The Press Box - Ep. 222: 'Achievement Oriented' on the Past and Future of 'Star Wars' Games

Episode Date: December 15, 2016

The Ringer's Ben Lindbergh and Jason Concepcion name-check their favorite 'Star Wars' games and talk to Jack Sorensen, the former president of LucasArts, about how he helped oversee several classic titles during the heyday of in-house 'Star Wars' development (5:24). Then they welcome Douglas Reilly from Lucasfilm and Justin McCully from Electronic Arts to discuss the upcoming slate of 'Star Wars' games (34:10) and the challenge of telling original stories within the larger 'Star Wars' universe (38:10). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Bill Simmons. Today's episode of Channel 33 is brought to you by Seatgeek, the presenting sponsor for my podcast, as well as the only fan-friendly app for buying and selling tickets for sports and music. With just two taps on your phone, you can instantly buy Seekkeek tickets to an event and you can enter that event just using your phone. No paper tickets. Drop your old ticket app. Use one that's built for 2016. Download the free Seatgeek app or go to Seekgeek.com. Today's episode of Achievement Oriented is brought to you by Bose. As the official sound of the NFL, Bose gets players closer to their peak performance and gets you closer to them with powerful products like their quiet comfort 35 wireless headphones. These are Bose's best headphones yet.

No noise, no wires, just your music, and you. Hello and welcome to Achievement Oriented, gaming podcast from Channel 33. My name is Ben Lindberg, and I'm a writer for the ringer.com. And on the other line, if he continues to fight, what will he become? It's my colleague at the ringer, Jason Concepcion. Star Wars. Nothing but Star Wars this week. Star Wars Week at the Ringer, Star Wars Week on achievement oriented.

That's right. So we are doing two Star Wars segments later on in the show. We're going to be talking about the future of Star Wars video games with Douglas Riley from Lucasfilm and also Justin McCulley from Electronic Arts, which has the exclusive Star Wars franchise for non-mobile games. And before then, we're going to talk to. Jack Sorensen, who's the former president of LucasArts and was there during what I would consider probably the golden age of Star Wars games at LucasArts. We should just briefly talk about what we think the best Star Wars games are because for about a 10-year period, I think I must have played every Star Wars game, like bad or good.

I would buy whatever had Star Wars a cover. And usually it was good during that period. Usually. Yeah, it was uneven quality, definitely. but as you would expect with any sort of licensed title, but there were not only great Star Wars experiences, but just legitimately great games that pushed their respective genres forward. So I've forgotten in huge chunks of my childhood,

but I remember so much of Star Wars games just like the first time I played Dark Forces at a friend's house and I had to have it, or the time when I quicksaved in Jedi Night right before a tentacle hit me from behind. So whenever I would quick load, I would just die instantly. And then I had to just start it over again. Or the first time I played X-Wing versus Tie Fighter.

There were just so many classics. So do you have a favorite? All-time favorite. I think it's very easy. I think it's got to be Knights of the Old Republic. Uh-huh. Just because I'd never, that was a deeper Star Wars experience than I think it had had ever come before it.

I mean, it's just a magnificent story. It really explored a part of the universe that I think, unless you're very, very deep into like the expanding universe stuff, you're not going to have any experience with. The gameplay was great. I'm not usually a turn-based person, and I loved it. After that, I would say, Dark Forces, I enjoyed as well. It's like, I didn't have a PC, but I played it at someone else's house,

and it was like one of those situations where you were trying to figure out ways that you could go over someone else's house and then kind of like manipulate the situation where somehow you'd end up playing Dark Force. Only you. Only you. Yeah, that's it. Wanted to spend some time with my good buddy who has dark forces, just purely by coincidence. Yeah. I like Thai Fighter, which was kind of the first time you got to play as the bad guys.

Those are my favorites. Yeah, I think Cotor is probably objectively the best. But I think maybe my sentimental favorite is Rogue Squadron just because it was great. I mean, it came along at such a perfect time. I was completely Star Wars obsessed at that time. It was special edition era, so I was getting into all the movies. I was reading all the books. And then Rogue Squadron came out and it was fantastic.

And I just remember so many times when I was supposed to be practicing piano or something and I would just sneak off to play Rogue Squadron. I have forgotten how to play piano, but I still play video games. So I feel like I knew what was going to be a bigger part of my life. But that was probably the best. And I mean, Rogue Leader was probably even better. But Rogue Squadron came along at a time when I was. was just extremely ready for it. But yeah, I love those classics. I love some of the sort of weird

Star Wars games that were kind of offshoots of the usual path. Republic Commando, I really loved as a tactical shooter or rebellion, which was kind of an RTS. So there's a Star Wars game out there for everyone just because there are so many of them. Did you ever get into the MMORPG stuff? I really didn't. And I spent like an entire year of high school just talking to my friends, about what we were going to do in galaxies. And just like, it was like, that was our main recreational activity. It was just when galaxies comes out, what are we going to do? And then galaxies came out and we just, we didn't really play it.

And it was a huge letdown. Sad. All right. So we are joined now by Jack Sorensen. He is the VP of business development and investment at a new startup in the U.S. called JoyMe Capital, which is partnering with U.S. game developers to help them launch games in China, which sounds like it would probably make a pretty interesting podcast on its own. But today we're going to talk about one of his earlier professional lives as the president of Lucas Arts from 1991 to 2000.

Hey, Jack. How's it going? All right. So to establish the time period, can you, to the best of your recollection, tell us maybe what was the first project you greenlit or that was published while you were there and maybe what the last one was? Yeah, I mean, just to be clear, I started Lucas Arts. beginning of 91 and I became president, frankly, I don't remember, it's either the end of 93 or early 94 and then I did go all the way through episode one and left in early 2000. So in 91, the first game I really worked on was secret weapons of the Luftwaffe for those who were probably now

too old to even know what a PC was in those days. Pre-CD-ROM, I think pre-even DOS, it was like 486 DOS 4GW kind of stuff. It was just nightmareish. Well, some of that game was then repurposed, I believe, for X-Wing. You were there really for the beginning of Star Wars games at LucasArts, which seems surprising now, but LucasArts was a productive company for about a decade before they even developed Star Wars games in-house. So were you there for that transition to kind of using your own licenses and making the most of them? Yes. It's a long story, but the early days of Lucasfilm games, which it was still called when I got there,

was that it was a kind of gaming think tank, you know, when they did these weird things like, you know, Habitat Club Carrebe, you know, some of the early real, I wouldn't really call them MMOs or online, you know, environments, although, you know, you still needed a floppy disk to run. them. But really by the end of the 80s, the shift was already happening that increasingly really George didn't like so much just to have an open checkbook to fund all this stuff. You know, and one was trying to get things at least to pay for themselves. And so that would explain things like the early Indiana Jones, like Last Crusade. They did on PC and things like that. And so I was not there for the green light of the first Star Wars game, which was an 8-bit.

product and really i honestly can't remember what was really one of being the first kind of true star wars game that we built but it was external but we um we produced it and managed it which was the uh super nintendo version um super star wars right and it was all part of this general trend of well let's make more money and gee we have star wars rights yeah so how much a part of your decision making was that during your time as president not to overexpose the Star Wars license, but also not to underutilize this really valuable thing you had under your control? It's an interesting question because really it's underappreciated in a lot of the stuff I've seen written about LucasArts. Really, I was the prime, if not almost the only real

interface with the rest of the company and with George as my boss. This is a very delicate balancing act that exists very rarely, actually, within large media companies that own lots of IP and also lots of ways of exploiting it. And usually if you look at a Hollywood studio, you know, like Disney or something, you know, the normal pattern is they're kind of war in camps and everyone's fighting over, you know, their percentage in order to get their bonuses and things. And so it becomes a bit of a zero-sum game, which explains a lot of the things that people find inexplicable, right about, you know, IP exploitation, that a lot of this does come down to corporate structure. But because everything really reported into George, we would have these civil, but still pretty open conversations about, well, yeah, if LucasArts doesn't do a Star Wars game, then the licensing group that actually controls the rights felt like they had to exploit it elsewhere.

And so when you have a major genre, I was particularly on console. And so for all the trolls who might be listening to this, please don't ask me about Masters of the Tarasazi. But, you know, that's actually a classic case of a game where, oh, the licensing group said fighting is a huge genre. We need a Star Wars fighting game. We resisted it. But at the end of the day, we didn't really find it to have enough team that we thought would do it externally. And so we did it ourselves and under complete duress, right? So there was a horrendous nightmare all the way around.

But we felt like we had to protect the rights because that was a part of the LucasArts brand. But we didn't want to do it. But, you know, we certainly didn't want EA to do it. either, for example. Part of it was we had to do a lot of this stuff, but I did not want Star Wars to take over the internal development. Two things that I find really interesting about the history of LucasArts is these little bits of kind of architecture and game design that ended up being kind of very quietly influential. There's the SCUM engine, which is a great acronym, which is the script creation utility for Maniac Mansion, which is really the first point-and-click adventure game.

And it was like this really kind of the first dialogue selector for a player. And then there's the IMU's kind of music system, which allowed the game engine to kind of sink the tenor and the emotional tone of the music with what was going on at the time. Can you talk about those things a little bit? Yeah, I mean, the scum engine certainly predates me. And obviously that is the brainchild of Ron Gilbert, who really was when I got there, almost really the head of all of product development, principally because most of the internal game. were hosted on his system. And so if you needed anything, you had to be nice to run. And, you know, Ron would then add your feature if you felt like it.

That internal engine building point-click adventure games was, you know, conceived as a kind of long-term, you know, iterative venture in order to progress that genre. And was all centrally and tightly controlled, which was in many ways very, very different than the way we wound up doing things later on. So, but yes, I mean, Scum was, I think, ground. at its time, but also because of that iterative nature, I do think that it became tougher and tougher to manage, especially as we transition to 3D, right? Wouldn't you see that with Grim Fandango? And on the IMEU system, that was Michael Land and Pete McConnell, who were our music department, both Harvard-trained, complete crazy, both combination programmers and composers. And I think it actually dates all the way back to secret weapons, but certainly on X-Wing.

in a primitive form, and then they convinced me to support their goals in patenting it, which was like a four-year effort, because we did think this is the way it was going to go. And in fact, it did go that way, but I'm not sure the patent really wound up being very protectable. And what was the process like for you when you were deciding whether to green light a game, specifically a Star Wars game? What were you looking for, essentially, in a pitch that you would use? to evaluate whether it would be commercially viable and also whether it would hold up to the

standards of quality you were trying to preserve? Well, Star Wars was generally handled differently, as I said, primarily because there was a market need that we were always trying to stay ahead of so that it wouldn't become a conflict. And usually, you know, we were really saying, like, look, here's a genre. And we did control all story elements. And we made sure that when we went out to a developer that we really had a concept and an approach in mind, what type of game mechanics and all that stuff. So it was not just getting pitches in for those things. It was much more about who can execute on this at a high level.

And so we definitely felt like we needed to protect the IP level that was sensitive to the entire IP. and really the fact that we were the guardians of it. So we felt like for even the hardest of the hardcore, that mostly they would be happy with what we did at least when it came to the IP. Because we always felt like if we did right by the IP, there was definitely a floor out there in the marketplace. And then it was just, you know, we may not be able to get to the highest of the high ceilings because we wouldn't have, let's say, an additional year or two,

to do something at a AAA level. Because once again, there were market forces that were saying, we need something that year to support other things that the licensing group had in mind for the overall IP. You guys released a lot of Star Wars games during this period. Yes, and I'm very sorry for that. Do you have any ones that are your particular favorites that you think just really hit the mark, whether they were hits or not? You know, I do have a fondness for X-Wing just because it fulfilled something that everyone always wanted.

and you guys know when you look at product from the day now, it's just really hard to put yourself back in that time place, right? But as we were, you know, we're all testing X-Wing, you know, it really just sort of came together and we felt like, man, you know, this is just fun and this is what everyone wants to do. So I have a great fondness for X-Wing, and I feel the same way about the original Dark Forces

where it, you know, it's the first game to really satisfy that level of action. and getting closer to that first-person experience of the films. So I think that there's a, you know, real issue around Star Wars and really almost any big, complex IP is that you need to get the details right. And even if people don't notice it, the overall attention to the care around the IP just sort of shines through. And I think with those games, which are effectively internally developed, we were able to do that.

and I think in some of the external games, especially not as much. Another game that I think hits the exact same marks to just describe was the first Rogue Squadron game, which again got a certain level of just kind of fun intensity, which is what we were going for, that was very opposite from what Larry Holland was doing on the X-Wing, and the X-Wing versus TIE fighter, you know, et cetera, and all that, that I think just, you know, satisfies that craving that people have around certain scenes from the films. And if you read accounts of the end of LucasArts as an active developer, and Jason Schreier wrote a good piece about that at Kotaku, you read about the lack of continuity. And I think there were three different presidents in four years. And George Lucas would get involved and then uninvolved. And every time he got involved, he sort of changed the direction that the games were going. And it made it very difficult on the development team. So how much of that did you have to deal with or try to diffuse during your time there? were you kind of trying to be a buffer between Lucasfilm and the actual developers?

Or how did you manage to last so long and also to oversee such a productive period, despite all the constraints and conflicts that you alluded to earlier? Well, so first off, I've seen those reports about the end of days, and I wasn't there, and I know a lot of the participants. And I have to tell you, I'm not sure all of that. that rings true. I don't want to cast dispersions on who the sources were, but it seems bizarre based off of my experience. So first off, I never had a conflict with George. I talk to George every week, sometimes every day, you know, for certain periods of times. Other times I wouldn't

talk to him for a couple months, you know, or we'll use shooting film, but he was always very consistent. In fact, I would only approach him within it. He would oftentimes call just to chat about things, but oftentimes I would only call him probably twice a year about something I'd say, here's a real conflict. And inevitably, every single time he would go, you know, it's your company, do what you want. So George was never a problem. He was always totally supportive. And that's not, you know, me doing revisionism or anything. He was always great. And actually the licensing group, and I talked about that conflict, it's really about attention. There's no personality conflicts. everyone got along.

In fact, one of the best things George always did is all of the heads of the different divisions. We all had a lunch, you know, with George once a month, and we would really last two, three hours, and we'd kind of fill everybody in on what's going on. And so it's really just an issue of incentives, right? You know, the licensing group, it wasn't just about money. It was oftentimes, look, in order to be a number one IP in the world with this little company of Lucasfilm competing against Disney or Warner, we have to be out there, you know, an X amount of scale. And that helps to support the rest of the programs around toys and books, etc.

Right. So it wasn't real conflicts. It's just, gee, this is a problem because you guys want this and we don't. But nothing was knockout, drag out. And so what happened in the 2000s is things did change. And some of that was leadership within LucasArts. And sometimes, you know, it may have just been that, you know, the risk factors, you know, the cost of the games and the potential for losses and stuff just required maybe too much

involvement by too many parties. So it probably came much more like a Hollywood studio, which is the way those kinds of things work. But I had none of those problems. Again, I think one big aspect is I did report to George and I was the last one to do that. After that, they reported in through the president of Lucasfilm, Ms. Chow. And so I think having access to George and getting him to resolve things in his sort of quick, sort of just basic homespland logical way was the secret. Did you talk a little bit about what that process was like in terms of development of really any project?

You'd get a pitch. You'd take it to the, you know, whatever management group you'd have and you'd evaluate whether it's doable or you'd get something from the licensing group. And then so how do you walk that through the various stages of development and so you eventually go gold and release it? and hopefully it's a hit. Wow. That's a gigantic question.

So on Star Wars, like I said, yeah, you want the pithy answer? Sure. Yeah. In that workflow, what are the hard parts? You know, where are the problems coming? Because the thing that strikes me about the game industry is that it's full of the smartest people, you know, you're ever going to see. They work really, really, really hard.

And sometimes the game is just bad. Yeah, I mean, certainly what you just said. I think that replies to any creative product, right? You know, movies are classic cases of you spend $200 million with all the best talent in the world and geez, why doesn't it work? Right. And so I don't think games are any different. And, you know, and you have this additional component of software, which is that 90% of the time, frankly, your game doesn't even work while everyone's working on it. So it's, you don't have the as much the concept of dailies and things that you just get sort of hints at.

It's really, really tough, you know. I mean, I've almost never been part of a game where it just doesn't, it seems to when it does work, it comes magically to, gather in a very, very late stage. I know it's done better elsewhere. Hallelujah to them, but that's got to be a very small subsection of people. And so just game making is hard. The green light process is a separate issue to game making. And I probably want to separate those two out. But at LucasArts, we, as I said, we had a different process with Star Wars where sometimes I just had to ram it through. And that's why oftentimes we went external. I'd try and get the creatives involved in those things as much as possible just to bless it and to make sure that they supported it and to give their best ideas.

But some of the stuff just had to get done. When it came to the original products, however, that was a very unique situation, LucasArts that I inherited, but also kept going because it really worked and it was fun, frankly, which is we had a group of what were called project leaders, a very ancient title in the Gaines business. And, you know, these guys ran the projects. And getting into the project leader group was the goal of, you know, almost all of the ambitious people. And it was like becoming a Freemason, you know, you had to do your dues and, you know, learn the handshake and eventually go through the ceremony. And frankly, I had very little to do with that other than to, I would say, sort of hurt it

and manage it. And I let those guys police that. And they were all guys. So I hate to be sexes about it. But they were all guys. And they were a much harder audience than I was in saying, like, well, yeah, they're ready, you know. I'm sure if you talk to some of those project leaders, they'll go, oh, my God, you know, he, you know, promoted that guy and that was just idiotic. But frankly, I never did it without the support of at least the majority of the project leaders, although most of them would tell it to me in secret, like, you know, are you going to let that guy, you know, veto that person?

I think that would be outrageous. And then they would get into the meeting and say, oh, I guess we'll take him if we have to. But that group, really, when they were finishing a game, you know, within six months or so, they would start coming up with concepts and they would kind of work them through the group. I always try to keep tabs on it and I would always try and give my two cents. But I did look for the group of project leaders to say, this is really great. But they also had to be, you know, commercially sensitive, right? So that was the primary role I would say is like, you know, is this really what's going to work? you know, when you particularly look at graphic adventures, which were declining in popularity and increasing in costs, this was a tricky thing.

I wasn't looking for how do I make this into, you know, a mega hit. It was more like, how do I make sure this doesn't lose money? But I still love that idea of everyone taking responsibility, but also power in determining what represents the brand. And I've never been able to recreate that again because I do think there's something unique about not under the culture there and growing that, but more important. that everyone could get into the same room and talk about it. And how did the arrival of the prequels change things for you? I guess what was the process like for story development before the prequels? I mean, how tightly controlled was that if you wanted to do an original story set in the Star Wars universe?

It's very rigidly controlled now and sort of centralized at Lucasfilm, but was there more freedom for you at the time? And did that change when the prequels came along? And was that a good thing or a bad thing? I assume that it was an opportunity in that there was sort of a new era of Star Wars you could make games in. And there was a lot of public interest, of course. But then there were maybe also pressures to tie into the movie or that didn't always work out all that well. So how did that change things for you? And I know that was at the tail end of your time there.

Yeah, but that was actually what I both wanted to go through, but also why it was the end for me, which was I certainly wanted to go through episode one. And, you know, you got a backup from that three years. years or so, right, when we really started thinking about it and getting going and George was writing and all the planning was put in stage. So certainly by 90, end of 96, 97, episode one, started taking over and then the whole runway of prequels and that entire behemoth started cranking up. And so I had promised that I would stay through that holiday, you know, which is why I left early 2000. So I went through all of that and it was a great experience, but it did kind of, I mean,

I hate to use this word, but it really did, you know, I don't want to say destroy, but it really, it really created a massive imbalance in the old Lucas Arts, especially in that last year where, you know, this is with all big movie launches, right, which I've done dozens, you know, since then, which is that, you know, you just can't miss those dates, right? So timing is everything. And timing, you know, back to a previous question you had, you know, when you talk about game development and everything, you know, time is the most expensive commodity. So when you look at someone like Supercell or, you know, Blizzard and then they, timing is not an issue. It can become egregiously crazy in how much time people spend. But the real issue is, is like, when you're at, when you're at

90% or 85%, and all you have is a couple months, it's unlikely you'll ever, you know, get a great, great product, right? Whereas if you say, okay, let's reevalue and give it another six months or so, you have a shot. But with the Star Wars games, we were dealing also with new hardware and other things and dates that couldn't be moved and big, big, big, big money. So they were not great. I think they were acceptable within the genre of license title support, but it only just got bigger and bigger after that. And of course, the industry was also changing. You know, the PC was going away, you know, as a legitimate platform. It just, like I said, sort of took over the company because a lot of the creative stuff was so small in comparison to a very large launch that I do think

that some of that creativity then was getting lost because it just didn't look as, you know, financially viable. And clearly after 2000, because of how much money was at stake, LucasArts became far more money focused. And so things that were more marginal, I think got cut, which ultimately hurt the brand and the rest of it. So yeah, the prequels change things. And I know this is going back of it, but are there any projects you remember that were kind of close calls that were in development at one time or that looked like they might be in development and never ended up getting made or seeing the light of day that you still sort of look back at and wonder what would have happened?

Oh, hell no. We shipped everything. That's what I've been told by everybody. God, that's a good question. There was, but I'm really kind of drawing a blank on it. And, you know, there are weird things that, you know, the senior management, you know, looking at the numbers was horrified by, like, afterlife, you know, that I tried to protect, you know, all the way through. It could have been a better game, and it is totally weird, but it was weird in the classic LucasArts way. And I'm still proud of it for that, you know, zaniness.

That just is nothing like it, right? And, you know, probably one of the most difficult projects is also one of the most I'm proud of, which is grim. Fendango, which Tim Schaefer is a genius. He's a genius writer. I'd probably be mad at me for saying this, but he's never been the greatest production manager. And he, you know, he wrote this epic thing that's incredible. And then he had to keep chopping it, you know, back because certainly the move to 3D and just

the scope of it was so vast. And, you know, the market just, you know, wasn't there. And so it is a compromise of something that really could. have been epic and at the same time I still look back on it and I played it again a few years ago and I thought, God damn it, still holds up, you know, for that genre, which is gone by, but it really is a magnificent, you know, piece of art. But it's things like that where, you know, it's less around. There's some big thing that we kill then. It's the compromise as you go through over it that is both healthy for any game. They shouldn't be self-congratulatory all the way through.

But, you know, you hate to compromise real quality. And that's always the friction, I think, in general, in a commercial art form. I mean, at the end of the day, movie, TV, film, even most music, they're commercial art forms. You can't suddenly take the word commercial out and say, you know, give me $20,000, $100 million so I can make some art. Looking back through LucasArts history, it seems like, you know, the games that you guys made, by and large, that had a real kind of cultural impact. and people remember quite fondly like Grim Fandango and the rest of the Monkey Island games, Baniac Mansion.

These were games that came from kind of like a single autour, so to speak. Is there a way to make licensed games more emotional, better, stronger story in the way that those kind of like single-minded, driven games are? Obviously, structurally it's going to be more difficult, but is there, is it possible? Is there a way to do it? Well, of course, but of all the games you played over your career and you talked about,

Is there any licensed game you play that actually does that? Knights of the Old Republic, I think, is probably the gold standard of a licensed IP that has depth, that has great characters, that it's really fun to play, has deep gameplay. But yeah, I mean, it's difficult. I think a lot of that obviously has to do with the timing. You know, when you get onto a licensed IP, a lot of times it's a synergy with a product that needs to come out. It's come out at a certain time.

And you just have to hit that date. Yeah. And, you know, so I kick that game off. And those guys really wanted to do it. a Star Wars game, and yet, frankly, I didn't trust their timing, and this is near at the end of my time at LucasArts, but the kind of game that they wanted to do, genre-wise, didn't really fit in with all the rest of the plans, what was going out of episode one, et cetera, and just demanded a far more open kind of concept around Star Wars, and this is in contrast to, let's say,

what eventually became Star Wars galaxies, which I also negotiated and kicked off for what took me two years of my life. But the, but, but, but Knights, you know, those guys are geniuses. they're really, really good. But we also knew that we couldn't fit them into the other boxes. And really going back to the old Republic was a compromise that we worked out with the licensing group in order to have more free reign for the genre to do something of quality. But, you know, that game was also really, really late. And I can't remember how late since I wasn't there, but my memory is from its original date,

it may have been over two years late. So, you know, that never happened under my role. rain, but maybe that's because that's a better game. So maybe it was much better without me. All right. And lastly, if you can look back on your basically decade running LucasArts, if you could distill from that any advice to give to the people at EA and Lucasfilm who are in charge of the franchise now. And I know you've been a game consultant in the past. So if you were consulting now, what would you say? What were the greatest takeaways from how not to screw up Star Wars. Yeah, I've consulted on a lot of licensed games and the other great learning experience

for me was working on six Pixar films, right, and working with them and even at an opposite Pixar. And it's what I said before is like you cannot compromise on the details. And I view it a little bit like CG in general, right, which is that people don't know why the uncanny, Uncanny Valley is there, but they feel it, right? And when you're a fan of an IP, you feel something when it's not right. And detail is expensive, but if you don't get it, the real danger you have with license IP and particularly in Star Wars is that people really want to like it. It's like a comedian who comes out. The audience is warmed up. They really want to laugh. Don't, don't like make it sad and bad. Because if you satisfy that, as I said, you have a really good floor of support.

But if you don't satisfy it, they will go after you with a vengeance. And so no, there's no compromise to that level of detail, especially with something, you know, that people love. So I hate to say it, but better to deliver a kind of medium experience that gets the details right, then compromise the details and shoot for the moon. The risk is, is the very people who want to like you will hate you. Strong words to end on. Yeah. Now that I've bummed everyone out.

All right, Jack, well, we really appreciate your time and you're digging deep into your memories and sharing them with us. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. And we'll be right back to talk about the future of Star Wars games. All right, it's time to remind you about Bose. As the official sound of the NFL, Bose gets players closer to their people. peak performance and gets you closer to them with powerful products like their quiet comfort 35

wireless headphones. I have a pair of those bad boys and I can confidently say that they're Bose's best headphones yet. No noise, no wires, just your music and you. For more information, visit Bose.com. Okay, so we are joined now by two of the people who are making the future of Star Wars games and the first is Justin McCauley. He is the general manager of Electronic Arts Star Wars. Hey Justin. Thanks. And we are also joined by Douglas Riley, who is the senior director, Lucasfilm Digital, and Franchise Management. Hey, Douglas. Hello.

So I know that you guys have kept a lot of the specifics of the post-Battlefront games under wraps, but what can you tell us, whichever one of you feels like jumping in? What can you tell us about who's developing what and when we might see it? What is the timeline of upcoming Star Wars games as far as the world is aware? So this is Justin. So yeah, we've publicly announced that there is another Battlefront game in development coming around holiday of 2017. And then we also have a game in development with our visceral studio here in Redwood Shores, California, being developed by Amy Hennig. She's been in games for many, many years, obviously most famous for the Uncharted series. So we've got Amy working on an action adventure title on the Star Wars universe. And that's scheduled. for 2018. And everything else is just still sort of rumored.

I know that there's a respawn game that... Yeah, we haven't talked many details about respawn. We had a trailer that ran last E3. It teased some lightsaber combat with the respawn game, but that's about the only more soul of info that we've released there, but really excited to be working with those guys. They're incredibleers and have a real passion for Star Wars. So really best in the business, right?

You've got dice leading to charge. on Battlefront, Vistral Studios, on the Star Wars action game, and then respawn as well. Could you just kind of explain for listeners, what is senior director for Luke's film and GM of EA Star Wars? What does that entail? What is that? How do you shepherd these various properties through the various stages of development? So this is Douglas. For us, it's, you know, a process of working with great partners like EA, and we also have partnerships with Lego and internal studios, looking at across the franchise what we're doing with films, TVs, comics, other properties, and trying to find great ways to take those stories and provide a platform for us to tell news stories,

and experience some of those moments from those things, working very closely with the story team we've created Lucasfilm since the Disney acquisition, as well as film marketing and other kinds of things. And working very closely with folks like Justin to try and make sure we're aligning ourselves around big events across the franchise going forward. So with a lot of coordination with a lot of partners and a lot of folks, that's most of what we spend our time doing.

It's just trying to make sure we're delivering great products that pay off on all these experiences. Yeah, and on my side with EA, and I work on a daily basis with Douglas to the point of where we even have, you know, office space up in the Presidio where I have a team that's up there a few days a week working hand in hand with, like I said,

story team, production teams, game development, QA groups. It really is a partnership. I mean, we said from the very beginning for this to be, you know, for this to work and for us to really create the game experiences that we needed.

We needed to centralize kind of those points of contact. So that's really what my role and my team are about is coordinating with the various studios that are all working on Star Wars games to make sure that we're not stepping on each other's toes within EA and that we're building complementary experiences and we're, you know, frankly, tying those games together in a meaningful way so that if you're a true fan of Star Wars, you want to experience everything that's in the comics, everything that's in the movies, and then everything that's in the games at EA. So those kind of that logistics and making sure that we're all working together is my main role at EA.

And how kind of macro or micro do those conversations tend to be, you know, are you focusing on, okay, we're developing this level. right here and we need, you know, this character to do this thing and we want to know if we can put this guy in the game or, you know, how do we, how do we resolve this level or this storyline or is it more kind of high level where, you know, you carve out a sort of segment of the Star Wars universe and then you can innovate within it? How closely tethered, I guess, are you two together at every step of the process? Yeah, I think the Justin's point, in many ways over the last four years, it has become a situation where it doesn't even feel like we're two teams. And we're both macro and micro at the same time.

We're trying to make sure those experiences they're building fit into the larger big beats of Star Wars. But at the very same time, you know, getting down to some of the tiniest details of story or what characters do or don't do what they look like, how models look. I mean, we spend a lot of time with ILM on some of the content we've done. done for Battlefront both on the Jeku map and the Scariff map, which just released. And so we go up and down from the highest 50,000-foot-level conversations right down to the tiniest. And I think that has made us feel like we're one cohesive team working on things together. I'm not sure whether it's micro or macro. The universe is, expand the universe is so

sprawling. There's been some streamlining of it in recent years. But if, you know, one piece gets moved in the comic books, that piece has to match up with pieces in the video games, has to match up with pieces in the animated shows. How do you coordinate all that stuff? How does it go? If a writer says, I want to have Kyle Katar and kill this robot, or something like that, how do you go about clearing that, making sure those are things that can be done within your particular fiefdom of Star Wars? Yeah, I think that's the biggest change for us is the introduction of story group.

And, you know, just can't talk about how it's been for them. But for across all of those things, they've been a central point for all of us to plug into that didn't kind of used to exist in the Star Wars universe. And so our partners have the ability to develop stories and write stories that are interesting to them, whether it's video games or comics or other things. And then our groups, the individual business units, plug back in the story team to make sure that those things can live within the continuity. And we can kind of be held to them in the future so that, you know, films and comics

and other properties won't then contradict them at a later date. And that's been kind of the central change and the central role of story team is to give us the freedom to do some really cool, creative things and have it all be one continuity that's consistent across multiple businesses. Yeah, I'd say too. I mean, the story team is invaluable for us in terms of like, you know, what we're trying to do. We usually come to the table with a story idea,

take a first kind of treatment path, bounce some ideas back and forth with the story team, here's what could work, here's what couldn't work. But, you know, they're invaluable, right? And for those very reasons that you point out, like, even we have massive fans on our team, it may be impossible for them to keep up with every thread, every character, what their plans for that character is. But, you know, folks on the story team, that's what they, you know, that's what they live and breathe.

So kind of coming back to us with, well, you know, this might not work, but have you thought about this? What about this character? And that's, you know, it's a process. And we have a lot, we get a lot of time. from the story group to kind of develop those ideas. Timing-wise, obviously Battlefront has been a big success. It does Star Wars multiplayer about as well as it can be done, really, and Jason and I have

both enjoyed it. But, you know, when you're kind of looking ahead at a standalone original story that's not just sort of fighting in previously established environments, but creating its own environments, we've gone a while without one of those. And, you know, obviously since the Disney acquisition, we've seen a couple movies now. We've seen many books and comic books. And that's come out in many other ways. But not so much in video games.

Is that just a product of Battlefront was something you could do more quickly or were there other considerations? Like, you know, we don't want to put out the big budget video game that establishes some original character when we're trying to ease people back into the movie franchise. Yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, games have a very long lead. So even longer in some cases than the films or other mediums. But with Battlefront, the focus of that first game was really to nail the core multiplayer experience of what Dice does great. I mean, that was the strategy of that title. And now as we expand down in the universe, we have a better sense of what characters are coming into play, what stories we can tell, what stories are maybe being told in a film versus a game. You know, that's where we've really ramped up the interaction with story to get those, bring those games to market.

We heard the fans loud and clear that the multiplayer was great, but it wasn't enough, and they wanted that complete package. So the team has been very focused on delivering that single player element. The inclusion of respawn has me thinking about multiplayer in e-sports. And do you guys have any plans to engage the e-sports arena at all? Yeah, obviously, EA has, you know, a competitive gaming division head of the bipeas. Peter Moore. I mean, it's a major role for Peter. And we've, we've focused initially on sports, you know, with Madden and with FIFA primarily. There's nothing that I can talk about today related to Star Wars, but it is obviously a space that continues to grow. And we know that many of our

fans are interested in, you know, not only films and TV, but also e-sports is a growing, growing place where people are spending a lot of their time. You mentioned some sort of distinction between the sort of story that might work well in a movie and the sort of story that might work well in a video game. Do you see distinctions there? Do you see certain types of Star Wars stories that work better on one screen or another? I do. I mean, you guys are gamers, I'm sure. You understand there's different. You need player agency, right? Gaming is not linear, right? You need to give that player some choice and to make them, you know, have to tell their own stories. And that's different from a linear story that's presented in film or TV or in books. So we do

try to find things where, you know, it is a character that you're helping to define, but you're interacting with that world that you know and love. We've heard loud and clear from a lot of our fans that, hey, you don't necessarily want to just retell the story of this character and make a movie game that traces the steps of Luke Skywalker. I know Luke Skywalker's story. I want to know a new story about another character or a character that I control. So that, you know, first and foremost, the gameplay defines what we,

want to do and how we want to tell those stories and how we want the player to experience that narrative. But it's a fine balance, right? You want it to be compelling and you want it to have the pacing and the feel of Star Wars because it's a very unique approach to storytelling. But it's got to work from a gameplay perspective as well. And letting each of the individual screens and formats kind of drive what kinds of narrative we tell because mobile is different than console, even within console genres. The way you tell stories a different player agency is super important. And I think for us, the key then becomes less about,

are we telling a story at that moment, but making sure that the experience we're giving is authentic to those stories, those characters, and those environments. I was looking at some of the demos for the VR experience for Battlefront. It looks incredible. I think piloting X-Wing is a dream of many people in the world. You talk about what went into that. And also, a lot of Star Wars games are third-person games.

What are the benefits versus third-person versus first-person with a property like this? With Star Wars, you kind of, you want to look at your character. But at the same time, that affects gameplay in terms of, you know, for Battlefront, you can see around corners. It's a slightly clunkier feel, but also you just want to see your guy or your alien or whatever the case may be. So to tackle the first one, well, specific to Battlefront, I think you've kind of the nail on it. I mean, historically, Battlefield as a franchise, you know, the through the gun experience was first person. That is absolutely where we started and where we designed Battlefront. But like you said, the character models are so strong. From the very beginning, heroes, the heroes that you play in Battlefront were always third person. That was, you know, from day one, that was how we wanted people to experience it. And as we went through development, we realized, you know, the same thing applies. to the rebel troop and the stormtroopers. I mean, these models were almost, you know,

photo accurate and competitive advantage aside, you know, a lot of people preferred third person. So we do offer that choice, and you can switch back and forth in Battlefront. But, you know, you look towards VR, if you've played the PSVR X-WR X-Wing experience, it is very much a first-person perspective, and that's just what works best in VR logistically.

I mean, being able to kind of see your hands and feet, body and feel like you are that pilot, I think is, you know, when you're doing traditional VR, that's going to be, that would be the approach going forward. That worked really, really well in that environment, just because that's that sense of sitting in the X-wing cockpit, you know, to be in that helmet. It must be a difficult decision to sort of balance quantity and quality because you know that whatever Star Wars game you put out is probably going to sell or there's some portion of the market that is going to buy that game, even if it's not. not necessarily your best work.

And so there must be a temptation to resist. And maybe that's something that, you know, in the old Lucas Hearts days, there were times where there was just too much Star Wars on the market and it didn't all hold up to a certain level of quality that it had been established. So in going for this sort of one game a year model, how hard has it been to resist the temptation to do more because it's such a big universe and it's such a valuable property? Yeah, it's not a hard and fast rule. I think you're seeing a one-year cadence on the on the HD side. Really what it comes down to is building complementary experiences, right? We want to find games, whether it be for mobile or whether it be for HD consoles that meet different player needs, right? And those, you know, certain studios are going to excel at a certain genre or certain style of gameplay. And that's really what we focused on is getting the best, you know, the best talent within EA a chance. to show what they can do with Star Wars.

And, you know, it's, again, not a hard and fast rule. You'll see experiences from us, you know, in mobile. And not to mention, live service continues to be, you know, a major shift in how games are experienced. So even though we may only be releasing one a year, there's so much content coming out on a daily basis, whether it be in Galaxy of Heroes or with the DLC that we've done for Battlefront. So, you know, it's more than just those singular releases.

I think you're right, though. There definitely is a challenge and kind of for me, an obligation to make sure we do balance those two things. And that we are really focusing, to Justin's point, on delivering really great experiences that are complimentary without kind of overwhelming the players and the franchise with too much content. You know, we navigate the film releases, too. We have a really great relationship with, you know, the studio marketing teams. we don't want to be stepping on each other's toes, right? We want to take, you know, we want to be in collaboration and make sure that our games are complementing

what's coming out theatrically. But that's the other thing. It's, you know, we look out for the entire Star Wars universe of content. And I think you're right. We have to avoid that saturation. And it is a fine balance. At the time of the Disney acquisition, there were a couple of projects at Lucas Games that got shelved.

One of them, Star Wars 1313, looked really cool, really promising from a fan perspective and also gameplay perspective. It told the story of kind of the underworld, the crime underworld, of course, got in a third-person kind of cover shooter mechanic. And the art was fantastic. I was just wondering if there's any plans for that to see the light of day at any point. And what happens to kind of like all that old development stuff? Does it just kind of sit there or is there any way for it to get plugged into other projects?

Yeah, the reality of it is, unfortunately, sometimes, you know, as things change, products and their projects change along with them, you know, we do keep that material. You know, one of the things we've done across, you know, the decade or so I've been here is, you know, with lots of projects get killed. But we keep them and we hold on the kernels of those ideas, and we might take a character from here or an environment from there. And so you might see things that maybe you didn't even know were part of that experience might show that in some other project down the road. But for now, there's no current plans to revive 1313. And are there any games that actually were released that you look to maybe just as people who played them or if you were involved in them in any capacity? But games that you look at and say, you know, this achieved this sort of thing that we are going for. We want to impart the same sort of experience that this one did. Certainly for me, there's a couple that stand out. Knights of the Old Republic and those games and the Old Republic MMO are sort of the bar for very deep choice-driven story experiences. And so we always look to those projects as kind of load stars, even with things we're doing now,

even if they're not necessarily the same type of game as being ways we executed storytelling in the Star Wars universe in a very, very compelling way. I think the Force Unleashed in some ways also fits in that bucket. And then there's some of the games like Republic Commando that told story that we just look back on and go like, hey, we did some things really well there. How can we learn from them and plug them into the new way we're doing things and the new way we think about Star Ocean? And is there any overlap between movie technology and video game technology? Are there any shared assets or techniques or, you know, ways that something like Rogue One or episode seven or eight kind of can be leveraged to improve a video game or vice versa? Absolutely. I mean, I think we are getting.

closer and closer to shared technology. And there's still different needs, right? To be honest, we've had a great relationship with ILM. ILM has shared with us specific textures and shaders that, you know, the materials of how they need to look in the Star Wars universe, those libraries are, you know, available to the EA artists. But I will say that the gaming needs are a little different from what the films are trying to do right now. You know, if there is an ILM model that's available, that becomes a starting point, a building block for our dev teams. And it's been incredibly valuable to have that reference library so that that authenticity can be dialed up to an 11. And it's something we continue to partner on is processing

power and the consoles get stronger and stronger. I think you're going to see that convergence of tech get even closer. Yeah, we're definitely seeing that on our side too. We're a lot of people who work in games now work in special effects and people who work in special effects, now working games, that didn't happen 10 years ago. And while we may not be there yet where we can just hand stuff back and forth, we're getting really close. And a lot of the techniques, some of the tools, a lot of the assets can actually be used across projects even if they have to be modified for their purpose in ways even five years

ago, we would have never been able to make use of them. Yeah. I think the fundamental difference still is in a game. You've got to be able, any asset, you effectively need to be able to look at it from 360 degrees and it needs to be something that, you know, somebody can walk around and expect from every single angle. And that's not always the case in an ILM shot. You know, that's still a fundamental difference between linear media and games. Obviously, Battlefront and the Force Awakens. There's a lot of synergy between those two products. How closely do you work with the movie side in terms of

understanding environments, understanding maps, you know, which character models are going to be in those things? And how do you just keep that stuff from leaking out? out. You know, obviously a bigger team just means more people involved. How does that relationship work? So we did just release the fourth expansion pack for Battlefront, which was entirely Rogue One themed. So while it wasn't a standalone Rogue One game, that actually is a perfect example of, you know, the kind of synergy and tie-in thematically with Rogue One. From the very kind of earliest days, Douglas and I talk about, you know, the early scripts for Rogue One and what would be possible and what was going to be great about being able to do some of these battle sequences in battlefront.

We get a briefing, some early concepts, kind of showed it to the dev team, and they fell in love with the concept of Rogue One. The overlap in terms of the timeline of where, you know, our game really pulled heavily from kind of the original trilogy, Rogue One, definitely pulling from original trilogy, but introducing new characters, new weapons, new ships, perfect connection point. you know, we agreed pretty early on in terms of which planet we wanted to focus on. There's a lot of sharing back and forth of the reference material, even to the point of where, you know, our dice teams do a lot of photo scanning, a lot of reference. So we were getting, you know, we weren't there on set, but we knew where a lot of the shots had been done.

So we went back and got pick up and were able to get data from the same area that they shot the film. Douglas, I don't know if you want to talk even more about some of the shares. we do within different vendors within? Yeah, I mean, this is, I mean, yeah, I mean, the great part about it is, obviously, EA is a very important partner to us. You know, they're very used to handling IPs that are, you know, popular and sensitive. And so we've had the ability to, I think, share with them in ways that, you know, maybe we wouldn't do with other folks.

And Justin's absolutely right. I mean, from the very beginning, we've thought Rogue One was perfectly suited for being able to take use of what Battlefront and Dice do really, really well. I think you'll see it to Justin's point. When you look at that DLC map and you go watch the movie and the theater, these two things, you know, feel inextricably connected together. The essence of that DLC is the essence of the movie. And that comes from a deep and meaningful collaboration and sharing of information, data, assets, all these things. And so they're just an extension at the end of the day of us. You know, always there's going to be a few spoiler things. You know, we try and keep close

and we don't want a lot of people to know about, but big beats, the big essence of the films and what they look like and how they play. We share all that stuff. And lastly, Star Wars games tend to gravitate toward certain genres, whether it's third person action or flight sim, and that makes sense. That's sort of what's in the movies. But we have also seen a lot of digressions from that. You know, do you guys think that certain genres just make the most sense for Star Wars and will continue to see the most Star Wars games made in those areas? Or even just speaking as fans, is there a sort of Star Wars game that hasn't been done, a type of game that, you know, you've always thought maybe a Star Wars version of that would be cool? I'll answer the second question first. Yes, we're not ready to talk about it.

I think that obviously this is a long relationship. And there are games. I think you're seeing a convergence of genres, right? You're seeing, you know, it's not a fine line anymore between an RPG and an action title and a shooter. There's the best of our, you know, even RTS is being called and pulled forward to, you know, incorporate into game design. And we look less at genre and more, you know, just how our players want to interact

and what kind of, you know, gaming motivations they have. There are always platforms that are better suited to handle certain genres, and I think that that's why you've seen with the new HD consoles over the last, you know, cycle, you know, it's shooters and its action that do very well, but I think there's more that we can do. And there's more that you're going to see from EA over the years to, you know, fulfill that entire fantasy of Star Wars that isn't just a blaster experience or an X-wing experience.

It's more than the sum of its parts. And I think we need to look at game design in the same way. Yeah, I think Justin's absolutely right on the convergence of genres. And I think we're always trying to think about it differently than we used to think about it anyway. I think we can stumble and I'm very careful about is, you know, Star Wars really works when you can tell a narrative, deliver character, let people be immersed in environments. And those genres that allow you to do that, they're the ones, I think, pay off the best. And the farther you get away from those things, I think the harder it's,

becomes to make that feel like it's a really compelling Star Wars experience. And so that's where we try and hit those sweet spots where, hey, as things converge and merge and change in the industry, is this a genre that pays off on that? Well, okay, great, let's go that direction. If it doesn't, you know, we probably will shy away from them. But yeah, I can't answer your second question. We understand. We tried.

Yeah. We look forward to when you can lift the lid on all of these things, but we appreciate your coming on and sharing what you could. So Douglas Riley and Justin McCauley, thank you very much for your time. Thanks, guys. That's great. Great. Thanks, gentlemen. All right. So that will do it for this episode. And Jason, we had a date tonight. I'm sorry. Standing me up. We had tickets to see Rogue One. I'm going to have to see it on another coast. I apologize to that. Business calls you away. We're going to see it in separate places, but we are going to see it and talk about it. So we will be back next week. Maybe we'll talk about some video game movies. We're probably going to see

Assassin's Creed and see if it actually breaks the streak of bad video game movies as its producers claimed it will be the case it's a low bar man it's a very low bar so enjoy rogue one we will be back next week save the rebellion