The following video interview with MachineGames’ Jerk Gustafsson was filmed on the eve of Wolfenstein: The New Order’s 8th anniversary, and the studio is 13 years old. So we took the opportunity to learn more about the company’s history and updated work policies, and how they created the game, which could be a good hint of how Indiana Jones and other future projects will take shape. Here is its full transcription.
★ Gamereactor: Looking back on this project, how do you feel, this project has clearly turned into a huge success, this is your first project as a label, as a new studio? Can you tell us how this project came to be?
Jerk Gustafsson: Yeah, it was a long time ago, we actually started MachineGames in 2009. When we started, we were thinking, what are we going to do? What do we want to do? So, the first year we basically created a lot of game concepts and we tried to find publishers who wanted to work with us.So, I think it took us about a year toBethesdaDiscuss in-depth.we start fromStarbreezePeople who knew Bethesda from the beginning, actually because we were talking to them about doing a project. Obviously, they’re one of the publishers we really want to work with.
Then, I think it was early summer 2010, they asked us: do you want to visitid SoftwareAnd check out new technologies to see if you’re interested in using id Software’s technology in the future? So we went to Texas and stayed there for a few weeks. We looked at editors and tools and more. That’s pretty good for us because we’re far from… Since a lot of us come from a Quake background, we know a lot about the technology, we know a lot about how editors work and how id Engines work in general, so we It was quick to keep up with the pace, which was great.
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Then they asked us at the time: Do you want to be aWolfensteingame? Obviously, this is something we would love to do! (laughs) It’s a very classic IP, basically the father of FPS, and we’ve always been a very strong first-person studio and have done games of this type. We feel this is a good fit for us. Obviously, we are also honored to be able to do something with this classic IP. So during those few weeks at id Software, we basically tweaked the fundamentals of the entire game. We had a whiteboard in a conference room there, and I actually had a picture of the whiteboard. Because we basically have the beginning of the new order until the end, all the big beats, all the story beats are there. We developed it in those three weeks, and it’s the game we ended up releasing, which is pretty cool.
[白板圖片顯示在視頻中3：20時間標記處]But, we’ve come a long way, and of course, it’s great to meet all of our heroes in the Quake era, Tim Willetts and Kevin Crowder et al. All of this makes us very excited.
“We’ve actually done a lot of work to make sure we can create a healthy and happy environment”
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★ We can discuss genres and your whiteboard projects later. But from that moment on, you’ve released four or five games. How can you be so prolific in less than 10 years without resorting to overtime?
(laughs) I think the industry has grown a bit. Obviously, 20 years ago, even 10-15 years ago, there were a lot more of these crunch and overtime hours, but I think we’ve grown up, and I think not just MachineGames, but the industry as a whole has grown up a little bit. We are also a little older now (laughs). People have families, and we also need to separate work from life outside work. So we’ve done quite a bit of work at MachineGames to make sure we can create a healthy and happy environment for the team, which will always be an ongoing process. However, we have policies in place within the studio to help our employees avoid long hours and long overtime.
For example, we now have limited office hours to make sure people actually leave on time. Also, people are passionate about what they do, and we want to keep that passion, but I think we can be more efficient, we can have a really big period when you’re trying to get something done, and everyone as a Working together as a team trying to work towards the same goal, you can get that boost even without adding extra time. You can still be more productive while maintaining regular office hours.
★ Do you think that the key to this healthy environment is to strike a balance between the enthusiasm of employees and the ability to drive them out of the office when the work is done?
Yes, in a way. It’s one thing when you’re in production, you may not see the progress you want to see, things are moving a little bit slowly, all those things. But when you see things coming together, when you see the pieces of the puzzle are coming together, you get an extra boost anyway, efficiency increases, and you get rewarded from the success of the work you’ve been doing . Like I said, you can keep that up for an eight-hour workday, and we’re pretty generous when it comes to flexibility. We probably won’t kick people out of the office (laughs), but we’re very careful now to make sure people don’t work too much and they stay in the office for a few hours.
★ You mentioned that MachineGames has grown over the past few years. How is your current structure? How do you handle teams? I don’t know if there are several teams that can work together, or can they be split? How do you think the structure has evolved over the past eight years?
This can be difficult to answer. We are in a very dynamic environment, and we also need to be able to adjust based on the stage of production. It looks very different from pre-production than when the project was nearing its end. But in general, we have both cross-departmental and single-departmental teams. For example, a cross-departmental team could be a group of people responsible for a certain part of the game. For example, for part of the environment. This will include level designers, environment artists, prop artists, etc. And then we have departments that support other teams more as a whole, like the concept art department or the audio department.
So it’s a little bit different depending on what type of division it is and what stage we’re developing at the moment. But obviously, we’re always learning, the way we operate now is a little bit different than it was 10 years ago, and even if you look back 20 years ago it’s completely different, you’re always going to keep making mistakes, in how we run the studio, there’s always There will be some things to improve. Especially as we grow and new people come in…all of these things. There’s a lot of work to be done to make sure everyone understands the culture of the studio, everyone understands how we operate…it’s basically an ongoing process.
★ Well, let’s talk about the game itself.I know it’s too early to talk about Indiana Jones, but[托德]Howard himself confirmed he was writing the story, among other things. So, what’s your take on the movie? What would you say is your favorite? What do you think is the essence of Indiana Jones?
For me, that’s Raiders of the Lost Ark of course. This is where the main characters build, and then they create the pillars on which the other movies basically stand. I also think it’s the best movie, it’s a classic adventure movie. When we were developing the game, we were very focused on Raiders of the Lost Ark.
★ We’ve said we’re getting old, those movies are old. There is a recent movie and an updated movie is coming soon. What do you think is the past, and what does pop culture think of Indiana Jones after the new movie comes out?
God, that’s a tough question to answer. I’m sure, to some extent, the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull did too, but I didn’t think much of it myself. Obviously, we watch everything, we watch movies, but not just movies, we watch a lot of old games, comic books. We just have to make sure that whatever we do, it fits the lore, and we tell a story that aligns with the lore, that doesn’t contradict the lore in any way. But when it comes to my personal favorite, yes it’s Raiders [失落的方舟]. I also really liked The Last Crusade, and I thought Sean Connery did a really good job in that movie. But there’s a lot of good stuff in almost all movies, you just have to find the bits and pieces you want to use.
“Youngblood’s co-op and RPG elements were really good learnings for us (…) and we’re now geared up as a studio”
★ I am eager to learn more, but I hope this will be in the near future. You mentioned that you’re good with FPS, and we can attest to that, but how do you say MachineGames is flexible in terms of the types you can use?
Well…we did experiment a lot with Youngblood. We still see it in between our bigger titles. It’s still a smaller game, so we took the liberty of trying more, experimenting with co-op etc. and adding some RPG elements.These are very good learnings for us, and I think by doing that game and developing that game, and also withArkane StudiosWorking together, we learned a lot. I don’t think we’re going to be experimenting as much in the future as we did specifically on that game, but we do know now that we as a studio have the ability to make things, to do things, to create things that are a little bit beyond us Comfort zone stuff, I think it’s great. We have a lot of great opportunities in the future to do something a little different from what we’ve done before, while still staying true to the core of MachineGames and what our games are.
★ For example, talking about things that might be slightly different from what you’ve done before, we’ve been talking about Wolfenstein. Going back to those games, do you want to go back and tweak now, given the extra knowledge, insight and know-how and how you work now?
Oh yes, there are many things! (laugh). I think Youngblood is a good example. I really like a lot of what we do because it’s also good, you need to allow yourself to take risks, you need to allow yourself to try new things, and I think that’s good. The same goes for the VR games we’re involved in, Cyberpilot being an example, which is also very different from what we usually do.
So, when you look back, you want to do a lot of things.This applies to all games you’ve made and all games we’ve made, from Starbreeze Studios’ Riddick andDarknessstart. But, you’re also proud of a lot of things that you think you’ve done well and that you want to keep putting some focus on.
So, I think looking back at the things you regret, or the things you wish you did better, you tried to learn from, and the things you felt you did well, it was a success, and we should keep doing it, and then You try to keep doing it, but try to improve it. So, whatever it is, even if you make a big mistake, we still learn from it. These mistakes have actually made us a better studio over time. I don’t really regret anything, although there are things I wish we could have done differently and that happens quite often.
★ So, Wolfenstein, Indiana Jones,Quake, no matter how you look at them, these are huge franchises, and we’ve talked about the whiteboard. How do you deal with these properties with so many staples, so many perceptions, as we discussed with Wolfenstein and Indiana Jones? How did you guys start the first three weeks of conceptualization you mentioned, maybe deconstruct what the actual nature of these properties is and try to put the game concept into place? How do you handle this with such a large property?
(laughs) I want to look back on The New Order, we usually start with the story, with what we want to achieve with the story, but when it comes to Wolfenstein, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to make the character. Basically help this classic action hero,B.J., pretty much the Schwarzenegger type in the early game, how can we get this character a little bit deeper and get to know him a little bit more, how can we move his storyline forward. Much work remains to be done in this regard. Also, of course, a lot of research, a lot of time spent researching old games and all that stuff.
But in general, it’s mostly about everything it takes to set up the project, figure out the key moments of the narrative, what the main goal of the story is, identifying those big story beats, all the important gameplay elements, and the visual identity of the game.
Of course, there’s a lot going on at the same time (laughs), but we usually start with the whiteboard, we say: we want to start here, then we want to go here, we have this big event here, then we have this storyline, and that’s the game The basics. We’re usually pretty good at sticking to what we set out to do, so when you look at this picture later, you’ll see that this is a New Order game from start to finish. Obviously, during development, things change, sometimes you need to cut things because you don’t have time, and sometimes you want to add things because you find: “Oh, this works great, we should use it more “, all these things. But when it comes to big story beats, we’re pretty consistent.
“For an open world game, we’ll probably go and see how to branch out the story in a good way”
★ Maybe applying this philosophy to FPS is how you’ve really added to the genre over the past 10 years and redefined it, and redefined it under a different name before that. The same philosophy you just described and the same way you work with games, you would apply “first, what we want to tell, and then the important gameplay beats that you just defined” to open world games, multiplayer games, because Are you a narrative studio first, or will you take a completely different approach?
In a way, a different approach, yes. We did experiment a bit with this in Youngblood, and we’ll continue to focus on some of those updates in the future, although I think for the games we’re working on right now, we’re trying to stick to what we know we’re good at. But there’s always room to explore, and if it’s a multiplayer game then of course the focus is most likely on the shooting side of it and making sure we can focus on the core game loop and making sure we’re on the right side before doing anything else Its improvements and settings.
If it’s an open world game, we’ll probably go and see how we branch out the story in a good way, because even if you have a point A to point B story in an open world game, you still want to make sure you’re in the main Everything done outside of the storyline benefits the story and contributes to the overall story of the game, right? So, I think you still need to stick to that foundation, whether it’s a multiplayer game, an open world game, or just a classic story-driven single-player point A-to-B game.
★ The answer is yes. What can I say? Thank you so much for taking the time, asshole. It was a great conversation and we look forward to learning more about your next project. Happy 8th Anniversary to the New Order.
Thanks, I didn’t even know that! (laugh). But now when you say it, yes! 8 years ago, time really flew by.