|
 Features
Interview
with Toby Gard of Confounding Factor
Confounding
Factor was formed in April 1997 by Toby Gard and Paul Douglas.
Coming soon after their outstanding success as the creators of Tomb
Raider and the iconic Lara Croft they were quickly signed up by Interplay
for a multi-title, world-wide, publishing deal.
Now based in Bristol, England the team is well advanced in its work on
Confounding Factor's first game. Now re-monikered as Galleon this
third-person action adventure will cast players in the role of Captain
Rhama Sabrier; legendary mariner, warrior and cartographer.
Due for release in Winter 1999, the game is expected to be one of the
biggest releases of the year and a sure-fire Christmas number one.
Toby
Gard was responsible for the design and original concept of Tomb
Raider.
Not only was he lead graphic artist for the game but he was also responsible
for the creation of Lara Croft - easily one of the most recognisable videogame
characters in history.
He, together with Tomb Raider's lead programmer Paul Douglas, left Core
Design amidst some controversy to set-up their own development company.
Now Gard and Douglas together are recognized as one of the most critically
and commercially successful European developer teams working today.
History
will judge Tomb Raider to have been one of the most influence games
of its generation, how exactly does that make you feel? Does it bother
you that Lara Croft herself has become more famous than the actual game,
and certainly more so than Paul and yourself?
I can't say that it does bother me to be honest. After all, who is more
famous Bob Kane or Batman? At the end of the day we're creating entertainment
and hopefully entertainment that people will really enjoy. I think I'd
be a lot more upset if no one had liked Tomb Raider enough to really
get into Lara's character.
How do you feel about the constant sequels to Tomb Raider?
Judging by the last one, and what's been seen of the next, the innovation
that marked the original seems to be almost completely lacking. If you
had been involved in the sequel would you have approached things in the
same way?
People are only interested in playing sequels if they haven't had enough
of the first one or if they haven't played the first one and hope that
the sequel will be better. In order to keep both audiences happy you can't
stray too far from the original concept but at the same time you have
to add enough freshness to keep people from saying that it's just a rehash.
Which I'm sure you can appreciate is a difficult balance to obtain. As
for what I would have done with the sequels? I think I would have concentrated
on fixing some of the gameplay problems that we never had time to address
in the first one.
You're on record as saying you're not really happy with some of the
sleazier aspects of the Tomb Raider marketing machine. Do you take
the relative failure of other copy-cat "cybertarts", such as Niki from
Pandemonium or Red Lotus from Deathtrap Dungeon, to mean
that OTT computer babes are not an automatic draw. What was it about Lara
that worked so well and does this mean there'll be no semi-naked women
in Galleon?
It was never the intention to create some kind of 'page 3' girl to star
in Tomb Raider. The idea was to create a female character who was a heroine,
you know, cool, collected, in control, that sort of thing. The problem
with those other games is that the female characters are actually there
for purely exploitative purposes. I know you could argue that Lara with
her comic book style over-the top figure is exploitative, but I don't
agree. I think it's ridiculous to say that portraying stylised people
is degrading. You can represent an over the top hero figure by augmenting
characteristics like a jutting jaw, wide shoulders, thin waist etc. and
that is not degrading to men. It may well be a stereotype, but it seems
to me that people are overanalysing this whole thing. It's pretty simple,
if women in a game are only there to be the equivalent of quiz show floozies
then they are being portrayed in a sexist way. When it comes to Galleon
there are all sorts of women in the Galleon world, just as there are all
sorts of men.
One can't finish talking about Tomb Raider without asking the
most obvious question: why were so many of the enemies in Tomb Raider
endangered species? Is cruelty to animals a hobby of yours or did
Ralph Harris run off with your wife or something? Can we expect a bunch
of dolphins to cop it in Galleon, or perhaps a spot of whaling
as a sub-game?
Errr… yeah. I'll give you that one. Well the explanation's dead simple
really. I wanted the game to start of with enemies that were reasonably
realistic so that the player could begin to believe in the Tomb Raider
world and hopefully be more surprised when it all went weird at the
end. The problem was that we knew it would be really hard to put in lots
of believable human characters because they'd be so immobile in comparison
to Lara. I'm also not keen on just mindlessly killing humans in games
anyway. So it had to be dangerous animals. The problem is that any animal
that's dangerous to humans we've already hunted to near extinction. Maybe
we should have use non-endangered, harmless animals. Then you'd be asking
me, "Why was Lara shooting all those nice Bunnies and Squirrels?" You
just can't win can you?
Why exactly
did you leave Core? Were there any specific reasons, or did you simply
feel you now had the means, and the recognition, to go it alone? Do you
regret anything about the decision now?
Paul and I left Core Design because we wanted to do something new. Partly
it was a wish for more extensive control over marketing and PR decisions
and partly it was because we felt that we were no longer being given the
creative freedom at Core that we had enjoyed while making Tomb Raider.
I enjoyed my time at Core Design and I was sad to leave, but it just felt
like a good time to go it alone. I don't regret that decision at all.
Like
it or not but you were lumped in with all the other teams that left big
companies, such as Bullfrog and Rare, the same time you did. Was there
something particularly offensive going on at the big software house at
that time or was it all just a coincidence? How do you think the companies
reacted to it all? Are they now all holding onto their internal teams
like grim death?
Our decision to set up on our own was not influenced by any outside events
so it is a coincidence. The truth is I have no idea how the big software
houses reacted.
What are you thoughts on the traditional way development teams work.
Are external teams necessarily better than internal ones? What's the optimum
size for a team working on an interesting, original, game?
I'm not entirely sure what the optimal size of the team is. We had a core
team of 6 for Tomb Raider and we're looking for a maximum of 10
for Galleon. Much bigger than that and someone or some people would
have to spend all their time organising everyone instead of working themselves.
What about finding the right team members? Did you have any trouble yourself
when setting up the company? How did you cope with the difficulty of putting
together a small team of people from scratch and how did you avoid the
inevitable clashes of ego and personality?
Putting together the right team is the most difficult thing we had to
do. It took us almost a year to gather the team of 7 we have now. Luckily
we have an incredibly talented and dedicated team. When it comes to ego
clashes it's all a matter of being reasonable at the end of the day. There's
nothing wrong with a good logical argument over game elements as long
as the people involved are mature enough not to get into a strop, lose
their temper or storm out.
The concept of Britsoft seems rather flawed, as there doesn't really
seem to be any universal constant in the content of most British games.
Do you think British software is distinctive enough, or are we trying
to hard to beat the Americans and Japanese at their own games?
Well, Japanese software is distinctive because of the way that the Manga
style permeates Japanese artwork so completely. In America and Europe
we enjoy a far broader range of artistic influences. Consequently British
games are very varied in style. I think that's a really good thing. If
you wanted to classify what Britsoft produces you wouldn't be able to
pigeon hole it because there are so many unique visions out there.
That's true to a degree but there was never a chance that something
like Duke Nukem 3D came from any country on Earth but America.
Even things like Command & Conquer and EA Sports games - with their
rawk guitars and glitzy presentation - are identifiably American. With
a very few exceptions there doesn't seem to be a lot of games around nowadays
that are so identifiably British. This must be a conscious decision on
the parts of developers, surely?
I can't really speak for anyone but myself on this, but I'd say no. I
can at least say categorically that I don't think about whether a game
is going to be British enough while I'm designing it.
What can we expect from Galleon, your first game as Confounding
Factor? What interests you in terms of gameplay and graphics at the moment,
and what sort of goals will you be pursuing in those regards?
What you can expect is for it to be different from what other people are
doing, different from Tomb Raider and hopefully pretty amazing.
We're still a year away from completion and have a long way to go before
the game is in a playable state. It is a third person game but we intend
to achieve far more with it than we could have hoped to achieve in our
last game. In making Tomb Raider we learned an awful lot from our
mistakes and even the parts that worked well, we know how to improve them.
Galleon is not a progression from Tomb Raider, It is simply what
Tomb Raider should have been.
Did Tomb Raider fall far short of your original vision then? Were there
some gameplay elements that perhaps you didn't have time to fit in, but
which will now be appearing in Galleon? Also, one has to ask but just
how much of influence was Prince of Persia? It does seem to have a lot
in common with the basic gameplay mechanics.
Tomb Raider turned out pretty damn well because we specced it fairly
low. Gameplay elements In Tomb Raider were deliberately kept simple. In
Galleon we have a much more flexible system and so we can have
a greater variety of gameplay elements. Prince of Persia was an
enormous influence. It was the first and still one of an incredibly small
minority of games where the main character is believable, because he moves
seamlessly in his environment.
Perhaps
it's just the pirate setting bringing to mind Monkey Island but will the
new game be a straight action game or will there also be a more cohesive
storyline and proper puzzles - the sort of things you seemed to be experimenting
with in TR, but which appear lost from the sequel. Do you feel there is
a danger of console games being dumbed-down for the mass market? It seems
a long time since we've had a popular game that actually requires much
more than a couple of brain cells.
Yes,
Galleon is all about story and puzzles. It's going to be like an adventure
game but with far snazzier action elements than TR.
Do you
make anything by the fact that Tomb Raider II was number one on
the PC last Christmas (beating Quake II) whereas on the PlayStation
it was actually second to FIFA 98. Does this say anything profound about
the users or does it simply prove that all PC owners are spotty geeks
and that Lara is the closet they get to a real woman? How much attention
do you pay to the demographics of the various hardware users and how much
truth do you feel there is in the traditional images of PC, PS-X and N64
owners?
I think
market research can lead you astray so I don't pay much attention to it
at all really. I'm a believer that if a game is accessible, captures the
imagination and is well executed then it will do well. The trouble is
that basing your predictions of what sells in the computer games market
on last year's figures is practically useless. Things change so fast in
just six months. Also I get the feeling that it's a bit of a self fulfilling
prophesy that console owners want just action and PC owners want just
strategy. Its because publishers and developers buy into that kind of
nonsense that the two markets are so flooded with those types of games
and so lacking their opposite. Seems to me that many people choose whether
to buy a PC or a PlayStation mainly on the relative cost and whether they
have needs for a PC for other purposes. There is no reason to believe
that someone who has bought a PlayStation wants to be limited to playing
a certain type of game. I think its the same for the other platforms too.
What
do you make of Sega's Dreamcast? Core were famous as being very loyal
to Sega - was that just a corporate thing or did you developers feel the
same way about the company?
The Dreamcast
is exceptionally good, and if Sony doesn't do something about it fairly
swiftly then they deserve to be utterly trounced by Sega.
Finally,
who would YOU cast as Lara in the Tomb Raider movie?
Carol Vorderman.
No! Salma Hayek. I think she's the only woman in the world with the figure
for it. It would probably be best to computer generate her though or pick
one of the female Hong Kong action stars, at least they'd be able to reproduce
the moves.
David Jenkins (david.jenkins@dial.pipex.com)
works with British Telecom's Wireplay, an online gaming service. He also
contributes to Develop, Europe’s premier newsletter for computer game
developers and publishers, and CTW, the weekly trade magazine. He has
also been involved in the organization of the Develop! and Online conferences
in London.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
