I was ready to explore.
For the past thirteen years, I had been making first-person shooters, from Hovertank One through to Daikatana, and I felt I had explored the highs and lows of shooter design. Likewise, I had experienced the best and the worst of company dynamics. My “eureka moment” at Softdisk with Dangerous Dave in “Copyright Infringement” led to the formation of id Software, while Ion Storm had been a roller coaster of challenges.
I thought about all of this in that last month as Ion Storm wound to a close as well as what opportunities were on the horizon. As we walked out of Ion Storm, Tom and I knew we wanted to continue working together, and there were numerous options to consider. The game industry had gone through so many changes, just in the last few years. Japanese role-playing games (JRPGs) dominated the awards with Chrono Cross, Final Fantasy IX, Dragon Quest VI, and The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask each taking a Game of the Year award from various outlets in 2000. The Sims, designer Will Wright’s game about simulated humans, created a new and interesting genre. Deus Ex managed to take home a BAFTA Interactive Award for Game of the Year, giving us a reason to celebrate.
In considering our next steps, we didn’t want to start another big company.
“I just want to code,” I said. The best times I ever had in game dev involved me coding for hours and hours and hours. “In my dream scenario, that’s all I’m doing. You design whatever it is,” I said to Tom, “And I’ll code it.”
I also wanted a break from the calamity of management.
At the time, the PC world was just getting off MS-DOS and onto Windows, and then a new kind of gaming platform emerged: the mobile phone. Early mobile phones were far from the smartphones that we have today, which are powerful computers in their own right with screen resolutions and processors capable of delivering exceptional play experiences. In the early 2000s, mobile phones had much smaller screens and most were two color, black on a green, gray, or blue screen. As primitive as they were, I knew that playing games on the go was going to be a massive segment of the industry soon, and I wanted to get in on the ground floor of the new mobile revolution that I was sure was about to take place. A handheld/mobile company was perfect for a small team, and it also put us in what we believed was an emerging market.
JAMDAT, a new company founded by Activision veterans in early 2001, was leading the mobile gaming charge. The hardware was beginning to improve, with faster processors and bigger screens, and soon the handheld PC market emerged. The most popular handheld PC was Compaq’s iPAQ. Compared to the limited mobile devices of the time, the iPAQ had a great-looking color screen, exceptional audio, a fast processor, and even early on had some decent games. That was the handheld we targeted for our first game. I was excited to code again full-time and learn C++, the Win32 API, and the iPAQ hardware (learning C++ was relatively easy since I was fluent in C, a language I adhered to because it was more performant, and working on shooters required every ounce of performance).
On August 1, 2001, the day after things with Ion Storm wrapped up, Tom and I founded Monkeystone Games along with Stevie Case, a level designer from Ion Storm. Tom handled design, I handled code, and Stevie handled business. As our first project, Tom designed Hyperspace Delivery Boy!, a top-down Zelda-style puzzle adventure game where the player takes on the role of Guy Carrington, a courier in training. Guy embarks on several dangerous missions in four different locations—all full of Tom’s signature brand of funny characters for players to interact with while solving puzzles and attempting to deliver various items. Hyperspace Delivery Boy! also had an action mode so the player could attack enemies as they solved puzzles and Panic Zones that gave the players thirty seconds to escape or die trying.
I was looking forward to writing the tools for Tom to make game levels, writing our game engine in C++ and the gameplay code in Lua. My last real programming stint was in 1995, using a NeXTSTEP computer and working in Objective-C. I also had to write all of the tools to collect and bundle game data, write a new level editor, build the game, and do a deep dive into Pocket PC hardware so I could put the game on it. It took me three weeks to write our tools in Windows, and another three weeks for the game engine—which was designed to function on both Pocket PC and other platforms, so we could sell it in multiple markets. We finished the game in four months, on December 23, 2001. Next up would be ports for Game Boy Advance, PC, Mac, and Linux. Hyperspace Delivery Boy! was critically successful and attracted a good following, but it wasn’t a breakout hit.
We moved from Hyperspace Delivery Boy! to Congo Cube, a match-3 game designed to be more action-based and wild than the current market leader, Bejeweled. Congo Cube hit high on my personal fun meter and joined hundreds of other games on RealArcade, a PC game store that released about a dozen games a week. Discovery, the process by which people find games, then, as now, was a challenge for game creators. Market leaders like PopCap Games had captured an audience with hits like Bejeweled and were able to advertise to that audience to promote new games. Others needed to spend significant money to advertise in those existing channels to attract players. It was an expensive proposition for most of us developing at that time. Mind you, this was years before the iPhone and the App Store combined to create the biggest casual gaming market on the planet.
Our next project was to develop a port of Red Faction, a PlayStation 2 game, for the Nokia N-Gage, a unique phone-game console hybrid with a button-like joystick. Its shape—a rectangle with one long rounded side at the bottom—earned it the nickname “taco phone.” Red Faction did something new for mobile games in 2003: It was the first fully 3D cell phone game with deathmatch played over Bluetooth. Up to three phones in the same room could deathmatch head-to-head. Looking back, I only wish this innovation had been on a platform that had more players! We were proud of our work, though.
There were plenty of exciting technical and design opportunities in the Wild West of the early 2000s mobile market, but were likely too early in the space to make a big splash. The market was microscopic compared to what it is today, and phones and handheld devices of the time did not have good input mechanisms to allow intuitive gameplay. Regardless, as a programmer and a designer, working on a new platform and learning a new language in C++ was captivating.
In 2003, Tom and I decided to move on from Monkeystone to work in the console space. Both of us had had our games published on consoles or ported to them, but we had not worked natively in the console space except for that brief and unexpected three-week marathon coding session for Wolfenstein 3-D’s port to the SNES. By now, the console market was well diversified. The PlayStation 2 (PS2) arrived in 2000, and the original Xbox entered the market in 2001. Working on consoles offered the tremendous benefit of platform uniformity. Where PC games and mobile phones had many different operating systems, device drivers, and performance capabilities, consoles presented a uniform target for developers to hit. I had enjoyed that aspect of Monkeystone the most—learning new tech, platforms, and design patterns. Through the grapevine, I learned that Midway Games in San Diego needed a game designer to steer the latest Gauntlet game. Midway originally brought Space Invaders and Pac-Man to the US, so I was familiar with their history. I loved San Diego, its climate, and its easy access to authentic Mexican food, and I felt ready for a move to explore entirely new horizons. As a bonus, Kelly and the boys were now also in California, so I would be closer to them, too. After some back-and-forth discussion, I signed on. As a computer-first developer for the past twenty-four years, I was eager to get some console-first development experience. Tom signed on to work in the company’s third-party division providing creative support for Midway’s studios.
From a design perspective, I jumped into the world of console certification requirements. Those in development already know what many players may not—there’s a reason that the user experience of all console games feels somewhat similar. It’s by design. The shared wisdom of design and user experience in the TRCs (technical certification requirements) was incredible. Technically, the consoles were likewise impressive. To develop on consoles, developers use a “dev kit,” which is specialized hardware designed by the console manufacturer to allow developers to run pre-release builds on the machines. As a designer, I ran the game via dev kits, too, but didn’t get into the code side. I left Midway shortly before Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows shipped. The game was heading for a “get it out quick” trajectory to compensate for some other games slipping, and Midway no longer had the need for the deep game design. It was great to get some console experience under my belt, though. As most games aim to do, Gauntlet shipped simultaneously on both PS2 and Xbox to take advantage of the biggest potential audience.
After I left Midway,* I decided to take a few months off, the first time I had done so since receiving the Apple II as a kid. This period of exploration, from mobile to console, was energizing to me. In the early days of my career, exploring machines and new languages was as consuming as a good game. I stayed up around the clock working on something not because I needed to but because I wanted to. Sometimes, games were released that had a similar effect, and I studied them like a writer studied a great piece of literature. While I was still at Midway, for example, Half-Life 2 came out. The expert use of physics for interacting with the environment, and the inclusion of physics puzzles gating progression was brand-new for shooters. This sequel was better than the original, and that was a tough act to follow. As of this writing, I believe it’s one of the best shooters ever made, and at least for me, it stands the test of time.
A few weeks later, World of Warcraft (WoW), a massively multiplayer online game, released. A brand extension of the longtime favorite role-playing strategy franchise Warcraft, the new game took the characters and the setting and placed them in a vast monster-filled world with millions of players running around with swords and axes on quests to kill those monsters (or anything else, for that matter). There was a huge social element that allowed players to form friendships and guilds. As a gamer and game designer, I was awestruck by the concept and the execution—the world size, graphical polish, orchestral score, and sophisticated, transition-less engine took things to a new level. As a game industry veteran, the business model and subscription rate left my jaw on the floor. At the height of its popularity, WoW had a reported 12 million players, each paying $15 a month. The game was making $180 million per month, or $2.1 billion a year. Of course, dozens of new MMOs were announced, all planning to take some of WoW’s market share. The second round of the MMO gold rush was on.*
Knowing I’d be taking a break from work, I decided to wait to really sink some time into WoW. I started as a rogue Night Elf (an Alliance character race) named Deathtruck. There were other players running around learning the game as I was, in training areas that taught players how to use weapons, fight enemies, loot corpses, and turn in quests. The entire area was situated on top of a massive tree named Teldrassil. Finding my way to the edge of this zone, I peeked over the canopy of the tree and saw for miles down to the ocean below. Up until now, I had been largely immune to the pull of MMOs, but my goodness, did WoW ever hook me. I played for fun, I played to learn, I played to escape, and I played to hang out with friends. As a designer, I took notes, compared its systems to systems in non-MMO games and in other MMOs. It was obvious to me that WoW had done something exceedingly right. Game designers immerse themselves in successful games to learn. Games are our texts.
Working on an MMO appealed to me. I started exploring opportunities for design gigs in that space and connected with a couple of other individuals looking to do the same—Rob Hutter and Bhavin Shah. Together, we founded the company that was to become Gazillion Entertainment. While there were multiple opportunities in the space, what attracted me to Gazillion was its focus.
“How about making an educational MMO for kids?” Rob said, telling me about the company’s focus. “A game that will provide the same kind of interactions you get with World of Warcraft but integrated with stealth education components.”
I’d seen firsthand the ability of tech to transform lives, my own included, and likewise, I knew what a powerful educator games were. In a sense, all games teach players how systems work and reward them for their success and their progress. I believed an edu-MMO focused on math could be done in a stealthy manner, where the learning was integrated into the game in such a way that players would have no idea they were actually learning something. My hope was that when they encountered certain math concepts in school, they’d have a leg up, because they would have mastered a similar method of thought in our game. I’d seen my own kids rattle off world leaders thanks to the game Civilization, and Michael knew Pokémon better than the periodic table of elements. In creating this game, I hoped kids would find math fun in school, because the same “puzzle solving” in our game was rewarding. Their path to a STEM career was made a little easier.
I got to work on the design and hired a capable team to build the game, which we named Project Redwood. In addition to programming, art, narrative, and level design teams, I also created my first-ever learning design team composed of teachers and designers with experience creating physical toys and educational materials for kids. This team was composed of veterans of the classroom and from LEGO MINDSTORMS, LeapFrog, and other educational toy companies.
What I wished for was this: to make an intriguing, fun, role-playing game for kids. World of Warcraft, as the name suggests, is scary. I wanted to flip WoW on its head and make an MMO that was just as amazing looking and safely social for kids, but as far as quests and challenges went, not scary at all. The big challenge, as I saw it, was to develop a game mechanic that was as fun as combat in MMOs but wasn’t combat at all. My solution was to fill the Project Redwood universe with animals kids could tame. The primary taming tool I designed was music played with a variety of instruments. If the player confronted a huge ten-point stag, I thought, instead of hitting or trapping them, the player tamed them with music or helped them in other ways to establish a bond. In this way, the game was almost idyllic and gentle—the complete opposite of DOOM. The learning team presented stealth learning within this world in the form of puzzles or progression. Most players, for instance, are unaware that experience point curves are sometimes exponential, while level curves are often logarithmic.
I loved what we were doing. We created a global advisory board of math education experts to evaluate our work every six months. We focused on introducing basic math concepts partly because we wanted to encourage kids to work in STEM fields, but also because math is a global language. The feedback from the advisory team was better than expected. They loved it. They thought it was intensely fun, encouraged repetition, and exposed mathematical concepts in a fully integrated, transparent manner. They said we had come up with representations of math concepts they’d never seen before and were thoroughly convinced that this was a new, engaging way to get kids excited about math.
We continued on, building and crafting our big world. Four years into development, however, rumblings on the tech team about problems with the licensed MMO engine began to surface. The engine was having difficulty supporting content at the scale it had been advertised as capable of handling. Our decision to license a game engine developed by a third party wound up being Project Redwood’s fatal flaw: The engine simply couldn’t do the job we needed it to do. We spent some time trying to retrench, to see if there was a way to save the vision. We even hired a specialized technical director to assess the entire tech ecosystem, but the engine technology components had major problems working together at scale. Blizzard had spent five years building the engine behind World of Warcraft. The tech director delivered a verdict that it would take at least a year to fix the client software and tools, or a year moving everything we had built to a different engine, a process I knew would take far longer. In the end, we assessed that the risks were too great and the additional investment unlikely to provide the return the investors hoped for. The project came to an end, but many of the learning concepts carried on in other games. It was a somber time—the end of an exceptional team and of a game we believed held huge promise. Overall, though, in 2009, Gazillion’s outlook was healthy. We still had five other games going, including two based in the Marvel universe. The takeaway lesson for me was this: Always license tried-and-true tech.
During the early development of Project Redwood, my father passed away on his fifty-seventh birthday. His death was not unexpected, but was nonetheless incredibly painful. His struggles with addiction had progressed, as they have a tendency to do. In early 2001, my brother, Ralph, and I flew to Boise, Idaho, to rescue him from a precarious situation. I paid off his debts and brought him to Dallas, where we checked him into rehab. I purchased a house for him to live in, and Ralph even moved in to help out. After a few years, though, he just up and left and moved back to Grandma Suki’s in Tucson. She welcomed him back, and unfortunately, he went back to drinking hard liquor.
So much of who I am comes from my father. Not just my appearance—I look just like him—and my name—I am named after him—but also my sense of humor, adventure, and desire to play games competitively (he bet, won, and sometimes lost cars playing pool). He was proud of his time singing with Mariachi Cobre, and I am blessed to have inherited his voice as well, though I only sing while coding, as several of my coworkers have noticed. He was incredibly proud of our Mexican and Yaqui heritage, taught me to be, too, and every dish I make comes from him having taught me to cook and cherish the dishes and flavors of Mexico. I still listen to our traditional music every day.
I flew to Tucson for his memorial. Family from both sides of the border were there, and everyone had good things to say about him. Everyone loved him. I loved him. While alcoholism and addiction defined his death, it did not define his life. He was so many things to so many people. When he passed, he had very few possessions. Among those, however, was a single beige folder. Inside was only his résumé, his GED papers, and an article about “mi hijo” who made DOOM. He always told me he was proud of me. Te extraño y te amo, Papá.
With Project Redwood coming to a close and people moving on to other projects, I was ready for my next exploration. As it turned out, friends and family who had never played games were suddenly interested in a game called Farmville, and they wanted to know if I had played it, too. The volume of these requests both in person and on Facebook caught my attention. What exactly was drawing in people who had, until now, never cared about playing games? By now, I was dating another game developer, Brenda Garno, who was working at social game company Slide at the time, and she and I started talking about the design patterns in these games. Slide published a game called SuperPoke! Pets where players created, cared for, outfitted, and customized a home for virtual pets. It was extremely light touch—players didn’t need to learn any specialized controls beyond point-and-click and click-and-drag. Further, the play was shallow—players didn’t need to retain information session-to-session or strategize about grand plans or short-term tactics. All the social games integrated the player’s friend network as a core component of play and a means of spreading the word about the game itself. Players asked for and gave gifts. It was about as far from first-person shooters as one could get, but nonetheless, I was fascinated with the design of these games. It was a form of asynchronous play that involved a player’s entire friend graph, giving new meaning to the term “shareware.”
As you might expect, game designers in a relationship spend an inordinate amount of time talking about games. Like me, Brenda is from the Apple II days, and she has an appreciation for game history and a lifelong love of game design. We had originally met at Origin in 1987 and stayed in touch throughout the years. I spent some time with her at Slide, with founder Max Levchin’s permission, taking in what was happening and discussing the business model with him. An original member of the “PayPal Mafia,” Max is one of Silicon Valley’s greatest technologists, founders, and investors, and we enjoyed discussing tech, both games and consumer products. These social games brought tens of millions of new players to games.
While we dabbled in casual games at Monkeystone, the rise of Facebook and release of Farmville kicked off the huge social gaming movement. The technology behind the games wasn’t interesting to me, but the game design for this new audience certainly was. In addition, the asynchronous play and shallow game dynamics presented an interesting design challenge, much of it running counter to traditional methods of game design, where we worked to build a mental model of the game in players’ heads to get them thinking and keep them thinking for hours at a time. This form of game design required us to come up with designs that captivated players who weren’t used to playing games and teach the necessary mechanics to progress further. Even more exciting, this audience was predominantly women in their thirties and forties, a demographic that traditional games had yet to cultivate or expressly design for. I was excited by the challenge and the diversity in the games and their audience. The more I learned about it, the more I wanted Gazillion to enter the space, too, but my cofounders and the board wanted to stay full speed ahead on MMOs.
I left my day-to-day role in Gazillion to join Brenda in making social games. By then, she had moved on from Slide to a smaller company that was, as they all were, looking for the next big thing. Working as a consultant, I spent three days doing nothing but studying the design patterns of the most successful games, in particular FrontierVille by Brian Reynolds, which had just released. Now I needed to come up with a cool game design, something that was going to make the social gaming world sit up and go, “Wow!” FrontierVille, like Farmville, was basically about growing crops as a pioneer out West. I wanted a totally different environment. And that’s when I thought back to the things I loved as a kid and teen: Don’t build a farm, build something fun—like a fun fair!
After a three-day deep dive into social gaming, Ravenwood Fair was born. It came to me all at once: the build-your-own fair idea, the gameplay events that would compel players to spend money incrementally and consistently. I mapped out the game for my small team of four programmers, an artist, and a producer.
It took fifty-seven days to build, and release, Ravenwood Fair. Within three weeks of its October 19, 2010, release, the game had four million players and earned $1 million in revenue for the company. Over the next six months, the game grew to 25 million monthly players, and the company grew from 30 people to 130 people. It was a huge hit. I got a lot of personal satisfaction from Ravenwood’s success, and offers to join companies and make games for them, too. It was such a wild time. In the end, however, Ravenwood was the springboard for what would be my next company, solely focused on social games. Brenda and I founded Loot Drop in 2010, with the goal of having four teams creating four separate games. Tom Hall joined us, too. Over the next two years, Loot Drop grew to forty developers, and we made games for everyone from Zynga to Ubisoft and worked on prototypes for big publishers looking to get into the space. In 2012, the social game bubble popped with Facebook’s change to the way game notifications worked. Namely, people were annoyed with the game messages spamming their feed, and so Facebook curtailed the practice, and with it, curtailed the ability for games to take off. It was a great ride for Loot Drop and for our time in the social and casual space. We released three games during that time—Ghost Recon Commander, Charmcraft Hollow, and Pettington Park—and built many more prototypes. One thing I’ll always find interesting about this time is that Ravenwood Fair was arguably as successful in terms of player numbers and revenue as DOOM was in its early days, but because of its platform, demographic, and market, it is still relatively unknown. Of those who do know about it, most are surprised to find that someone known primarily for violent video games made it.
By this time, Brenda and I had been together for years, and we got married in October 2012. We decided to get stealth-married in one of our favorite places in the world, Disneyland in Anaheim. Tom Hall got ordained as a minister to marry us, and along with his wife, Terri, we, our families, and closest friends got in line at the Mark Twain Riverboat in the afternoon. After the boat left the dock and rounded the corner, Tom began the ceremony. Eventually, all the other riders on the boat, including Disney employees, knew what was happening. People clapped and congratulated us, and we went to eat at the Big Thunder Ranch BBQ. Brenda’s three young kids were my kids, too. Maezza, Avalon, Donovan, and I all got on really well. When she was just ten, I introduced Maezza to Chrono Trigger, and as I had with Michael, we played through the game together. She was soon my WoW buddy, and she even started to learn C++. Avalon had an early interest in cooking, and together she and I cooked my family’s traditional cheese tacos, tamales, and taquitos. Donovan, Avalon’s twin brother, played games with me, narrating my play like he was telling a story. He took an early interest in game design, too, and wrote entire game designs in notebooks, “playable,” so to speak, from beginning to end starting when he was just five years old. Lillia, who was fourteen at the time, had been raised as an only child to this point, and found the family she always wanted.
Following Loot Drop, I worked mostly as a consultant, a tried-and-true road followed by a good number of game designers. I worked with mobile companies, traditional game companies, TV shows looking to expand their audience, and movie studios who were sitting on juggernaut IP that had major game potential but hadn’t yet been picked up. My interests outside of work, or perhaps orthogonal to my work, were also occupying a larger part of my life.
Because of my work on Project Redwood, teaching kids to code was becoming a real passion project for me. Programming is transformative, not just for tech, but for people’s lives. Because of code, my life was transformed from one of poverty to one of privilege, and I wasn’t going to take it for granted. I spoke regularly at schools in the area, particularly to Latino and Indigenous students in nearby communities whose backgrounds were most like mine. I volunteered to work with kids who had a tough start in life and who reminded me of myself, giving lots of in-person and online talks and mentoring kids who showed interest. I ended up writing a booklet for kids to teach them how to code in Lua and donated it to Pinnguaq, an agency that works with Indigenous youth in Canada.
I was also becoming increasingly interested in preserving game history through my work with the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, and the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. In particular, I realized that many game archivists didn’t have the ability to interview early coders about their process if they didn’t also have an understanding of assembly language, the tools, or the computers of the time. I began interviewing designers, including Sid Meier, Will Wright, Nasir Gebelli, and even Ralph Baer, about their early processes. I hosted an event at my house, another Apple II reunion party, and invited technology historian Jason Scott to interview people while there. Among others, Jason interviewed Margot Comstock, the cofounder and editor of Softalk magazine.* Capturing these oral histories is so incredibly important.
Through work with museum conservationists, I was becoming aware of the importance of my own archives. Every day, we lose critical materials that are historically significant as they are tossed out, recycled, or deleted. Design documents and disks full of uncompiled code represent the foundation and building blocks of the most important cultural medium of modern times. My own archives were substantial, containing everything I had ever worked on, including while at id Software. There are things that I have from early id Software that even id Software doesn’t have (unreleased game assets or early builds, for instance). These materials, as well as the materials of other game creators, have critical historical significance. Believe or not, they’re still tossed out every single day.
I began to get my archives in order just as our family headed to New York City for a bit of vacation and a consulting trip. We had just moved into our new home, which had a unique room, an actual hidden room—the perfect place to store my archives.
* Tom would eventually leave as well to work for KingsIsle Entertainment in Austin.
* The first round of the MMO gold rush was launched by Ultima Online in 1997. While other games certainly predated Ultima Online, its success captured the attention of the more mainstream developers. By then, more players had access to an internet connection, allowing them to partake in the world of online gameplay.
* While working on this chapter, I received news that she had passed away. Margot was the glue that held the Apple II community together.