Mike Arkin, Jason Hough, Brian Collins Interview (AvP Extinction)

Adam: So how did you all find yourselves working at Zono and then part of the development of AvP Extinction. You had mentioned that Jason, Brian you two are friends and went into Zono together but give us a little more history about how this all kind of initially came together.

Brian: Yeah, I was actually in college in San Diego, and I was graduating and then Jason and I were friends, so we’d hang out all the time. He’d say hey “Yeah, I’m doing artwork for this video game developer up in Orange County. You want a job?” And I said like “Yeah” and then this is like very early in game development days so there was no qualifications. It was just like “Can you move a mouse?” “Yeah, I’d have some experience on mice” and so the next thing we’re starting with Sega Saturn games and then we made a PC game called Metal Fatigue. I don’t know if you guys have played this game. This is like the predecessor to AvP Extinction. It had a lot of ties together. AvP was built off the same engine, used the same game behaviours and things like that.

Jason: Yeah, well so I was really into 3D animation and all that kind of stuff back then and I was taking a class at University of California San Diego. At one point, I was helping out the instructor with a computer issue. They were using all these big silicon graphics machines and she didn’t really understand like the operating system part but I was also like very techy. So we got to talking and it turned out she was friends with Ed Zobrist who was one of the co-owners of Zono and they were looking for someone who could come in and help out with art but also help out with like getting their networks set up. They had just started this office and we’re having a lot of issues with computers and that sort of thing.

So she got me and Ed talking and they essentially hired me as sort of a dual title like artist/network engineer type person and I was much more into like the technical side of 3D animation art like getting the models right and all the low poly stuff and everything whereas we had another artist there named Michael Gates who was much more just pure artist but he wasn’t into like the software and everything. I think he would almost have preferred to do everything by hand at the time. So when we were working on a game called Mr Bones at the time when I started there which was a Sega Saturn game and Ed and Novak, the two owners, were talking about hiring another artist. So, I recommended they talk to Brian. It was interesting. Getting in the interview and everything like as Brian mentioned it was kind of a wild west back then. If I recall correctly, his portfolio that he sent was mainly like these pizza ads that he had drawn for some pizza places. That’s how we ended up at Zono.

Mike: The official Zono story was it was like I had worked at Crave for a while and I had the summer of severance as I called it where Crave had laid everyone off. I went to the beach every day and I had lunch with Novak who was the other co-founder and yeah he just said can you help us do Biz Dev and I said sure. Like I worked at publishers for years and signed deals, so this is like the same thing. It’s just asking people for money instead of giving them money. Like how hard could it be. That’s a joke. It was actually very hard and after like a month of doing pitching and stuff I said “Hey if AvP doesn’t get finished, I don’t have a team for the stuff that I’m pitching. So like AvP needs to get finished and what I see is it’s never going to get finished and I think you guys should let me help.” Novak was like “Absolutely like start tomorrow” and the other co-owner was like “No we want you to focus on pitching stuff.”

So, I was like “Okay fine. I’ll focus on pitching stuff.” But I really wanted to help out with AvP particularly since the client was Fox and I knew the guys. It was like my old buddies and a couple weeks went by and one day like I don’t know 8 A.M, I got a call, and the guy says I’m going in today. I’m going to fire everyone, and we’re done. Fox didn’t pass. We don’t have any money. I said, “Well how can I help right because why are you calling me” and he goes “Like can you help. Can you just like take over” and I said, “Okay look I’ll come in right” Because it was like a 40-minute drive, so I had to like actually get dressed and stuff and I didn’t work there. So, I’d go in like once a week or something and I went down, and I sat with them, and I said look like you’ve got a problem with Fox. There’s a contract that is long over budget and if someone was suing…

I think that was the event that happened. Someone was suing them for money. They didn’t pay the agent. They owed the agent 5% for like the last two years and so I said “Okay well I gotta settle this thing with Fox. I gotta settle this thing with the agent. I need to get you more money to finish the game and then I’ll take over as producer and help get the game done but you can’t fire everybody. You just gotta like hang on for like another month or something” and he was like “Okay”. He kind of had calmed down at that point right and so I said, “My title is producer and I’m gonna get you the money to pay me.” So, I went to the agent, and I said, “We’ll pay you half” and they said, “Okay sure” So that was like five minutes. That was done. Then I went to Fox, and I sat with them. I made a budget. People in the budget that like had already quit or whatever and I was like “We need six artists, and we need this” because that’s how you did it back then right.

Any hope of covering when you were late, you had to do by like throwing in extra people and they said “Okay we’re gonna approve the extra… it was like $300,000 but we’re not going to approve Line 27. I was like “What’s Line 27?” They’re like “Oh that’s your salary” and I was like “Okay like that’s kind of weird. But I’m the guy that’s come in here reorganized the project. Like I settled this legal thing. We just need a little money to finish.”

They’re like “Yeah no we’re not paying for you.” So I was like it’s okay because when I put in the real numbers, it still worked out right and so we signed this amendment but when the amendment came, they had accidentally forgot to remove Line 27 and they had put it back in by accident. The producer on the Fox side was a buddy of mine and he told me he goes “Yeah when the final contract draft came, I pointed that out but the guy was so embarrassed that they had forgotten to remove it. That he left it in because he knew that he had screwed up and like he’s just like okay just leave it in whatever.” So, at that point, I had said to them like “Well I want to be a partner. I don’t want to just be an employee.” So, they said “Ship AvP and we’ll give you a third of the company” and so we shipped AvP, and I ended up one of the three owners of the company and yeah, I think about a year and a half later, the two of them left and I ended up owning the whole thing.

Aaron: How much did Extinction cost? What was the budget?

Mike: I don’t remember but it would have been most maybe $2 million at the most. It was a small team. I mean when I got there, it was maybe 12. Maybe I think during that last phase it was like 10 people. The team was an inexpensive team right and when I was selling the team, that was our pitch was that we’re inexpensive but it was also it was a small team. There was all this tech that was built for Metal Fatigue but I will tell you of that 2 million, probably about a million of it got left on the floor. I said at the beginning I was going to shit on Fox a little bit but Fox had like a succession of people put in charge of the project that were mostly just people from QA. They would come in and like they would ask for something and it would get billed and then they would say “No we don’t like it. Take it out” and just get thrown away and so that was the big thing.

One of the reasons why I wanted to get involved and one of the reasons why I wanted to push it to the end by stopping all that. I mean there were things like I was like “Hey how come there’s no cutscenes?” I remember asking about a bunch of things. Like I would say “Like what about this or what about that” and then every time I’d ask, Jason would be like “Oh yes some Fox QA guy said it wasn’t good enough and we removed it.” There was a story that somebody on the Fox side had played Age of Empires and so one day, there was just like a list of every Age of Empire feature. Can you please add these things.

Brian: Yeah, my favorite Fox tester/producer anecdote is we would go to these meetings, and they would tell us about they consider themselves the holders of AvP canon and they knew it all and like Jason and I, we knew everything about the movies. We watched them 10 million times and we had this point where we had the Predator could only cloak when he wasn’t in water because in the movies he jumps on water and the tester at Fox would say “No that’s coincidental.” Every time in the movie one and two if he gets near water, his cloaking cuts out. “That’s a coincidence. It’s unrelated.” My other favorite anecdote is our main designer Novak who’s like our mentor at the time. He wanted to have female Predators in the game because that’s something you’ve never seen before. He loved like having new stuff and so he went to Fox and said, “Oh yeah we’re thinking about adding female Predators” and the tester said, “Oh you can’t do that.” “Oh, why not?” “It’s like because Predators are strong, and females are weak.”

Mike: So that last phase of development where I finally got to like get involved. I basically just said “We’re not listening to them anymore. We have a game. We’re gonna finish it. Anything that they ask for, we’re just gonna say no.” So they would start putting things in the bug database that we’re like game changers and we’re like “Nope that’s gameplay, we’re not changing that. That’s a feature request. We’re not doing that” and I said “We can wrap this thing up.

We can take spend another year and a half. We can wrap this thing up in like three or four months if we just stop listening to their crazy changes” and that’s what we did and honestly that was fun for me because I just got to sit there and just say no to everything right and our Fox producer actually like lived with us because he worked up in LA and the office was like five minutes from our house. So, we gave him like a back office, and he would just sit there, and he was just so sick and tired of the whole thing. Like I don’t think he actually worked on the game at all. I think he was just back there like reading comic books or something, but it was fun though and the end result was good, but the end result should have been twice as much.

Jason: Yeah, more than half the game got cut.

Mike: Jason why don’t you like briefly tell them about the original idea of the game. Like what the game was until they pulled all the characters and stuff out.

Jason: I’ll go back to sort of the origin of the whole thing, I think. So, we just finished Metal Fatigue and we were looking for another project and were considering a bunch of things. I’ll actually segue into one of them briefly in a minute but what ended up happening was we heard through a developer producer friend of ours who I think was working for Looking Glass at the time. Ken Rossman is his name and he had heard through the grapevine that Fox had been looking for someone to do in AvP RTS for a long time which is interesting because Mike sort of mentioned that from the other side of things sound like they’ve been talking about it for quite a while but anyway so we talked about it and told Ed and Novak, our bosses that they were looking for this and we’re really excited about it and so Ed and Novak got a meeting with the producers at Fox.

So Ed said to me and Brian “Like we’re gonna go up there to pitch them a game so we need an idea for a game and then we really want to wow them so what we want to do is actually show up with like working software” and so over the course of like there’s very little time right. Probably a week. Maybe two at the most. We basically we wrote up an idea. Mostly Novak wrote up the initial like concept, but it was all just us brainstorming as a team and then we took Metal Fatigue essentially and just ripped out… Metal Fatigue for anyone’s not familiar with it. Probably most of you who were who would be watching this, it was a giant robot mecha RTS and it’s sort of main claim to fame was that the limbs of the robots could get hacked off during battle. Then you could pick them up and stick them on your own robot and kind of mix and match parts like that but it’s other claim to fame compared to something like Starcraft was that it had three layers to the battlefield.

There was the main battlefield that you’re sort of used to but there was also like a sky layer which we had like these floating asteroids that you would fight on and then also these underground caverns that you would actually dig out with your vehicles and there was resources down there and things like that. So, we took Metal Fatigue we ripped out all the robot stuff. Brian spent a mad week modeling the Marines and Aliens and a Predator and then we went, and I think we found a website that had a bunch of sound effects from the films, and we just stole everything and threw it in this demo and the demo was essentially very much inspired by Aliens the movie.

It was just a team of space Marines who were going into this cavern to root out whatever was causing this issue and so we were able to do a lot of stuff with the fog of war that we had in that game engine and we added like motion trackers so it would like kind of mark roughly where things were that were outside of your actual view. I’m not overhyping it I don’t think but it was really good. Like it was just like a five-to-ten-minute demo, but I mean it really sold what we wanted to do as a sort of not like a Starcraft type game where you’re just moving around vehicles and the units are just tiny little pixel guys. We wanted to do something close up almost more of a real-time tactical game than a real-time strategy game in a way.

Brian: Yeah, our big concern was that if we didn’t do anything because again this is late 90’s. You could still go to a publisher and pitch a game without a demo back in these days and so we were thinking like if we did that, the publisher is going to say “Hey we love Command & Conquer, can you just make an AvP Command & Conquer? It’s going to be awesome” and it’s funny because that’s why Jason and I and everyone worked on this thing because we want to be close up to the Marines and we wanted to feel claustrophobic and then we’d get there and they tell us what they were thinking and it was like yeah the Aliens, they would have like Alien tanks. It would be great like an Alien facehugs a tank, that makes an Alien tank. This is how it’s going to work. Command & Conquer, Aliens go guys go. So, we were so glad we brought this demo.

Jason: The meeting was kind of one of those magical moments. We showed them this demo and like I turned around. I don’t remember which one of us was actually playing it. It might have been Brian but I kind of turned and looked at the two producers from Fox who were there, and they were just staring at each other with like their jaws… they were just like “This is what we’ve been waiting for.” Like Brian said they thought they wanted to Command & Conquer and then they saw this like close-up tactical thing that felt like something from the movie, and they were just like… I mean you could just tell right then that they were going to go for it.

It felt really gratifying because it was a lot of hard work in a very short amount of time to throw that demo together. I wish we still had the demo. Someone probably has it but yeah, I think that basically sold it. The actual game concept that we wrote up. Mainly Novak wrote up was not as… it was sort of like yeah whatever. The thing that they could see on screen and actually get their hands on and play and when they heard how quickly we had made it, that probably set us up for problems later as Mike said because the whole thing ended up being like late and over budget and stuff.

Mike: But it was it was more tactical right? It had inventory and it had persistent characters right. It wasn’t like just make 10 Marines, they had names and stuff.

Jason: Yeah, I mean it was meant to be much more like a series of scenarios that you played more tactically, and a story would unfold and all that. So that was sort of our initial concept and that was what we were sort of aiming to make and I think what the first sort of major wrench that kind of threw everything out of whack was that they wanted and we wanted I think at the same as well to do multiplayer and so when we actually started development a lot of the attention was on multiplayer and designing units where you can have all three sides fighting all the time and it would be sort of fair for everyone and that implied sort of like more classical like resource management and like going and taking over certain spots which is where the micro atmosphere processors came from.

But over the course of development it sort of diluted the original vision of like this scenario tactical based game. Then the great irony and frustration was that we ended up cutting like the entire multiplayer aspect of it in order to get it shipped. It really compromised, in my opinion at least especially in hindsight, like the singleplayer game was never really that satisfying because so much of the gameplay had been… well it’s okay for singleplayer but the main reason it’s there is to kind of teach you the multiplayer aspect and then that never ended up getting in there so.

Mike: I just wanted to jump in like you talked about multiplayer also right and I know by the time I got there, multiplayer was gone, and I had asked “Hey what about multiplayer?” And Jeff said, “Well the code’s all there but like Fox decided to cut it right” and it was another one of those… like I wasn’t there for that conversation, but I think it was just some capricious decision. Some QA guy kind of thing or something like that and we had PC. When I played at my desk, I didn’t play on an Xbox. I played on a PC.

Jason: I would say 95% of the time we played it ourselves was on PC. Me and Brian.

Brian: Yeah, with a mouse and a keyboard, not a controller too yeah.

Mike: So, I’d go to Jeff, and I’d say, “Can we ship this PC version, right?” And he goes “Well we just need a license for Miles Sound right which is a thing a lot of PC games use back then but other than that it’s basically shippable. Like we just would need to like spend a day or two and make an installer and I was like “Well RTSs, that’s the number two genre of PC games right” At that time. Now it’s not as big but at that time RTSs were really big and so I go to Fox and I’m like “This is awesome. Can we get a couple hundred thousand dollars from Fox. We’ll ship the PC version and look we’ve got this PC thing. Like you guys have seen. It’s done. Why don’t we just ship this at the same time?”

And they said, “Well we’re doing a deal with EA and EA doesn’t want to ship it if it’s not multiplayer” and I was like “Okay but the multiplayer is all there. We cut it out. Like let’s put multiplayer back in and make PC.” So, the guy looks at me and now at this point Fox has sold all the games to Vivendi Universal right who also owned Blizzard and so this guy that I’m talking to technically he works for Vivendi now and they don’t own the game. The game is owned by EA. So, there’s this weird thing where I’m not even supposed to deliver builds to my producer anymore because he works for Vivendi who doesn’t have any like legal relationship with this game anymore. Technically it’s EA and he says to me… this is like the boss not the producer guy.

He goes “Well if we wanted to do a PC AvP game, we would just call Blizzard and have them do it for us.” Even at the time I knew that that was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard right. So, I was just like “Huh okay but again it’s done. We could just package it up and ship it” and they were like you can’t ship an RTS without multiplayer. I think today the argument I would have made was like “Look for a $100,000, even if the thing’s a failure you’ll still make millions. I mean it’s AvP. You’ll sell a few hundred thousand units at least.”