I interviewed game designer Chris Taylor, an industry friend since the early 1990s, in April 2007 for DEVELOP Magazine.

Chris Taylor is the founder of Gas Powered Games and the designer of hits such as the Total Annihilation and Dungeon Siege series.  His latest game is Supreme Commander, the new RTS which is topping the sales charts as game industry pros congregate at GDC.  

A lot of people were under the impression that the possibilities of the RTS were pretty much played out by now. Obviously, you didn't agree and the sales figures tend to back you up.

I knew that there were so many more things we could do with the genre. In Supreme Commander, the key design element was the Strategic Zoom, as the ability to zoom in and out combined with the bigger maps allowed for more actual strategy. Supreme Commander is unique because it's actually the only strategic game in the genre. It’s not focused on the tactical side like most. The difference is important--strategy is what happens before the battle, tactics is what happens during them. Strategy is Eisenhower planning for the 10 months before D-Day. Then the troops hit the beach and everything is decided in a matter of minutes. That's what it's like in most RTS games, where you're thrust right into the tactics.

You have been one of the most consistently successful designers of the post-id era. And yet whenever you are interviewed, you seem to be disappointed about your inability to fully execute on your designs.

 I aspire to give each gamer the greatest game ever, the best thing that they can possibly take home from the store in a box. I really want them to take it home and have a crazy, over-the-top experience. That's not realistic, though, there's just too many constraints built into the industry to ever give that pure unedited, flawless vision. And yet, I will never stop aspiring to deliver it.

How do you go about shooting for that experience despite the constraints?

I think the key is to surround yourself with the best and most-talented people you can get your hands on. I've learned that I've got to go out and pull in the best people and sell them on my vision. Without that, you're done. You cannot do it on your own.

How do you know where to draw the line between your design vision and the reality of production?

Today, with all the processes we have in place, it's become pretty clear. In the old days, the reason we had so many time and cost overruns is that we didn't know how to go about managing the process. Now, when someone suggests a change, we know what the calendar and dollar implications for hitting the milestones will be. I think it's good, though, it's healthy. 

What is your biggest regret from Dungeon Siege II? How about from Supreme Commander?

The intro, the tutorial area should have been smaller and tighter, if not taken out entirely. We should have thrust the player right into the action. Instead, we chased the whole tutorial thing and it was wrong. It was bad. I don't have many regrets about Commander, although I wish we'd had more time to fine-tune things and reduce the system requirements. That's not a problem over time, obviously, but right now I really wish we could have hit a lower spec coming out of the gate.

You've spoken previously about wanting to add more modding capacity to Supreme Commander. Was that an important part of your design concept? 

I wanted it from day one. I love the mod community, and the mod manager is baked right into the game. We'll continue to support their efforts, and we're going to keep providing the hooks they need to make those mods.

Do you have any intention of getting involved in the MMO space in the future?

I have some ideas, but if I'm going to get into that space, it's got to be a radical, inspired change. I don't want to do just another one. I'm kind of done with copying existing genres and adding a twist to it. That being said, you can copy ideas, and with one small change in the genetic code you can change the outcome entirely. 

How do you feel about the transition from the very small production team you had when working on Hardball II compared to the size of the teams you are currently overseeing? 

You can build these really huge, comprehensive games now. The challenge is holding the vision throughout the team, evangelizing and reinforcing the vision. But if you take your eye off the ball, you will create enormous production problems for everyone. You have to stay on top of them. People are complex, and they need leadership and vision.

You've said that the era of the giant single-player RPG is over. Obviously, MMOs play a role in that, but is there anything more to it?

It's not just MMOs, it's the idea of communications and community. I think that the feeling of community and the pleasure of playing together with people, even with just one other person, is so compelling that going back to the big solo RPG is hard to envision. There will be exceptions, of course, someone will probably come up with a new and really compelling gameplay mechanic. But then, someone else will add a multiplayer twist to it and trump it again.

The man known as the Dean of American Game Design toils alone, unfunded and underappreciated, in a forest in Oregon. He has renounced games; or perhaps, one might say, games have renounced him.

Who is Chris Crawford, and why does he toil alone? 

Is he Don Quixote, a dreamer slaying dragons that exist only in his own imagination? Is he Albert Einstein, an unsurpassed genius fruitlessly spending his winter years chasing an impossible grand theory while his peers reap high praise for incremental improvements in proven fields? Or is he Miyamoto Musashi, a peerless master soon to emerge from the wilderness of his isolation with brilliant insights into his craft?

I’ve hunted him down to find out.

A Portrait of the Designer as a Young Man

I didn’t know where to start, so I started at the beginning and asked Crawford about his life before games. He didn’t say much.

“I studied physics, got my masters in physics, and then I taught physics for two years. Then I moved back to California and had a teaching job that was kind of crazy. I did high school assemblies on the Energy Crisis.” He was quick to add that “I was working on games pretty hard, even then. I built my first computer game back in 1976 on an IBM 1120.”

Crawford joined Atari in 1979, where he created two educational simulation games, Energy Czar and Scram, for the Atari Home Computer System, before he was promoted to manage programmer training. n his spare time, he created Eastern Front (1941), which went on to become his first best-seller.

Eastern Front (1941) was one of Crawford’s most noteworthy creations so I decided to press him for details. “Eastern Front was a creative implementation of an obvious idea. ‘Let’s do a good wargame on a computer!’” he said. “Pulling it off involved an awful lot of creativity, but it required tactical creativity as opposed to strategic creativity.”

I was puzzled by what he meant. Crawford has a reputation for being outspoken, but it’s a cryptic sort of outspokenness, profound to the point of incomprehensibility. Talking to him can be like reading A Brief History of Time at 120 words a minute. You always feel like you’re missing something.

“Tactical creativity is implementation creativity. How do we build a good map? How do we move units around? How do we build a good AI system? You already know where you are going and you are just figuring out how to get there.”

“So would you say in today’s game industry we have a lot of tactical creativity and less strategic creativity?” I asked.

“Nowadays the stuff we call creative is tiny, tiny stuff. It’s hard to even call it creative at all. Technically, yes, I see a lot of creativity. But I see almost no design creativity in the stuff that’s coming out there.”

I decided we should review the rest of his work before we moved into philosophy. We got back to the details. After Eastern Front, Crawford created Legionnaire, Gossip, and Excalibur, and wrote The Art of Computer Game Design, the first of his many books. His reasons for the book were intensely introspective.

“I wrote Art of Computer Game Design really as a self-education exercise. The best way to figure something out is to write a book. You don’t realize how ignorant you are until you try to write it down,” he explained. “The book took me a year to write and there isn’t that much prose in it, and that’s because it took me so much time to sort things out.”

The intellectual self-development paid off, as Crawford’s following game, Balance of Power, was his most successful. It sold 250,000 units in 1984 – a staggering number for the time, more so given it was in the Dark Age after Atari had imploded and before Nintendo came onto the scene.

In 1987 Crawford founded the Game Developers Conference, which he would chair for the next seven years. He also created Trust & Betrayal: The Legacy of Siboot. “It’s the game of which I’m most proud,” he said. “Trust & Betrayal went further beyond games than anything else I had done. It had major innovations. If we think of an innovation or creativity as a leap, then Eastern Front had some good sized jumps, Balance of Power some very good sized jumps, and Trust & Betrayal had a bunch of truly mighty leaps. It was completely alien.”

Alien indeed. Trust & Betrayal put the player in the role of an alien acolyte competing against six computer-controlled acolytes of other species for the title of Shepherd. Each of the computer-controlled competitors had a distinct personality and the core of the gameplay was figuring out which ones to ally with and which to oppose. It was a pioneering attempt to put real characters into computer games, relying on artificial personality and language parsing solutions that were innovative or clumsy. No one had ever made a game like it before, nor since.

It sold only 5,000 copies.

Trust & Betrayal was the beginning of the end of Crawford’s pursuit of computer game design. In the eight years prior he had designed twelve games. In the next four, he did just four, and two of them were sequels (Balance of Power II and Patton Strikes Back). The other two were global simulations, both released in 1990: Guns & Butter and Balance of the Planet.

When I asked Crawford about Balance of the Planet all he said was “it was good, but it was not one of my best.” A few years ago, he was not so circumspect. In a 1997 essay, Crawford spoke of his reaction to the release of Balance of the Planet: 

I was so proud of that design! …I wanted to create a game that honestly addressed environmental policy problems, something to show just how powerfully a computer could present a complex issue. I did just that… Yet when I released it to the world, the reaction of industry, press, and consumers was unenthusiastic. Perhaps their reaction is best summarized by a review of Balance of the Planet appearing in Computer Gaming World. The reviewer noted that ‘it is the closest thing to art to be sold as computer entertainment...but it is just not fun...if the game is not fun, it simply wouldn't be right to endorse it...’ Here we have an acknowledgement that Balance of the Planet is some kind of art, yet the review refuses to endorse it because it isn't fun! …perhaps our reviewer would react to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony like this: "Gosh, Mr. Beethoven, your symphony made my heart soar in awe at the majesty of the universe, but you know, it's just not fun. We need some tunes we can dance to, or catchy jingles we can snap our fingers to.

Ulysses

Crawford, I believe, could have endured commercial failure for his artistic work, if he had received critical acclaim as a visionary. But critical condemnation for lack of “fun factor” was too much for him to endure. He left the game industry in 1993, beginning a decade-long odyssey of false starts and fresh ideas that continues to this day.

Crawford announced his departure in a famously histrionic lecture known as the Dragon Speech. “It was the greatest lecture I’ve ever given in my life,” Crawford told me. “It talked about my pursuit of games as an art form, and how I had seen the industry moving away from that dream in the pursuit of money. It had completely discarded any pretense of doing anything worthwhile. It was just pure money-grubbing of the most short-sighted kind. And the industry had no real future with that sort of an attitude. So I decided to just go off and do my own thing.” 

I asked him why it was called the Dragon Speech. “Throughout the lecture I used the rhetorical device of the Dragon as the artistic ideal, with me as Don Quixote – the fool who defies all industry logic and imposes his own reality.”

“I concluded the lecture speaking as Don Quixote. ‘All right, I am leaving the industry. And by leaving the industry I can see the Dragon. I can see him now. Yes, yes, you frighten me, Dragon. You hurt me! I can feel your claws ripping through my soul.’ I almost screamed the words out. It really scared the audience. I pulled out my sword—a real, leaf-bladed sword—held it up, and shouted “Come Dragon, I shall fight you! CHARGE!’ And went galloping down the lecture hall, ran right out of the door, and never came back. That was how I announced my departure from the games industry.”

If Crawford’s departure was larger than life, his post-departure ambitions were even larger. Crawford’s goal was to create a new art form: Interactive storytelling. “I thought it would take me eighteen months, maybe two years, to put together interactive storytelling. I’ve been working on this for eleven, or twelve years now.”

What exactly is interactive storytelling? “Games about people instead of about things,” explained Crawford. “It’s very difficult to understand. It’s just like the problem they had with the cinema – it took them about fifteen years to figure out what cinema really is. Around the turn of the century, the thought was that cinema was like a play with the camera sitting where the audience sits. That’s where we are with interactive storytelling – people can’t conceive of it.”

The closest anyone has come, said Crawford, is an interactive story called Façade (http://www.interactivestory.net/), by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern. Façade has been broadly praised by mainstream commentators such as the New York Times, which called it “the future of video games,” as well as by Crawford, who called it “without a doubt, the best actual working interactive story world yet created.”

Crawford is somewhat more grudging in his praise of Façade in private. “Façade is the only genuine interactive story-telling thingamob out there, but it only demonstrates just how difficult the problem is. The story has only three characters, takes place on a single stage, has a limited repertoire of behaviors… It’s still very good – And it works, which I can’t claim the Erasmatron does. But they defined The Problem more narrowly.”

The Erasmatron is Crawford’s own interactive storytelling technology. And The Problem is the richness of human social interaction.

“Social interaction can’t be built in incrementally,” he explained. “Take romance. You can’t just permit a gesture called Kiss and expect to get some romance in your game. Because romance involves a hell of a lot more than just kissing, it’s a huge array of behaviors. Real social interaction is one giant step that has to be taken at once. You can’t approach it a tiny step at a time.”

Crawford, in other words, seeks to create a platform that encompasses all real human interaction in a computer environment. “I want to bring the whole set of human behaviors in at once, complete in a mathematical sense, covering all dramatically important activities. And the set must be closed, not open ended.”

I asked for more details, and Crawford really started talking. He was theorizing at Faster Than Light speeds, and my note-taking went from inadequate to moot.

“My first solution with Erasmatron was inadequate. I asked too much of storybuilders. The solution I have now is to create a language, ‘Deikto.’ It’s a small language that has only around a thousand words, it’s very skeletal. But it permits you to do anything, describe any human behavior.”

We were looking at samples of Deikto code for a bit when I suddenly realized I’d been interviewing Crawford for almost two hours. I decided to press him for a self-evaluation: “You remind me of Albert Einstein, post-relativity. Have you, like Albert, lost your way?”

Crawford thought for a moment. “I think it’s a fair comparison, me to Einstein, post-relativity theory. I am searching for a grand, unified theory – a grand wonderful solution to all of our problems, and I have not produced an answer yet. The difference is that Einstein really was groping the entire time. He never showed a major step forward. Whereas I am much more confident that Erasmatron will solve the problems. And Mateas and Stern have published a tiny version of Unified Field Theory – so we know it can be done. But it’s weird and immensely difficult. I may not have the strength to pull it off, but I retain great confidence in the likelihood of success.”

It is the peculiar tragedy of genius that the greatest minds of any generation find themselves drawn to challenges that are beyond the limits of their era. Tesla invented the radio and the alternating current before embarking on a fruitless quest for broadcast power. Einstein gave us the special and general theories of relativity before turning his attention to the unified field theory that eluded him to his death. It is quite possible that Chris Crawford, perhaps the most gifted designer of his generation, is destined for a similar fate.

But I actually think not. When Crawford emerges from the wilderness of his isolation, like Musashi with the Book of Five Rings, count me as unsurprised.

This interview was originally published on The Escapist on 27 September 2005 under my pseudonym Max Steele.

This interview with Brad Wardell of Stardock, designer of Galactic Civilizations and publisher of Sins of a Solar Empire and Sorceror King, took place as part of the DevGame course on March 4, 2016:

VD: Today we're talking with Brad Wardell. He is the founder and CEO of Stardock. He is one of the industry's leading designers of what we call 4X strategy games, which I will let him explain what they are. He is the designer of the Galactic Civilizations series and the publisher of Sins of a Solar Empire. He has also worked with our old friend Chris Taylor on Demigod and his latest game is Sorcerer King. 

Brad: Hi, glad to be here.

VD: First of all, I want to point out that Brad is an excellent designer. I've got several of his games. I've played both Galactic Civilizations II and Sins of a Solar Empire, which PC Gamer just last week recently named two of the 25 all-time top strategy games. Brad, congratulations for that.

Brad: Ah, thanks.

VD: Now what exactly is a 4X strategy game? Why has that become a category in its own right?

Brad: A 4X game follows a very specific pattern. If you think of chess, or any number of common strategy genres, they all have their own style. 4X has a very specific style which stands for eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate. So the beginning of the 4X is always about starting with very little, you grow into something, you find your opponents and then you use what you have to try to beat them. There are a lot of other terms for them, such as “empire builders”, for example, but overall 4X has come to mean a specific strategy genre that includes not just Galactic Civilizations, but Master of Orion, Civilization, and various other titles.

VD: Now, we have studied the history of games throughout the course, so I'm interested in knowing which strategy games were most influential on you in developing Galactic Civilizations.

Brad: Well, clearly Civilization. When I did Galactic Civilizations, I was still in college and very naïve on IP laws, clearly. It was a different time in 1992, and I wanted something like Civilization, but in space. So, I came up with the radical name of Galactic Civilizations. That, obviously, had a pretty tremendous impact on the initial start up of the game. And over the past 20 years, numerous other titles have had influences here and there on the development of the series.

VD: You and I are pretty close in age, so what were some of the strategy games that you were playing back in 1992?

Brad: There was Spaceward Ho, certainly Empire.

VD: Were you ever into the board-and-counter wargames or were you more of a computer strategy guy?

Brad: There was always Risk, but back in those days when I would be playing a non-computer game it was usually Dungeons & Dragons.

VD: So you're more of a role-playing game guy rather than a war gamer?

Brad: Yeah. I'm less into the Panzer General sort of thing, I like history and all, but I'm not into it just for fighting wars.

VD: So, getting outside the strategy genre, what were some of your favorite games when you were younger?

Brad: I would say Archon. This was the Commodore 64 era. There was Zork and the Ultima series. When I got to PC, it was Star Control and the Wing Commander series.

VD: What system did you usually play on?

Brad: Well I started on the Commodore 64. That was my first computer.When I got a PC in 1989,  I got a 286 which was just a PC clone.. I'm trying to think of the very first games for the PC I might've played. It would've been an Ultima.

VD: How did you go from doing 4X strategy to designing business games like Business Tycoon and Entrepreneur? It's a little unusual to just hop into the business-type of games. What inspired you to do that? Was it your own experience as entrepreneur?

Brad: Running a business is often like a strategy game because you have very finite resources; you have competitors and you have to win "territories" in the form of physical geography or market share. So, it ironically just worked out that those kinds of games or those businesses lend themselves to turning into strategy games.

VD: You've moved from doing science fiction with Galactic Civilizations into doing 4X fantasy with Fallen Enchantress and Sorcerer King. What were some of the challenges that were involved in moving from science fiction to fantasy?

Brad: The biggest one for us was going from a space-based game like Galactic Civilizations II to a land-based game like Fallen Enchantress. Specifically, the terrain. You are dealing with the ground. And that turned out to be a huge challenge for us because we had never had to deal with it before. We had never really run up against things like video memory or the limitations of DirectX in terms of how to make a mountain. You think about it, of course, but how you make something like a mountain can be limiting based on DirectX, because there's only so many points you can put on there. So that turned out to be a huge hurdle for us, and that really bit us in the butt, because, at the time, we didn't do our homework on what we could and couldn't do with the current technology.

VD: Interesting. That's very timely because we're going to be getting into things like polygon count and so forth when we talk about art later today. Now, in the publishing world, the market for fantasy is considerably larger than the one for science fiction. Is that true in games as well, or do you find that science fiction usually outsells fantasy?

Brad: I read mostly science fiction myself. In the game arena, I would say science fiction tends to be a bit ahead of fantasy, only because the problem people run into with fantasy is that they think fantasy means medieval Europe with magic. And that's not a just a problem in terms of the designer's limits, it's more the expectations of the public. If you move too far outside the box, you are punished for it in the marketplace. Whereas in science fiction, you have a little bit more room to breathe.

VD: Speaking of moving outside the box, I was really fascinated to see how you took a crowdsourcing approach to the Sorcerer King quests. How did that work out, and what were some of the challenges that came about from doing it that way?

Brad: Yeah, that was a very fun and interesting experience. It is one that I would like to do again in the future because it worked out so well. Essentially, the problem we ran into came down to the budget. We are an independent developer, the team size for Sorcerer King was like six people, so it was pretty small. It had a relatively small budget, but we needed to have lots and lots of quests. So one of the ways to do that was to say, look, here's a tool, let's make quests, and we will hang out on Skype together and you send in your quests and I'll sort through them, and we will put them in the game then come up with some way to give goodies or some sort of reward in exchange. There was no competition because there was no budget for any of this.

VD: Right, but you are able to compensate them by in-game rewards and that sort of thing.

Brad: And there were credits, of course, as a lot of people are trying to build up their portfolios. But most the time, for most of them, it was obviously just for fun. What I'd like to do in the future - and I actually just came back from Valve where we discussed this - is that I'd like to see a system, an apprentice/journeyman/master system on Steam where novice developers can start selling their stuff and work their way up. It would be a marketplace that didn't only consist of premium stuff but rather, people worked their way towards that if they want to do something more than just casual modding. With that sort of marketplace for user-created content, I think players would end up with so much more content for their favorite games.

VD: That sounds similar to what we're doing where with DEVGAME. We've got six different dev intern teams in the group here as part of this course.

Brad: Cool.

VD: So you've already answered my next question, which is how large your development teams are compared to the past. It sounds as if  they are actually much the same size they used to be back in the day. What sort of range are your budgets these days?

Brad: It depends on the game. Sorcerer King was an unusually small project, but I would say on the minimum side, four developers are required. Every game you need an engineer, preferably two. You need at least a couple of artists to make the kind of games that we like to make. And on the high-end, you can get into over a dozen people but we don't have any games that involve dozens and dozens of people or anything like that.

VD: And how long are your development periods normally?

Brad: We try to aim for somewhere between 24 and 36 months.

VD: That long? I didn't realize that.

Brad: Yeah, we have games and development that won't ship until 2018.

VD: Wow, fantastic. Now, this is something that I'd like to ask every designer or producer, what do you consider to have been your best design or development decision, and what was your worst one?

Brad: The worst ones are always easier for me. I would say the best one was actually The Political Machine. The original Political Machine was supposed to be a game like You Don't Know Jack, which was a trivia game of some years ago. 

VD: I remember that one.

Brad: The game was mostly political trivia.We were committed to ship this game at retail in June with Ubisoft, and a couple of months before, we were playing our internal beta and it was just not any fun. It was terrible. So at the last second, we redesigned the game into more of a strategy game, with each state being a territory that you had to capture for its electoral votes. We did all that right at the end and rewrote it in about a month. I don't recommend that as a good thing in general, but that was what saved that game. 

On the bad side, Elemental from start to finish was just a disaster. That was the game that preceded Fallen Enchantress and people don't usually hear about it except for when people are trying to criticize me on the Internet. That was a project where we were so in love with all of the things that we wanted to do with the game. We wanted to do all this stuff, and we tried, but it turned out the engine just couldn't handle it. It wasn't even a matter of the hardware, it just turned out that DirectX could only have so many vertices and you could only do so much with it. We ran into all of these artificial problems because we had never dug deeply enough into DirectX at the time. At the end, we were chopping this project that was originally going to be a Master of Magic-style game into something that was nothing like what we intended to make, but was what we could get in there and still have the engine work with it.

VD: Yeah, I can imagine where that would be a problem. Sorcerer King is your most recent game and you have two more games coming out soon, can you tell us about those?

Brad: Sure. We shipped Galactic Civilizations III last May. Sorcerer King came out in July. Just this past week, we shipped Galactic Civilizations: Mercenaries and we released Political Machine 2016 last week too. So it's been a pretty busy few months. The next game on the line is Ashes of the Singularity. I'm out here in Maryland working on it until it ships. It's a massive real-time strategy game where you are dealing with thousands of units and you're trying to conquer a world. That is supposed to come out this spring. Also this spring is Offworld Trading Company where you start a company on Mars and are competing with other corporations for dominance of the Martian colony.

VD: Okay, cool. We will keep an eye out for those. Brad, thanks so much for stopping by DEVGAME. I really appreciate it, and we will look forward to speaking again with you soon.

Brad: I appreciate it. Thanks a lot!