The Too Human Side of Denis Dyack

A candid chat with the president of Silicon Knights
3/11/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 3

Too Human's journey throughout development has been an interesting tale that has had its low points and high points. Originally to be a five-disc PlayStation game for EA/MGM, the project was moved to GameCube when Silicon Knights signed on to be a second-party developer for Nintendo. After releasing both Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem and Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, it was revealed that the company would break its exclusivity with Nintendo and develop Too Human for the Xbox 360, as well as another unknown project for Sega.

Since the game was announced for the Xbox 360 at X05, development has had a few rocky moments, to say the least. Too Human was first shown during E3 2006 at a time when Microsoft was hot on showing as many games as they could for the Xbox 360, since Nintendo and Sony we're debuting their first next-gen offerings. Too Human was shown behind closed doors and was playable on the show floor, and even though this two-level demo was extremely early, it was quite apparent that Silicon Knights was showing Too Human too soon. Initially developed using Epic's Unreal Engine 3, rumors circulated in the fall that Silicon Knights would be dumping the engine, because it wasn't performing as well as they hoped.

This rumor came to fruition as Silicon Knights filed a suit against Epic Games stating that the engine didn't perform as promised and that Epic refused to fix their problems with the engine, focusing their efforts -- and money from licensing fees for Unreal Engine 3 -- on their game, Gears of War. Epic has since filed a counter-claim against Silicon Knights stating that Silicon Knights breached their contract with Epic, is using Unreal technology in their new engine, and is using Unreal technology without licensing it further in their upcoming Sega project.

Having to go back to the drawing board, Silicon Knights rebuilt Too Human using their own proprietary engine -- the Silicon Knights Engine -- and during this year's Game Developers Conference they showed a near-complete build of the game. After playing a good chunk of the first level of this tasty action-RPG-hybrid, we came away impressed -- but we needed to know more. We tracked down Silicon Knights President Denis Dyack post-GDC to find out about where the game was in development, get details about the upcoming demo, see how things are progressing with the Epic suit, and find out the potential for an Eternal Darkness sequel.

Crispy Gamer: How was the game received at GDC?

Denis Dyack: I would say it was overwhelmingly positive. It went better than what we expected, quite frankly, because it's always hard to tell how we're going to do at this kind of show. At the event, I think we originally scheduled for about 30 outlets, we ended up knowing a week before that we were going to have over 50, and by the time the actual press event occurred, we had so many people there -- it was standing room only -- it was well over 50 and the only potentially negative thing was that we couldn't get any more game systems in for people to play, so we had the same amount of time with way more people. I think, given our past history, we don't have the benefit of the doubt -- we have to fight for every positive thing we get. I would say 95 to 98 percent of all the feedback we got was extraordinarily positive, which to me says it was a fantastic event.