to the technology and stuff because the slice models that we used for Blade Runner were used for the units in Command and Conquer, Tiberian Sun, when I was running the studio and the guys in Southern California were working on the railroad two had a lot more in Las Vegas had a lot more direct to control over our hands on the studio

of the artists that were doing stuff here. So I definitely got more involved in the series as we went, but generally speaking, as Brett was EP on the Command of Conquer games or some of the Commandantocker games, I was EP on other games, and he contributed to my games too, so I don't want to make it sound like I was just everywhere he was, too. We definitely helped each other out all the time on what kinds of things we were doing,

and we ended up with leaders that ended up creating their own games as well. So Ed, who was a producer on Comedicocker, ended up running some games later, Dan Sermac, a bunch of other really great EP. So it was really hard to explain because back nowadays, you would have a team, and you have a creative director and a business leader, and back then it was like, well, we have a game, we got to get it done, we need a producer on it, we need a couple of coders, and oh, we have a problem here, bring in a guy who knows compression, he'll work on it for a bit.

And it just was a little bit more, a little bit less formal, a little bit more unstructured than you would have today. So we talked about, you know, like the limitations of older technology and the restrictions. Do you think Command and Conquer is a series, like a game concept that would have worked without CD-ROM? To me, it's really one of those defining games at the CD-ROM era. So the Command and Conquer gameplay would work fine without CD-ROMs. But the whole thing we talked about, which is the why, it would have been hard to tell the story in a way that wouldn't have been painful if we didn't have the story elements, the video elements,

because we were able to communicate a lot more context in a very short period of time with the visuals, with the video sequences. So there are a couple sequences within Command and Cocker that are text missions that are scrolling because General Shepherd disappears during the middle of the game and goes away and you don't know what happened to them and you start getting briefings from Eva and others

that are written in text and you could see people being even when you were testing the game just very uninterested in watching the text they were waiting for the next video sequence so I think it wouldn't have been the same game for sure obviously without the CD-ROM But I think it's also the thing that it took, it made the genre more interesting to people who didn't think they were interested in the genre.

I would say it's, and not to make too big of a parallel because it's truly a phenomenon, but I think it's the same thing that Fortnite did for Battle Royale shooters. It became so accessible, became so successful, and its theme was accessible enough so that it became the thing that people were willing to try when they never thought they would try it before. Yeah, before Fortnite Battle Royal was kind of lacking in personality. It was a thing a bunch of people did just for the sake of doing it, whereas Fortnite it became more like, you know, here's the story behind it, here's your team. You know, there's a lady over there wearing a pink bear suit,

and she's trying to build a structure before you can. So, like, it adds a little something extra. Yeah, I definitely see that. Yeah, and I think, you know, the audience, the large appeal to it, and the audience and their early choices drove Fortnite in a certain direction, which I think actually sets up the success for Apex, because there's a certain, clearly a lot, of gamers that wanted something that was a little bit more serious. And although PubG was a great game, a brilliant streamer that turned game designer,

I think it hurt it that the assets were all kind of off the shelves and originally, and it set a certain tone for the game. And they've struggled, I think, from the beginning to get, back to their own identity, whereas APEX definitely has a very clear identity and a very, very specific kind of expression. So, yeah, it's interesting. I think these things matter, you know. The CD-ROM made a big difference for Command and Conquer because it enabled us to give the context for why you're doing the game. And because of that, we made some choices with the actual game graphics because we wanted to feel like it was a video feed. So we used photorealism at the game.

as a guide with, you know, a really pixely small palette art that's supposed to be like satellite feeds. And so that was trying to make those things tile is really, really tough. It would have much easier to go with a theme that would like a, like a Warcraft theme where you could just make kind of a stylized tree, and people would accept a lot of those as a forest. We couldn't do that. We had to have trees to look at trees. So you mentioned that you know, you've been a lead creative role in some of the other games. In games besides Command and Conquer.

So I don't know. Are there any particular projects that you've headed up that you look back and you're like, I really feel like I accomplished what I set out to do with this game? Oh, yeah. Lots of games I've made. I felt really good about how they came out, and some were more financially successful than others. The ones that come to mind immediately are Dragon Strike,

which is a Dragon Flight Simulator. I was always a big Dungeons and Dragons dork. I was a GM for 30 years or something ridiculous like that, a very long time. So being able to write fiction that became part of the Dragon Lance world was just amazing. And it was a lot of fun. And I wanted to make a flight simulator anyways because as a programmer, I was really excited about 3D systems and rendering. So I was a technical.

I basically made that game almost by myself. There's only a couple people that helped. So technical as well as artistic. The artwork, I did some of the artwork as well, but Rick Parks did the bulk of the individual screens. And then I had to do all the 3D models because there was no 3D modeling software that I could use. I had to actually type in the points similar to the old school days. So that was a big one. Then I'll rattle through a few more without getting into the little stories.

But Monopoly came out very much like I imagined. Blade Runner Lion King was very much. you were the lead designer on Blade Runner. I was the art director, the technical director, and the executive producer. David Lurie was the lead designer. That is a game that I've always regretted

not having been able to play. It didn't come out on Mac, right? It was just Windows. No, Blade Runner was PC only. And even Command and Conquer, we did do a Mac port of Command and Conquer, as you pointed out earlier. We all love Mac.

We wanted to do Mac games. It's very difficult to get them to sell. Well, yeah, in the 90s, like, it was, why would you make a Mac game? I don't know why people was a dying platform Well funny part is I know a lot of people with Macs that like to play games But they wouldn't play games on their Mac

They all had PCs or consoles It's like I don't know why you don't play games on your Mac It's like well you know I use my Mac for work I don't really want to use it for games Okay Not sure why but you know it's quite capable So yeah And you know

I think at the end of the day All those games I just mentioned were all Games I was very proud of And they set out to do what they were Every one of them I could give you all the things I wish we had changed or wish we had gotten a chance to do, but they all turned out very well. You know, after the Westwood days, what did you go on to do beyond that? Well, I became the chief creative officer for electronic arts in Los Angeles when we did a couple of Medal of Honor games.

One by Patrick Gilmore, I thought was quite good. And while there, I contributed feedback to a lot of things, but had a very strong role in designing the control scheme for the Battle for Middle Earth, which we ended up porting to consoles because we got something that we felt was pretty good. So we brought those over to PlayStation and Xbox. And I was very happy with those. In fact, actually in matches, some of the folks that were very good at the controllers could actually beat the people on the PCs, which was pretty amazing to accomplish that. So I was really happy with that. And then for several years, I worked with Steven Spielberg on Boomblocks and some of the other games and Boomblocks, which had we done the mobile game,

he wanted to do would have looked an awful lot like Angry Birds. Inger Birds borrowed a lot from Boomblocks, and their words not mine, by the way. And, you know, we did a game with Stephen that was amazing that I wish we would have finished. LNO. Yeah, people, it's a, it's a legendary game for a good reason. It was truly amazing, but it was a long way from being finished. And at that time, the world's economies conspired against EA being able to have the stomach to keep funding that game. I think it would have been worth it ultimately, but I can understand. It was very expensive. What was that game going to be? I hear people talk about

LM and O. Yeah, it was a really interesting game where the game was more about your interaction with a character that was central to the story. And the reason was so amazing was Habib and some of the other folks had done, I'm just an exquisite job of crafting the visual. and they, I mean, this is somebody who came from film, and of course, you know, Spielberg had no small part in that, but it didn't, the best thing I can say is it didn't feel when you played it, when you looked at it, it didn't feel like a game. It felt like a film. It was stylized, so it wasn't like strictly photo real.

And there was some art that was recently released that I looked at, and, you know, sometimes you imagine, you go, oh, man, it was so good looking at the time, and then you go, ah, yeah, not really. No, it really was that kind of looking. And it would hold its head high even today, and that was on hardware that was positively anemic compared to what we have now. Right. Yeah, it's really a shame.

I would love to, you know, I've seen that game make it out because I feel like, you know, 10 years later, the idea of a game that is kind of like almost seamlessly mistakeable for a cinematic experience, everyone's still trying to grasp that and no one has. Yeah, it was very aspirational. Maybe we wouldn't have made it, right? Maybe we wouldn't have gotten there, but Doug Church and the folks that were driving that thing,

I mean, super talented people. I think they could have gotten there. But I understand. I mean, I was the, I was with Blueprint Studios and I was, I guess it was technically not even Blue Pritchers, it was the L,A, but I was a leader briefly on the project to try to get it finished. And they were asking me, well, is it going to get done this year? And there's lots of people winking and nudging and saying, just tell them it's going to get done, and we'll kick the can down,

I'm like, ah, I'm not going to do that. It's a long ways from being done. It's going to cost a lot of money, and it's responsible to tell the company that and not pretend that it's going to get done sooner than it was. And it was really, these were really hard problems. As Doug Church would always say, we're trying to solve really hard problems that take a while.

And so that's why I think people talk about it so reverently is because it was very aspirational. And it's good to have those, you know, even if they don't. see the light of day. Like people continuing to push the bounds of video games and what the medium can be is important. Yeah, I think so.

I have all sorts of game ideas that I still would love to do that the hope is that people would experience them and just be sort of in a sense of just somewhat shock and awe. Like, oh, my God, you know. Blade Runner had that in a bit. This video sequences because the compression technology and everything were kind of grainy.

And you could tell what we were going for and the visuals looked very close to the film. But the compression technology definitely made it feel more like a video game than a film because it wasn't crisp and clean. And the sequence ends with the spinner landing and the guy gets out of the spinner McCoy and takes a step and then stops moving. And the world is the lights are spinning and the reflections are going into people, the crowds milling about and everything.

And you're sitting there looking at it as a player and you're like, why is the movie stopped? And as soon as you realize, as soon as you click the button, and the guy walks, you're like, oh, my God, I had no, what? Yeah, I mean, it's, it was a hell of a moment. Looking back at that, it's really an amazing accomplishment because that's, that was 97, right? So it's like the same time as Final Fantasy 7 on PlayStation. Correct.

Did a lot of the same things, but I think not nearly as convincingly. Yeah, and back then, you know, back then, we used no video, no acceleration hardware. It was all software doing everything. So it was incredible. The other adventure game at the time was Monkey Island 3. So if you were to look at Monkey Island 3, frame by frame against Blade Runner, you'd have a good sense of why it was, I mean, it was just stunningly beautiful game. But, I mean, you know, that ultimately gets back to what we were talking about earlier,

about technical limitations. How do you get around them? Exactly. And, you know, I think maybe the saga of LMNO speaks to the fact that the biggest technical limitation now is just money, resources, you know, like manpower, time. I don't think so Yeah, I don't think we're as an industry bound as much by

technical limitations because there's usually ways around most problems. We're bound by how much creativity that people have around how they're going to deal with those challenges and honestly just the ability to get to the level of quality that as consumers we continue to ratchet up our expectations the average

artist in the industry today is far better than the average artist we had back in the 80s 90s. I mean, so far better. I mean, kids coming out of college are better than the best artists I had employed in many ways. But the appetite and the desire and the standards of the consumers have gone up dramatically. The tools allow those artists to get creative and learn and grow faster than anything had before. And that constantly rationing up of expectations makes the bar go up. So we have a lot more people that are very good. But it's, it's hard to find people who are truly great. All right. Well, I think we are out of time, but I really appreciate you taking some time out of your day

to talk about your experiences and your career. So thanks, Lewis. If people want to find you online, where can they look to see you on your project? Yeah, I'm not a social media person. I don't help maintain a web page. I have a Wikipedia page. Please don't go there.

I don't even know what's on it. I mean, you're not even allowed to add to that. Yeah, no, I know. but I mean, like, it's, I don't, I know people don't let you, but there's lots of, you can tell when something's been authored by, somebody has some idea of what their bio is. Mine is like always changing randomly. So, so there's not really a way to get to me online. Sorry. Not for any good reason.

I'm just not, I've never been a big consumer of social media except for when I worked for Zenga. Then I was pretty heavily on Facebook, but so sorry. So what are you working on now? I work in Amazon and I run the game studios for, Amazon and Seattle. So we've got four teams making some great games. If you're listening to this, go play the Grand Tour. Actually, go watch one episode of the Grand Tour first, then play the game, and you'll

really be surprised. It has one of those moments in it where you're watching a little bit of video, and you're like, oh, this is kind of fun, it's interesting, and all of a sudden the car is driving. You're like, wait, what just happened? And even to this day, when I look at it, I miss the point. I don't catch the point where I transition from the pre-camp. roll right into the game. And I just think it's an amazing moment and it's worth seeing. It's 15 bucks. There's 13 episodes. It's got a huge amount of content. And it's really,

really fun. So not to plug my game, but it's not actually my game. It's my studios. And I thought Craig Sullivan, who did Burnout and New for Speed, worked on it. And I think it's just a really cool product. And so that one, we've got another game that's a shooter that we're working on, which is announced. It's called Crucible, but we're not giving many details on. I've got another game. It's a third person action strategy game, not really real-time strategy game, but it's got some elements. And then we have a bunch of people that do things that a lot of people who watch Twitch already see, which are these extensions that we build that do let the audience get pulled for opinions and things like that. Well, it's great that you're still, you know, right there

at the cutting game games. Oh, yeah. I'm actively involved in games. I love it. All right. Well, thanks again, Lewis. Thank you. Take care. You know, You know,