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

Aaron: It’s funny you’re bringing up the multiplayer thing because it also sort of relates to what we’re talking about off the air about making up stuff for interviews because during press, you guys told everybody that it was in development before the online services were ready and good to go at Sony and Microsoft. So, you were caught off from a development side and told everybody lies in press.

Mike: No, I mean that wouldn’t have been me. That would have been Fox had some PR person and I mean that’s not a lie. That’s just a spin.

Brian: We had a really great idea for multiplayer for Predators. So, in the multiplayer game it would be Marines versus Aliens and then Predator players would see all the games that are happening, and the Predator could jump into any one of those games and hunt a specific person on the map and try to get out without getting killed. So, he would be playing like a totally different game. He would just be like poking into existing real-time strategy games between humans and Aliens.

Jason: It was a real kick in the gut when the whole multiplayer part got canceled. I can’t remember exactly but I feel like the original plan was that it was console and PC and that the multiplayer side… like we knew obviously the PC multiplayer was no big deal. We had all the code for that for Metal Fatigue and it was sort of just like well the console stuff will get sorted out as far as matchmaking and all that before we ship. We’ll just drop it in at the end but I don’t know if that factored in their decision or if it was just purely a schedule and money thing.

Mike: Yeah, in fairness like that probably was a bigger problem. When I say multiplayer would have been easy on PC but on Xbox… like an Xbox wasn’t allowed to talk to the internet directly and you had to have this like a bridge. I forgot what it was called. There was a name for it, but you literally had to have a bunch of servers that would bridge between the Xbox world and the internet to talk to like your master server for example and it was a little bit more work than it would have been on PC.

On Playstation. Xbox actually had the internet. Playstation didn’t and it was like a 75 dollar essentially, I guess. It wasn’t a modem. It was like an internet adapter. It would have been a little janky. It would have been like a feature on the box that no one ever used right because you would have to like coordinate with a friend or something but on PC. Like they said every PC RTS had multiplayer and I think it would have been fine just to have a PC version that was multiplayer and that would have been the feature of the PC game.

Aaron: What about Skirmish mode? Did you ever flirt with just including Skirmish just against AI?

Jason: Yeah, I think we had that in Metal Fatigue. I think there was some challenges and the nice thing about Metal Fatigue was that all three sides in the battles were essentially the same. They just had different parts and slightly different units but their goals and everything were the same whereas in AvP obviously each side kind of had its own unique thing they were trying to do and how they were going about it which complicated things. But yeah I mean if we were going to have multiplayer, we would have Skirmish against AI as well but there was a whole different set of maps for multiplayer.

There was lots of things that you wouldn’t necessarily do in the singleplayer campaign that would come in a multiplayer but from a development standpoint, it was just supremely frustrating because we sort of started with making sure everything worked well for multiplayer in terms of the balance of the units. The things you went about doing so that the multiplayer would actually work because if we just made this scenario based tactical thing, it would have been a major struggle to get anything fun multiplayer out of that from a balance stamp and all that. So for whatever reason that’s why we sort of focused on that at the beginning of the whole process while the story and all those scenarios were getting kind of designed by Novak. Then when it all got dropped, it was like well gosh now our single player game is not what we wanted it to be originally because we had to make all these compromises to facilitate multiplayer and we’re not going to get multiplayer. So that was a very frustrating time for sure.

Aaron: What about the concept of AvP as this RTS. At the time, one of the big games was Starcraft and it was very obviously AvP inspired. The Marines were the Marines, and you had the Zerg there. So AvP had sort of influenced notable things there but when it came to you guys working on Extinction, was it a natural fit for what you were trying to do? Did it fit into your perspective of this real time tactics game as I suppose you were originally going for or was the difficulties making the concept work?

Brian: There was one problem with the concept in that the Alien life cycle when you think about it in practical terms is a little flawed. So, Aliens run out and try to gather hosts and one host equals one new Alien but in the process of gathering those hosts, some amount of Aliens are going to be killed by the Marines. Therefore, they’re always fighting about losing battle which is why in a lot of our math we have animals everywhere so you can facehug. Like to get some fresh meat into the equation there. That was always a big hurdle for us of like well if you think about how Aliens work, they’re always going to lose because Marines are always going to kill some Aliens and there can only be ever as many Aliens as there are Marines. Therefore, how do we like make this equation make some sense so the Aliens can have some fun yeah.

Mike: But adding animals was a great solution to that and that’s game development.

Brian: But it was so undramatic. Like your Alien horde is made of cow Aliens. Like is that really what we’re going for. Shouldn’t it be like dangerous animals. That’s why we have like a variety of animals.

Mike: I mean it was Alien 3 right. There’s like the dog Alien and it’s not sexy but it’s still an Alien. It’s still Xenomorph DNA so even if it was like a rabbit Alien, it would still be deadly.

Jason: So, one of the tricky parts about that which is kind of the other major sort of frustrating issue that I mentioned earlier. If I can quickly give a little context to this too. Before we started working on AvP, we were entertaining a lot of possible projects and one of them was a Superman game. I think it was for Nintendo 64 or something like that but never even got past the planning stage. But when we first sort of signed up to explore the idea with DC, they sent over this massive like thousand-page Superman Bible where all the things you could and couldn’t do with Superman. What he has to look like. How is cape worked. I mean it had so much detail. All the story that was canon and so on and then you could just sort of take that and use it as your rule book for what you can make and not make.

Compare that to when we started working with Fox on Alien and we were like “Well so do you have like stuff written up that we can use?” And they were like “No if it’s in the movies, you can do it but you might want to ask us anyway and we’ll give you a ruling after the fact.” So a lot of the development was us kind of coming up with ideas or recognizing like problems with the… not with the AvP universe but more of just like how do we make this work in this context of this game and there was no like clear easy way to get answers on those things. It was always we’ll write up the issue or better yet send us a build that sort of shows what you want to do and then we’ll tell you yes or no after that. So, we would often have to make things in order to find out if we could do that or not which as Mike said a lot of stuff ended up on the cutting floor from a budget standpoint.

That’s where a lot of that frustration went, and it was actually pretty late in the process. Maybe halfway through where we were getting some weird answers back from them on stuff and I don’t want to dig on Fox too much. I’m sure they had their own frustrations and things going on their end but we got some weird responses to a few of the things we asked about. It was taking a really long time to get these answers because we’d have to send them to our boss and then he would send them to the producers there and then they would get the answers and come back and it was a many two or three day thing every time. So we’re finally like “Can we just talk to the person who’s making these calls so we can hash something out that’ll work?” And that’s when we learned that it was like one of their QA guys, a tester who would take the builds we were sending and then he would just like write up all these things that were doing wrong. So, he was their in-house expert purely by being the only one who would ever point out that we had done something wrong or something that didn’t mess with his vision of what the lore should be. Like there was no official lore.

Mike: Yeah, so from the from the Fox side, when I had worked at Fox, one of the things like that when I was doing AvP for example I would say “Like well who’s the expert here?” I was thinking about like well Lucasfilm. There’d be a room full of people that were like the keepers of the canon right or maybe they would ask George. I don’t know how that worked and what I what I found out was that at Fox, it didn’t exist right and so like if we were doing Titanic, then Jim Cameron would have to give answers. What would be the correct way to handle something in Titanic for example but when I worked on the Die Hard game, each Die Hard movie was a different director and so you can do anything you want. Directors don’t own anything. Bruce Willis doesn’t own anything. You can do anything and so with Aliens, there was a woman in licensing who was the brand assurance was what they would call it right.

In other words, it was her job to approve like the Kenner toys would go to her. She was wonderful. She was a great person. She would give me toys and stuff like that which is probably where this came from, and she would look at it and say “Yes that’s correctly drawn. Yes, that’s an Alien. It’s not doing anything that isn’t appropriate or harm our brand.” That was it. But if you went to her and said, “Look what about the movies?” And she would be like “I never saw the movies right”. There was no layer beyond that at Fox. So again, like on Die Hard, it was up to me, and we couldn’t have anything inappropriate, but brand assurance didn’t look at the Die Hard game right or they didn’t look at AvP. Their job was to approve toys and bed sheets and lunch boxes and stuff and so the good news was yeah that for the most part at Fox at least, we could do whatever we want. I’m just not sure that I would have put some dude in QA in charge of that.

Jason: Yeah, and it almost, at least at first, it wasn’t even necessarily that the guy was in charge of anything. They didn’t have anyone who was the keeper of the lore and so it was more of just we would say “Hey can we do this?” The Producers would say “Yeah that sounds pretty cool” and then two weeks later they would say “Actually can you take that out?” And we would be like “Oh okay” and it was only sort of as we talked to them more and got more and more frustrated that we realized that there was this guy in QA who was saying “Well you can’t do that in this universe” and he would convince them and then they would come back and tell us to remove it or change it or whatever and so it was a frustration and I think obviously everything in hindsight is better. I’ve since done the Gears of War stuff and Mass Effect and all that. They always have someone who’s like they know the whole franchise and they can either give you the answer or they can make a decision and quickly and it just smooths everything out.

Brian: We did use that to our advantage though. We had some crazy Aliens in there like the Ravager and we had like the Dual Blazers for the Predator. Like crazy stuff that we thought would be cool and at that point like Mike said we were just rushing to ship so they didn’t even care anymore. So, we just put whatever we wanted in.

Jason: Well for us was we constantly had this struggle of just we needed variety for this type of game. You need a lot of different types of units and different things they can do and they need to be strategically make sense and all that. There was this real resistance I think early on to just have anything other than your basic Alien and the Marines that you see in the films and the Predator. So we were constantly sort of fighting to add stuff and often we would just add it and see what they said because that seemed to be sort of the way they worked.

Mike: The gameplay standpoint right like in an RTS, you can’t just have like one Predator right and in fact the guys online the fans of the universe would say this game is horrible. You should only have one Predator. Right like there should never be more than one Predator. They hunt alone but it wouldn’t be a fun game if you didn’t have eight different kinds of Predators. So that AvP Extinction really expanded the universe. I don’t know if any of that ever like leaked into other things, but we created all these new Aliens. We created all these new Predators. The Marines I think, they gave us all that. The movie had enough variety.