War Stories

When creating Ultima Online, Richard Garriott had grand dreams. Richard and Starr Long planned on implementing a virtual ecology into their massively multiplayer online role-playing game. It was an ambitious system, one that would have cows that graze and predators that eat herbivores. However, once the game went live a small problem had arisen...

1998's Thief: The Dark Project was a pioneer for the stealth genre, utilizing light and shadow as essential gameplay mechanics. The very thing that Thief became so well-known for was also the game's biggest development hurdle. Looking Glass Studios founder Paul Neurath recounts the difficulties creating Thief: The Dark Project, and how its AI systems had to be completely rewritten years into development.

Brad Wardell, founder of Stardock Corporation, details the difficulties in the development of Elemental: War of Magic, a game that shipped in a largely broken state. A memory error caused the development team to pull features from the game in order to fix the issue, but the concern wasn't resolved by the time the game released. As a result, the original vision for Elemental: War of Magic was never fully realized.

Croteam founder Davor Hunski discusses the long development history of the first game in the Serious Sam series. Starting development all the way back in 1996, Serious Sam went through many different iterations, with big shifts occurring every time a new ground-breaking game released. With money running out, Croteam went for a Hail Mary. They crafted a vertical slice that packed all the best bits of the game into one demo.

Toys for Bob's Paul Reiche III and Fred Ford talk in-depth about the development history of Star Control and Star Control II.

Tim Jones, lead artist and producer for the classic PC game "Aliens vs. Predator," talks about the risky development choices that ultimately led to the game's incredible success.

With 150,000 possible land battle locations, 2,500 river crossing locations, 20,000 possible ambush locations and much more, Total War: Rome II was quite the ambitious project. Pawel Wojs, lead battlefield artist on Total War: Rome II, discusses how the plan to integrate land, sea, and siege battle elements into the game was nearly too ambitious a task.

Glen Schofield, the co-founder of Sledgehammer Games and the creator/director of Dead Space, goes in-depth on the development of the classic third-person horror shooter. Glen set out to create the scariest video game of all-time, borrowing gameplay elements from Resident Evil 4 to create a product with a unique blend of horror and action. Always upping the ante, the Dead Space team decided to create a massive dreadful tentacle that attacks and drags the game's protagonist around the environment. Little did they know, this element would prove far more difficult to develop then they had ever realized..

In 1995, Westwood Studios set out to make a game based on one of the most beloved science fiction films ever made. They took a big risk, applying unproven technology and storytelling methods. Blade Runner wold go on to become of the highest-selling action-adventure games of all time.

Westwood Studios co-founder Louis Castle talks about the development of the classic RTS, Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun.

Reactor Online. Sensors Online. Weapons Online. All Systems Nominal! In this Special Edition of War Stories, Russ Bullock (President, Piranha Games), Derek James (Designer), and Brian Windover (Lead Engineer) discuss the development of the upcoming MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries. We also speak with Jordan Weisman, founder of FASA Corporation and creator of the BattleTech universe, and get a little bit of a history of the MechWarrior and BattleTech franchises.

Frictional Games' Thomas Grip, designer of Amnesia: The Dark Descent, discusses the development of one of the most frightening games ever made. Thomas talks in-depth about the game's unique sanity system, as well as how the team continually tricked players into scaring themselves.

Mega Crit Games co-founders Casey Yano and Anthony Giovannetti set out to combine the roguelike and deck building genres into one game, but found themselves faced with an obstacle: how to reveal the enemies’ intent. With the help of an active playtesting base on Steam, they realized that to make the game succeed they would need to scrap the ‘next move’ system for something more Twitch Streaming friendly. And thus, the ‘intent’ system was born.

Lucas Pope, creator of Return of the Obra Dinn, explains how the localization of the game's logbook put the game in some seriously dangerous waters.

Aleksander Kauch, lead game programmer for This War of Mine, goes behind the scenes of the game's development and explains how they turned a management sim into a visceral experience about civilians at war.

Charlie Cleveland, design director for Subnautica, goes behind the scenes of the game's development and explains how they crafted an exciting and dangerous experience without allowing the player to fight back. Charlie shows some early prototypes for Subnautica, and describes why they decided to create a game with primarily non-violent gameplay.

Sébastien Bénard, lead designer at Motion Twin, goes behind the scenes of Dead Cells' development. Sébastien explains the challenges they came across and how they made the game feel so good to play.

Sid Meier, the creator of the popular Civilization video game series, goes behind the scenes of the development of the franchise's first entry. Sid explains some of the challenges they came across while transitioning the game from real-time to turn-based strategy.

When Lorne Lanning first conceived of what would become Oddworld, he wasn't necessarily setting out to make video games. What he needed to do was tell a story. On this episode of War Stories, we hear from the co-founder of Oddworld Inhabitants and learn all the ups and downs of Abe's journey to the screen over the past 22 years, including what comes next for the franchise in Oddworld: Soulstorm.

Cyan Worlds co-founder Rand Miller goes behind the scenes of the development of one of the best selling PC games of all time, Myst. The HyperCard-developed title ran into some snags when trying to run on the CD-ROM format. "I had a really powerful Mac, with a lot of memory and a lot of hard drive space, and we were still working in mud," said Rand, discussing the game's performance early-on. Rand and his brother, Robyn, compressed the image and audio data as much as they could so the game could run smoothly on 1x CD-ROM drives.

For today’s episode of War Stories, Ars Technica sat down with Naughty Dog Co-founder Andy Gavin to talk about the hurdles in bringing the original Crash Bandicoot to gamers around the world. When Andy and his partner Jason Rubin made the decision to bring the action platforming genre into three dimensions, it required living up to their company ethos of “leaving no stone unturned” in the search for memory - even if it meant hacking Sony’s library code.