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Interview with Graeme Devine of id software
For
many, it was quite a surprise when Graeme Devine was hired as id's in-house
game designer a few months ago. The designer of the popular but hardly
hardcore-gamer-friendly 7th
Guest was going to be muscling in on the design for Quake 3?
Good golly, Miss Molly. To
be fair, Graeme Devine's experience in game design stretches back over
20 years, and 7th Guest is but one example of his work.
Gamasutra jumped at the opportunity to conduct an interview with the elusive
Devine, who discussed the past, present, and future of id software, as
well as that of his own career. Coming
to id from Trilobyte, people think of
your background as being primarily 7th
Guest. But you worked in the
gaming industry for a long time before that. I've seen it quoted that
you helped develop the classic fighting game Double
Dragon – is that true, or was it more of a conversion that anything
else? Also, what did you work on pre-Trilobyte? Did I hear
a rumor about something related to Pole
Position way back in the 80’s?
I worked at Atari, Lucasfilm, Activision, and Virgin.
I've been in the industry since the late 70’s and worked on a lot
of titles in just about every genre you can imagine. I worked on the PC port of Double
Dragon, and the various ports of Pole
Position. I've owned three
of my own companies, and now work for id software.
7th Guest was clearly a landmark
title in gaming – how and why was it devised and why do you think it was
so successful? Hmm. Right technology, the game design, and the timing.
CD-ROM was just coming into its own, and people wanted something
other than a text based encyclopedia to show off their system.
It didn't hurt that 7th Guest wasn't a bad family game either. Extreme Warfare was the title
you were developing before Red Orb got grabbed by TLC, and the ensuing
political machinations prompted the project to lose its funding. Could
you explain the situation around the canning of Extreme
Warfare and the (presumable) dissolution of Trilobyte? How hard did
this turn of events impact you, and how close to being finished was Extreme Warfare when the plug was finally
pulled? Very,
very hard, and I think I, along with all the other Trilobyte lost souls,
am still recovering in many ways. I
think you see parts of X-War
(Extreme Warfare) in games like Halo and Tribes II. You can also find the innovative ways in which we constructed
worlds with numerous players in X-War
in many newer game offerings. I
don't think TLC quite grasped that the Internet was quite what it was,
nor that they had the developer who made 7th
Guest, which had given MYST,
one of the reasons that they purchased Broderbund in the first place,
a good run for its money. They
could have had X-War and future 7th Guest games, but alas politics makes for strange decisions. |
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Features
Introduction
