“You’re only as good as your last title.” says High Voltage Software VP/Chief Creative Officer Eric Nofsinger. He’s explaining to me how the company’s reputation is riding on much-hyped Wii first-person shooter The Conduit. To me, the words make perfect sense — four and a half months ago, I wrote how the game is High Voltage’s first major attempt to escape a resume filled with mediocrity. Combining that with knowledge that the company’s Wii tech investment was self-funded, it shouldn’t surprise me that this attempt might also be their last.
But those words bring me no pleasure, because this time I’m not pontificating from an armchair. This time, I’m not concerned with crafting obvious electrical puns. This time, I’m not accusing The Conduit of being the next Red Steel. No, this time I’m standing face to face with gentlemen who have shown me a title with the potential to revolutionize console shooters in more ways than one, and it is with nothing less than genuine empathy that I ask them what would happen should The Conduit fail to carry their hopes.
At the 2008 Nintendo Media Summit in San Francisco, GameCyte spoke to Eric Nofsinger and Micah Skaritka of High Voltage Software about how the company managed to fund The Conduit, how fans have shaped key elements of its design; and how, despite all odds, it might turn out to be the triple-A shooter Wii core gamers have supposedly been waiting for.
GameCyte: Nintendo has set out to prove that you don’t need lot of technology and lots of powerful graphics to make a fun game, and you guys are railing against this with this high-tech first person shooter that attempts to pull every ounce of power out of the Wii. I personally agree with your opinion that there’s a market for this kind of game, but how do you feel about going against the grain like that?
Eric Nofsinger: I think it is a risk… but with risk, there’s also great opportunity. We look at it and we see that with the kind of gamers that we are, the kind of gamers that other folks we know are, gameplay is obviously king — and we’re very much aligned with Nintendo in that fashion, we believe that gameplay is the most important thing in a game — but we also believe that if given the option of having great gameplay and great graphics, a lot of consumers would want that. We want to deliver both. The system, I think, is capable of a lot more than most developers and publishers are pushing it to do.
GameCyte: You say this started out as a tech demo, to show off your Quantum3 engine that you used for Gyrostarr, as well as…
Micah Skaritka: We’ve used that in a lot of our titles, and it’s very versatile. We’ve used it for everything from Family Guy to Harvey Birdman; I think most of the games we’ve released in the last three years have been on Quantum3.
GameCyte: So you’d been working with this engine for a while.
EN: What happened was we decided to do a major enhancement to it. We rearchitected some segments of it using our advanced technology group, which allowed us to introduce things like normal mapping, light mapping, dynamic water, full-screen effects, material-based effects… we were able to do a lot of really cool wizardry through that tech demo. Basically, we challenged our ATG group, “Hey, here’s some stuff out there on these other systems. Is this possible on the Wii?” and it seemed like everything we threw at those guys — “Can you do this?” — they’d say “Let me get back to you,” and then they’d come back in a few days and go “Yeah, we figured out a way to do that, it will take this amount of time. Can we do it?” and each time management would say “Yeah, do that!”
They put a lot of effort into it, and I think it shows. That demo became our proof of concept that all this stuff is capable of being done on the Wii — and about 12 months ago, we started on The Conduit. We knew we can do the gameplay, and after our ATG group proved we could do the visuals, we decided to combine them.
GameCyte: I’m curious about how you were able to make this huge R&D investment in all these graphical abilities for your engine. What was the original purpose? Were you trying to sell the engine using this new enhancement? Was there something particular you were going after with this investment before you decided to make a game with it?
EN: Everything we do is meant to eventually end up in a game; we’re not a technology company in that we’re making technology just for technology’s sake. However, when we did make it, what we were hoping to achieve is a real competitive advantage. We had a strong indication that many of these things would be possible if we put the effort into it, because we have done GameCube games in the past, among other things, and it seemed like most of what we’d seen on the system were the same kinds of graphics we’d seen on the GameCube, and that didn’t seem right. It inherently seemed flawed, because you should be able to do more with a more powerful system.
GameCyte: Was there another game in the works, perhaps an aborted project for one of your other clients for which the new tech was originally intended?
EN: No, not really. It really all started, initially, with a conversation between our CEO Kerry Ganofsky and myself, where we were sitting around and bemusing the state of the Wii. We were saying, “We love the Wii, this is such a neat system,” but our game consoles were gathering dust. The first-party stuff was awesome but there wasn’t a lot of great third-party stuff at the time, and we said to ourselves “this sucks, we’re spending all our time on 360 and PS3…”
GameCyte: I’m just rather surprised that you could make an R&D investment like that — even assuming all your staff were in-house — without a project in mind for the technology.
EN: One thing we’ve been fortunate with in recent years is venture capital; outside investors are willing to put money into game products and into us exploring notions for products and building prototype phases, not just full development of games. With The Conduit, the news piece was “Who’s the publisher?” and a lot of folks asked that, but although it became kind of a big news thing it really wasn’t ever in question for us because from the start of the game we’ve had full funding to complete the product how we wanted to complete it.
That really put us in a different position where, knowing we wanted to do an original product, setting aside a certain amount of money to do research and development just seemed to make more sense than to leap right into the game and hope for the best.
GameCyte: You knew there was going to be an original project, but you weren’t sure what it was going to be.
EN: Exactly.
GameCyte: So you wanted an original project, you had all this technology, you saw that the first-person shooter software market was wide open on Wii — how did you go from there to an actual game? From where did you pull in the gameplay, the story, the AI?
EN: Well, a lot of that came from within the team. We had a lot of things that we liked about different games, and some things that we didn’t like… The setting came first. We knew we wanted to do something that was real-world, not just based on something completely fantastic — not for this version. We wanted to do something that had some sort of realistic setting that would allow us to really showcase technology in that setting, and something that would be identifiable, that people would be able to look at and go, “Oh, okay, I get that.” We’ve got the Pentagon, the Oval Office, the Library of Congress, the Jefferson Memorial; there’s a lot of cool stuff that really hasn’t been explored, and I think it’s something that people will pick up on right away and say “Oh, that’s neat, I recognize that, it looks just like it.”
GameCyte: The storyline — was that already in someone’s head before this tech project began?
EN: No, not so much; it was definitely an involved progress. We’re fans of science fiction; we’re fans of conspiracy theories…
GameCyte: Any particular conspiracy theories?
EN: We’re big fans of the Templar, and the Masons; in my office I’ve got this gigantic encyclopedia of secret societies…
GameCyte: (laughs)
EN: One of the things we realized early on was that folks that are into conspiracy theories are really into them, and there is a plethora of wonderful material to draw on out there. We’ve peppered a lot of the environments with many, many little story elements — like little objects that are in certain historical locations. If people look around, they’ll find all kinds of things that will make them ask questions. It’s part of how we’re trying to tell the story.
Another thing that was critical to us early on is we realized that we didn’t want to spend all our resources on heavy-handed cinematics. The influence there was Cloverfield. We kind of liked the idea that the characters of Cloverfield are thrown into the middle of this event, but also that a lot of things aren’t really explained to the viewer; you pick up on things in the periphery. We wanted to have a deep story for the players who did want to go and explore and discover more of the universe, but didn’t want to club players over the head with it.
GameCyte: I notice you named a couple of the camera modes SteadyCam and HandyCam, with the latter giving you that shaky effect… is that direct inspiration from the film?
EN: There’s definitely inspiration there. We know people want to experience the game differently though, and that’s been a carryover throughout. At all of these trade shows, all of the forums, we read all of the posts… we really want that feedback about the game. When you say “triple-A shooter” that means a lot of different things to different players, so we’re not so full of ourselves that we think we have all the answers. We listen to fans and press, and try to incorporate that into what we’re doing. That goes down to the customization of the control, our camera, all of that. We want to give as much customization as possible.
GameCyte: There was an interview at Nintendo Wii Fanboy where the team mentions how they’d liberally taken the best elements of Halo, GoldenEye and other triple-A FPS titles and integrated them into The Conduit… What I’d like to know is, what Wii titles did you take inspiration from?
EN: I’m not sure if there’s a clear choice on the Wii, but I will say we looked heavily at Metroid and Medal of Honor: Heroes 2. Metroid does a lot of things right, but it’s not really a first-person shooter per se; it’s got some elements of the genre, but it’s more of an adventure game. But then you look at Medal of Honor: Heroes 2, and they do a lot of things right there, but it’s a port. We wanted to do something that was exclusive to the Wii, and was built from the ground up to be a definitive first-person shooter for hardcore players. We try to steal from the best, so we take ideas from wherever it makes sense, and then apply them judiciously.
GameCyte: Other than the control scheme, is there anything you can put your finger on that fan and press feedback have influenced?
EN: Oh, absolutely. We got great feedback on the default turn speed, the character run speed [both are now adjustable - Ed.], we got feedback on some alternate mappings, and those are all in the works. People on a lot of forums said they liked how it looked, but they felt that some of the screenshots and videos looked a little jaggy, and so that was one of the things that we got on right away — we came up with a new system that allows us to get right up on a texture and have it look really crisp and clean. Folks said they wanted depth of field; we put depth of field in. Those are all things that fans and press have asked for, we’ve listened to, and we’re integrating. We’ve got a big ol’ punch list. We’re not going to say that we’re going to get to everything on that list, but we’re going to keep listening and the things that make sense that we can get in, till the day we ship, we’re going to keep listening — and the things that we can’t get in this version, we’ll put in the next version.
GameCyte: You’re planning a Conduit 2 already?
EN: Absolutely. We look at this as a franchise, and something that we want to do multiple versions of. We know we’re not going to be able to hit everything out of the gate exactly how we want, and we know that we want to have a really good, solid first outing that Wii fans and folks who specifically want core gamer games on the Wii are going to support. I think people are going to feel like they got their money’s worth, but we’ve got a big ol’ universe of stories that we want to tell. This little segment of the story takes place in D.C, but there are a lot of other things that we have to tell about our shadowy government organizations.
GameCyte: What location do you think we might go to next?
EN: That, we’re not saying just yet. But we have some really strong ideas.
GameCyte: Will we know by the end of the game where it might be headed?
EN: I think by the end of the game you’ll have some strong hints as to where some next settings — some next openings might be. There are definitely some threads at the end of this story. Our storytelling isn’t about wrapping everything up in a nice tidy bow; the kind of gamers we want are thoughtful, they like to be challenged in their storytelling, they want to ask questions. We want to provide them with a lot of answers but leave them with questions too — areas that they can discuss.
GameCyte: You’re not going to leave us with an Assassin’s Creed or Halo 2 cliffhanger ending, are you?
EN: No, no, no… we want to give them a journey, and make sure they feel like they’ve experienced something. We don’t want to be so cliched and Hollywood that we’re beating them over the head and going “This means this.”
GameCyte: Your control scheme contest — have you received anything particularly awesome there that you’d like to share?
EN: Well, we received a whole lot of awesome, really… in the first twelve hours since that press release went out, we received 400 submissions — very detailed, full-on control breakdowns. With the rules of that contest, having to map all of those to all of the different elements, we figured that we weren’t going to get back as many as we did, at least not at first — but we got a lot of really interesting schemes.
Now, the real trick for us is not “did we get anything really interesting,” it’s narrowing it down to just a handful so it’s not an insanely crazy set of 75 controller options or something.
GameCyte: (to Eric, Micah both) If you had to pick, what your single favorite control mapping of the ones submitted so far?
MS: I’ve only seen a couple of them so far, but there were some crazy ones in there. There was a weird shake one… I think the fire trigger was on the shake instead, so you’d shake the Nunchuk to fire.
EN: I saw one that was interesting where they kind of mapped everything out to the Wiimote and Nunchuk but then they also had a whole scheme in there for using the Wii Fit. That was interesting.
GameCyte: Oh, I would love to see something akin to Police 911. It’s this arcade game where you stand in two spots on the ground and it’s got a camera that watches your profile, so if you shrink back or crouch you can retreat behind cover. You could do that with the Balance Board.
EN: That’s a good idea.
GameCyte: Another favorite — what are your all-time favorite guns in shooters you’ve played?
EN: (without hesitation) Cerebral Bore.
The Cerebral Bore from Turok, that’s probably my favorite. I just think it’s crazy. I like a lot of the weapons from Duke Nukem, a lot of the weapons from the better Turok games… a lot of the weapons from Perfect Dark — those are all great games for really distinctive weapons.
MS: I like the Needler. It makes it so you don’t have to be as precise, but you have to get it as much over there as you can, and then you get to see it explode.
GameCyte: Which Needler though? Halo 1, 2 or 3? They’re all different…
MS: Halo 3 is the one I’ve had the most experience with. It’s kind of like the replay gun. What was that movie, with Gary Oldman and Bruce Willis…
GameCyte: That sounds familiar… The Fifth Element?
EN: (holds up notepad with “Police 911″ circled in black ink) You said that title was called Police 911. Do you know if that was Konami or…
GameCyte: I’m pretty sure that’s a Konami game.
Ladies and gentlemen, he actually just wrote that down. Police 911.
(all laugh)
Can you tell me who your publisher is?
EN: No, we can’t yet. Unfortunately, we’ve got the gag order, it’s in the hands of lawyers. We really do want to tell people. It’s a done deal, it’s just a matter of the last bits of contract negotiation on that going back and forth. Until that gets sown up, I can’t really say.
GameCyte: But we can say you have a publisher.
EN: You can say we have a publisher.
GameCyte: How long have you been in negotiation? What was the point at which this company said “Yes, let’s do this?”
EN: It’s been about a month that we’ve been in serious negotiations with them. I mean, we’d talked to many other folks before that, but then it sort of got whittled down to the best condenders. I will say that the publisher that we did go with… we didn’t necessarily go with whoever was the highest bidder; we went with the publisher we felt would be the best partner, and would be willing to work with us and make sure that we could continue to make a triple-A title, and was very open to the idea of starting on a sequel.
GameCyte: Going back to the beginning of this interview, I’d like to ask — what if you’re wrong? What if Conduit doesn’t have the fanbase you hope it will? What if it turns out that the core gamers you’re hoping for aren’t on the Wii, they’ve actually on a different console? What happens then?
EN: I think it changes the landscape; I think a lot of folks are waiting to see how we do, to see if it is a viable system for hardcore gamers. I believe, and I think many people believe — our entire company believes that the Wii is a viable system for core gamers. We’re going out swinging hard, and we’re going to give this our all, and if it doesn’t work, we can’t say it’s for lack of trying. I’d rather go out there and fail then give it a half-hearted effort — which I think a lot of folks still are.
I think a lot of folks still are dipping their toe in the water, and they’re doing some things that are interesting, but they’re not really taking it to the next level. We want the Wii to be the gaming console, and I think that’s not just pretty graphics; it’s great gameplay and pretty graphics, and great audio, and great storytelling, and a great multiplayer experience… we’re trying to pull all that together, and it’s a lot of work.
But I think that if it can be done, we’re going to do our best to make sure it happens. Our reputation is riding on this.
GameCyte: You think so.
EN: Oh, very much so. I think that just like in movies, you’re only as good as your last title, and I think that High Voltage has worked on a lot of titles over the years, mainly licensed titles.
GameCyte: Is this your first original title?
EN: It’s not our first original title, it’s our first major-scale original title. We’ve done some WiiWare titles…
GameCyte: Gyrostarr.
EN: We had some limited success with that, it’s been doing well for us, but I look at this as our first attempt to make a triple-A title. I think most gamers are smart and realize that a lot of the licensed titles we’ve done in the past, those were timed-to-market products and they could look the other way, and now go “Well here, now they finally have a chance to do the kind of game they want,” and they’re willing to look at our company and say “Okay, they’ve got this history, they’ve made a lot of games, they can make a game, now here’s their shot to make something really, really good” and we have to live up to that promise.
GameCyte: You decided to do that on your own, though — you didn’t have that publisher to begin with.
EN: Yes.
GameCyte: So… can you tell us anything about Animales de la Muerte?
EN: (eyes light up) Absolutely!
GameCyte: What’s that about?
EN: Well, it’s a zombie apocalypse in a Mexican zoo.
GameCyte: (laughs) High concept.
EN: It’s a crazy, over-the-top and gruesome brawler, multiplayer kind of Smash TV-style game. Like Monkey Island, you have to save the good animals, and if they get infected, you have to take out the bad animals. It’s a simple little game concept, but it’s funny as hell and there’s lots of comedy, and we think it’s something really good. Internally, where we’ve been on the fence with it is we’ve put a lot into the development of it, and we’re looking at doing it as a WiiWare title, but honestly we’ve had a little bit of trouble squeezing it into 40 megs.
We’ve got a lot of cinematics, and a lot of comedy there. We don’t want to kill the comedy.
GameCyte (points to Wii demo station currently running The Conduit) Well, you guys are making a reputation out of doing things with limited resources…
EN: For sure, but… I don’t know, you look at Strong Bad and that game’s really fun, and they’re doing it on WiiWare so that’s certainly inspiring.
GameCyte: What would you say to publishing on PSN or Xbox Live Arcade?
EN: Maybe… I think that could be cool. PSN would maybe be a good one. I feel that Live Arcade right now is really saturated, and it’s hard to stand out. Maybe if fans were really vocal and said to us “Yeah, we’d buy this on Live Arcade…” I just feel there’s a lot of stuff out there, and on WiiWare there’s still a lot of great opportunity to stand out and do something special.
GameCyte: You do know that reading this, there will be fans who will say “Yes, we’ll buy this on Live Arcade,” right?
EN: That would be great! I welcome the emails. We have no shortage of correspondence, and definitely to anyone that’s ever emailed us, we do try to email everyone back. It’s not always the quickest turnaround time, because we receive a lot of email every day, but we really do listen to what folks have to say. You won’t see us just sending cheesy form letters back. What makes me feel really good are the folks who contact us and say stuff like “I was going to sell my Wii, but now I’m going to hang onto it cause this is awesome,” or “I haven’t bought a Wii yet, but now I’m going to because of this.”
GameCyte: How many of those have you gotten?
EN: A good number… I think that gamers in general, there’s sort of a perception that gamers are just kind of fruity or whatever, and I consider myself a gamer…
GameCyte: And you don’t consider yourself fruity.
EN: Well, I’m fruity.
GameCyte: (laughs)
EN: Well, I think that we’re also incredibly passionate individuals, and we really care a lot about quality entertainment. I’ve had so much correspondence with folks that are really open and just want to make sure that we succeed so there are more great games for the Wii coming out.
GameCyte: That’s really great to hear.
Can you tell us anything new about Animales?
EN: I’ll say that we have a pretty wonderful menagerie of horrific animals that have gotten built up. There’s something wonderfully grotesque about a walrus with half of its head missing… The one phrase I can leave people with is “Zombie Petting Zoo.”
GameCyte: (smiles) I’d be clapping but my hands are full.
What have you learned from your experiences with Gyrostarr? We’ll admit it didn’t do terribly well in our review…
EN: It was a good first outing, but I don’t think it was a perfect game. We got a lot of great feedback, and one of the things we learned from it, probably the biggest thing we learned was to get feedback from folks like yourself early and often. I think most of the reviews we got for the game are fair, and I think that in the critiques that they gave of the game, there are a lot of things that we could have fixed. We’re not so full of ourselves that we think that we’ve got the answer for everything, and I don’t think that you can say you’re making a game for core gamers if you’re not listening to core gamers and implementing that. I think you’re making a game for yourself as a core gamer, and maybe that was something that we did wrong with Gyrostarr, was that we made it a little too much for ourselves as opposed to getting that feedback.
That’s something I really think we’ve really been doing right on Conduit, and we plan on doing that on all of our future original titles.
GameCyte: You’ve had plenty of partners in the past, and I’m sure you’ve had many deadlines, but self-funding this title you haven’t been strained the same way. Is that correct?
EN: That is correct. We impose our own internal milestones, but what’s different about it is we’re far more quality-driven as opposed to checklist-driven. We don’t just check things off a list and say “done, done, done,” until it’s all fun.
GameCyte: That rhymes. (smiles) From a gamer’s standpoint, I respect the old 3D Realms/id Software model. But are you worried that now you have a publisher, you might once again have these constraints?
EN: I’m not — with the publisher we ended up with, it’s a partnership. They’re going to have good input just like anyone else would. They recognize what we have and what we’re trying to do, and I think we’re very much aligned in that. Plus, that was a critical component to our contract negotiation, making sure that we still were able to, as I said earlier, making sure that they had the same goals in making a great game as we do.
GameCyte: Has it been agreed, then, that you’ll be able to set your own deadlines and maintain your own quality standards?
EN: As far as the quality standards and things like that, yes. As far as the actual ship date and things like that, they have their own set of criteria that will need to come into play. They have marketing teams that need that, and actual physical manufacturing that they have to worry about, and QA — one of the reasons we’re most grateful for a publishing partner is being able to align with a QA team. We’ve got a great internal test team that does a really good job, but a publisher will be able to unleash an army of testers on our game. It’ll be great — we’re going to find so many bugs and issues, and we’ll be able to fix all that stuff before the game hits.
GameCyte: Thank you both for the interview. This was a real pleasure.
The Conduit is slated for a Q1 2009 release on the Nintendo Wii. You can read our hands-on preview here.
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