Dining With Developers, Vol. 2: Haden Blackman, Part 2
4/17/2009 5:16 PM | 10 Comments | Page 3 of 9
Scott Jones
Status: Coffee makes me feel 4-percent sexier.
Blackman: I worked on fishing boats just out of college. I grew up in a little town in Southern California. I thank God every day when I come to work now.
Narcisse: You guys just won a writing award at DICE.
Blackman: We were up against
Fallout 3. If you were to ask me beforehand, I thought
Fallout 3 was going to win.
Fallout 3 had one of the most amazing moments I've had in games in 10 years. I was in the Vault, still creeping around with my gun, when I hear the girl who's supposed to be my best friend. She's all upset, and I see these guys dressed like the guards I've been killing all along, and without even thinking I kill them both. And she's losing her mind. And I realize I've just killed her dad. The fact that it can tell a story about our different perspectives is a huge success.
Lucas: What was the last Star Wars story that we cared about in a videogame?
Kahn: Shadows of the Empire?
Jedi Knight II?
Lucas: Shadows, yeah.
Blackman: Knights of the Old Republic.
Kahn: TIE Fighter was not horrible.
TIE Fighter was a pretty cool story.
Jones: The old Dark Forces games. Those were great games. One thing I remember from the original game is the Easter eggs. You know, the "Ewoks suck" graffiti. Or the Stormtroopers bathroom. There's none of that, at least from what I can tell, in
The Force Unleashed.
Sam and Nathalie banging the plastic toys together
That's more of a factor of time than anything else. We basically told the team, "Look, we can put Easter eggs in, but they're the last thing to go in." Some of it, too, is the nature of the industry and the way things have changed, and the ESRB. Here's an example: In the TIE fighter level, if you explore enough, there's an area that we thought nobody could actually get to. But you can actually get to it. We put a Clone trooper helmet just sitting there, in the middle of nowhere. When I saw a screenshot of that,
I lost my mind.
Because I was like, You guys have to tell us every single thing you put in. Because the problem is, we've got a wide range of ages, some guys just out of school, people who don't always understand that if I put in something like "Ewoks suck," that might actually raise eyebrows with the ESRB. The ESRB doesn't want us to put in anything that they don't know about. We were hot on the heels of Hot Coffee, and we were really paranoid about that stuff.
It's funny you brought this up, because just yesterday I was having a conversation with our lead environment artist from the first
Force Unleashed, and we've told all the level artists that they can [include] two Easter eggs per level. I have to approve them. But you can do two. We'll give you a little bit of leeway. We'll build that into the schedule and everything, because we love this stuff, too. The restroom in
Dark Forces is hilarious.
Lucas: [To Evan and Jones]. I just want to make sure that you guys write into the written work here that he said "the first
Force Unleashed." All right?
