News

Sep 16 2010

You Make Fun By Having Fun

When I first started in the business (Jeez, is it really fifteen years?) making games really was, well, a lot of fun and games.

There were, of course, plenty of creative frustrations and long hours, but back in those primitive days game development was just like what you want in a game: adventure, exploration, and immediacy. When I look back at the kinds of stuff I did in the Wild West days of games — like the Mechs in MechCommander, the Ospreys in Half-Life, or the animations in Counter-Strike — I remember it almost the way you do a great gaming session: a lot of drama, laughing, cursing, and pushing yourself hard.

In a word, fun.

Sep 16 2010

What A n00b

Today it’s my pleasure to introduce our technical art director Steve Theodore, also referred to as the “king of all technical artists” by our art team.

(With apologies to all other technical artists out there; I’m sure you’re awesome too…)

It’s a distinctive pleasure to have Steve onboard at Undead Labs, because I’ve been trying to recruit the guy for at least five years. Can you believe he turned me down to take a job at Bungie working on Halo 3? Really, what was he thinking?

Aug 11 2010

Joy, Drama, Humor, Horror, Blood, Guts And Gunfire

For seven years, I headed up game design at ArenaNet, working with a family of friends to create the Guild Wars games. I am tremendously proud of the work we did together and of the world that millions of players have lived in and enjoyed.

Still, when the opportunity came to join Jeff at Undead Labs, I didn’t hesitate. I knew I could do so safely. Guild Wars 2 is well in hand. Eric Flannum has been at the helm as lead designer for more than a year now, taking the concepts we developed at the start of the project and bringing them to life. He and I are long-time friends and partners-in-crime, working together on Warcraft II, Diablo, Starcraft, Sacrifice, and every Guild Wars release to date. I have complete confidence in the game that he and the team will make.

I am ready for a new challenge, and this is the perfect opportunity to do something groundbreaking and amazing. Console zombie-survival MMO. If your heart doesn’t race a little at the possibilities, check to make sure you’ve got a pulse at all.

Aug 11 2010

And Now A Word From Our Team

Today is a momentous day at Undead Labs. Over the past few months we’ve been quietly refining our design, working out the core systems, and — most importantly — building the most ass-kicking zombie-slaying game development team ever assembled. Over the next few weeks I’ll be introducing the entire team to you; including our inbound art director Doug Williams, who painted the tasty image attached to this post.

Today, we start with my long-time friend and colleague James Phinney.

Jun 04 2010

This Will Never Work

Welcome to the year 2000 2010. As you know, our Big Plan is to bring the best elements of the first-person shooter massively multiplayer online game genre to the console platform.

I know, you’ve heard this before. I know you are not impressed, because every time you hear this it either never happens, or you get a weak port of an otherwise excellent PC title that does not feel at all like a true console game, and then the publisher expresses amazement that it was not successful and blames the console platform. It happens every time, and now “they” are saying that FPS MMO games are just simply better suited to the PC, and that console developers should just give up and go build more Tomb Raider and Madden sequels.

We hear you, console fans. But this time it’s going to be different, because we are willing to chart a bold course and develop an FPS MMO specifically for consoles, which will allow us to take advantage of the unique features of the platform and give you a true console experience. The pundits still say we’re crazy, and that it will never work. I guess we’ll be able to look back in ten years and know who was right.

So, let’s talk about some of these “unique features” of a console FPS MMO…