The real-time strategy video game Aliens versus Predator Extinction was released in 2003 on Playstation 2 and X-Box. Published by Fox Interactive and EA and developed by a small independent studio called Zono. Zono was established in 1991 and was named after its two founders Ed Zobrist (Zo) and William Novak (No). Zono had previously released the real-time strategy game Metal Fatigue in 2000 which was the predecessor to AvP Extinction. Zono eventually was closed down in 2005.
Aaron and Adam sit down with three developers who were at Zono during AvP Extinction‘s development and share their insights into what went into making the strategy game. Producer Mike Arkin, designer Jason Hough and artist Brian Collins joined us on Episode #168 of the AvP Galaxy Podcast.
You can watch the podcast below or read on for a transcription.
Brian: I’m Brian. 20 years ago, I was an artist on AvP at Zono. These days I’m a software engineer at Google doing augmented virtual reality and I think that’s all the interesting bits. In the AR VR space, it’s less of a shift than you might think. It’s very game-like spaces so it’s actually more of the same stuff. I just do very boring stuff now instead of very interesting stuff like you do for games. So instead of Aliens, I’m making Gmail buttons.
Aaron: Jason how about yourself?
Jason: I’m Jason Hough. I was a designer at Zono although I started there as sort of an artist. Technical artist might be a better term these days and since then I did work in the mobile industry for a little while doing App Store type stuff at Qualcomm. Then while I was doing that, my hobby sort of became writing and I managed to get a novel sold to an agent or picked up by an agent and sold to a publisher. Then I’m switching careers to become a full-time author. So that’s what I’m doing these days. I did two Gears of War books. I co-wrote a Mass Effect book and I’ve done some Star Wars short story work.
Aaron: Any interest in joining the AvP authors?
Jason: Interestingly the opportunity came up a few years ago but I was in the middle of another project and couldn’t do it. So, they went with a friend of mine Scott Sigler. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet.
Aaron: You need to. That is awesome. It is one of the best Alien books. [Editor: The Alien book Scott Sigler wrote was 2020’s Aliens: Phalanx.]
Jason: I’m really glad to hear that because he was super excited when they sort of had to pivot and invite him to do it. I wish I could have could have done it but it’s something that he had wanted to do for many many years. So he was super super excited. It’s nice to hear that it turned out well.
Aaron: All right, Mike last but not least.
Mike: I’m Mike I was the producer at Zono. In fairness I came onto AvP in the middle towards the end. I was friends with one of the owners of Zono and we had lunch one day and he said why don’t you come help us out. I was like on vacation between jobs and I started doing Biz Dev, but I kept looking at AvP and saying “Hey I think you guys maybe need some production help” because there was no production management at all and so I jumped in. I guess not even the middle.
I guess really just to help deal with some legal stuff mostly and then help push the team over the edge and get it shipped. So, there you go. Today I run a development studio called Big Boat Interactive and we do a little of this and a little of that. We have a couple of remasters that we’ve done with some classic games, and I have the AvP source code and keep hoping someday I will find a way to get that game remastered and shipped on some modern PC but that’s a different story.
Aaron: That is something we see crop up a lot on social media these days is when you’re gonna do a remaster of the game. Like I’m not sure we can really ask them that one but it’s something people really do want to see, and people have tried to remake the game in the past as well. So, there is a lot of love in in the community for Extinction.
Mike: Probably the biggest complication would be it’s owned by Disney now right, so they own the game code. They own the franchise and they have not been friendly towards remasters at all. So, I feel like that might be a tough kind of dead end which is unfortunate, but I have all the code.
Adam: So, one of our staple questions when we have new guests on the show especially guests such as yourselves who have played a part in shaping the Alien and Predator franchises is to ask about the first time you all experienced the franchises. Do you remember the first time you ever encountered the Alien or Predator? Did you see the films or was it another piece of media like the games or the comics?
Jason: I actually remember it quite vividly because it was when the Aliens film came out and I was not old enough to see it but I had gone to the movie theater to see something else. At the time, this was in the mid 80’s and I’ve gone to theater to see something else and I heard all these explosion sounds coming through the wall of the theater next to the one I was in. So, when I went out to get a snack, I just poked my head in the door to see what movie it was, and it was literally in the dropship scene when I walked in. When they were going on the planet, and I didn’t leave. I just sat down and watched it and then I stayed and watched the next showing. Then finally got kicked out for being too young to be in there but I think I ended up sneaking in to see it like 12 times that summer and it’s still one of my all-time favorite films. Then went out and sought Alien and of course Predator and all that later but that was my first introduction to it.
Brian: When I was in elementary school. This was when everything was on VHS tape and sometimes hard to get your hands on horror movies because you didn’t want to go into that section in the video store because it would be mixed with other movies which you wouldn’t want to be standing next to. I’d heard on the playground “Oh there’s this movie where this alien just like bursts out of the dude. Like you gotta see it.” I’m like “Well I have no avenue to see this film” and so someone had a VHS tape that they were just handing around to friends, and we had to like sneak into the bedroom where the VHS player was and like “Look there it is. It burst out of him. Oh my God look at that.” That was my first Aliens experience.
Mike: I remember my cousin had a tape of Alien and he was like “Oh it’s too scary. We can’t watch it” and I think I saw like a few minutes here and there right because it was like we watched it and then like the parents came and told us to turn it off or whatever. So I knew about the Alien but like I hadn’t seen the movie and I remember when I was with my dad like walking down the street and he was like “Let’s go to a movie” and we’re standing in front of theater and it was Aliens. I didn’t know what it was and I was like “Well there was this movie I wasn’t allowed to watch so let’s go see this” and I had no idea that it was Jim Cameron, like the big action movie. I just I remember sitting in theater just like what the f**k, this is awesome. It’s like if you ask me what kind of movies I like, this is it right. It’s like sci-fi, military fighting the aliens, wisecracks. So, I just I walked out of the theater, and I was like “That’s the best movie I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Aaron: While we’re here to primarily talk AvP Extinction, I know Mike you used to work at Fox Interactive and had some hand in the development of AvP Classic. Now it’d be criminal of me not to ask you about it while we’re on here and we’ve got you. So, tell us about that experience working on that game?
Mike: I had worked at Acclaim. That was my first job in the industry, and I worked on a lot of things. I feel like there was something Aliens – I think maybe it was being talked about when I was at Acclaim. Then I left Acclaim, I went to Sony and then about a year after I left to Acclaim, I ended up at Fox so it must have been that Alien Trilogy was being talked about when I was there. I got there and it was a license deal so we weren’t really involved but we were also basically like handling reviewing of all the licensed products right just for like video gameness. Because I had like a bad relationship with Acclaim. When they came for like the final approval of Alien Trilogy they said well why don’t you take care of this, like have a little fun and so I went into the room.
I was like “No you can’t ship this. It’s awful” and I have to thank whoever that was for letting me have that tiny, tiny iota of revenge but after that shipped, I was like “I really like these Aliens games. Like this is kind of fun. I want to do something like with AvP because we had this Jaguar game we’re playing. The Jaguar game – the thing that made it so cool was that they built models of all the Aliens and they photographed them from all the different angles and made sprites. So even though it was kind of janky that they looked really good because they were they were models instead of hand-painted and so I found those guys. It was Rebellion in the UK, and I was like “Hey look we want to do another AvP game. Can you just basically do like what you did before and do that on Playstation?”
And they were like “Yeah cool”, and it was like a really tough project. Like they were really small. It was like five or six people on the team and the model thing just wasn’t really working on Playstation and design wise, like the design wasn’t really there and they didn’t have a great plan. Luckily for me, I went to go work at Activision on Battlezone and as I was leaving, I handed the project to a guy named Dave Stalker who just comes back to the story like a few years later. I said to Dave “You’re a designer. This game really needs a lot of design now” So it turns out after I left, he basically spent like a year and a half at Rebellion working with them on the design of the game and it turned out to be a great game.
Oh, and like five minutes after I left, they were like “Hey we really don’t want to do this the model thing. Can we just make 3D models of everything” and Dave was like “Yeah sure.” They blamed me for that. They were like “Oh we asked him, and he wouldn’t let us do it.” At the time I was at Fox, we kept saying hey it’d be really cool to do like an AvP RTS and we talk about it at lunch all the time right. So a couple years later I was talking to Novak who’s one of the founders of Zono and he’s like “Yeah we’re doing this AvP RTS” and I was like “Ah that was a great idea. I’m glad they finally did that.” So, I guess that’s my history.
Adam: So, the game, there was a PS1 version in development that was dropped, and they just went with PC for that one, right?
Mike: Yeah it was it was PC, Playstation and Saturn and so Playstation was kind of like the lead SKU around the time that I left. I think what my understanding what had happened was like I said development was a little troublesome and I don’t think it was troublesome like that they couldn’t handle it. I think it was just they bit off more than they could shoot right. It was the amount of stuff they were trying to put into the game I think was more than a Playstation could handle and so I think after I left, they just pragmatically said “Let’s just drop this and stick with PC that can handle so much more memory, more power”.
Metal Fatigue
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.”
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.
The Queen Alien and her nest.
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.
Predators attack the Marines.
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.
Adam: It seemed like out of all the Alien and Predator games released in this era like I think Extinction probably had the most fun when it came to creating these new units and adding to the lore but beyond that like what you’ve mentioned already like, what was kind of the creative process like trying to make these new units that had never been seen before for the game? I mean you were saying Fox wasn’t really too worried about these new kind of Aliens? There wasn’t much back and forth with that?
Jason: It wasn’t so much that they weren’t worried about. It was that we would have to make it first and then show it to them for them to be able to decide if they wanted if it was okay for us to do or not. It seemed like, if I maybe I’m remembering wrong and Brian you probably were in more to these meetings than I was but often their default was no and then we would have to convince them why the game needs it but they were pretty resistant at least certainly on to adding too much new stuff. I think that was maybe even borne out of a little bit of the fact that there was no one kind of in charge there of making these decisions and so no one really wanted to be the one who would have to say at Fox like “Yeah I’m the one who approved adding this new type of Alien to the to the franchise.”
Brian: If you remember like you could select the types of Aliens in the menu system, and it would show like that Alien standing. For the longest time the Alien Warrior had a giant penis hanging down between his legs. Like really long out of control. It was like our test to see if Fox is looking, and it was in there for months. Like every build we would send this Alien just had it swinging back and forth in that menu and no one ever said anything about it. See they’re not looking. We could do whatever we want. This thing has like a three-foot-long schlong hanging down front and center. It’s gonna poke your eye out and like a week before we started to get into the cycle of sending final builds, there was a bug in the bug system. It says it appears the Alien Warrior has a giant penis.
Mike: Like for example there’s like the King Alien, the Queen Alien I mean the Queen we had in the movies but the King and the Praetorians, did somebody do a sketch? Like how did that get modelled?
Brian: Oh yeah, we just went for it, and they were purpose-built. They weren’t just hey it would be awesome if we had an Alien with a giant schlong. It would be like there’s a reason why each one was created the Ravager. The idea was we should have an Alien that could chop someone’s head off to execute somebody and the idea was like it’s going to be this like risk reward thing because if you put its head off, you’re not going to be able to facehug it. Okay great. That’s what we’re gonna have. It should be really big because it’s an in-game unit and it has giant claws because that’s what it does. It cuts people’s heads off, so the designs of the new Alien types were to serve the purpose of the game that they were meant for. So, the Carrier. We needed something to get a lot of facehuggers in there quick so you could like hit that mob of Marines. Oh, what would do that? I don’t know. Like an Alien where the pipes on its back carry face huggers. Good. Go. Do it.
A Ravager is attacked.
Mike: Did you make those models Brian or was that another model?
Jason: Yeah, I think Brian made all that stuff.
Aaron: I know it doesn’t help you guys in the past, but they do have somebody like that now. They did over the last 10 years or so.
Jason: Yeah, and I can see that, and I think that’s the maturity of the whole industry kind of growing up to be more like how movies are done.
Adam: I’m curious about some of the concept art for the game. I mean these days you have like full art books that are released for games that just feature loads of concept art but very little has really been seen publicly for Extinction. Is this just a case of concept art production for games being more extensive now or is there art for this game that’s yet to be seen?
Brian: I’m a better 3D modeler than I am a drawer, so we did it live.
Mike: Yeah, there was no concept art, right?
Jason: No we would just build it and like and it messed well with the way they wanted to work because I think there were a few occasions where we would send them either a write-up of something we wanted to do or a simple drawing or whatever but anytime we just sent them a build that had this thing in it. We could say here’s what we want to do with this, that would get us the quickest yes or no like an unequivocal because they could see… like we could tell that we needed a unit that worked this way or whatever but when we actually just show them the game with that, they would go “Oh I see what you mean okay.” It just worked much better for us and like Brian said, I think he could probably model like the Carrier Alien and get it working in the game faster than he could sketch it and not only do you get to see it but you got to see it working and fulfilling its purpose.
Brian: Yeah, and we were in a survival mode at that point. It would have been better had we sketched everything out. But we were just trying to finish this thing because we were just going for it.
Adam: And another thing we really like about Extinction was the visual and audio continuity between AvP2 which is one of the like big games that brought Aaron and I into fandom and Extinction you had units that look similar to their counterparts in AvP2. You had some of the same sounds shared between the games. I think at the time it was commented that it was an intentional design decision to keep continuity between the games made during this era.
Jason: I feel like that’s a little bit of a spin. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt here but it could have been that some of the things that we would ask them “Hey can we do this or how should this look or whatever.” Part of their decision factor was “Well let’s go see what they’re doing in AvP2 and make sure there’s some continuity going on” but I don’t remember that ever being communicated back to us that “Do it like this game is doing” or “This is why we have to do it this way” or whatever. It may have weighed in their decisions, but it wasn’t made apparent to us. I do seem to recall that we were given a big dump of sound effects and the player models that’s right to basically use as we saw fit. So that’s certainly where the sound effects spark came from.
Brian: I mean it’s no surprise that their assets when we got them were of a level of fidelity that was a little bit but beyond what we were working on at the time so any connection you see between the two, it’s us getting inspired by receiving their assets and trying to up our game a little bit.
Aaron: One of the things I really like about Extinction actually in terms of like some of the mission objectives that you end up playing through is if you’re playing a Marine you would come up as a human as an enemy. If you’re playing as the Alien, it was obviously the K species and Predators against opposing clans, the games never really did a lot of species on species fighting. Tell us about the sort of decisions to include that as parts of Extinction? Especially the Predator because that was a very dominant part of the narrative.
Jason: I think a lot of that came out of the fact that we were mainly developing multiplayer at the beginning because we wanted to have, like in most RTSs of the day, you could have battles where people just pick whatever side they want and yet it still has to work. So if two of the players picked Aliens and the third picked Predator, you had to have something going on there and then even though the multiplayer itself didn’t make it into the final game the fact that we had all this material, it was a tool that we could use in designing single-player missions. We’ve got all this stuff for having two different Alien sides so let’s make some missions that take advantage of that.
The Predator capture a Queen.
Brian: We had this idea for Predators where… and a lot of this has been fleshed out in the last 20 years but back in the day, we were big fans of the Dark Horse Comics, and we love the Predators from those comics but their culture. What the Predator Alien was all about was very constrained. They were like noble hunters that would get attracted to planets that have the dangerous prey on them and so our military Predators were supposed to be like the other side of Predator culture where they actually have like this whole society. The Predators that we see in the films are like the redneck Predators. They like just want to go out and kill something. That’s not all Predators and that’s where this Predator bureaucracy comes from.
Like you have the military Predators that are actually like normal Predators. That’s how Predator society works going and trying to rein in all of these random hunters that are going across the universe dropping Alien eggs on planets so they could hunt things.
Jason: Those types of things at least where a lot of the butting heads we had with the QA person who was the unelected keeper of the lore.
Brian: Yeah, he loved the like savage individualism of the Predator. It’s just a man versus the universe. Yeah, and like to suggest again I’m not saying that our concept of the Predators should be canon or was the greatest idea ever, but it didn’t fit into… this is one man or one Predator in this case against the universe. He takes all comers and that’s all Predators are all about. Like that didn’t seem right with us.
Aaron: That seems like a little bit of ineptitude on Fox’s side there with the person being in charge not knowing what you’re doing with the genre. You need that variety.
Jason: It’s a big difference I guess between wanting people to adhere to what’s already there rather than looking at it more of let’s grow this and expand it and explore other aspects of it because when you get into that territory that’s when you’re saying, you need to say yes, we can add this to this universe and people get nervous.
Brian: I remember we had the Ancient Predators and in the Ancient Predator ship, they had like a banner with their Predator symbol on it and the feedback was like “Why would Predators have a banner? They’d be hunting. They wouldn’t be making like stitching banners and stuff. That’s lame.” I’m like that can’t be… how do they get spaceships if all they want to do is hunt stuff?
Aaron: You guys have mentioned these mini atmosphere processes that the Colonial Marines repair to generate resource in the campaign. They’re obviously a hell of a lot smaller than the counterparts in the film but I was always curious if it was an intentional reference to the novel of the film where they mentioned there being lots of smaller atmosphere processes on LV-426 or was that just the necessity of the game?
Jason: It was a necessity of the game and it’s one of the few things I can sort of claim that I came up with. But it was basically there as a point of map control for the tech class especially again in the multiplayer side, we needed things like that but we also couldn’t do anything on the scale of the atmosphere processor of the movie simply because we were in this very close-up… we wanted to actually see the Marines walking on stuff and not just having to be a little pixel specs moving around. So yeah we it was purely a necessity to just have something that was tiny and my sort of logic in my head at least was in the movie Aliens there’s this one giant structure that fails so it would seem like a logical next step for Weyland Yutani to say well “Let’s spread out 10,000 of them across the planet that are as big as a refrigerator rather than just putting all our eggs in this one huge basket.”
Adam: Well, the dropship makes an appearance delivering new units for the Marines and we see some wrecked APCs, there were never any usable equipment made with the exception of the Exo Suit. Did Zono ever toy with the idea of having more vehicles in the game. I imagine it could have given the character designer something fun to play with from the Predator side of things too.
Brian: We had an APC you could drive around. It was just too huge and it’s not square and things that aren’t square in real-time strategy games always have pathfinding issues, so we didn’t have the most advanced tech back in the day, so everything had to be square. The problem was we wanted to be able to see people and if you want to see a person then, a tank is going to take up like most of the screen. Like the dropship was also player controllable at one point and it was just too huge to control. It was kind of dumb. Like the Predator. The thing you get as the Predator. The shrine. We had a big old version of that that Predators could sit on, and it never made into the game.
AvP Extinction – Dropship
Jason: It was purely just a scale issue as I recall and it was also a little bit of this… sort of going back to that original demo that we showed them and how it just triggered this light bulb in their heads that they thought they wanted like a Command & Conquer style game. Then as soon as they saw our demo they were like “Oh no we’re gonna go this totally the other direction and have it be close up and like gritty. It’ll capture that feeling of like an almost horror film kind of claustrophobia and stuff that you get which wouldn’t be there if you could zoom way out so that an APC was something that you could actually drive around by just clicking on various points.
Brian: I remember about halfway through when things were looking dark for us, there was a point where Fox was like “You guys have that APC that you could control. It’s in the game, right?” “Like yeah.” “Why don’t we just change this into APC racing?” That suggestion was made.
Mike: I think the kind of lesson here is that you have these big corporations like Fox was a giant corporation right that made some of the top movies of our generation but at the end of the day what it comes down to is that there’s a bunch of individuals. Human beings that are put in jobs and so the difference between AvP being this amazing game and being a different game was just about somebody at some point pointed to one guy and said you’re going to be in charge of this. There was a producer in the beginning who I think is someone… I don’t know if he knows Aliens really well or not but he was someone who would have been very consistent and would have stuck with the original design and they fired him and when that happened, I think that’s when they didn’t have a replacement.
I think they just said “Well we’ll just let the developer keep going and we’ll just have people in QA evaluate what they’re doing.” I don’t know anything about that. I was long gone at that point. I don’t know why they did that. I know that when I met with them, they had mentioned that right. They said, “Well we did have a strong producer on this, and we fired him” and I think that the guy that they eventually put on board to be the producer was one foot out the door. He was like “F**k this place. I don’t want to work here but I need money.”
Jason: Well, that was also that sort of that time period you mentioned Mike where like EA was doing the game, but Vivendi had bought Fox and it was all very confusing for us. Especially me and Brian and sort of those of us who were directly working on the game on a day-to-day basis. We didn’t really understand or even know what was going on with all the stuff. It was just very confusing and the main message to us was just wrap it up. Figure out a way to finish it as quick as you guys can.
Brian: Yeah, we would be on calls where we didn’t know who was on the other end or if we had, if we should do what they say or not do what they say. We just rolled with the punches.
Mike: Yeah, and what ended up happening like I said, and Jason reinforced is that Fox sold it to Vivendi. Well no they sold everything to Vivendi except for this which became a co-publishing deal with EA. Essentially means that EA got the game to publish and it was through EA Partners which was kind of like their third-party games we don’t want kind of departments and so they really didn’t put any budget into it because the problem was that they bought it but they didn’t own us and if EA doesn’t own it, then they see it as a short-term thing.
Like let’s ship this and make some money but not a long-term franchise. So, they didn’t want to invest in it that because it wasn’t theirs and so I’d go to a lot of meetings with EA, and it was just like they were like “Look we just need to ship this thing. We’re not going to put money into marketing. We’ll do a minimal PR.” I don’t know if there was even a press tour but in spite of all that it sold 300,000 units like in the first ship right which for a console game, that’s a big deal. Back then 300,000 units was a lot of money and today if EA shipped 300,000 units, everyone would get fired but that was still like a win for AvP. If they had put money into marketing. This was a multi-million seller easily.
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.
An Alien horde is coming for the Marines.
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.
Adam: After like seeing more strategy games coming out for consoles in the 20 years since Extinction was released, have you guys ever thought about how you might do a new AvP strategy game with how game development has evolved?
Jason: Well I mean one of the things that I think was sort of always in the back of our minds, when we sort of got towards the end, I would often look at the game we had made and kind of wonder why isn’t this as good as the demo that we showed them that we made in like two weeks. It was just the demo implied or spoke to more of a curated like scenario-based progression type game with tactical situations. I guess maybe more like something like X-COM but real time and all that and I think especially with the budgets that games get these days to do like a genuine story that plays out in this series of tactical scenarios could still be totally amazing and that was sort of what in our heads what we had set out to do originally.
Brian: Yeah, there’s a fundamental flaw in early 2000’s RTSs where maybe the best way to play is like Mike said make a zillion units, lasso select them all and say destroy this thing. Now destroy that thing. Now destroy this one. We call this like the Uber unit, which is just everything you’ve got, you’re just microing it across the map and modern RTS games find ways to prevent or to discourage that kind of player behavior. Like Total War for instance that’s just not a thing you do in Total War and Dawn of War 2 has like heroes that you wouldn’t really want to select them all at once because they all do different stuff. We could have put more detail into our game to support that kind of gameplay.
We had a tester who all he would do when he was playing AvP Extinction was just make a zillion military EXO suits and then go and stop Aliens with them and the game would be running so slow because you’d have 500 billion of them and like it would just be a total mess and it’s not fun to watch. I’m sure it’s not that fun to play except for the like audaciousness of it all.
Exo-Suits Attack a Predator
Jason: Yeah it’s funny too you mentioned that because we haven’t really touched on this but as I mentioned earlier, we played on PC almost exclusively especially for the first half of the development, we didn’t have any Playstations or X-Boxes to develop on and I remember when we first got the dev kit and we got the game running on it and it was like an absolute slideshow and there was just this sense of panic. We were already really low poly and pretty well optimized. It’s not like the PCs we were running on were very fast but we thought were gonna have to go and get everything down to just really crude. Luckily it turned out that, it needed a lot of optimization but and eventually we got it running just fine without really having to change much but there was definitely a time there where we were thinking that we were going to have to gut things even more just to have it run in a reasonable frame rate.
Mike: PS2 was hardware that was really easy to make your game run slow. Like you had to actually purposefully write tight code to make it work well. So, it took us a while to get there. Fox actually hired another team to do that work for us and they did nothing except drain a bunch of our budget away and then we had one guy that turned out to be really smart and we let him do it.
Aaron: So, it was literally just one dude in-house?
Mike: Well yeah on PS2, there’s like two little helper CPUs that do all the setup for the 3D math and so if you don’t do that right, then your stuff all runs at 1 FPS right. So it’s very very easy to be like “I got my game running” but you didn’t write the VU code and so it was like a couple of hundred lines of assembly that he had to write and the first guy that did it, was kind of checked out when he did it and so he wrote like thousands of lines of code that was really slow and so at one point, this one guy (David Eaton III) said I’m going to take this thing home for the weekend and he came back and he’s like “Oh yeah now it runs 20x faster.”
Adam: Since your time working on AvP Extinction, the Alien and Predator games have seen some genuine highs and lows. Have you played any of the games that came after years? If so, do any of you have any thoughts on them?
You can read more about the Superscape game here.
Brian: I have made an AvP game that came after this game. You’ve not played it because it was Aliens versus Predator from the first AvP movie on mobile phones. This is pre-iPhone. The first thing that I had to do is I had to go to Fox Studios and read the… because the film was unreleased at this point, so I had to read the script for the film to get the flavor for the film. They wouldn’t let me leave with the script. I had to read it in front of them for two hours and the first scene in the script, it changed for the movie but in the script, the scene was like slow pan, there’s a football stadium or a football field and there’s a car in the middle of football field and there’s two teenagers having sex in the car and then there’s a Predator and an Alien fighting on the roof and I can like almost hear like a guitar rip in the background. Okay this is gonna be the dumbest movie and then I read the rest of it, and it was basically like a Predator CSI agent is like investigating Earth.
Aaron: Do you mean the second AvP film? Requiem?
Brian: Yes, that’s it.
Adam: You worked on a mobile game for Requiem. I wasn’t familiar.
Brian: It was at a company called Superscape that I worked for.
Jason: I played Isolation. I think that was the only one I played since I played it with the VR mod, and it was just insanely good yeah. I spent an hour just hiding in a locker watching it walk around through the little slats.
Mike: I went to E3 and Oculus had a little demo area and the guy that I knew worked at Oculus, he like kind of got me in and I played that the space sim right and I was playing that and every like minute or so, I’d hear someone scream like the kind of scream like terror. At the end of the demo, I was like what the f**k was all that and they were like “Oh that’s Alien Isolation” and they go you do want to play, and I was like “No, no way like that sounds awful.” So, I never played it. What I really want is I want an RTS or like an X-COM tactical game and I bought FireTeam because I think I accidentally thought that that was a tactical game and then it turned out it was like a first-person shooter. I was kind of mad.
Aaron: Well, there’s one coming out as of recording in 10 days. It seems to be more like X-COM meets real-time tactical game called Aliens Dark Descent.
Aaron: That’s everything Adam and I had prepared but there were just a couple of questions that I thought were interesting from our community members. A lot of the other stuff they were sort of asking were things we’d already put in and you guys have already addressed. So just a couple more questions and then I will let you escape from these nerdy folk. So Komenja would like to know and I think Brian you alluded to this earlier, were Warcraft 3-star hero units ever considered for Extinction and I think that’s a yes, isn’t it?
Brian: Yeah, didn’t we have like named units. They just weren’t any different than the other units.
Adam: Well, you had one, the Elder one at the end of the Predator campaign.
Brian: Yeah, I loved making him because like what would an old Predator look like. Well, we should have grey dreads on them. People are gonna love it.
Jason: In the initial original design that Novak wrote up, there were hero type units right. It just came down to the whole sort of this mentality people get into. I’m just going to select everything and send it at the enemy when you’re mixing in things people who are important, it gets too like picky and fiddly, I guess.
Adam: And community member HunterGets asks what unique opportunities did a top-down perspective give to both the AvP franchise and to your team?
Jason: Well for us I think it played in really well to like limiting your field of view purely because when you’re looking top down, you can’t see that much for their heads. So, it made it at least in our initial sort of plan for the game, it made it almost easier to make it kind of scary and claustrophobic because you literally just couldn’t see past 15 or 20 feet or whatever the limit of the resolution was.
Brian: Also, when you look at screenshots like if you just do an image search for AvP Extinction, you just look at the selection of screenshots as painful as they are to look at because it’s a 20-year-old game, when you look at them, they look cool. It’s like a bunch of Marines shooting at a bunch of Aliens and that’s what like AvP is. Like there’s Predators pulling spines off things and a bunch of Marines shooting and explosions going off and in a first person game, I don’t mean to say anything bad about first person games which I love but you don’t see like the top-down drawing of here’s a bunch of Marines, here’s a bunch of Aliens. This thing’s exploding that thing’s blowing up over there. There’s bullets flying everywhere. You get like these high drama screenshots in the top down here.
Aaron: Who’s idea was it to have the Aliens be decapitatable but then also regenerate when they got to the hive.
Brian: That’s Peter [Green]. We love decapitating things. We had the worst character animation engine so like when we were making this game, proper skeletal animation was very common in games even though like in our previous game it wasn’t that common but, in our game, we didn’t have skeletal animation. So, things were made out of parts like the early Playstation 1 games would be. The side effect of that it’s very easy for us to chop things off because you just make that part fall off. That’s why heads are popping off all the time. That was the one like parlor trick we had and so yeah like popping Aliens heads off but something we really love.
Mike: And Peter by the way left Zono after he did the Everest game and was one of the small team that started Starcraft 2. So, he continued, and he worked on Starcraft 2 I think for like 12 years or something until he retired a multi-millionaire. Maybe in retrospect maybe we all should have gone with him.
Aaron: Before we let you escape hopefully on, is there anything you’d like to share, any anecdotes or thoughts about your time working on Extinction that we just haven’t given you the opportunity to with any of our questions or the flow of the conversation.
Jason: Well, I mean this whole chat has been a great just from a nostalgia standpoint. For all the frustrations that we had, it was a fantastic time of our lives. I think Brian and I, we had an apartment that we shared up there near Zono and we basically we would work till like late hours all the time and then we would go back to the apartment and play Quake 2 multiplayer until late, and it was just a blast. It wasn’t a very experienced team other than Ed and Novak. Like the rest of us were all pretty green and it was just a blast.
Mike: It’s kind of like almost like a time that you’d read about right because game development doesn’t really work like that anymore.
Jason: If I could quickly mention Mike because I’d like to recommend this to people whenever they ask me about that time period, there’s a novel written by a guy named Austin Grossman called You and it takes place at a small game studio in Southern California in the early 90’s I think or late 80’s and it really captures what it’s like to be at Zono because there’s a lot of stuff going on in that book that’s really similar to what we went through.
The Aliens have created a nest.
Mike: It was a different time. Teams are 10 times bigger now and that team was small. It was scrappy. I wasn’t getting paid because there wasn’t any money for most of the time, I was at Zono but yeah everybody there loved what they were doing. There was like a sense of like being in the trenches like in a battle and there was fun and there was misery, but we all had the common enemy of the publisher.
Jason: It was frustrating in a key way a lot of the time that we would have these great ideas and especially people like Peter that we mentioned, AvP was like his dream project and he came on fairly late in the project and he would come to me with just like pages and pages of ideas and changes he would want to make and he was a lot more into like the nitty-gritty of RTS games than I was and it was just frustrating to have to go “Yeah there’s no way we can get that past our producers with the time and budget we have left.”
Mike: Peter had worked at Westwood. I think he’d worked on Red Alert 2 actually and I remember Peter’s responsibility was like the particles and so because he was so passionate about it, that game was like this mass of… The screen just fills with particles, and I remember there was this long-standing joke that he kept saying that someone was going to shoot radioactive fire and there was this whole thing about was radioactive fire really a thing or not. Peter insisted that it was, and I think there was a strong opinion that it wasn’t actually a thing.
Adam: Thanks again guys so much for joining us. I know it’s been a long conversation, but this game was really important to Aaron and I growing up and we have fond memories of it. So, thank you guys for developing it.
Jason: It’s gratifying to hear that it’s still something people talk about and want to talk about 20 years on. It’s pretty cool. So yeah, thanks for having us on. It was it was great chat.
Aaron: Is there any outlets, any websites you guys want to refer people to learn more about yourselves or pimp projects?
Jason: I mean jasonhough.com if anyone’s interested in the books I’ve written recently.
