RSI Museum ep01 . Strike Commander

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:24

   [Music] all right well uh welcome to the very first video interview of the RSI Museum here talking to Chris Roberts and Rob Irving two of our Cloud Imperium employees who are veterans of a game called strike Commander Y which was released 20 years ago demo strike corner there for you released 20 years ago next month and uh just released on gog.com for $599 if anyone wants to give it a try uh so why don't you start by telling me uh what each of you did on the project uh well

2. 00:01:14

   let's see I was the uh Project Director and um I I I don't know whether i' say lead programmer but I certainly did a lot of programming on it so Jason yeah Jason telon and myself did uh most of the most of the the core initial programming anyway and built the real space system which was the engine that drove strike Commander later on Wing Commander 3 Wing Commander 4 Pacific strike uh wings wings of glory and a bunch of other Origin Games we had so Rob I was in TDA because we didn't have designers yet and uh I built most of the game Flow actually which is the the structure say what TDA stands for technical design assistant basically we did all the jobs the programmers didn't want to do was essentially how it got started at origin well and also but also like map play out so like what level

3. 00:02:02

   basically what a level designer does now is kind of what a TDA did yeah exactly and a lot of number crunching and everything just like it is today all right how did strike Commander come about uh did you come up with an after wink Commander was released or was this something that was in your head uh previously uh I'm not sure if it was something that was in my head previously I was sort of thinking about the next game I wanted to do and I wanted to uh do something uh slight different I was sort of pretty intrigued by uh the flight Sim aspect and I wanted to uh sort of take uh the wing Commander presentation and storytelling approach even further than was done in the very first Wing commander and kind of what we were doing Wing 2 and uh put in a different setting and I thought it' be kind of interesting to sort of take Monday uh jet fighter combat but sort of

4. 00:02:52

   project it into the far future of 2011 uh where Society sort of for fall apart and you know corporations have uh you know become more and more powerful and they're sort of all independent uh mercenary uh squadrons or armies you can even hire to sort of Do Your Dirty business or fight for territory or resources now strike continued your legacy of extremely cinematic games um if win Commander was letting people live in a Star Wars film what what was the was the inspiration for strike uh well I think uh uh you know there's definitely a lot of Top Gun in it although you're not quite as uh military is so I would I would sort of say uh I would say that there was a there was a fair amount of Top Gun uh

5. 00:03:41

   and then I'm trying to think as we sort of had this uh uh storyline that sort of involved people that were you know best friends at one point and split across into sort of competing uh squadrons over their principles which uh uh is something I think is pretty common in in uh in in various forms of narrative I can't remember if that was necessarily inspired by a particular movie but uh but it certainly was and the other thing that's interesting to note if you look at um uh the characters in um uh strike Commander they all have resemblances to certain uh fairly well-known actors you would know so at one point we were trying to persuade uh origin or I was trying to persuade origin to see if we could go and like get Mel Gibson to voice the the lead and and and let us have his likeness so we just kind of

6. 00:04:28

   have a guy that looks like I'll give in at the moment that's prob before before he got crazy now on release you described great K's development as being uh the equivalent of Apocalypse Now for your gaming uh do you still look back on that way or did you remember those days more fondly and uh well it's funny because uh you know I I was just I was actually reading my sort of Apocalypse Now uh forward in Sun death which is the manual in in Str commander and uh if I I'll I I put out here for you uh where was it again it was it's a whole thing here it is y okay so strike Commander a game designers apocalypse it was two and a half years ago just after release of win Commander that I started out what I estimated to

7. 00:05:15

   be a one-year project two and a half years now is like super quick for any game design uh but OB back then it sort of felt like an eternity cuz uh you know Wing Commander was done about 18 months or so and I guess with this I was thinking yeah we can do it in year um and you know I think we brought it out two and a half years later and EA was very upset because they sort of bought us uh before we finished it and we said hey we're releasing this soon and it took us a little longer but uh looking back on it um you know relatively considering what we did which was pretty revolutionary we uh you know we had uh proper 3D uh on the terrain on the on the on all the objects it was Garo shading and texture mapping it was real texture mapping so no other PC game at the time nor than any other PC game for quite a few few years afterwards ever do like proper real-time texture mapping

8. 00:06:02

   like Doom was 2 and a half D I think Quake was the first ID game that had proper 3D texture mapping uh so we did a bunch of things or a real real uh Real Time 3D cockpit and all that and all that stuff was you know stuff that you see in Monday flight Sims and no one had seen you know still it took years before anyone else did it so I I'm pretty proud of what we did so to achieve all that and build a technology that was the base of many more games origin like Wing three and Wing four and um you know Pacific strike and these other games uh was was pretty impressive but it was definitely it was hard work I mean the team worked six to seven days a week 16 hours a day and we thought we were doing it for a year and ended up being about two and a half days so that was probably the hard like in terms of constant burn or constant Crush that was probably the the the biggest gun I think that sort of

9. 00:06:50

   added a lot to the the sense of uh Apocalypse Now um but looking back on it I think it's kind of uh amusing that two and a half years seemed like eternity when some games will take you know like um freelancer was six years before it came out or rage I think I can't remember where it was rage was six or seven years ID or something so and I don't know how much the most recent Grand Theft Auto but that's certainly not two and a half years it's a bit longer than that too so uh so I guess maybe you know with with hindsight uh maybe not as apocalyptic as I thought but uh but yeah a lot of sleeping under desks waiting for builds at 4:00 in the morning things like that uh a lot of uh Wing Commander players were surprised by strike Commander's flight model instead of an arcade game it was an extremely accurate F-16 simulation uh why did you go in that

10. 00:07:38

    direction uh well I know I'm glad you recognize that Ben but uh I think when the game came out a lot of people actually didn't even realize or give us Kudos I mean I I remember that people were complaining that you know F-16 Falcon was much more uh you know Falcon 3 was much more accurate um and uh it wasn't actually I mean we actually spent a lot of time uh modeling it out and and uh we had quite a few uh Iraq first Iraqi War veterans that flew f-16s that flew it for us and gave us their feedback so we actually uh decided that because that was we wanted to sort of have a realistic flight simulator that was also fun and so we sort of went uh for that uh and I think maybe because the fictional setting and and sort of the way it was set up and the legacy of wink commanda people didn't assume it was uh accurate and you know that's just the thing people assumed Falcon was

11. 00:08:27

    accurate because that's what it was sold as and ours couldn't have been accurate so things that were were not correct in Falcon were sort of taken into being correct um but yeah now we just thought it would be fun to try and make something that was fun but accurate at the same time you want to say something Rob I was just G to say as much of the research as they'd let us have we looked up every missile everything we could get our hands on that they would let us have amms were classified we couldn't find out how fast they were yeah now arguably strike Commander's biggest Innovation was its use of textured 3D models instead of pre-rendered bit maps how did that come about uh well so originally what we were going to do is we were going to have the landscape was going to be textured and gar shaded and then when we revealed it I think uh we did a big reveal in 1991 at CES we blew everyone away uh and

12. 00:09:18

    at that time we actually the ships were like they were in wi Commander where we had pre-rendered uh we' made 3D models and then rendered them as uh views all around them and then we would draw whichever bitmap view that was closest to where you were looking at um and uh we were going to model like buildings on the ground because they were pretty simple with Texas and stuff and we built this editor called eore EO R which was built by Paul Isaac who was you know long time work with me on win Commander times lore uh and then uh strike commander and everything I did at uh e origin and then later on came with me digitel and he'd written this editor and we'd uh we'd had this uh new promising kid that just came out of the air force uh called Paul Steed and uh none of the real artists actually wanted to do with

13. 00:10:06

    any of this like low rare boring 3D stuff so Paul was like oh yeah I'll I'll I'll build a couple of buildings or whatever and so he went off and he was playing with his tool which compared to the stuff we have now is super primitive and like a week later he sort of came to my office and said hey I want to show you something and he' like modeled like an F16 in this 3D tool and it's not like it wasn't a tool that's like now you do it really nicely in Max and import it in it was like was hard to use but it looked amazing and we were like oh my God okay we and then so we basically threw out all the bitm stuff and decided to every all the everything the planes as well as the I mean the we were always doing the the the you know buildings on the ground and the landscape it's 3D but we were going to do the plane we didn't think we'd get enough detail in the planes using real-time Graphics cuz this was software you didn't have as much nowhere

14. 00:10:54

    near as horsepower that we have now but he pulled it we're like oh my God we got to have that and you now I look back at the graphics and it looks pretty primitive but uh back then it was literally mind-blowing and uh you know that was a you know Paul Steed had a big reason uh for that happening and I think so he was pretty big contributor to sort of moving forward real-time 3D objects in games strike was set in the distant future of 2011 did you still think you think he would still be making games today at that time uh well you know that was what was that 20 I think when we came up the setting it was like 20 years ahead of time I don't know that's probably you know the uh you know youth so uh I mean I'm not sure that was like oh I'm only going to make games for 10 years and

15. 00:11:40

    I'll be dead at the age of 30 or something but I don't think yeah I don't think we were I don't think we definitely picked 2011 thinking that seemed like quite a distance off and I guess we sort of felt like if we picked something like 2030 or 2040 that it would get into the realm where everyone would think it would have to have sci-fi and spaceships Stu I'm looking to see if you have a bio in here oh no there's not one for you cuz I said in 5 years I'd be writing fulltime or 10 years I'd be writing full time so we don't get that from you yeah writing full time that's that's what I said so no I didn't think I was going to be Mak video games was there anything cut from Strike Commander that you regretted early previews included an unusual array of aircraft including a P38 instead of just the modern jets uh when did that change I don't remember a P38 yeah I I don't remember the p 38 um I mean it was

16. 00:12:32

    I I can't remember what we did I mean I think uh you were always it was always a mercenary Squadron and you were always going to be flying jets I think we dabbled around with the idea that you take occasionally could like have an older school um kind of you know like a Mustang or something and then I think we junked it because we sort of decided that it just wasn't going to be very fun for you to be flying a World War II uh era fighter against a M day jet fighter there isn't much competition when that happens um so I think that was it but no I don't really regret I mean I I sort of feel I actually feel like Shri Commander pretty much ended up with everything we wanted in it was it was probably one of the uh best crafted games that that I've been involved in so you know win Commander always say like you know I made win Commander it was pretty much

17. 00:13:19

    the game that ended up was the game that was in my head and we designed it on paper and it just happened like it just everything just sort of worked first time bam like that we didn't really have to revise anything none of the missions were like balanced or anything it was literally the design that was done on paper strike Commander was a little different it sort of felt like it was sort of like uh like I said crafted it was almost like you know doing the Venus do Milo or whatever where we really like chipped away and formed and made it you know but every aspect by the time it was finished felt really polished uh you know really well done and so it's actually one of the games that I'm the proudest of I think at the time um it had a hard time uh getting some of the recognition obviously a lot of people liked it but because of the hardware requirements you know essentially it wasn't very playable unless you had a 48633 and 48633 it was super smooth and

18. 00:14:08

    a lot of fun but if you didn't have that then um it could be frustrating and I think that was probably one of the things that sort of held it back it was almost sort of too far ahead of its time were there ever any plans for a follow-up to strike another tactical Provisions disc I've heard of something called Phoenix Force oh yeah uh can't remember so much about Phoenix Force but we did it we did we did one I think we did at least one um Mission disc uh and I'm not sure about on the strike Commander side sort of came out we sold we actually I ended up actually selling really well but at the time it sort of felt a bit underwhelming mainly because maybe it was the two and a half years development or whatever and then I got sort of busy on Wing Commander 3 and then that thing then that sort of blew up so I I don't think and this was so there wasn't any conscious decision not

19. 00:14:56

    to do a sequel uh there also wasn't any ious sort of plan to do a sequel but we got to run off and make a World War II game which was really cool since Wing Commander had inspired us to go back to that two combat so that was Pacific strike yeah that was loads of fun today can you tell me the story behind zap SC PR hi PR wherever you are so on his first day because they had just canceled our three Legends and PR came to work for us this very first day PR got hold of utility that I think Jason had built which was used to quickly delete directories from your computer cuz that was hard to do back then and it didn't check if it was a network drive so on day one PR deleted our entire Source tree from the network so it and all the programers spent the entire

20. 00:15:45

    weekend I mean literally 72 hours straight rebuilding Source from Individual machines and putting it back together so pray became known as wipe out because of that yeah no it was I don't remember anyone was very happy at that point this is not not all the ated backup systems you have now in fact I I uh I think we had just gotten a network or something in An Origin cuz when we did Wing command there wasn't any network it was basically what they called sneaker net someone went you know to the next person's office with the disc uh so yeah no that was not a good start for Prem but he he he he turned good in the long run thanks for letting me work on your game what's this big red button do all right now I've I've spoken to a couple folks and they've all indicated that the strike Commander ship party was an interesting time anything you can uh

21. 00:16:33

    share or remember I have no recollection of that party uh yeah no we had we basically we had the ship party we had it at my uh first house in Austin which was out on Lake Travis um and uh uh you know we we had been two and a half years and at the time that was incredibly long for any project and everyone had worked really hard so obviously there was a lot of uh and everyone was really close and there was a lot of uh and we were all pretty young which means uh we all had high high uh desires and tolerances to alcohol uh so there was a huge amount of drinking that happened uh uh my brother eron um I think won the uh won the cup for that as he normally does he's he's a actually was quite famous for we used to

22. 00:17:21

    call him the Six Million margarita man that was his sort of nickname for his uh his his drinking exploits uh and uh yeah it's uh I mean uh various I had a stone there was a stone table that were was in the garden area uh that was literally broken into by people dancing on top of it uh there was people passed out in the garden in the Gazebo area everywhere uh so it was it was it was pretty uh uh yeah it was pretty epic party I mean don't forget everyone at origin most of people then were much younger than they are now like everyone's now old you know don't drink like that but this is a bun of uh 20year olds that had just worked their asses off for 2 and a half years seven days a week now did you take anything away from Strike Commander that you carry with you still to a Star

23. 00:18:11

    Citizen uh well I mean you know I I stri so like there's a there's there's a style of immersion and into like so for instance for me I really like immersion into world and a universe and there's a style of uh interface that I like to do that sort of is in the theme of the world like I don't like uh game interfaces that are on top of whatever the view of your world is and sort of strike Commander perfected that from what we started with wing Commander so like when you were seeing your ship and you wanted to load out the weapons you literally saw your fighter sitting on on the tarmac with you know these different uh missiles all sitting in their little little carts they'll be pulled in just like you see if you see a picture of an F-16 with all the weapons displayed out in front of it and you would pick it up so I I think that strike Commander pretty much perfected that sort of uh

24. 00:19:00

    cinematic uh kind of immersion style that was you know we did a win Commander 3 but in win Commander 3 it was with live action instead of handdrawn stuff and it was what we started in Wing Commander but sort of strike Commander was the most polished version of it and you know you can to this you know to this day if you play something like Starcraft 2 and you look at their story stuff they're in between their mission stuff it is 100% that um setup and system and they've in fact said that they were were sort of inspired by kind of what Wing commander and some of the lady games did so I would say that was uh kind of one of the areas uh that I would I took away and um the other thing is doing your own like doing R&D Tech design on uh stuff that no one else has done before is harder than you don't me think it is it takes longer but those

25. 00:19:48

    are my two takeaways I don't if you have any Rob yeah actually for me it was funny CU I just assumed every game was that well crafted once I worked on my first game in the industry I'm like yeah everybody does this and I went to other companies and realized that a lot of people didn't care about their games that much and didn't work that hard and didn't go to that extra level on the game so you know I'm like this is where I want to be AAA that's where I want to be now would you like to revisit the strike Commander setting someday could we see Sky citizen in the future uh well I you know I would say that I had a lot of fun with strike Commander but I definitely feel that like sort of real world stuff is more limiting than doing something like uh Wing Commander or Star Citizen which is much more sort of you're in space and you can pretty much you you have it all you can do all the crazy stuff in space

26. 00:20:36

    you can make your rules up or you could do stuff that could be sci-fi down the planet so so as fun as it was I'm not sure I would want to go back and do like a uh sort of more harder core realistic simulator I think we already got this one right anyway FY s c s CS CS C FY F CS C all the way and uh this is all everything and so what happened was uh uh late night uh I can't remember whether we would been out somewhere maybe we'd all been out E3 maybe no no no it was definitely an Austin but um essentially what happened is we work really hard so we would work six or seven days but occasionally Aaron would organize the team night out so we would basically all go out somewhere on Sixth Street because there was in Austin there was no Fourth Street or Warehouse dist any of that

27. 00:21:23

    stuff at that time and everyone would drink themselves blind uh and then I think one time we sort of came back to the office afterwards and everyone was going around uh basically singing and like I can't remember someone decided like we were going to do like an angry punk rocker song and so decided it was going to be the strike Commander strong uh and this was actually pretty uh it was like maybe a year into development or something but basically what it was was and hopefully there's no 11y olds but if there are you turn off the thing right now U but it was is uh or I'll just it'll be Fu which you can figure out what the fu is Strike Commander strike Commander strike Commander so imagine like an English punk rock stri stri stri and that was basically what people were like singing

28. 00:22:12

    because they was like I can't remember who it was I think Thomas Blom had his guitar and he was like doing the punk so basically it was sort of like this you know Johnny roton dicko ma was probably involed was definitely invol that so anyway so that became and that sort of became the unofficial strike Commander chant which was you know Fu strike Commander strike Commander which was based on this sort of punk rock impression thing we did when everyone's trashed and it's stuck and that's why it's on there and uh and all the stuff so only really the development team knows that but now all you guys do too secet it's probably much more funny for us than you guys but anyway right I'd like to thank you very much for being on our very first episode of the RSI Museum I'm sure we'll be talking to both you about other projects in the future um and uh happy 20th strike Commander all

29. 00:23:00

    right awesome well thank you Ben thanks for asking the questions and thank you guys for watching