When you think of the great military shooter franchises, Spec Ops does not come to mind. Created by Zombie Studios, the series was a budget franchise, the kind of game you’d find in the discount bin at Kmart. From 1998 to 2002, the franchise released nine installments. The first two games in the franchise, Spec Ops: Rangers Lead the Way and Spec Ops: Ranger Team Bravo, were well received. The following seven, not so much. I can’t tell you why, because I’ve never played them. But if I had to guess, it had something to do with releasing seven games in just three years. Maybe the quick development schedule caused a drop in quality, or maybe players became burnt out on the franchise. Too much too fast is never a good thing. Whatever the reason, after 2002, Spec Ops games disappeared from the shelves. After that, the franchise somehow ended up at Rockstar—yes, the same Rockstar that makes Grand Theft Auto—where a new installment sat in development for two years before it was canceled for unknown reasons.
Finally, in 2006, it came to us.
“Do you play a lot of military shooters?” asked the Fox.
“Not really.” I grimaced, hoping my honesty wasn’t about to kill my chances of working on the game. “I played some Counter-Strike back in the day, but aside from that, the genre just never appealed to me.” This was mostly true. My dislike for military shooters actually stemmed from my field training at Lackland Air Force Base back in 2002.
One evening, all the trainees gathered in the auditorium to listen to an AC-130 gunner discuss his tours in the Middle East. To accompany his talk, he showed a video from one of his missions. Through the grainy lens of the targeting camera, we watched little white dots sprint for cover as they tried to avoid the death from above. In the background, we could hear the gunner cracking jokes as the dots fell, one by one, and went still.
The gunner’s casual attitude didn’t bother me. I don’t know what it’s like to kill someone, but from all accounts it sticks with you. This guy killed people for a living. It made sense he would develop an emotional distance between himself and his work. What I found unnerving, though, was the reaction from my fellow trainees. They were laughing and cheering like we were at the movies. There were many reasons for everyone to feel okay about what we were watching. The footage bore no resemblance to reality. It was grainy, black and white, shot from high in the sky. The people dying on-screen were dots, blips. Even if you could muster empathy for them, they were still enemy combatants. Their deaths had been sanctioned for the greater good. So why couldn’t I shake the feeling we had just watched a snuff film?
I’d always felt a little out of place in the military because I naturally bristle at legally mandated conformity and an institutionalized class system, but those were temporary constraints I accepted when I signed away four years of my life; I’d have to deal. But this was something different. This was the celebration of death. The loss of life is tragic—any life. War happens; I accept that. When it does, death is inevitable. But it is still tragic.
That was the moment I realized the military wasn’t for me. Afterward, whenever I played military shooters like Call of Duty or Battlefield, they made me feel the same as I did in that auditorium.
I didn’t say any of this to the Fox. There’s a belief in this industry that in order to make a great game you must love the genre or franchise you’re working on, as if only a foaming-at-the-mouth fanatic can understand what players want. If you’ve ever wondered why so many video games feel like microwaved leftovers, this is why. Fans are wonderful and should always be embraced, but their opinions can be deadly to the creative process. Fandom is an organized religion whose holy laws are handed down by people who get angry on the Internet. By defining what something should and should not be, fans secure ownership over that which they love. When their passion informs rather than inspires, it becomes a millstone around a creator’s neck.
You don’t get into game development if you don’t love and play games. That shared passion blurs the line between creator and player. When we see ourselves as players, we design to our audience, believing we are designing for ourselves. By doing this, we forget that our job is not to give players what they want; our job is to show them things they never imagined.
As a writer and designer, I would much rather work on a project for which I have no affinity. I don’t need to make something I like; those things already exist. The pleasure they provide me comes from experiencing them as part of the audience. The pleasure I get from writing and design comes from the challenge. For me, there is no greater challenge than taking something I couldn’t care less about and finding a way to approach it that sparks my interest.
I told myself this was the reason I said yes when the Fox asked if I wanted to work on Spec Ops, despite my opinion on military shooters.
As my mother has always said, “That’s a great excuse, but it’s not a very good reason.” The truth is, I wanted to make Spec Ops because I’m a hypocrite. As a military shooter, it would embody a lot of what turned me away from the military. It would also be a full-blown AAA game with a focus on narrative. This was an opportunity to help build a game from the ground up. If it did well, it would potentially open a lot of doors. Could I honestly ignore my beliefs for the sake of furthering my career?
Yes—absolutely and without hesitation.
TO MAKE THIS GAME, we needed a development partner. We found one in Yager, an independent studio located in Berlin, Germany. They were new, having only released two games, both of which were combat flight simulators. They lacked AAA experience, but 2K did not. By working together, the Fox knew we could create something special.
Our competition was fierce. We were up against fan-favorite franchises Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon, Battlefield, and Call of Duty. Each of them had carved their own niche into the genre.
Originally developed by Red Storm Entertainment, Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon franchises were both inspired by Tom Clancy novels. As tactical shooters, they aim for realistic combat, requiring players to focus on caution and tactics rather than fast reflexes. Often, a single bullet is enough to get the player killed. While the two franchises have a lot in common, their core gameplay is very different. Rainbow Six focuses on heavily planned infiltration tactics, whereas Ghost Recon is designed for on-the-fly battlefield tactics. If we were to pick two verbs to describe each game, Rainbow Six would be breach and clear; Ghost Recon would be outmaneuver and progress.
The Battlefield franchise, developed by Visceral Games and EA DICE, built its name on large multiplayer battles, which can include up to sixty-four players at once. These matches take place on large maps designed to simulate the widespread chaos of real war. To further that design, players are not limited to the normal run-and-gun gameplay associated with FPS multiplayer; they can expand their combat arsenal by commandeering vehicles such as tanks and planes.
Activision’s Call of Duty is a franchise so big it’s developed by three studios—Infinity Ward, Treyarch, and Sledgehammer Games. By excelling in both single-player and multiplayer design, Call of Duty has earned its place as the king of military shooters. Its narrative campaigns are nonstop, action-packed affairs, probably the closest video games have come to distilling summer-movie blockbusters into an interactive experience. Its multiplayer mode matches the stellar gameplay with a progression system that rewards player skill by unlocking gameplay options, both during a match and afterward. It’s a perfectly designed addiction loop built around the smoothest, most responsive gameplay in the genre. Play unlocks new features, which lead to more play, which increases your skill, which unlocks new features, and so on.
These were all time-tested franchises, with formulas refined over multiple installments. We weren’t foolish enough to think Spec Ops could make a run at any of them. All we wanted was to carve out our own niche so we could stand beside the greats and hopefully enjoy a reasonable piece of the market share.
YAGER’S PITCH FOR SPEC OPS was exactly what you’d expect from a military shooter: Dubai is taken over by terrorists, and three Delta operators are sent in to rescue the city’s captive billionaires. The military shooter genre was already packed with games about duty-driven Caucasian soldiers fighting terrorists of unidentifiable nationality. If Spec Ops was going to succeed, we needed to offer players something different, so we threw out the guts and kept the skin.
The location, time period, and setup remained the same—three soldiers fighting in present-day Dubai. That was the box we had to work within. As far as creative constraints go, these were spectacular. They were loose enough that we could essentially write any story we wanted. At the same time, they were defined just enough that we were able to bypass the initial brainstorming and not get lost in the weeds of preproduction.
Trying to decide the who, where, and when can be an enjoyable part of the brainstorming process. It’s fun to sit around spitballing ideas, to feel that rush of adrenaline when a concept ignites the possibilities in your brain. But it can also be very treacherous to navigate. A new idea is like a new relationship. It’s exciting, electrifying. Everything about it seems perfect and unspoiled. Dwell on it for too long, however, and suddenly the new idea becomes an old idea. The initial excitement wears off, and its cracks begin to show. You wonder how you could have ever been so blind. This idea was never good. You can do better than this. So you begin to brainstorm again, and soon a new idea catches your eye, and that familiar chill runs down your spine as your scalp tingles with elation. This is it, you think. This is a brilliant idea. And the cycle begins anew. Everyone gets caught in this trap. Coming up with an idea is easy; the pleasure is almost instantaneous. It’s instant gratification that requires zero follow-through. Good stuff, but deadly to the creative process. A great idea can get you high, but the process of actually bringing it to life will lay you low. If you get addicted to that new-idea buzz, then every time you hit a creative wall, you’ll go back for another hit, and you’ll never move forward.
Coming off the success of BioShock, the Fox wanted to double down on dark and gritty. “We need something with a story,” he said. “Something thought-provoking that makes people scream, ‘What the fuck did I just play?’ ”
Yager’s art director, Mathias Wiese, ran with the idea and drew concept art showing Dubai half buried beneath the desert. There was no reason behind it; he simply thought it looked cool. Normally, that would be enough to make me hate it. Cool is one of those meaningless terms that get tossed around during development. It is nothing and everything—cultural dark matter. Its parameters are subjective. You could almost argue it doesn’t exist, except for the fact its proof is all around us: the clothes we wear, the games we play, the music we love. Coolness is the lifeblood of mainstream entertainment. As pop-culture artists, we live and die on our cool. That’s why cool is the most dangerous word in video games. We chase a concept that cannot be defined, terrified it will elude us, and in the grip of our fear, we are easily controlled.
In this case, however, I had to admit, a sand-covered Dubai looked pretty cool.
Taking that image and the Fox’s directive, I wrote a one-page story proposal riffing on Apocalypse Now, a film that military shooters had somehow not yet ripped off. The concept was centered on a US Army colonel who goes rogue and seizes control of an abandoned, sand-covered Dubai. A trio of Delta operators is sent into the ruined city to find the Colonel and take him down.
When writing one-pagers, I never come up with characters’ names. At that point in the process, there’s no guarantee what you’re writing will make it to the final product. Anything and everything could end up on the chopping block, usually sooner than later. It’s like working at a cattle ranch—you don’t name the cow you’re eating for dinner. This being a military story, it was easy to explain the plot without naming my characters. Everyone was referred to by rank. We had the player’s character—the Captain—the two Squadmates, the Lieutenant, the Sergeant, and finally the villain, the Colonel. That would have been the end of it, except for one problem: I am a fucking glutton. I love to eat, and not well—the junkier, the better. Fried chicken is a particular passion of mine. If I see it on TV or on someone else’s plate at a restaurant, I have no choice but to get my own or else spiral into seething jealousy. This made it difficult for me to type “the Colonel” over and over. The further I got into the document, the more my mouth began to water. Instead of finishing it, all I could think about was driving to the nearest KFC and sacrificing my digestive tract on the altar of that white-suited Kentuckian. My story proposal would be completely lost on the reader, if they happened to love fried chicken nearly as much as I did. The Colonel needed a name change, or else my efforts would amount to nothing more than fast-food propaganda.
When it comes to naming things, I’m a devout follower of the “I Spy” method. If I can see it from where I’m sitting, it will eventually show up in one of my stories. That day, it just so happened, my copy of Heart of Darkness was sitting beside my keyboard. I glanced at the author’s name—Joseph Conrad. It seemed too on the nose. I needed to make it less obvious, so I swapped the C for a K and voila! Problem solved.
I said a silent prayer to our Mortal Kombat, whose victories art flawless, toasty be its name, and thanked it for teaching us K would always be cooler than C.
I emailed the proposal to the Fox and headed home.
“Hey,” he called out as I walked to the door. “This is brilliant.”
The shock must have been clear on my face, because he quickly backpedaled. “I mean, it’s good. It’s not bad. I think it’s workable.” His praise grew fainter with every sentence, but none of it registered. In his enthusiasm, the Fox had fucked up. My proposal was brilliant, ergo so was I. He sent the one-pager to Yager. I went home, confident they would love it. I was going to write this fucking game, and no one would be able to deny me.
A FEW WEEKS LATER, I sat in Yager’s conference room, staring across the table at the writer they had hired to turn my idea into a script. We’ll call him Mr. Sunshine.
I was rambling, as I always do when I first meet someone alone. Socially, I am a naturally shy person. I have to meet someone a few times before I’m comfortable enough to be myself. Professionally, I don’t have that problem. If I’m talking to someone because of my job, all of my insecurities disappear. It doesn’t matter if someone dislikes me; we’re there to work, not make friends. To get these conversations going, I developed a form of rambling that would help break the ice.
I’d start with a comment about being tired, which I always was, and then slide into a series of self-effacing anecdotes about food, film, and guilty pleasures. When the conversation inevitably stalled, I would return to an earlier topic and use it to segue into a personal story about one of my many irrational fears. It was all nonsense, which was the point. The other person felt comfortable because I was clearly an idiot, and I felt comfortable because after going on like that for twenty minutes, there was little I could do that would embarrass me.
Mr. Sunshine smiled politely as I went through my routine.
“I did the math, and it turns out I spend almost thirty hours a month floating over the Atlantic in a giant hunk of metal. It sounds crazy when you say it out loud. Flying used to be so amazing to me. I’d wake up in one place, and a few hours later I’m on the other side of the world. Now, I feel like I’m living on borrowed time. Tempting fate, you know? Anytime the plane hits turbulence, my brain says, ‘Guess this is it!’ Then I pull out my iPod and find a suitable song to die to.”
“What song?” he asked.
I feigned hesitation. “. . . ‘For Crying Out Loud,’ by Meat Loaf.” That wasn’t a lie. Track seven on Bat Out of Hell was my go-to dying song. The only reason I feigned hesitation was because I’d noticed the admission landed better if I came across as slightly embarrassed. I don’t know why, since the musical stylings of Mr. Loaf and Jim Steinman are a goddamn national treasure, but whatever. You have to play to your audience.
“I think it’s good that you accept it so calmly,” said Mr. Sunshine. “It means you’re at peace with death.”
“You know what’s funny, though? I think my plane is about to crash, and I’m fine. But if a spider ran across this table right now, I’d lose my shit. What’s up with that? It’s like I’d rather die in a fiery crash than look at an itsy-bitsy eight-legged abomination.”
With no trace of humor or sarcasm, Mr. Sunshine looked me in the eyes and asked, “Have you considered the possibility your fear of spiders comes from a genetic memory sent back through time by your descendants who live in a future where arachnids have evolved into mankind’s primary predator?”
That shut me up.
I couldn’t get a read on this guy. He had those blank, empty eyes shared by sociopaths and idiots. It’s possible he realized I was rambling by design and decided to throw a verbal wrench in my spokes. Or, he was crazy. I don’t mean that in the ablest sense. Genuine mental illness and self-destructive tendencies—I understand these. But there is a type of crazy that can only be described as a willful denial of the world around us. I had no idea what Mr. Sunshine was trying to do, and it scared me to death.
THAT AFTERNOON, I CALLED a meeting with Mr. Sunshine and some of the team leads. I thought it would be good for us to kick-start the week by defining who our main characters would be. It was the first meeting I had ever organized at Yager, so I started off by rallying the troops with a boilerplate pep talk.
“We have an opportunity to make a game unlike anything else. If we do this right, Spec Ops could be the most important war game ever made.” I remember thinking I was nailing it, because one of the leads was smiling and nodding along.
“This is the moment we decide to be different. I think we do that by setting out to make a game about people instead of war. That won’t happen if our characters have names like Gunn or Brand. They need real names so we see them as real people. A good name speaks to the nature of a character, like Norm from Cheers, the guy at the bar who is always there, in the same seat. If we brainstorm about who we want our characters to be and then find a name that embodies that, it will inspire us even more as we flesh them out.
“Let’s start with our player character, the Delta squad leader. Who is this man? What type of person do we want him to be?”
The team said nothing. All they did was stare.
“It’s okay to say whatever you’re thinking. This is brainstorming. There are no wrong answers here.”
Not a goddamn word. Even the nodding guy had forsaken me.
“No one has any ideas about who our main character should be?”
Mr. Sunshine stared at me with those dopey, blank eyes. He had a lot of opinions on spiders, but nothing about the character he’d been hired to write.
I threw my hands in the air. “Well, I guess our main character will do a lot of walking in the game, so how about we call him Walker?” I wrote it down and kept going. We can change it later, I said to myself. We never did.
“Let’s move on to the members of Walker’s squad.”
The blank reactions continued. There were a few Americans working at Yager. If one of them hadn’t been in the room, I would have believed my words were getting lost in translation. But no—either the team was too afraid to speak their ideas or they didn’t have any yet. Whatever the reason, I was too annoyed to brainstorm new names, so I just began naming my friends from the air force.
“Personally, I feel it’s important for our game to have a diverse cast. There’s three guys in our Delta squad. I don’t see any reason they can’t be Caucasian, African American, and Hispanic. The Hispanic guy’s name could be . . . oh, let’s say John Lugo. And the African American guy could be Alphonso Adams.”
“I don’t know about that,” said Mr. Sunshine. Apparently he did have opinions about names. “It’s not realistic for a character’s first and last name to start with the same letter.”
I leaned forward over the conference table. “What is my name?”
“Oh—”
Before he could continue, I began listing off my coworkers whose first and last names also started with the same letter. Not my best idea, since there were only three of them, but luckily Mr. Sunshine backed down before I had to start naming comic-book characters like Peter Parker and Bruce Banner.
For someone I was inclined to dislike through no fault of his own, this guy was managing to hit all of my buttons. What had started out as petty jealousy was already nearing genuine loathing, and it was only our first day together.
OUR FIRST TASK WAS writing a script for the game’s vertical slice. A vertical slice is an internal demo that will serve as a quality benchmark for the rest of the game. The script for the vertical slice mainly would serve as context for the action beats. Aside from that, it was expendable. Once the game’s full story was agreed upon, the vertical slice script would be rewritten and integrated with the larger narrative.
Every writing team has disagreements, some more heated than others. That’s what happens when you get a bunch of show runners together in one room and ask them all to cede control. Everyone has their own opinion as to how certain things should be written. Over the years, I’ve become more diplomatic about how I navigate these disagreements. Back then, however, I was young and cocky. I wasn’t looking for diplomacy; I was looking for the quickest path to the finish line. If anything got in the way, I’d steamroll it and move on.
Mr. Sunshine didn’t want the characters to use vulgarity. He was adamant that professional soldiers wouldn’t swear when speaking to one another. It was a silly argument. Of course soldiers swear; the phrase “curse like a sailor” exists for a reason. For a soldier, a bad day at work means getting shot at and possibly killing someone. That is not a job for people who find vulgarity to be unprofessional.
This fight went on for weeks. I couldn’t understand why it was such a sticking point. I cussed all the time, and thanks to a contract I signed when I was eighteen, I was technically an ex-soldier. I was living proof of my own correctness. Mr. Sunshine wouldn’t budge, though. Finally, I just ignored him. When we wrote a scratch script for the game’s demo level, everything I wrote used vulgarity. If Mr. Sunshine wrote something, I added vulgarity to it, usually right before the actors recorded it, and always without telling him. This did not go over well.
On the one hand, what I did was not out of the ordinary. When you have multiple writers on a game, someone has to review all the scripts to ensure the character voices remain consistent. There was no time for feedback and iteration, so I did the rewrites myself. Plus, it’s worth mentioning, I was right and he was wrong.
On the other hand, it was a dick move.
When you’re in a collaborative industry, everyone must work toward the same vision, or else everything will fall apart. To swear or not to swear may not seem like an important issue, but it directly informs the personality of your characters. The language we use when communicating with other people tells a lot about who we are. This is why dialogue is so important. When thoughtfully crafted, it can reveal untold depths. As the saying goes, “Actions speak louder than words.” But the actions we’re comfortable performing in front of others do not necessarily reflect the feelings and personality we hide from the world. To know someone, you must hear them speak when they are most vulnerable. It’s our accidental words that reveal our true selves.
Here’s the thing about swearing—everyone does it. Even if you go out of your way to say “dang” instead of “damn,” you are still swearing, just in a family-friendly way. A curse is an emotional exclamation. Your body produces an emotion and in response, your mouth forms a word meant to convey that feeling. The severity of that word will vary based on numerous factors—upbringing, vocabulary, native tongue, age, social norms, and most importantly, the intensity of what you are feeling. Everybody swears, some more crudely than others.
The thematic journey of Spec Ops was one of descent and denial. The main characters struggle to maintain control in a situation that is already out of their grasp. Had they maintained a constant level of professionalism by not swearing, they would have exercised superhuman control over their emotions, which would have been in direct opposition to their actions and story.
I could have compromised by writing a vulgar draft and a clean draft and then having the actors record both. The problem is that’s not a compromise; it’s a deflection. Appeasing both sides would only have prolonged the argument and pushed a resolution to a later date. Even worse, by recording a clean draft of the script, I would have given my opponent the ammo necessary to win. It would have been very easy for Mr. Sunshine to say, “It’s already recorded, so let’s put it in the game and see how it feels”—at which point it would never have been removed. I wasn’t going to let that happen. The game deserved better than that. Also—and I can’t stress this enough—I was right.
AROUND THIS TIME, YAGER’S development producer went on maternity leave. If you’re an American, and therefore unfamiliar with how other civilized nations treat maternity and health care, it might surprise you to learn German maternity leave can last up to three years. This is what’s known as quality of life. Germans have it; we don’t.
Three years is a long time. We could conceptualize, build, and ship the entire game in that time. The game was already in production. Processes were in place, wheels were spinning. All we needed was a producer, someone who could drop in and take control without missing a beat.
Back in California, there was just such a producer: Bonnie LaFramboise. She had cut her teeth at Looking Glass Studios, the legendary studio that went on to spawn Irrational and many others. When Looking Glass shuttered its doors, rather than move to a new studio, Bonnie chose to leave the industry and build a new life for herself as a baker and midwife. Luckily for us, she’d recently dipped her toe back into the development cesspool.
The way I imagine it, someone took a helicopter south from Novato deep into the business-park jungles of Redwood City, California. There, they would have found Bonnie engaged in a stick fight with some uppity young designer who’d gone over time and budget.
Bonnie would have heard our pitch for old times’ sake, but that was no guarantee she’d be willing to take on a job like this.
“This mission’s important, Bonnie.”
“Do you really think it’s gonna make a difference?” she’d have asked. “It didn’t before.”
“That was another time . . . You said that your war is over. Now, maybe the one out there is, but not the one inside you. I know the reasons you’re here, Bonnie, but it doesn’t work that way. You may try, but you can’t get away from what you really are—a full-blooded development producer.”
Basically just like the opening of Rambo III.
I don’t know what they said to convince her, but it worked. Bonnie LaFramboise arrived in Berlin fully prepared to get production on track. In our first meeting, she asked me to fill her in on where we were with the story. It was just the two of us, alone in a conference room. I launched into a foaming rant about Mr. Sunshine.
Without raising her voice, Bonnie looked me dead in the eyes and said, “You do not yell at me.”
I liked her instantly.
AFTER THE VERTICAL SLICE, it was time to create a detailed story summary. Yager wanted Mr. Sunshine to take the lead, so it was up to him. I gave him the one-pager I had written, along with directions for what his summary needed to include—a full story outline, backstory for the game world, character bios, proposals for missions, possible locations, and a list of key moments. It was a substantial amount of work, but it was still a first pass.
“I’ll need a month,” he said.
“Really? I’d have thought like a week and half.”
When making a game, the first idea never survives. It is the sacrificial lamb whose innards will be used to divine the game’s future. Think of it as a form of hepatomancy, the art of reading omens in the entrails of animals. Disemboweling a first idea is bloodless, but not painless. The more time spent doting on your first idea, the harder it will be to see it sliced from tail to sternum and flipped inside out.
“I’m not comfortable turning in work that falls below my personal standard of quality.”
“I can respect that. If you need a month, that’s cool with me.”
A month went by, and sure enough, Mr. Sunshine’s summary appeared in my email. He’d met his first deadline; always a good sign. I opened the document, expecting to find the usual affair—an overview of the main plot points, characters, and thematic arcs, plus a few proposals for missions, environments, and set pieces. I expected this because my mind was small and limited in what it could imagine. What I found inside that document was nothing short of madness.
The game opened on our heroes scaling a skyscraper and then gunning down a squad of unarmed enemies who were playing volleyball and eating nachos. It only got better from there.
In Mr. Sunshine’s story, the game’s villain was a soldier turned dictator turned eco-terrorist, whose goal was to turn Dubai into a war-torn hellhole so he could broadcast footage of his atrocities across the globe via cell phone. These terrible images, accompanied by his charismatic speeches, would incite a Third World War that would decimate the earth’s population and save the planet from global warming.
Highlights included a spunky young reporter who traveled from New York hoping to snag a one-on-one interview with Konrad; a holographic zoo dedicated to lions, giraffes, and other extinct animals; and an overturned boat that had been converted into a dive bar/memorial where the parents of Konrad’s soldiers spent their days getting drunk and lighting candles. Like the cub reporter, these parents all traveled from the United States just to be here, somehow managing to traverse the impassable sandstorm surrounding Dubai.
Nothing in Mr. Sunshine’s summary made sense. It defied structure, logic, the game’s core design, and any concept of quality I had ever known. The choices he made were so baffling that I began to question whether it might be a work of genius beyond my comprehension.
I needed a fresh pair of eyes, so I sent the summary to Bonnie. Her reaction would tell me whether Mr. Sunshine was a buffoon or I was a lowly gnat incapable of appreciating his majesty.
Three minutes later, I had my answer.
“THEY’RE EATING NACHOS?!?!”
Thank God. It was just a piece of shit.
I’M NOT TRYING TO belittle Mr. Sunshine. His intentions were pure. Idiotic, but pure. The man had a story to tell, one he was very passionate about. That’s commendable. It wasn’t his fault he had no idea what he was doing. For a video-game story to be powerful and true, it has to grow from the game itself.
Every game has a natural story, which is the expression of its art, design, and gameplay. Everything has a reason; every action has a cause and effect. As video-game writers, we have to take a step back and look at everything that exists and ask, “Why?” The answer to that question is the story of your game.
The natural story of Spec Ops was “US soldiers fight one another in a Dubai that has been abandoned to the desert.” Our Dubai was covered in sand because we thought it looked cool. It was mostly uninhabited because we couldn’t figure out a way to believably populate the city with noncombat NPCs (nonplayer characters, or computer-controlled AI). The player controlled an American soldier because our game was a military shooter, and North America was our largest market. We fought other American soldiers because no other game had done it, and we wanted to be different.
SOMETHING caused Dubai to be abandoned and covered in sand. SOMETHING brought a US Army battalion to the city. SOMETHING turned those soldiers into despots. Later, SOMETHING would bring three Delta soldiers to Dubai, and SOMETHING ELSE would make them go to war with their fellow Americans. None of these things were defined by the story; they were all caused by external constraints.
Bad stories ignore their constraints. Good stories work within them. Great stories embrace external constraints and repurpose them as the core elements of the narrative.
Mr. Sunshine’s summary did the opposite. He saw Dubai covered in sand and asked, “Why?” The answer, he decided, was global warming. He ignored the other pieces because they weren’t necessary to his vision. His story rang false because he treated the characters, gameplay, and genre as window dressing. As a writer, your loyalty is to the game, not yourself or the player. Betraying that loyalty is the only way you can fail.
I’LL GIVE HIM CREDIT; he stood by what he wrote. His summary wasn’t the result of a misunderstanding. He consciously ignored my direction because he felt his story was more important. For him, Spec Ops was a platform, an opportunity to speak out against carbon emissions. Not to do so would be borderline criminal.
I explained to Mr. Sunshine that I appreciated his dedication to his beliefs, but we weren’t interested in making a game about global warming. He was being paid to write a story based on Heart of Darkness, and blatantly ignoring that direction was also borderline criminal. Now that his first idea had been expressed, he needed to rework it into something that resembled the original concept.
No writer enjoys getting contrary feedback. You can tell the difference between a pro and rookie by how they react to it. Mr. Sunshine got huffy. “I see. You want something dark and gritty.”
“Yes. But specifically, something inspired by Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness.”
If you only take one lesson from this book, let it be this one: never challenge a German to be dark and gritty, because holy shit they will take it all the way to eleven.
“What about a level where the player has to blow up a mosque filled with women and children? Is that more to your taste?”
“No, it is not. It should go without saying, but try to avoid scenes that might spark an international incident. Think you can do that?”
“Fine.” He crossed his arms and turned away, like a kid being told to clean his room. “I’ll need another month.”
“Whatever. Just get it done.”
Mr. Sunshine spent the next month poring over his original summary and then sent it back to me, without making a single change.
“Please tell me, because I swear I want to know, what it is about this summary that you think matches the assignment you were given.”
“All of it.”
“See, that’s hard for me to believe, because I asked for a new summary, and what you’ve given me is the exact same document as before. Even worse, you took an entire month to do it. How is that in any way acceptable?”
“I’m sorry, but I think we have a responsibility to say something important about how we’re treating the environment.”
“By shooting people in the face.”
“I . . . what?”
“We’re making a game about shooting people in the fucking face, and you think that is the best venue to start a conversation about global warming.”
“You’re being purposefully dismissive, but yes. That’s what I think.”
“Well, okay.” I had no more questions. And Mr. Sunshine had no more time. His career as a video-game writer had reached its end.
Au revoir, auf Wiedersehen, and good riddance.
In the end, we built a fantastic writing team for Spec Ops. For some reason the game’s final credits don’t list everyone, but the team consisted of myself, Chad Rocco, Georg Struck, Jack Scalici, Richard Pearsey, and Shawn Frison. Remember those names, because the game would not have been the same without them. Mr. Sunshine could have been a part of that team, if he had just learned to let go. But writers who cannot take feedback are not writers; they are children playing make-believe. All they want to do is bang on a keyboard, hear that fun clickity-clack sound, and be told how special they are.
Game development is not a day care; it’s a job.
Video games may be art, but not all of us are artists whose personal visions must be allowed to blossom like a delicate flower. Our value is measured not in ideas but in our ability to execute. A team needs to know you have their back. We ride together, die together, and for God’s sake, learn our fucking place. Doing so will not make you a soulless wage slave. It will grant you immortality. Don’t like the task you’ve been given? Let go of your ego, find an angle that interests you, and then bring it to life like it’s the last thing you’ll ever create. I guarantee it will be unforgettable.