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Vol.
2, Issue 14
February 28, 2000
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That’s
very good advice. There’s nothing like losing a lot of work to
make you frustrated.
Eekels: Yeah that’s the worst.
Ewing: The worst is doing work that you’ve
already done over again.
Of the
feedback you’ve gotten from UT, what strikes you the most, what
really gets you in the heart and says, “Wow”?
Eekels: I think for me the biggest feedback
is people saying that Unreal Tournament is right up there with Quake
3. And with Unreal deathmatch, we wanted it to be just as good
as Quake and give people something different to play and a comparable
or even better product. But in Unreal networking didn’t work all
that well. With Unreal Tournament we are competing with Quake III: Arena,
and in lots of reviews, they favor Unreal Tournament.
Ewing:
Especially when we first started Unreal Tournament. Everybody was
saying, “You’re going against Quake III: Arena? What are you guys,
crazy? You guys are going to get clobbered.”
Eekels: And it’s holding up and it’s doing
okay or even better.
Ewing: That’s definitely one of my answers,
but my other answer was, I’m very proud of all the accolades that
the level designers got. Just the one fact is that we strive to
make something different, to try for a lot of varieties in our levels
and make them, to just try and make them different from the regular
style deathmatch levels but still make them fun to play. But to
make people say, “Ah man, I remember that level!”
Eekels: It’s the thing that sticks in your
mind. Instead of saying, “The one with all those rooms?” I remember
this one like the Overlord map. The Beachhead map!
Ewing: Just people remembering your map.
“Oh wow that was such a cool map.” That’s a neat experience to
play in an environment like that. That was one of the big things
to me.
Let’s
talk about Quake III: Arena and Unreal Tournament. Who was the first
to come up with the idea?
Eekels: Bill Gates.
Ewing: Well, ah, as most people know, Quake
III: Arena was announced first, but I’m sure they were thinking about
that idea for a long time before they announced it as well, but
we originally also thought of doing a multiplayer expansion pack
after Unreal and we had thought of doing this before we heard of
Quake III: Arena. So I’m not sure who originally thought of the
idea first, it may very well have been them. We did think of the
idea before we heard the announcement from id that they were going
to do it. Then we did a collective, “DOH!” when we heard that they
were going to do that to and that we would have to release it after
them. Ultimately you always get the people saying that you’re copying
their idea or whatever.
Was there
a rush to release Unreal Tournament, or were you hoping you would
get it into stores before Quake III: Arena?
Ewing: Definitely I’m sure we were hoping
that, but above that was our will to release a game that was absolutely
as polished as possible. We kept saying for those last 6 months
that we’re 98% done, but we just wanted to squash all the bugs and
make everything as good as possible before we released it.
Eekels: Whenever you get a new version
of the game code-wise, things are fixed in it, but because they
got fixed something else got broken. So it’s always 2 steps forward
–
Ewing: 1 step back.
Eekels: That kind of thing. So we just
wanted to make sure that Unreal Tournament would perform well.
Ewing: Of course we were hoping that it
would come out before Quake III: Arena, but that’s not something
that drove us forward. I mean, both development schedules seemed
to change a lot and I don’t think either team really focused on
the other team that much we were just making our own game and making
it as good as we could.
Eekels: There is a good thing if you release
a product first. But definitely the decision to release it was
when we were sure we had a good game.
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