Game Matters

Max Payne: The Making of a Franchise

Before I dive into a series of blogs on game design, I'll first give a quick overview of some of the thinking that went into the concept and design of Max Payne. In effect, Max Payne was purposely positioned for success right from the start. Here's how:

o A game's name is one of the most important marketing decisions to be made. It should be non-generic (avoid overused words, like "warrior," "shadow," "dark," "beyond," "legend," "combat," & "destiny") and memorable. A perfect name will convey something about the product (i.e. Doom, Tomb Raider, Grand Theft Auto), have good word-play possibilities for press and news headlines (i.e. "Maximum fun!" or "Duke it out!"), and have a good short-hand version that still tells people what game is being referred to (i.e. "Max" and "Duke"). The game should not be too long, or complicated -- avoid colons and dashes, as these are complications and often indicate a name that's too long (one of my favorite actual examples: Descent: Freespace -- The Great War). There are many more attributes good names should shoot for, and I'll cover them later in a blog on the art and science of game titles.

o Max Payne was conceptualized during Tomb Raider's peak run, and the design purposely avoids the special elements that made Tomb Raider unique and popular, such as swimming, the acrobatic moves, settings, horrible third-person camera, stuff like that. Yet, during this same time, other third-person action games more closely copied Tomb Raider's formula, and were therefore perceived as clones. (Space Bunnies Must Die comes to mind.) Games are labeled clones when they too closely copy previously successful games. One of the most important keys to being noticed and newsworthy is being unique, and this was a key design guideline for Max Payne. Being different is one of the most important principles of positioning. If you're not significantly unique, you're a follower, and by definition followers do not lead.

o Max Payne is a model of simplicity. This means that it's not a hard concept to communicate to press and gamers: You're a fugitive cop, everyone is out to stop you. The story is rampant revenge. The gameplay is straight-forward, too: Max shoots all enemies! Max Payne's gameplay verb is kill. It's not explore (Myst), or build (Roller Coaster Tycoon), or drive (GTA series). (Yes, games can have more than one gameplay verb, but for my point here I'm referring to the dominant verb.) Often, games that try to have more than one gameplay verb, like kill, sneak and negotiate (Deus Ex), can be too complicated for reaching the mass market. Simplicity rules.

o The game was designed with several interesting hooks to help it stand-out and generate buzz. The key hook is bullet-time, which I won't go into further. But perhaps overlooked are other important hooks: [1] The game's film noir style, [2] the game's graphic novel story presentation, and [3] the game's Hong Kong flick cinematic action. All of these hooks are dramatic and relatively unique within the game world, and that's what makes them buzz-worthy and news-worthy.

o The game was originally titled Dark Justice, as this well describes the game's theme. But, we felt it was more important to focus on the game's lead character like we had previously done with Duke Nukem. The comic book industry is smart about naming their comics the name of their lead character (or characters, as in X-Men, Fantastic Four), such as Batman, Spider-Man, Superman and so on. The idea is that when you have a character-focused franchise, it's trivial to put that character in new stories for sequels, or for exploitation in other media. But if you name you game with a setting, such as Tomb Raider, well, then you've a special setting that you must deal with each game. With Tomb Raider, every story you tell sort of needs to involve a tomb, otherwise the title doesn't fit. This is why I think it was a mistake not to name the Tomb Raider games after the lead character (Lara Croft) instead.

o Controversy. Max Payne had a little, though it didn't get as much press as we thought it might. Still, controversy that fits the context of the game is good for stirring up news. Duke Nukem, for example, had only one or two levels with strippers (and no nudity), and yet it generated endless controversy when the game was released in 1996. The bottom-line is that if you can build a little controversy into your game, do it.

o Positioning-wise, Max is the game industry's leading vigilante cop -- this is game category that he owns. The attribute Max owns is "bullet-time," like Volvo owns the word "safety" and McDonalds owns "fast." For a game to be successful, it's critical to have it be either the leader, or the alternative, in a category, such as Coke and Pepsi. It's also important to own an attribute. In fact, game designers would help themselves by thinking in terms of attributes rather than features. When you own an attribute then it's your brand that springs to mind when someone mentions the attribute. If I mention the attribute "cavity fighter," then the brand most people think of is Crest. If a say "document copier," then you think of Xerox. In the game industry, if someone talks about "bullet-time," the game automatically connected with that attribute is Max Payne. That's a very powerful positioning principle at work.

o We had a controlled, deliberate marketing plan for Max Payne, designed to ramp up the game's buzz and news-worthiness. A key way to make a game news-worthy is to give it a news-worthy attribute, and position it as a category leader. Second, do not hype the game -- let press and players do that for you. And third, keep the game exclusive by not releasing too many screen shots or too much news about the game. I've seen too many times publishers and/or developers flood websites with shots and info, and quickly news about the game becomes tiresome. With Max, we teased, but we didn't show too much. And when we did show, we knocked socks off by showing content and effects that were never seen before.

To sum up, Max Payne benefited from deliberate positioning-powered design, with several positioning principles baked into the game's design that were calculated to make the game newsworthy, compelling, unique and properly branded. In a nutshell, this is how to build a franchise, and how to build news-worthiness and buzz. Of course, execution and polish are also paramount, and Max Payne excelled in those areas, too.

Just to be clear that I do not hijack improper credit, Max Payne was developed (all content and code) by Remedy Entertainment (they did all the hard work!), and produced by 3D Realms (meaning we funded a significant portion of the game, handled the publishing agreements, helped guide the game's design, helped play-tested and polished the game, handled the shareware release, and oversaw and co-designed the game's marketing).

3D Realms is currently working with another developer, with a very similar relationship that we had with Remedy, to create another hit series (or so we hope!). In 2004 this game will be announced and it will make a good case study in the making of a franchise, allowing me to discuss our key decisions prior to the game's release, and eventually seeing if we made the right calls.

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Unrelated note: Thanks to the many kind words from people who have somehow landed on this blog (including a lot of industry friends), and to the other industry blogs that have sent them here. My plan is to update this blog once or twice per week. And speaking of "plan," I've had it pointed out to me by several people that this blog is just a fancy resurrection of the the ".plan files" that were so common ny developers in the late-90's. Can't argue.

So, I was gonna write a book!

So, why do the blog thing? Well, as crazy as it is to do, I was gonna do something even more zany: I was going to write a book. On game design. In fact, I got about 20 pages into it, with over 200 pages of compiled notes. These notes are just dying to be expanded into coherent articles, and this blog will be my outlet.

You see, a book is a helluva lotta work, and I don't have the time as I'm still knee-deep in the industry, involved with business, marketing and primarily design. Blogs are far less formal, less demanding, no deadlines, and I can handle the whole project a small bite at a time and make it last years.

I had several publishers lined up waiting to publish my eventual book, but honestly, I do not need the money and had already decided to donate every penny to some cause within the industry. That won't happen now, but game design books typically don't sell well anyway, so hardly anyone's loss.

Perhaps the one thing that most put the brakes on my desire to write a book was the formation of a new game developers discussion group in 2001, which I will not name here -- publishers are not suppose to know about it. This group, invitation-only, and consisting of several hundred premier game developers worldwide, provided a ripe outlet for my DNA-driven desire to write and share info. Once that dev group got rolling, the book thing skid to a halt. In fact, the dev forum is still a great outlet for new ideas, and it's helped cystalize many of them, and got me to rethink others.

That's where this blog enters the picture. All the stuff I've written about is behind-the-curtain, so to speak. Some of it is dying to peak through. This blog is where many of my thoughts/ideas/criticisms can be expanded, improved, and etched in digital stone, making this blog an excellent personal archive for years to come.

BTW, that book I was going to write would have been titled Game Design Matters. I registered the domain a long time ago. I decided to shorten the name for this blog to allow for topics that weren't necessarily design oriented.

And now you know the rest of the story.

Next up a little meat: The story of how Max Payne was designed as a franchise from the beginning.

The game industry needs help!

To kick-off, I'm going to briefly bullet-point a few industry problems:

o The industry has come to rely too much on licensed IP. (IP is short-hand for intellectual property. Generally, an IP means a brand, such as the James Bond brand, or the Zelda brand.) The game industry will only establish itself as a true creative entertainment force by creating original IP. The more we leech off Hollywood, in particular, the more we will be seen as a servant industry, rather than a creative innovator. The trend lately is for publishers to use the crutch of licensed content to build games. But, research shows that 80% of the top-selling titles our industry produces are original brands (meaning titles born within the industry, including their sequels and spin-offs.) This will be a fully explored topic down the road.

o Most independent developers have no financial leverage. The result is that these financially weak dev studios do not have the means to create their own IP -- instead they live paycheck to paycheck doing their publisher's bidding, happy just to have a job. And that usually means making a licensed-based game or doing a port, and neither of these pay well for most dev studios, and so they remain stuck in this rut.

o Another problem with weak dev studios is that they have little opportunity to pursue their own projects and try to create something original and innovative. New studios can be a great source of risky innovation, because, after all, they have little to lose by swinging for the fences. But, this is true only if they have the financial means to do their own thing, and in today's industry publishers almost never fund high-risk, original projects from new studios. This is a big change from how things were in the mid- to later-1990's.

o The industry is still relatively young, and this means there are still too few experienced leader-designers driving projects from conception to completion. It'll be a decade or two before we have sufficient leadership talent to cover a majority of projects.

o Publishers are full of poorly experienced producers who oversee projects by both internal and external dev studios. This problem, too, will be mostly corrected in a decade or two. But, publishers can at least recognize this problem and quit promoting to producer status people from with their QA departments to oversee projects -- producers need far more in-the-trenches design experience.

o For the most part, the industry (pubs and devs both) does not have a reliable methodology for producing successful games. But then, neither does the movie industry, and they've been at this a lot longer than us. Yet, for both industry's, there are clear-cut systems/formulas/methods/principles/you-name-its that, when applied, can significantly improve a product's chance for financial success. This is beyond comprehension for many people (usually artistic types or those who've already been hardened in the belief that such formulaic systems are not possible), but I've convinced beyond doubt a good many in this industry that it's true, and this topic will be covered here in many coming posts.

o UK dev studios are going through a particularly tough time, because there are no strong UK publishers left. Eidos has been slumping for years, and Take-Two is HQ'ed in New York city now. This is a problem that may not be correct-able.

There are more issues along these lines that the industry is facing, but this'll do for now. In coming posts I hope to expand upon most of these points individually.

Every saga has a beginning...

This blog will focus on the game industry, as that's my business and my passion. You will get a true insiders look at a variety of topics, from company branding, royalties rates for star developers, game design principles, book and game reviews, rating game advertisements, the importance of story and emotion in games, to you-name-it.

For me it all started in 1975, breaking into my school's computer lab late at night, creating games on a Wang 2000 personal computer, long before they were called PCs. Back then state-of-the-art was a 12-line, green text display, 60 characters across. At the time, I lived in the heart of Australia, Alice Springs. I was 13 and had discovered my future.

Almost 30 years later, I've written for several national publications (such as long gone COMPUTE!), over 200 columns for The Dallas Morning News, and co-authored a book on beating arcade games. But all of this was in the early- to mid-80's, before things really took off.

By the later 80's, having written some 100 small games on various computers I'd owned -- Commodore PET, Commodore 64, Amiga 1000, and several IBM PCs (including the original pre-hard-drive Intel 8088 version, bought the year it came out) -- I was beginning to explore shareware as an avenue for making money with all of these games I'd made. Shareware had started in 1982, but was not exactly making anyone wealthy, except for a handful of authors, such as the creators of PC-Write, PC-File, and PKWare. No one was making money in by releasing their games as shareware. This is where luck and opportunity met preparation, and Apogee was born.

Apogee became wildly successful in the shareware arena, starting with very successful series of Kroz games from 1987 through 1990, at which point I quit my day job and began to treat Apogee as a real, full-time business. The first thing I did was recruit more game developers, convincing them of the virtues of shareware, and that Apogee was the expert in shareware marketing. And we were! In 1987 I pioneered the multi-episode method of releasing one-third of a game as shareware, and selling the remainder of the game directly to buyers. This was the key to being successful in the shareware market, and even though my kroz games were not flashy compared to other shareware games at the time, I was the only one making the big bucks -- around $50k to $100k a year.

Mid-1990 I began talking to John Romero, a game coder at Softdisk, and eventually convinced him and his two co-worker friends, John Carmack and Tom Hall, to give shareware a try. They made Commander Keen in about four months and we released the game to the world on BBS's mid-Dec. 1990. A month later I sent them a check for $10,000, and they, too, saw that the future was shareware.

Well, this was suppose to be a brief background post, but it's already well beyond that! Apogee went on to release some 35 games (all but a few solid money earners, including several massive hits). In the mid-1990's we changed our name to 3D Realms, a strategic move to ride the growing 3D action game category.

In 1998 3D Realms became a founding member of Gathering of Developers, a publisher based in Dallas. I was a co-owner and one of the board of directors, and learned much about the publisher side of the business. Eventually, G.o.D. sold itself in full to Take-Two Interactive.

Nowadays 3D Realms is best known for the creating Duke Nukem and co-creating Max Payne (with Remedy). 3D Realms is one of the world's most successful fully independent PC game developers -- this means we do not require financial help in creating games, thus allowing us to make the games we want to make, with the level of execution and polish we want to give them. (And yes, many can say we've abused this freedom!) We have uniquely positioned ourselves as specialists in character-based 3D action games. We've also developed a methodology which we believe enables us to create successful game brands with a soaring degree of confidence, and as of this date we have a major unannounced game well underway that will, like Max Payne, be an proving ground for our techniques.

In this blog I will discuss a wide range of game development topics, ranging from pure design, to the business side, from marketing to game reviews. There's not much I won't touch upon, and those who know me (or who used to read my ".plan files" from the late 90's) know that I don't hold back my opinions. The fur will often fly, that much I can promise.

My company bio page has a few more details, and a fairly good recommended reading list.