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"If it had gone wrong, I didn't have anything to fall back on. I knew the alternative was sitting in a comms room and commissioning servers that wouldn't exist in three years time. I would have had nothing to show for it." And so they plowed on, seeing Enemy Territory downloaded and installed millions of times by gamers in all the major territories in the world. "At the end of 2003, Enemy Territory won half a dozen game of the year awards and had been nominated for a BAFTA. We had always believed that you could go and make pure multiplayer combat games and have them sell - Battlefield 1942 proved that in the same year. Battlefield and Wolfenstein Enemy Territory vindicated this idea, it was clear that they could draw the kind of audiences that would make them commercially viable. "By the end of 2003 we had a bunch of left over concepts from Enemy Territory and a load of big ideas. We wanted to make a spiritual successor [to Enemy Territory], and so we began to talk about how it might work. Kevin Cloud and I began to discuss the high concept for Quake Wars. It was like one of those conversations you have when you're fifteen, saying 'Would it be cool if X!' and 'wouldn't it be so cool to see Y!' And so all we had to do was to convince the programmers it was possible." The programmers, of course, were a little more reserved. The company started out with the Doom 3 code and were then faced with turning it into an outdoor, vehicular-based combat game with some "pretty advanced networking" and physics systems. Splash Damage were heading into deep water and their youthfulness began to show for the first time. "We had never built a game without having another game as a solid foundation," Wedgwood explained. "We always had a library of assets to play with from the start. We knew nothing whatsoever about high-poly modelling, about realistic dynamic lighting, or about building game engines. We worked for nine months trying to build a terrain-rendering engine. By the end of that we had some blurry snowy white hills. By the time the Doom 3 multiplayer was finished [Splash Damage's level designers and id Software worked together to build the Doom 3 multiplayer maps] we should have had the technology ready to make a game with. We had to go back to Id with our cap in our hands and say 'sorry, we really didn't get anywhere.' We had spent nine months trying to solve this problem, and it was about nine seconds before John [Carmack] gave us some solutions." Id, it seems, were more than ready to address the problems that their Splash Damage protégés now faced.
"Some of the most interesting and important things in life are counter-intuitive," Wedgwood says of the solutions proposed by Carmack. What the Id founder had to come up with was the 'mega-texture' - a huge, unique texture that would cover the whole of a map's terrain. The solution allowed Splash Damage to draw more, and to draw further, even when that had seemed like the opposite of what they should have been thinking. It was clear that Splash Damage were now able to benefit from more than just their own passion and enthusiasm for the Id Software games: they were also benefiting from Carmack's savant-like technological insight. In fact, Wedgwood explained, they now benefited from the insight of whole range of developers who use Id tech to create Activision games. "When you write a thanks list for the end of a game you can just include everyone, because they will all have helped in some way," Wedgwood laughs. "We got a thanks at the end of Quake 4, but I'm not quite sure what for." There seems to be plenty of gratitude for Splash Damage. Wedgwood has created a rags to riches story for several dozen gamers, almost all of whom were working on mods before they got into full-time employment with his company. "Everyone we have hired has had a stunning portfolio, certainly much better than anyone sent to us by a recruitment consultancy," said Wedgwood. Having formed from the games community, and then having continued to hire directly from the same pool of obsessed gamers, meant that Wedgwood has kept a tight focus on having the right people (with the right kind of passion) for his studio. "A mod team like Nuclear Dawn just keeps finding really good level designers, and we see them and ask if we can have them too! The really good mod teams will attract the really talented people. Initially we tried to recruit from the film industry, but the synergy really isn't there. Film is all about rendering a single frame, the idea of player interaction or seeing things from all sides just isn't there." And because Wedgwood's staff consists of first-person shooter gamers, the talent hired for Quake Wars has mostly been a friend of a friend, or discovered directly by the team who themselves are knitted into the FPS community. It's as if Splash Damage represents the maturation of the mod community: where the Quake modders end up if they're any good. The net, Wedgwood muses, has changed everything. It created the games that he wanted to play, and the games he ended up building. It changed how it was possible to recruit people, and how the community would influence his games through those people. It allowed him to have a dialogue with Id Software before he became a professional developer, and it enabled him to realise a multi-player combat game that thirty people would devote a chunk of their lives to creating. "The future of media isn't TV," he says. "It's YouTube. The same sort of thing seems to be true of consoles and PCs. Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo control what you see on their screens, like broadcast television, but the PC is unconstrained. That, I think, is a very important difference." |
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