Introduction

In recent years, retrospectives of classic games have been well received at GDC, but there have been very few stories about classic game tools. This series of articles will attempt to fill that gap, by interviewing key people who were instrumental in the history of game development tools.

The first two articles in this series have featured John Romero (about the TEd Editor) and Tim Sweeney (about the Unreal Editor).

For the third article, I am very happy and honored to speak with Chris Norden about the tools that were developed to create the landmark FPS / RPG hybrid, Deus Ex. I spoke to Chris at GDC 2018 in San Francisco.

Before the Ion Storm: Origin and Looking Glass

David Lightbown: How did you end up working on Deus Ex at Ion Storm?

Chris Norden: In 1994, I was working at Origin in Austin as a programmer. My first paying industry gig was on Jane’s Combat Simulations AD-64D Longbow, Jane’s Combat Simulations. It was originally an arcade-style game called Chopper Assault. I worked with Andy Hollis on that for two years.

After shipping that, the last thing I wanted to do was another military sim, because I’m not a military guy. I had been chatting with Warren [Spector] on and off, who was also at Origin. He was very much into story-driven role-playing games. I thought to myself, “I like those types of games, I want to work on something like that!”

In 1996, Warren left Origin to head up the Austin Looking Glass studio, which nobody at the time knew existed. That studio was doing Mac ports of games, like Links 386 Pro. They were also in process of developing an original golf game called British Open Championship Golf.

Ultima Online was still in development at Origin. It was being called Multima, and it was using the Ultima VII engine, I think. I played around with that a little before I left Origin to join Warren at Looking Glass.

[Author’s Note: The main Looking Glass studio was in Cambridge, MA, just outside Boston]

Warren had written a design doc, and we started working on a role-playing game with the acronym “AIR” (for the “Austin Internet Role-Playing”) for a while, which was going to be online. We wanted to do something 3D, because 3D accelerators were just starting to come out. We had gotten a prototype of the Voodoo 1, and we wrote a small engine using GLide.

We worked with Looking Glass in Cambridge [the main office]. After British Open shipped, I was helping Mark Leblanc and Doug Church with the engine for Thief, which was called the Dark Engine.

For financial – and other – reasons, Looking Glass wasn’t doing great at the time. They had amazing games, but they just didn’t sell that well. So, after about a year, they made the decision to shut down the Austin office.

[Author’s Note: Chris is absolutely right about the games… Ultima Underworld, System Shock, and Terra Nova were some of the most critically acclaimed titles of the 1990s]

There were just a few of us when the office closed – Warren, myself, Al Yarusso, Harvey Smith, Steve Powers – and we all still wanted to do this role-playing game. We all hung out together after the office closed for about six months or so, with the hope that we would be able to start a new company and make something. We had a really nice design doc, and we started shopping it around to publishers and talking to different people. I don’t even remember all the publishers we spoke to. Two of the people we spoke to were John Romero and Tom Hall, who were working with Eidos to start a new studio in Dallas called Ion Storm.

I had known John from back in the early Id days. In 1991, MTV threw a giant ship party for Wolfenstein 3D in Dallas. They had two VR Virtuality Arcade Machines set up. I was a kid at the time, and I was like “Oh my god, this is the coolest thing ever!” I met John, back in his “I'm too rich to care about anything” days.

John is awesome, I actually went back and worked with him at Monkeystone Games, did some contracting for a Gameboy Advance title, but that’s a different story.

[Author’s Note: The game in question was called “Hyperspace Delivery Boy”. It was going to be published for Gameboy Advance by Majesco, but they decided not to go to manufacturing at the last minute.]

We talked to Romero and Tom Hall, and they were like “Warren, you’re awesome, let’s do a game!” and Warren said “Well, here’s the catch. We’re not moving to Dallas. We’re not moving to California. We’re not moving anywhere. We’re going to keep the studio in Austin. We’re going to stay completely autonomous. You’re going to give me full control over everything. You’re going to give me the money to do it, and it’s going to be cool.” and they said “OK, sounds good. Done.”

[Author’s Note: This is certainly an oversimplified version of the actual discussion, but it’s the basic gist of what happened]

Warren had a giant design doc for a game called “Troubleshooter” at the time, which eventually morphed into the Deus Ex design doc.

So, we started Ion Storm Austin studio with the six of us. At the time, I was CTO, head of IT, HR, security, and lead engineer. We didn’t have anybody to do all that stuff. So, we had to interview people and staff up pretty quick.

It was a tiny team. We had 3 engineers: myself, Scott Martin, and Al Yarusso. Sheldon [Pacotti] was hired as the writer. We had two design teams of three people. One headed up by Robert White, and one headed up by Harvey. I think we had six artists, headed up by Jay Lee.

Oh, and I hired Alex Brandon, because I was a huge fan of his music in Unreal. Now I’m really good friends with him. I introduced him to his wife because I was friends with her in high school. He’s a great guy: excellent musician, and he really understands the technical side of everything.

Then we hired an admin, and that was pretty much it. Then, it was: work your ass off for two-and-a-half-years! [laughs]

You go to Digital Extremes: Choosing between Unreal and Quake Technology

DL: So, while the rest of Ion Storm went with Quake technology, you guys chose Unreal. Can you explain how you came to that decision?

CN: As much as I respected the Quake technology, I knew at the time that there was no support. We were making a very specific type of game where we wanted you to be able to do anything. Quake was a shooter engine, and that’s it. If you wanted to make something other than an FPS, it was a lot of work, and you got no support from Id. They basically took a CD of code, threw it at you, and ran away.

DL: In my interview with Tim Sweeney, he called licensing Quake tech from Id at the time was basically a “quarter million dollar xcopy”.

CN: Yes, that’s exactly right! I mean, it was awesome tech. It was revolutionary at the time, but we knew that – as a team of 3 engineers – we can’t rewrite the engine, and we can’t write our own engine. We just don’t have time.

So, I was huge into the Amiga, C64, and the PC demo scene when it became a thing. I started seeing videos of this game called “Unreal”. And I thought “Holy shit, it’s got RGB lighting, and it’s full 3D. It uses MMX, SSE, and 3DNow. That looks really cool!” But, we couldn’t find much information on it, so we scheduled a trip up to Digital Extremes in London, Ontario, in Canada. We met Tim and the team, and they showed us all this cool stuff. I also met Carlo Vogelsang, who I now work with at Sony – he’s at Playstation. He wrote the Galaxy Audio Engine: pretty much all assembly, super hardcore guy. There was a particle systems called “Fire”. All of this was inside the engine. I was like “I like the way you guys do this stuff”.

Their focus at time was super-usable tools, which had never really been done before. The Quake tools were OK, but they weren’t very user-friendly for non-engineers. We had a bunch of designers who were not engineers, so they needed to know how to use this stuff.

So we said “you guys have good tools, everybody’s really nice, you’ve got a bunch of hardcore old-school guys who were around in the 80s doing the hardcore shit… how do you do your licensing?” And they said “We’ve never really done this before, this is new for us.” I don’t think they had an idea of how to do a licensing model back then. We told them “We’ve got Warren Spector, and we want to make a game using your technology”. When they heard that, it was clear that they were pretty excited to work with us.

I honestly don’t remember the terms of the original licensing agreement. Tim would probably remember. I don’t remember how much we paid, but I don’t think it was very much.

DL: It probably would have been in line with what Id was charging for Quake at that time?

CN: I think it was less! That was another good thing. Their technology were relatively new. We were not the first licensee. Wheel of Time was one of the early ones, Klingon Honor Guard was another.

[Author’s Note: You can read more about the history of licensing the Unreal Engine in my interview with Tim Sweeney on the Unreal Editor]

So, we decided to do it. They gave us all the source code, and they said “We’ll do our best to support you guys”. It was all one-on-one. We would just send an email if we had a question, there was no format support structure at all.

There was a lot of pain because it was something that they had never done before. We sent them so much code, and so many suggestions, back and forth, and got updates. But I think it was the right decision. I think if we had chosen Quake, it would have been a much more difficult game to make.

I also became a member of the Unreal Tech Advisory Group. We came up with the idea for the first tech meeting, where the leads from each of the companies who were licensees – which were, at the time, maybe four of us – all got together, talked about how to improve the engine, yelled at Tim about stuff that was silly, drank too much, ate too much, the usual stuff. I still stay in touch with all these people today.