The forgotten interview with Chris Roberts

I’m so sorry, the second of this month’s Unpublished Paul posts is late this week, due to a bunch of different things falling on me at once. It’s a special one, though!

What follows is a transcript from an old interview I did with Star Citizen and Wing Commander creator/film producer Chris Roberts, way back in 2013. It was an interview I put together with the hope of supporting a much broader feature about the man and his history, a profile piece of the sort that I like to do sometimes (see here and here).

Unfortunately time and life and other commitments meant the scale of this project was too much and I worked on it too slowly. The next year, U.S. Gamer beat me to it with this profile piece and I considered my beginnings a little dated.

However, it was a great interview (my third with Roberts, who is always an interesting person to talk to) and it touches on a lot of Roberts’ career, influences and early achievements. I think it’s a good transcript to read through as is and, with that in mind, I’ve decided to share it here. It’s edited for clarity and slightly annotated, but otherwise remains the conversation we had.

Paul Dean: As I understand, you were born in the US but you grew up in Manchester, from where you’ve kept the accent. Is that right?

Chris Roberts: What happened was that my father was teaching at Manchester University. He was doing research in Guatemala at the time when I was about to be born. My mother and my father decided Guatemala probably wasn’t the best place to have your first child born. My mother’s American and my father’s British, and she stayed with her parents in Palo Alto, which is basically a suburb of San Francisco. I was born there and then, when I was a couple of months old my mother took me down to Guatemala, and then finished out my father’s research. He was there for a year researching, writing a book, and then went back to Manchester.

I essentially grew up there and, when I was nineteen, I was taking a year off from going to University. I came across to visit my parents who had just moved to Austin, Texas, because my Dad had been recruited to the University of Texas. I took that year off, whatever you want to call it, a gap year or whatever, and I was writing computer games. I’d been doing that since I was 13. I’d been making money doing it and I was being published in stores from I think about 15 or 16.

The weather was a little nicer in Austin. The American girls seemed to like the English accent, which wasn’t bad, and there was definitely a lot… everything seemed like it was cheaper and there was more of it, especially back then. Now, the world’s become more homogenised so there’s not things you can only get in America that you don’t get in England as well. Back then it was like, the big American movies would come out in America and then they would come out in England a year later and stuff. So I came over and was like, “Ah, you know, this is pretty cool.” I met and hooked up with Origin [Systems] when it was just starting in Austin and the rest, I guess, is history. I just basically never went back.

PD: It’s funny that you mention that because one of the first things I want to ask about is how different the games scene here was in the 80s. If I’m right, one of the first games you made was Wizadore, then Stryker’s Run…

CR: Yep, Wizadore. I did Match Day on the BBC and then I did Stryker’s Run. Then I was working on what became Times of Lore. I started working on it in England when I was writing it for the Commodore 64, then I went across to America. Origin published Times of Lore for the Commodore 64 and then the PC.

PD: It seems like in Britain we were much more focused on the Spectrum and the C64 than the US was. Were those your earliest programming influences?

CR: Yeah, I started playing around with a ZX… well, the first one was the 80, I think, the one that was 1k, then the ZX81. Then we got a BBC Micro and that was what I did most of my programming. I think that what happened was, my father was always into technology so they’d gotten an Apple into his department in Manchester University. He’s a sociologist but they’d got it in for word processing and I was pretty fascinated by the ability to animate and have images on screen. I was an artist when I was young so I was really keen. I was playing arcade games so I was sort of keen to animate and move things and maybe do my own version of arcade games.

So, I took an extracurricular course at Manchester University with a friend of mine. We were both whatever we were, pretty young like, 12 or something, and learning how to program on a Commodore Pet. The teacher that was teaching it, he was trying to teach things like databases for saving phone numbers and we were just trying to figure out how to make helicopters fly around on the screen. That teacher became the editor of The Micro User, one of the BBC Micro magazines, and he remembered me and my friend from the class. They were about ready to launch and he called up and said, “Hey, I remember you guys were writing games. Do you have anything you can sell me?”

That was my first paying gig. I got paid £100 for Kong [it also made the cover]. That was a lot of money as a 13 year old back then, so I was big time. It went from there.

I migrated from Basic to Assembly Language because you really needed to do that to get the performance out of the machine, and so Wizadore, Match Day and Stryker’s Run were all programmed in Assembly Language. The big challenge, which probably people don’t really remember now and it was certainly more of an England thing versus an American thing… in those days, all the games were on tape. You had to figure out how to load the game in from tape into memory. It’s not like disc drives where you can randomly access the data even while you’re playing. When I came across to America one of the things was, everyone had disc drives. No one in England had disc drives because they were too expensive, they all had tape. For one of the Times of Lore, I’d actually figured out how to pack a whole bunch of data and information into it that I think wasn’t so appreciated in America because they were all just used to having the game already being on three or four floppies

It was always a challenge. The BBC Micro had 32k of memory. Now, pretty much every email you send is probably at least 32k. The screen mode you used was 20k so you actually ended up really only having about 12k that you had to fit everything [in to]. Load it off [the] disc, figure out how you would compress the imagery and all the logic for your game into essentially 12k. That’s pretty challenging.

PD: I remember that through my Spectrum and then my Amiga days. The platform would remain static but people would become better and better at coding because they became more efficient at using, say, 48k of memory. Do you remember the name of the teacher-turned-editor by any chance?

CR: I actually do not. I think you can probably look up… he was the editor from the beginning of The Micro User so I can’t remember the name . I think you can probably Google “The Micro User” and he would be the editor because he used to teach at Manchester University. [It’s probably Derek Meakin.]

PD: What were the first games that you remember playing? Clearly, you must have taken a lot of influences from other games before you started making your own.

CR: Well, I used to play a lot of arcade games. I actually have a Galaga machine here which was one of my favourites from back in the day. I still remember playing Space War in an arcade in Aberdeen. Was it Aberdeen? In Edinburgh when I went up there. My father had a teaching engagement and he took me and my brother up and we were pretty small. We went off to the arcade. I remember that, and basically all the classics on the arcade side whether it’s things like Asteroids or Tank Zone, Galaga, Galaxian, Defender and onwards.

On the computer side, some of the first games I played were the Infocom games, the text adventure games. They were on Apple II. I got a few games I could play on the Apple II that was in my father’s University office. On the Spectrum side there there was some Imagine stuff, before they all went bankrupt. The company that I liked the best was Ultimate. All their games just blew my mind. I thought they were pretty awesome. I’m trying to remember… I’m like pulling back into my memory banks to remember… one was called Knight Lore, maybe?

PD: Oh, yeah! The isometric adventure.

CR: Yeah! That was amazing, I remember when they had that isometric thing. I was like, “Aw, how did they do that?” because everything used to be 2D platformers before that. I think they were, on a game front, pretty inspiring for me because they had a really high quality. On the BBC Micro there was some cool stuff. David Braben and Ian Bell obviously did Elite which was pretty awesome.

I thought it was all pretty good but, you know, going across to America, that was kind of where, like… England was good as a market but America, the number of units sold was significantly more than you would be selling in England, so that was always a reason [to go there].

PD: I can see the appeal of that. When you were talking about a lot of these games, I don’t know if you realised, but you just mentioned a whole slew of sci-fi titles. Was that the kind of stuff you decided you wanted to make as well?

CR: Definitely. I liked both, I mean, fantasy and sci-ii were two things and still are things that I love. I think my influences on a pop culture side… Star Wars is obviously huge, so that was a big impact on me when I was eight and I saw it as a kid in the movie theatre. When I was young I used to draw comics and it would be spaceship battles, or… Probably I was a bit more into sci-fi than fantasy but I also grew up loving things like reading the Lord of the Rings.

Actually, when I was a young kid I had this fantasy of, if I like inherited £100,000,000, I would be able to do Lord of the Rings. That was what I thought when I was eight, nine or ten or something. It seemed to me like it would require such an insane amount of money to do justice to the film. [A bit more than that, actually.]

PD: In a way, you’re right! I think it’s interesting that you ended up in Texas. Were you working for Richard Garriott at the time?

CR: I wasn’t working necessarily for him… The way Origin worked… Origin actually treated everyone who was developing the stuff as developers, so Richard was a developer for Origin as well as owning part of Origin, and I was a developer for Origin. Before we were bought by Electronic Arts, we owned our own work. I owned Wing Commander completely, Richard owned Ultima completely. But we collaborated, he wasn’t necessarily my boss, but we were good friends and close. I actually wrote a bunch of conversations for Ultima IV, helped him when he was crunching on his development side and did stuff like that. He lent resources to me to help finish Wing Commander and stuff.

PD: So there was a bit of cross-fertilisation, maybe?

CR: Oh yeah, definitely. Absolutely. It was really tight. The early days of Origin were great. There weren’t a lot of people in the office. It was a small scrappy company competing against bigger people and, yeah, it was tight. Everyone went out to get lunches together. As the company grew and became part of EA I think, when I left, there were over 300 people working there. You sort of lose that sense of tightness. But in the early days it was a great place to be at. When I started working with Origin there was maybe five people in the office in Austin. It was a great place even up until the moment I left, but it definitely had something special when it was so small.

PD: At the time, did you feel like you were pioneering PC gaming? For me, I was about ten or eleven at the start of the 90s. That, for me, was when PC gaming took off because Wing Commander happened, a few years later Sim City 2000 happened, Doom happened… the first XCom game happened. All in that early 90s period. Did it feel that it was that dynamic and exciting?

CR: Definitely, it really did. That was one of the reasons why I left and was burned out. One of the reasons I’m coming back now is that I feel like the rules have been rewritten and you can feel like you’re inventing again. I definitely felt when we were doing stuff, we sort of felt like we were making it up as we were going along, inventing the language of how the games would be. The technology was moving along really rapidly so you could do all these new things. It felt like every day you were doing new stuff that no one had tried to do before and that was super exciting.

That was on the development side, but it was even on the business side. I remember when we did the mission packs for Wing Commander. It all came out of the fact that when I made the game, I had all these assets created and I didn’t have enough disc space for some of the ships so I basically had to shelve them. They were sitting around and Wing Commander was doing so well. It was going to take a while to do the next one. Everyone’s like, “Well, what can we do in the meantime? Everyone loves this.”

I said, “I used to play D&D, they had this little campaign modules that you would get. Why don’t we do something like that?”

Everyone was like, “Ooh, I don’t know if that would work!”

We would have to put a disc in a game and in a box and get it to retail and we couldn’t charge full price for a game. I’m like, “Well we could maybe add $20, the cost of one of those D&D modules. Let’s try that out”.

We had this big debate. The marketing and sales guys weren’t sure whether the retail guys would want it. We said, “Ah, what the hell, we’ll give it a try” and we thought we’d sell 10,000 copies which wouldn’t be bad back in those days. We sold, I think, about half a million copies of the first couple of mission discs on Wing Commander. It’s amazing for back then, because just selling 100,000 units of anything was a huge deal.

It felt like the whole industry was figuring out what was happening. On the business side, you felt like you were in the avant-garde of it and that’s why I sold Digital Anvil to Microsoft, that was one of the reasons I took the break. It felt like that kind of stuff [had] gone away and you had to be part of this big corporate entity over here or over here. You weren’t so much inventing things on the fly. That’s what I love about the online stuff that’s happening now, it feels like that world is opening up again and you’re forging new models, new relationships and new ways of developing.

PD: Which is fantastic. It’s interesting that you mentioned the mission packs and those doing so well because at the time, that felt quite natural and logical to me as a young kid, spending his pocket money to just get more of the same game that he’s enjoying. Wing Commander was a really big deal at the time. I thought it was a great game and particularly the first three I was really enamoured with. They were sort of your interpretation of all those influences, then? Of sci-fi and Star Wars and Space Opera and things?

CR: Yeah, you know, I loved sci-fi. The other thing growing up - this is maybe more an English thing - is, I was a big military history. I had models of Tiger Tanks. As kids, me and my friends would build Airfix models and so World War II and military stuff was pretty big.

PD: Commando Magazine was huge.

CR: Right. I think it’s more an English thing than an American thing, I’ve noticed. I liked all that. Wing Commander was merging my love of some of that military history stuff along with the sci-fi stuff. Those are all influences blended together. I think it worked out, so that was good. I think anyone that creates anything in the entertainment space is always influenced by various different influences and it’s how you combine them into something that feels cool and right for the medium you’re doing it on.

PD: Well, the first two were great games. Then, for the third, obviously CD-ROM was coming to the PC. Originally, when CD-ROM games came out, there was loads of FMV. There were all these excuses for putting footage onto a disc that was more important than the actual game. I remember Wing Commander III where, actually, the game was still the focus and the FMV supported the story rather than getting in the way. [And it still works quite well today.] I really liked the way you did that, but that was a big technological jump for you as well and a big jump for you to suddenly be a director of famous actors. That must have been a bit scary.

CR: It was definitely pretty scary at the beginning. We shot a test in ‘93 because we wanted to test out the technology and originally I wasn’t thinking of doing the directing. I ended up directing the test just because… for whatever reason. I can’t remember! We were maybe going to get someone in and then we didn’t. I was like, “Ah, I need to see how this goes anyway”. Then I did it and I was like, “Hmm, yeah OK, I think maybe I can handle this.”

Even the language of cinema - how you set up a scene and what shots you need to compose and all the rest of the stuff… I hadn’t studied film. I obviously watched a lot of movies and was a big film fan, but I hadn’t gone to film school. There are a lot of technical aspects of filmmaking that I had to learn. I did it with our test shoot and did it as I was doing the later stuff.

That, for me, is probably the best way to [learn]. I’m not really good at school. I’m much better at doing it. I’m not the guy that reads the manual. I figure out how to operate something by pressing all the buttons on it. So yeah, it was fun. I think the thing for me, and probably why it was less about "I just wanna make a movie and I don’t really care about the game” was, my focus - and even this is what drove Wing Commander, and it’s still driving today - is, I just love the escapism that movies can give you or games can give you. It’s the immersion into the world.

One of the biggest things that drove the original Wing Commander was, I didn’t want anything that made you sort of… pulled you out of being in this world. I didn’t want that typical game IU, or “Here’s how many lives you’ve got, here’s what high score you’ve got”. I always felt that broke the immersion. When you’re in Wing Commander, if you wanted to save the game you’d go to the barracks and you’d clink on the bunk. If you want to exit, you’d click on the airlock. it was all meant to be in that world and so that was what the drive was. I love story and narrative and I think you can use that story and narrative to tie your action together and that will give your action meaning and context in a game. That was my idea and that was what really drove what I was doing with Wing Commander.

Wing Commander III was the natural progression of that. Back then, especially if I was doing storytelling the old way, which was the Wing I and Wing II style, that was very rudimentary animation like Saturday morning cartoons. You just couldn’t get some of the subtlety of a performance or emotion out. Filming a real actor, you could. We didn’t have the fidelity in the computer animated stuff to have the same sort of range of emotion. That was kind of why I did it, but it was all in service of the experience and the immersion and the game, not just because I was a frustrated movie director and someone would pay me to do a game. I do think there were cases in the old days of that multimedia push where that was kind of what was happening.

PD: I definitely agree with you there. When you assembled the cast, you didn’t assemble “a cast,” you got John Rhys-Davies and Mark Hamill. You got people who were a pretty big deal. How did that happen?

CR: We did Wing III, we were casting, it was brought up and we were like, "That would be interesting”. I met with Mark and then we were like “Okay, this makes sense, let’s do it.”

When I went and did the live action stuff for Wing Commander III, there was an interest in it in Hollywood because it was this new thing. We’d hired some really good people on the film production side, they had good relationships, so it was more generated from the casting directors and the film producer side of it. I met with [the actors] and we got on well. I think everyone was up to try this new thing. It was kind of fun!

It was great getting so many experienced actors. They bring a lot to whatever they do. I have a much bigger appreciation for all that now I’ve spent a lot of time in the film business. In fact, I think character actors are some of my most favourite actors of all the actors out there.

PD: Was that something that you missed in your early gaming days, when a game was much more just a core game experience and it didn’t have much of a world built around it?

CR: The story, definitely, yeah.

PD: You were just talking about world building, or how the movie making can add to world building. You’ve mentioned this in interviews before. You weren’t tempted when you were making games to make text adventures or to go further down the RPG route instead? You’ve touched on that but you’ve never really gone that way.

CR: Times of Lore was essentially an RPG. It was done top-down. It looked sort of like Gauntlet but it had a story and had a whole interface for the conversation system that was menu driven for joystick, which if you look at what you do now in a lot of RPGs, it’s pretty much exactly the same interface.

PD: That seemed to really influence the Ultima games, but it feels like you moved away from that afterwards.

CR: I had - I still have it, I still own it - I developed a project called Silverheart with Michael Moorcock. That was actually going to be my next game after Freelancer and then I sold the company and did film stuff. Fantasy is… like I said, I like both of them but obviously spaceships is probably number one and also what I’m best known for! I think if I was coming back and saying "I’m going to do a fantasy game!” I may not have the same level of support I would have done when I was doing Star Citizen.

I just feel like this game and this level of world building doesn’t exist, or hasn’t existed for a while, whereas in the fantasy arena there is some pretty awesome stuff already.

PD: You were saying that you had the typical child’s dream that it would be nice to have a few hundred million to build a world, to build something futuristic or fantasy style. You’ve kind of done that now, or you’re doing that again. You did that with Wing Commander, which I thought was a pretty coherent world set in the far future. How does it feel to be doing that now, to have come round to that through Star Citizen? It may not be a hundred million, but it’s a lot of money to be crowd-funded [at the time of the interview the funding was into the tens of millions, but it’s now reached $109m as of February 2016] .

CR: It’s great. That’s one of the things I’m most excited about. There’s a level of detail that I can put into the world, whether it’s detailing out exactly how the ships work and walking around inside of them and all the bits that work, or down on the environments on the planet. It all feels like, now I can paint it, build out this world to a level of texture and detail that I couldn’t do before. That’s pretty exciting to me. If someone gave me lots of money and I could do whatever I wanted, whether it’s movie or games, I don’t think I’d be like, “Ah, I’ll just be doing movies.”

In some ways, on the games side with what the technology’s allowing you to do, I can build a more detailed, interesting world digitally than I can in a movie. A movie is a narrative for about two hours and it’s kind of constrained on a path. We’ve got a lot of film people working on Star Citizen that are having a good time because a lot of times they’ll conceptually design something or build a prop or whatever and it may never end up in the final film. It may get cut out or you only see one angle of it and they put all this other detail on the other side. In something like Star Citizen, all that gets seen by the player. They’re flying around, you get to appreciate all the details because it’s not like you’re just building a facade on one wall of a room. You have to build all four walls of a room. I feel like you can realise the world with more detail in the interactive arena compared to the traditional linear storytelling.

PD: Was that something that you jumped on with 80s-style games [influences], with what was around during that time? Obviously, worlds were more limited but I remember the late 80s as a period when games did open up a little more.

CR: Definitely. Those were the games I really liked and responded to. Elite’s a good example. Elite did a very good job of giving the impression of a much richer and bigger, detailed world than really was there. Anything that got you a sense of being immersed into a world was something that I responded to pretty strongly. That really drives me on all the stuff I’m doing so, for me, I feel like I couldn’t do what I’m doing on Star Citizen in the movie world even if someone said, "Here’s $200,000,000.”

That’s cool for me because really, my dream ever since a kid was building these worlds and then getting to spend time inside them.

PD: Which is a pretty cool dream. I can see how that ties into Dungeons and Dragons as well, and tabletop role playing, which I don’t think I’m ever going to grow out of, even as I’m getting older. You mention the modules, so I guess you must have played a bit of that as well? That was big in the US in the 80s, and over here as well.

CR: Actually, in 1976 I was a year in the US because my father did an exchange thing with UT in Austin. We always had some American friends and a lot of summers we would go across to America during the summer say, to visit my mother’s parents and stuff like that. When we’d go visit - this was in the 70s, before I wrote any games - I was introduced to D&D in the early stages back when it was first becoming big in America. I was like, "Wow! This stuff’s awesome.”

I was a little kid and some of my parent’s friends, their sons were a little older. They’d say, "Hey, come and play this.” One of them was good at being a Dungeon Master. That whole sense of imagination and world building, I loved it. I could see the possibilities with a computer, being able to set up that world in a way you can actually see it and do all those things. Before, in D&D, you had to sort of keep it back in your mind.

Yeah, those were all pretty big influences. Another big influence would be Traveller which was basically a pen and paper sci-fi game.

If you look at Elite and you look at a lot of other games or even the stuff I was doing with Privateer, really, you trace a lot of that back to Traveller, which I guess you can also trace back to various sci-fi like the Foundation Trilogy and things like that.

PD: So really, a games designer’s influences shouldn’t just be games.

CR: Oh no, I don’t think so. I think you take it from all around, right? I think the best people do. People in any form of entertainment generally tend to do that, or at least, I hope they do.

PD: It’s funny that you say that. I’ve been writing about video games for a while and I’ve done other writing in my life. The video games thing is, people always say you should just play a lot of video games whereas actually, it’s really good to have a wide cultural experience of reading, of watching films, of studying history.

I think it makes you a more rounded person and better able to appreciate what you run into. And more creative.

CR: I totally agree. My process generally, when I’m trying to come up with something, or thinking about the world I’m building, is a combination of all those. Generally I immerse myself. I watch a lot of movies, read a lot of books, look at pen and paper role playing games - even my design staff on Star Citizen, I have put all the Traveller books in front of them and other things like Renegade Legion on that side. You have movies, you have TV, you have books, you have pen and paper role playing games, I think [they’re] all really viable and useful influences, just as much as playing other games.

History, I find, is always a very good influence. We have it in Star Citizen and I had it in Wing Commander. I like to take something from history that, in the case of Star Citizen or Wing Commander, you project forward into the future, [use it] as a foundation or a guide for what you’re structuring. I feel like that helps ground whatever narrative you’re doing. Wing Commander was absolutely the war in the Pacific in World War II. The Kilrathi were the Japanese, the Imperial Japanese maybe and the Confederation were the US Navy. Instead of it being the Pacific Ocean it was space and instead of it being islands it was planets. It worked very well as a base because I think it ties into what people in a lot of ways almost have subconsciously hanging around from their knowledge of the past and history. It makes it seem more real to them or more tangible.

That was kind of the idea with Star Citizen. "Okay, let’s pick an interesting time from the history of our world that could be comparable.” I felt that the decline and fall of the Roman Empire was a pretty interesting one. A lot of things change and they had to deal with a big, spread out empire which definitely you would if you had an empire spread out in space. You don’t have true, instant FTL communications and interestingly enough, if you look at Asimov on his Foundation stuff, he was inspired by… that basically is the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Even if you look at the Star Wars stuff there’s a certain amount of that as well. I find them all really useful and inspiring sources.

PD: Were there any games that you played as a kid that inspired you as much narratively, then? Computer or video games where the narrative stood out for you? It wasn’t so strong back then.

CR: It wasn’t so strong. The Infocom games, narratively, they were good. I really liked those. From the Zork ones to things like Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. He did one that was about bureaucracy which was quite good. I liked those. There were some Cinemaware games that I felt never felt like they really had a great narrative, but I felt that if you presented something cinematically then that would help and that was part of the inspiration for some of the stuff I did for Wing Commander.

The games I made were always about narrative because I felt that was missing for me, I wanted that sense of story and progression. I felt like I wasn’t getting that in games. That was one of my bigger drives when I was making games, was to get that, that I felt like I really wanted and liked from other media. I wouldn’t say that there was anything I played and said, "Oh my God, this is an incredibly engrossing story,” other than the text adventure games which I liked.

PD: I just want to touch on one other thing about Star Citizen. Player participation is going to be a fairly big deal. Are you comfortable letting players start to shape the story of a universe that you’ve created?

CR: Yeah. My analogy for what I want to try and achieve is going back to the old D&D days, where I feel like my role is to be a Dungeon Master. If you’re a good Dungeon Master, you go with what your players are doing as well because they’re providing part of your narrative. I need to create a really compelling environment. There are obviously going to be some big events that on our side we will control, but we want to have a fair amount of it be player driven. I don’t think it’s possible to have a tightly controlled, scripted narrative in an online game with thousands and millions of other people. I just think it doesn’t work. That’s the Old Republic problem right now, [that] they have. Even if it did work, just generating the amount of content is almost impossible. You can never generate content faster than your users can play through the game.

I think it’s very important in building a world like I’m trying to build with Star Citizen, to build a world that lets the players themselves write a lot for the narrative. I’m more focused on creating tools and opportunities for people to interact in cooperation with each other, in comfort with each other.

I feel like if I do it right and I’m the Dungeon Master, you’re sort of like the puppet master of what’s going on. You’re occasionally tweaking and stirring the pot here and there and there, but you’re letting the players generate a huge amount of their ongoing day to day narrative of the universe. If it’s done well, it could be really a pretty amazing place.

I think Eve just announced that they had broken 500,000 people and they’ve been going for ten years now. That’s pretty impressive. Even though Eve’s a bit too hardcore and complicated for me to immerse myself into, it just goes to show you what the strength happens when you build your system and you make it more about being more player-driven.

I do think it’s the challenge. The challenge is how to achieve that with adding some sense of character, personality and narrative. We’ve got some ideas and things that we can do and how we can [blend] the two, but hopefully it’ll be pretty cool. That’s what gets me up in the morning. That’s a really cool challenge to try and solve.

PD: That’s probably a really good attitude to have to it as well! It couldn’t come any quicker. That’s not me at all being on your back. I can’t imagine the amount of work you guys have to do, but it’s looking incredible.

CR: There’s going to be a lot. It’ll be great. I just meant it not so much like… “Hey, it’s a lot of work.” I meant it more like, in my head I can see it.

When I make games I see a picture in my mind and what I’ve always been good at is being able to realise what I can see in my head. What I can see in my head I think is really kind of cool, it’s just the frustration of… to get it from there onto a screen, working in a game that everyone else works on, doesn’t happen in a day. I would like it to happen as quickly as possible.

I’m building this thing because this is a world I want to adventure in. This is *my* take on how I would want to be in an open sandbox world, interacting with other people, fixing or changing some of the things that turn me off or make it hard for me to get immersed in some of the other ones I’ve seen out there. It can’t come soon enough for me. I can’t wait to be flying around in the same universe with everyone else. It’s going to be pretty cool!

PD: It is. I can relate to that. I do loads of tabletop role playing and I often Dungeon Master. When I have an idea for a scenario or particularly if I’m world building, it’s there - it just can’t come out to the keyboard, or it can’t come out of the pen fast enough. I need some kind of data transfer from my head. Everything’s too slow.

CR: Yeah, that’s kind of the way I feel. But it’s good, it’s fun. It feels like there’s a lot of things to do that’s… new ground. What I’m excited by is the fact that we have such a great community so early. We can test some of these things out early and see it. I find it endlessly fascinating to see the dynamics that go on in the groups we already have. You can already see people gathering to their squadrons or groups and planning how they’re going to take over the galaxy. I think there are going to be a whole bunch of things, once we get it up and running and people are adventuring around in it, that we probably wouldn’t have even anticipated or known.

PD: If you engage with your community, players appreciate that and they respond. It’s nice to feel that people care about what you think.

CR: Absolutely. The team on it definitely appreciate that. Every game I’ve built, unless it was some of the games that I built when it was just me doing the programming and the art and everything, which was a long time ago… I need a good team to work with me because it’s as much about what they’re doing as well as what I’m doing.

A lot of the time, [with] anyone that works on something that’s on a creative basis… you’re doing it because you love it, [you love] games and you want other people to dig the stuff you’re doing.