Growing Epic: Programming to Managing and Back Again
In
the pre-Unreal days of Epic, what was your main role in the company?
Were you managing people mostly -- as a producer, like you said -- instead of
programming?
TS:
On ZZT and Jill of the Jungle, I was almost exclusively
programming. And from 1993 to late '94, I was kind of cheerleader/producer of
all the external projects. So at that point we had three to five external
projects.
We had Cliffy working on Jazz Jackrabbit, James Schmalz
working on Solar Winds, this fighting game called One Must Fall
was in development, and there were a few other projects like Zone 66 and
other work. So there was a full-time job just to manage people, just to get new
builds of the games from them and test them out, give feedback, and do all the
marketing and everything.
How big was the company? For example, did you have an
accountant, or were you handling all the finances yourself?
TS:
Well, at that point, we scaled it from one person to about eight, I think. I
hired several people to take phone orders. We got a little office in Rockville,
so that we wouldn't have people coming into my parents' house every day.
My
old friend Carolyn Smith that I grew up with did accounting and helped out with
things like that. And then Mark Rein came on in 1992. He stayed in Toronto, but
he did sales, marketing, and deal-making -- he signed a lot of deals that
brought us more money.
Now you've got Mike Capps as the president. How did you transition from running the
company to having a dedicated management team?
TS:
We were pretty loosely managed through shipping Unreal, until -- gosh --
2003 or so. We were basically
self-managed. We had a small team: during that time frame, we never got more
than 25 people, so I'd be the manager of the technical folks and Cliffy was
kind of the designer, producer, and manager of the creative and artistic folks.
It was very loose.
The
thing is, with a company that small, you don't really need a lot of management.
If you hire great people, and they're all self-motivated, then you can get by
without a lot of structure. But as we grew -- I guess 2004 or so, we brought on
Mike Capps and started developing two projects simultaneously. That was a
strategic thing: we realized that having one team was too small for a modern
game company.
The
problem is if you have a single team, then you have a huge team developing a
project through to completion. Then it ships, and now you want to figure out
what your next game is. Well, the ideal way to do that is just to have a small
number of people -- like five or six people -- doing pre-production work. Just
experimenting with concepts, trying to figure out what the game should be --
doing that for a year or more before they figure out the game and before you
scale out to a large team.
So
the ideal team size goes from 30 people at peak to five to six people at the
start of a project. If you have a single large team, you're pretty much
screwed: when you go back into pre-production, suddenly you have 30 people on
payroll; it's expensive and you aren't able to work productively.
For example,
how do you start working on artwork and characters before you know what your
game design is and what mechanics really work out? So we saw moving to two teams as the solution
to that, that way you can always do projects overlapped so that one project's
in pre-production with a smaller team, and another project's in full
production. As one project completes, the other is ramping up.
That's a good idea. Do you still have that model?
TS:
Mmm hmm. It's been more complex because, at Epic, we also have the engine team
now -- it's big enough that it's managed separately, so that's an 18 person
team plus...
Once
you get up to 30-40 people, management becomes really important. And when
you're 100-plus, if you don't have good management, your company is quickly
destroyed just because there are so many different layers of communication.
With 20 people, everybody knows everybody else and then talks to the people
they need to for whatever they're working on.
With
100 people, now you have the engine team working with the game team,
complicated sub-teams, all that; you have upward communication; and then you
have external companies you need to keep informed. It's just impossible to
schedule unless you have a serious structure in place with producers on
projects taking responsibility for project management, leads in each area, and
so on.
In the late 1990s, Epic's headquarters moved a few times.
What's the story behind that?
TS:
In 1997, we had started Unreal. We were well into the project, and we
weren't making the progress we needed because everybody was all over the place
-- it was a very complicated project.
So we got everybody together in Waterloo,
Canada for a year to finish the game, since some of the guys already lived up
there. It was really nice for about six months, and then it froze over and
didn't thaw again for another six months, so we got really annoyed at the cold
there.
After
that we decided to set up a permanent office and bring everybody together so we
could be a more efficient developer. We looked all over the country, decided on
Raleigh, and moved here in 1998.
It
was funny to relocate here because absolutely nobody working with Epic at the
time had been born here. It was just a random place that we chose after looking
at the cost of living here, on the west coast, and all over the country.
Do
you like it now that you've been here for a while?
TS:
Yeah. I'm really happy with the area. It's a good cost of living. We can hire people from all over the world,
they can come here, and with a good game developer's salary, you can buy a nice
house. Whereas in California, you'd be stuck with a one bedroom apartment.
Raleigh
is a really nice place. There's a lot of hiking, good weather, there's the
mountains, there's the beach. Lots of good things.