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GR: Do you feel like games take themselves way too seriously these days?
MG: Yes. (laughs) Shit’s gone off the rails. Everybody’s so like, “Oh, a game’s got to be art, and oh, I need to show my creative…” You know it’s bullshit. A lot of it’s just bullshit. I don’t want to just crap all over things. There’s a lot of great things happening too. Like, Uncharted, which I think is amazing. That is one of the most amazing, fantastic things. It blows us away. But it’s so different from what we’re doing. (laughs) It’s a different sport, it's not just not in the same ball park.
RP: I like serious games. I think there’s room for everything. Here’s the only thing that matters: Is it entertaining, and did the last moment gratify us so much that we’re really excited about having the next moment? And you can do that whether it’s serious, whether it’s not serious… there’s so many great games. And there’s also so many terrible games. And the difference between a great game and a bad game isn’t its tone, it’s whether you’re being entertained or not. Are you enjoying your experience, and do you want to keep having this experience or not?
Above: Dominic Santiago - Saving humanity and hating every minute of it
GR: Where do you think this serious mentality has come from? Is it because games are a more mass market medium nowand we’re trying too hard to justify ourselves?
MG: I would bet yeah, that’s probably a part of it. The more people get involved, the more things kind of get homogenised. It’s like “Okay, here’s the formula we know works”. And what’s funny is that a lot of the time something will happen by chance, or something will be done like “Hey, people like it when you use this particular button to do this particular action”. So everyone’s using that.
And now we’re like “Well crap, now we’re stuck with using that”, as far as like “Well this is how you sprint, this is how you jump”. It’s now the standard. We’re hosed as far as that goes. But a lot of gameplay decisions, we feel like sometimes something will get decided and it won’t even be relevant to the result. It’s the difference between causation and correlation.
So sometimes things will become the standard, but they actually don’t even matter. So that’s frustrating sometimes. And you have to fight against that. “Dude, that doesn’t even matter! Do what’s fun!”
GR: It doesn’t matter what the guy’s emotional problems are as soon as you’re looking down the sights.
MG: Yeah! One game did that, and it sold well, and now we all have to do this crap. (laughs)
Above: DNF as it was in 2001. Don't worry, it looks a lot better now
GR: What state was Duke in when you got hold of it?
MG: It was a collection of scenes. They all had good intent and they were reasonably well connected, but the pacing was a bit up-and-down and some of the art assets were of different levels, so it needed about a year of work. So we brought in about 70 guys and polished it all up to a nice shimmering shine. Multiplayer was not there, so we’re putting multiplayer in. And getting it up to speed on the PS3 and 360 also. And that’s about it. The vision of the game and the design, this is 3D Realms’ vision. We did not go in there and say “We know better”. These guys have been working on this for a long time, so these are well thought-out things they have in there. So we’re just polishing it and making it consistent.
GR: Was there much you had to bring to it in terms of brand new content?
MG: Not a whole lot. I think that the biggest example would be the Duke Nukem model itself. But the thing is, we didn’t just gut the whole thing. We replaced the outer model, but the bone system, the animations and all that stuff, that was great. We just touched it up.
Above: 3D Realms' 2009 build. The current DNF is much more like this
GR: As an outsider, a Duke fan, and someone who had a lot emotionally invested in the franchise, what was the delay like for you?
RP: It was the same as it was for you. I just wanted a great game, and every time a story would happen or some video would come out, it was like, “Awesome! I’m in!”. And then time would go by, and I’d say “What? What the hell’s wrong with these guys?” It’s this weird kind of love/hate thing. And it just kept going on so long that we went through some other emotions too.
I’ve been really busy though. Immediately after starting Gearbox we jumped right into our stuff, and we’ve been so focused on our things. And even though you look over and go “Well what are you guys doing over there?”, the one thing that was always true was that they were sincerely committed to the game and making it great. So I was always confident that at some point there would be something. I always kind of believed.
It wasn’t until it really collapsed that I was like “Holy shit”. You hear the big screech, you hear the crash, and you have to look out the window to see what happened. And before that happened I was just happy to focus on what I was doing and know that those guys had it and that they were going to do what they were going to do.
