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

Aaron: You mentioned in marketing there and Brian you brought this up earlier when we were talking cut scenes. You might not have got a lot of marketing, that intro, that trailer, that cinematic one. It’s f**king awesome.

Brian: We were blown away when we got back.

Aaron: I remember watching that on… do you remember the days of gaming magazines where they came with DVDs and CDs, I remember watching that on a DVD that came with a random Xbox magazine in. It was awesome but we’ve never known who did that. So, I’m assuming that wasn’t a Zono thing?

Brian: No if you play our previous game Metal Fatigue, we made the cutscenes for that in-house. That might have informed the decision to have someone else do them for AVP.

Mike: I think that those cutscenes were made by, that was Fox when Fox still had money.

Jason: From my recollection, that was on Fox’s side of the responsibility list. We would just add them to the game when they gave them to us and then at some point, it became clear we weren’t going to get any, so we had to do stuff in the game engine or with the loading screens or whatever is purely a stop gap to fill in that blank.

Mike: I think that was typical then and it continues to be right where it would be something just negotiated at the beginning. Like are we giving you money to make cut scenes or are we keeping the money and we’ll make the cutscenes right and so if a studio was a big multi-hundred-person team, they would say “Oh yeah we can make the cutscenes.” In this case I think Fox was like “We’ll take care of that. We won’t give you the cash. We’ll just do it and at the time, it was very popular to hire… there were two or three big companies that did this. Blur was one of the ones that they probably did 20 or 30 different games.

Jason: I remember talking to Digital Domain about it at one point.

Mike: Digital Domain had a whole game group, and they did lots of these intro movie cutscenes, trailers, whatever and so that was a pretty typical thing to do and like I said, that was before the big shake up at Fox when they had a lot of money. There was management change at Fox like three or four times. So, the management that was there when I was there. He was like all in. Whatever it takes. Use the movie companies. Use the sound stage if you need to orchestrate music or whatever. It was like whatever, we’re a movie company so use those resources and that’s probably when that got greenlit.

Aaron: But then you had to pivot to using the loading screens as an answer to not being given stuff by Fox.

Jason: Yeah, and again it was a combination of that and just the whole sort of directive of just, wrap the game up, finish it and so we just had to do whatever we could.

Adam: I know you said you did some voice work in your games before. This was one of them right Brian?

Brian: I was one of the scientists I think in this one. I’m trying to remember. So, we had a gag where a lot of our characters would have the last name of Johnson because that’s hilarious. I was Silky Johnson which was one of the Marines and anyone named Johnson who is definitely me.

Mike: By the way do you guys know that Extinction was not the original name of the game?

Aaron: Natural Selection. For maybe two years, folk were aware of the existence of a console game called Natural Selection but then it wasn’t until it was announced as Extinction that people became aware of what it was. This strategy game.

Mike: Yeah, and the Natural Selection thing was because there was another game. There was a PC game called Natural Selection or something. So, some lawyer just was like no you can’t do that. So that was that. I kind of I thought Natural Selection was kind of a neat name but Extinction was pretty good too.

Adam: Were there any aspects of the game that you were really worried about during development that you felt you absolutely nailed it when everything was said and done?

Jason: One that I can remember at least from the stuff that I was personally like designing and working on. One of the big things we were worried about when we started was how you would control an RTS with a console controller because all of the popular PC ones obviously were mouse and keyboard and the big thing that we hated from other console RTSs. There weren’t many if I recall was basically they were just doing a mouse and keyboard interface with a controller so you still had to like try to get the stick to this corner and then drag a box.

It was really like fiddly and you would get the wrong units and so we experimented with a lot of stuff but my idea was let’s just keep the cursor in the center of the screen instead of moving it around like a mouse and that you would just select things by like pulsing out this little selection circle or box. I think everyone was really sceptical about it including me but once we got it like working in the game, it actually worked pretty well. That was sort of like the moment where we were like okay we can actually do a fun RTS on a console because that was the one thing that we were all like how the hell are we going to solve this.

Brian: Also putting like the hot actions on the d-pad which is like standard in console games these days but back then like having all those hot actions on the d-pad was very useful as well.

Mike: I would say that the controls are now standard too. I mean I remember like a year or two later playing the Army Man RTS and it had the exact same controls.

Jason: I don’t remember what game it was but there was some game after that, that had used the same thing and I felt really gratified that…

Mike: I think the Halo RTS. I’ll just say like from the business standpoint from the publishing standpoint, when I work on the publishing side, it was like first person shooter RTS and driving games were the number three like revenue generating games at that time. This is like early 90’s and everyone was saying “Man if only we could do an RTS on console because consoles where the money is. This was like the number two PC genre” with Starcraft and Total Annihilation and Command & Conquer obviously and everyone just was like “No you just can’t do that. It just doesn’t work like the controls aren’t there. It’ll never work” and so when I went and looked at what these guys were doing, my first thought was like holy shit. You guys cracked it.

Like the whole world is going to come to us and ask us to make 20 more games with this tech and then it turned out that like literally the minute that that game shipped, the whole industry decided they didn’t care about RTS anymore. Yeah, it was like five minutes before it was like RTS just ceased being a genre and the idea of a console RTS just was no longer interesting to anyone. So, I was about a year or two late, I guess.

Adam: I can’t think of any other console games that tried to do intuitive RTS controls for a controller like before Extinction. You would see it later with those games.

Jason: It’s funny because I feel like I remember like genuinely and I’m not trying to talk myself up at all, but I came up with that and then it worked really well and then like no one ever brought it up afterwards. Like that we had solved this riddle or whatever. In fact, it almost was sort of like “Oh yeah. That’s just how console RTSs are done isn’t it?”

Brian: That’s a testament to how well it worked is it never came up again.

Jason:  It felt natural, and we very rarely had to explain… like we would give people the controller and say play the game and tell us what you think, and they would get it like really fast.

Aaron: I’d read some of the reviews and this is where I feel like you were treated a little unfair because some of them were complaining about the control schemes and the controllers and I’m just here like maybe it’s also the benefit of years of hindsight of Halo doing it and stuff like that now as well but this feels so natural and in in some ways, it kind of makes me flashback to Alien Resurrection specifically as well where that game did what has become standard now. With looking on one analog stick and moving on the other and you guys did what have become now a very natural feel of the RTS on the consoles. It’s just you guys being ahead of the curve, and I felt it was unfair to see those comments in some of those old reviews.

Jason: One of those things where I think like if you have ours as your example and it’s for whatever reason I’m working for you, it’s very easy for people to go “Well you should have just started like how you do on a PC” and that was the first thing we did because we literally just took Metal Fatigue and plugged a controller in and it was apparent right away to all of us that it was just a terrible interface for controlling a game on a console. Well, it’s frustrating to hear that the reviewers at least some of them maybe were complaining about it.

Mike: The reviews were like 7s?  Is that correct?

Aaron: 6 & 7s, yeah.

Mike: It’s the thing about the game press right also that you can’t ever satisfy them and I think that they feel like they’re not doing their jobs if they’re not super critical. If you’re like the greatest game in the world, then finally you maybe cross over the hump where they’ll give you some praise but other than that, like they see it as their mission in life just to be to be negative.

Brian: After we finished AvP, we did a selection of budget games that all received like single digit percentage reviews like eight to ten percent. I think we did one. We did an Everest climbing game and that got like a 10% review.

Mike: That’s the thing with the game business again also which is the game box doesn’t get the budget printed on the corner right like. Made for $120,000 and that’s a problem, I think. We didn’t have a choice right. That was work that was offered to us.

Jason: I think you can sort of probably see from this conversation that there’s a lot of stuff that goes on behind the scenes that affect what the final product ends up being. No one sets out to make a crappy game, but I guess my point is like a reviewer – they only look at the product they don’t say well how come this is like this and we can say well because we had to cut multiplayer. It shouldn’t be their job really to take any of that into consideration, but you can see why hopefully at least like some of the things turn out the way they do.

Adam: Well regardless if the game might have received mixed reception upon release, from what we’ve seen lately posting more about this game, a lot of fans remember AvP Extinction quite fondly. But upon release, did you guys have any like office reaction to seeing the reviews or were you just like “Phew I’m glad that’s done. That was too stressful.”

Jason: It’s not like we all thought we had shipped a masterpiece or something. The whole end part of the process was so frustrating for all the reasons we’ve discussed that I think none of us were surprised. In fact we probably agreed with most of the criticisms and all we could do was at least know that we had done the best we could with the resources and the time and all that just to get something out the door because the alternative as Mike mentioned, was everyone getting fired and the game getting canceled which would have sucked.

Brian: We are proud of it though. It was cool having a box with our names on it that said like Xbox, Playstation and Aliens versus Predator. We are a very small developer so to like have a big license like that and we were proud of the game, and we would take the mixed reviews because that’s a great review as far as we’re concerned.

Mike: I mean it was bittersweet because it really was a great game and I think like we knew all the things that weren’t in it and we knew all of the political struggles and dealing with that that one f**king tester at Fox every day and dealing with management that was hostile to us right but to make a great game and yet have those challenges I think was still a pretty great accomplishment. I would love to have seen the multiplayer PC version of that. I would have loved to see an expansion pack with more levels. I would have loved more.

I mean I don’t even care about all the stuff that got cut like the inventory and stuff like that. I mean just even the final game through natural selection ended up having some really good stuff in it right and it was a great game. I tell people for years like “Oh I love this. Oh, I’m a really big fan of AvP.” I’m like “Did you play the RTS?” “Like there was an RTS? What are you talking about?” And I’d be like well go get a Playstation 2 and pick it up for five bucks.

Aaron: You guys have talked about half the budget being left on the floor and while obviously you should be proud of the final result, is there anything on the cutting room floor that you guys really wished we’re in the game. What’s that favorite thing that didn’t make it into the game that you really wish would have been?

Brian: The tunnels is the thing. We had this idea that there’s a surface that the Marines are best at and then the tunnels are where the Aliens are best at, and you could send your guys down into the tunnels would that be like a really super dangerous thing to do. So you would want to like mass up a bunch of Marines at the mouth of a tunnel and then like send in a motion tracker to see if it’s going to be safe. It would be like super creepy to like get down in there because the Aliens would have hived up the whole thing and they would have all the advantages and we had to ditch that whole idea of poking holes in the map and being able to have tunnels in there.

Mike: For me, early on when I was there because I got there at the end right but so I don’t have any first-hand knowledge. I kept hearing stories about like what the game had been and at some point, I vaguely remember somebody, it was probably Novak showing me some documents or something and it was screenshots of the game when it had like inventory and each guy on your team had armor and helmets or guns or whatever that you could switch and swap. I thought oh that would have been really cool. Like more like an X-COM. Now I don’t know. I only saw this one thing so I don’t know if that was even part of the development or it was just an idea but that said, I like the final game. I like the idea of an RTS where you’re like click click click to unit unit whatever because when I play RTSs, I usually just make as many guys as I can and just send them to the enemy base and overwhelm but I think that more like tactical game, I would love to have seen that game.

Brian: There was a time where the game was a lot like Dawn of War 2 where you had heroes that could have like an item and we actually had ammo too so like a marine could run out of ammo and you would have to set up a supply line of like an android that would shuttle ammo to the front which probably wouldn’t have played out very well. Better conceptually than in practice but that kind of like detail is what we were going for at the beginning of having it like a lot of weapons and armor and your weapon runs out of bullets, so you got to go back to like the weapon bullets station.

Aaron: It sounds… would this have been before or after you guys. The first Starship Troopers RTS.

Brian: We were after that.

Aaron: It sounds like there would have been crossover there because I vaguely remember that being more of a real-time tactical game where he was doing like what you were saying. There would be there was inventory. You could put certain weapons on certain units.

Jason: Was that a PC game?

Brian: Yeah, we played it during Metal Fatigue.

Jason: I think that’s sort of the key really is that a lot of that stuff, especially the tunnels and the inventory stuff, it came down to a general feeling at Novak and higher-level people at Fox that it was too complicated for the console. It’s easy to manage all that stuff on a PC but there was like a process of simplification I guess once the things that we designed that everybody thought “Oh that sounds really cool” but once you actually start getting it in there, it was over complicating things in a way that was not compatible with our schedule and budget.