Brian Reynolds Interview

IGNPC: Before entering the game industry you were studying philosophy as a graduate student at Berkeley. You sent a demo to Origin and Microprose, apparently trying to get as far away from California as possible. Why did you want to leave California, especially with the plethora of job opportunities in the Bay Area?

Brian Reynolds: Gosh, I don't think anyone has ever asked me that question! Truth be told, I had a pretty miserable year in California. I didn't like the philosophy program I was in very much, and trying to live on a 9000ドル/yr fellowship in the VERY expensive Bay Area was definitely a challenge. So all of that together left a bad taste in my mouth and I was ready to start fresh somewhere else! Fortunately I found Maryland greatly to my liking. The Baltimore area is definitely underrated!

IGNPC: What did you do for that demo?

BR: Well, as I was slowly starting to realize that graduate school in philosophy might not work out for me, it also occurred to me that I'd better start thinking about other careers. I remembered "hey, I used to like programming computer games", so I went to the store and bought a bunch of books on DOS innards (Peter Norton, etc). I bought the Microsoft C 6.0 compiler and sat down to try to duplicate some of the graphics & sound of the state of the art games I'd been playing of that time (Ultima VI, Populous, etc). I had a fair amount of success, and as I worked I grew more and more interested in it and less and less interested in graduate school. My demo had VGA graphics & animation, and "AdLib compatible sound", and since I'd done all the programming myself (no purchased graphics "libraries"), it made for a successful electronic resume.

IGNPC: What games did you work on before Colonization, and what was your role on them?

BR: I started out in Microprose's adventure games department. I was the lead programmer for "Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender" (my first game!), and "Return of the Phantom". The writing for the latter was done by Raymond Benson, who now writes the official James Bond novels. I also built the library and some of the code for "Dragonsphere", Microprose's final adventure game, as I was transitioning to Colonization.

Dragonsphere was designed by Doug Kaufman, who later worked closely with me as co-designer of Civ2 and Alpha Centauri. I think if we'd known as much about adventure games when we started as we did by the time we did Dragonsphere, the adventure game series could have had more success.

IGNPC: Aside from your own work, what computer games have you been playing of late?

BR: Up until September I played quite a bit of Starcraft. Since then it's been Age of Kings (Age of Empires 2) in a pretty serious way. I shamelessly used my industry status to get into one of the elite clans (DaRq-I'm "DaRq_Cattle"), and I've gotten pretty darn good at the game.

IGNPC: Have you played Call to Power? If so, which new features in that game do you feel really add something to the subgenre?

BR: I've only played it a bit, in a professional-evaluation-of-competition kind of mode. It had some cool ideas, like stacked combat, that I certainly would have wanted to adopt for Civ3; I thought its greatest shortcoming was probably the interface, which was unfamiliar to long-time Civ players and didn't emphasize the key gameplay elements quite enough.

IGNPC: Which gameplay elements are you the most proud of introducing, in any of your games?

BR: I was very proud to have Colonization ship at all (my first strategy game!) and especially to have it make a nice profit. I'm extremely proud of the job we did on the Civ2 design (the first monetarily successful sequel to a Sid game), keeping the parts of Civ that worked, cleaning up the parts that didn't, and adding some neat new stuff that increased the overall effect. I was particularly proud of the improved diplomacy and AI in Civ2, which I think is some of my best work, and the work that Doug Kaufman and I did on game balance made Civ2 one of the best-balanced games to date. And we were of course dumbfounded by Civ2's success. Its lifetime sales projection when it shipped was in the five figures, I believe, whereas the actual sales were in the seven figures! My personal favorite parts of Alpha Centauri were the science fiction research and writing, and the diplomatic personality/AI which I think is the best I've done.

IGNPC: Which parts of your games have been the least satisfying?

BR: The frustrating parts! It's always depressing when you realize that you're not going to be able to accomplish something that you wanted to do for a game. For Alpha Centauri the biggest frustration was trying to get the 3d "voxel" code we'd licensed to draw the units in a cool way.

IGNPC: Civilization II and Alpha Centauri both feature a greater sense of urgency, a more pressing pacing, than did Colonization. How did you achieve this improvement?

BR: Doug Kaufman and I have gotten better and better at game balance as we've done more of these, and I think that's what you're seeing.

IGNPC: Please describe a few of your most important principles of game design.

BR: Well the most important one is to always be playing your own game as you're developing it. Developers who don't play their own games either through not wanting to or because some technical element (e.g. graphics engine) isn't done and therefore prevents it, usually wind up with inferior products.

IGNPC: Please describe the role you played in the development of Colonization. How much of the design did you do, and who helped you with it? What else did you do on the game?

BR: That was my first project as a designer, so it was kind of an apprenticeship with Sid. I was kind of the creative lead, and did the programming, creative design, and research. The topic and basic ideas for the game had come from me, so this was kind of my "big chance". Sid spent quite a bit of time on Colonization, mostly on game balance and "finding the fun". He supervised the overall design and also spent a lot of time passing on his design methods and training me as a designer/programmer.

IGNPC: How did this role of yours evolve as you moved on to Civilization II and later Alpha Centauri?

BR: Well, after Colonization, Sid was really no longer involved except in name. We discussed Civ2 for about 2 hours at the beginning of the project and that was pretty much it-I'm very grateful to Sid for being willing to trust me with such a cool game. From there on I was basically on my own as a lead designer and had close collaborations with Doug Kaufman on Civilization 2 and Tim Train (and Doug again) on Alpha Centauri. And though on Civ2 management would occasionally look over our shoulders to make sure we were heading in "the right direction" with the Civilization license, we effectively had a free hand. During the principal development of Civ2, I was actually living in England (my wife had a Fulbright teaching fellowship and Microprose management was generously willing to let me "telecommute"), and freedom also tended to follow naturally from the distance. So I sat up in our little house in Richmond, North Yorkshire looking out at the sheep and wrote my dream game (Doug would send me e-mails, we'd talk on the phone once a week for a very expensive hour, and he came over to visit once). By the time Civ2 shipped, Microprose management had changed and we weren't getting along too well with the new regime. That's when we left to start Firaxis.

Alpha Centauri was my project-Sid was working on Gettysburg and then afterwards prototypes for his next game.

IGNPC: Too often, a game developer gets tired of the game being made by the time it ships. After working on it for so long, all of the surprise is gone. Further, repeated attempts at perfecting the game have made the developer intimately aware of the game's flaws. You appear to consistently avoid this problem. I surmise that in a large part this stems from having the leeway to make a game to your personal taste. Aside from this freedom, what else has kept the experience fresh and rewarding for you, so much so that you have happily returned to the same subgenre for three games in row?

BR: I think you're right about the leeway, and I'd add to that the fact that Civilization (the original) was by far my favorite game at the time I embarked on both Colonization and Civ2. Being thoroughly addicted to the game not only provided a near-infinite reservoir of morale and enthusiasm, it also meant I knew the game through and through. I think, by the way, that it's probably time for me to move onto a new subgenre!

IGNPC: Just how much freedom have you had in shaping each of these games?

BR: Well during Colonization I was a rookie designer so I was of course being watched closely. I had a pretty free hand in the "creative elements" (topic, story, general scope of features), but Sid really supervised the game balance and specific features (which isn't to say he deserves blame for any flaws in those areas - rather, he deserves credit for all the flaws introduced by me which -weren't- in the final game!) After Colonization I had basically proven myself and was more on my own. With Civ2 we all knew, of course, a lot of the general touchstones that were going to be part of the game; I think that made it easier for Microprose to trust me with a solo design (remember that at the time Microprose didn't expect to get a colossal number of sales out of this anyway). By the time we got to Alpha Centauri I was a partner and principal co-owner of the company, so I had about as much freedom as a designer can ever hope for.

IGNPC:When designing a game, with what relative weight do you consider features you'd like to play with, your strengths as a developer, the desires of the public, and the desires of a publisher?

BR: It's hard to say, since they're all important in their own ways. I suppose it largely depends on the area in question - there are some areas where I listen very carefully to the publisher or to the public (say marketability, and sometimes what features to include), and other areas (say, game balance) where I feel it's more appropriate to follow my own instincts. But in neither case is one exclusive to the other. Another important area which you don't mention is the desires and strengths of the team-it's important to try to make sure everyone on the team is doing something they love doing and are good at.

IGNPC: What features have you found yourself having to push for?

BR: I'm not sure "having to push for" is a truly distinguishing factor, since any important feature takes some work to get in the game. But if you mean having to push for with "the powers that be", it usually comes down to resources - a game designer like me is always happy to use more resources (read: spend more money) on a project, so there's inevitably a point where they want to (or have to) tell me "no more", or that I need to cut back on something. The big money resource-wise usually goes into art and multimedia, so those have been the areas where trade-offs have had to be made; there were a whole series of cut scenes I would have liked to include in Alpha Centauri (the so-called "interludes"), but the resources just weren't there. But the trend in the industry has been toward higher production values and bigger budgets, which from a creative perspective has certainly been a good thing for me.

IGNPC: What features have been pushed for by your producers and publishers?

BR: Publishers of course generally realize that designing games is what I'm good at and selling games is what they're good at, so I've had good relationships there. Typically the overlap comes in areas of "marketability", and they'll have suggestions about how, for example, to make the game more engrossing in the first 5 minutes, first half hour, and so forth. These are more often than not really good suggestions from a gameplay point of view as well.

IGNPC: What features have come from your team?

BR: All kinds of things. During Alpha Centauri the team really held me to the promise not to ship the thing before it was really cool, really ready to be shipped. My producer, Tim Train, would see that a particular part of the project wasn't really getting enough of my attention-say, scenarios, or reward screens, or unit animations, or whatever - so he'd jump in and get people organized and inspired to make sure that part of the game was cool. And Jason Coleman (senior programmer) and Dave Inscore (artist) took over the interface development for a while to prove it was possible for us to do a game with both a consistent and cool-looking interface. Part of my own maturing process as a designer/developer has been in learning to give other team members enough freedom to shine in their own right.

IGNPC: Alpha Centauri saw the introduction of landmarks as a gameplay element. How was that idea born?

BR: Two words: Bing Gordon. Bing is one of the co-founders of Electronic Arts and has a very good eye for games, especially in the areas where game design overlaps with marketability. Credit for the original landmark idea goes to him, and it was a great idea. Bing would fly out to see us once a month or so, and we had a superb time brainstorming until the wee hours of the night (Bing, of course, being on Pacific Time, had a big advantage over us there!) He'd also sit at my other terminal and play multiplayer Alpha Centauri with me, but if I got too ruthless he'd say "Hey, I came out here to cheer you up and inspire you, and now you're going to plunder my base?"

IGNPC: Each of your Civ games has included non-violent win options that were viable, fun, and balanced well with combat options. How much work did that add to the development process?

BR: Having multiple ways to succeed is one of the central touchstone of the design principles I follow, so I wouldn't necessarily say this is something we "added" to an existing design - it was integrated into the process from the beginning. That said, I do think these sorts of strategy games are some of the most complex and difficult to balance, and balancing multiple victory conditions against each other is one element of that.

IGNPC: Alpha Centauri pulled philosophy into the gameplay in a way we hadn't seen before in Colonization or Civilization II. Considering your study of philosophy, I imagine that was a gameplay element you would have liked to include in earlier works. Please describe your earliest ideas for working philosophy into gameplay.

BR: Well getting philosophy into the game was certainly a central attraction of the "science fiction" nature of Alpha Centauri. Up until then I'd done exclusively history games (I also have a degree in European History), so it was refreshing to get to "do some philosophy".

IGNPC: Colonization had a fertile setting for emphasizing the exploration side of gameplay. To emphasize philosophy, one might have preferred a setting in the European Renaissance. Would you have preferred to do a game in the European Renaissance, and if so, what dissuaded you?

BR: Well the European Renaissance certainly sounds like a great topic for a strategy game, but not necessarily the best topic to get a lot of philosophy into the game. The fictional nature of Alpha Centauri allowed us to draw our characters a lot more sharply and distinctly than the natural blurring and greyness of history. It is a lot harder to emphasize different points of view in a history game strongly, because you are also constrained by trying to reproduce actual historical characters and situations.

IGNPC: What goes into making a good AI for a turn-based empire building game?

BR: Mostly lots of playing the game and watching the AI play. I'd basically watch the game play until I saw the AI do something stupid, then try to correct that and repeat ad-infinitum. Over a long enough period that produced a pretty darn good AI. I have always tried to teach the AI the same successful strategies that I use in playing a game.

IGNPC: Alpha Centauri also introduced AI players that respected territorial boundaries. What challenges were involved in supporting that?

BR: We'd thought boundaries were a good idea for quite a while, but the challenge was to figure out a way to handle it which didn't add any micromanagement to the game. I think the system we came up with worked really well for that, and once we had the game system in place the rest (AI) followed pretty smoothly from there.

IGNPC: In Alpha Centauri you finally had the opportunity to do a game with multiplayer support. Now that you've done it, what do you feel is the relative importance of good AI vs. good multiplayer support?

BR: Well "good AI" basically means "good single player experience" and "good multiplayer support" means "good multiplayer experience", so basically you're balancing single vs. multiplayer play. So from a marketability standpoint you're balancing your single player experience against the multiplayer value. It's an interesting challenge because most players still play single player, but your key "hardcore" players want to play multiplayer (and are very vocal about it!) So the answer is you really need both these days. That's just another aspect of "the bar being raised" in terms of what you need to do to create a true hit product.

IGNPC: Expansions to Civilization II merely involved exploitation of the original engine without adding any new AI or gameplay. To what degree do you feel the expansion to Alpha Centauri has done better?

BR: Well I should begin by emphasizing that I wasn't directly involved in either set of expansions. The Civ2 expansions were done by Microprose after I'd already left, and I have only passing familiarity with them. The Alien Crossfire expansion for Alpha Centauri was done by Tim Train as producer/designer with Chris Pine doing the programming and Doug Kaufman co-designing and balancing. I think they did a great job putting a whole new feel on the game - in certain senses, playing Alien Crossfire feels like going in a whole new direction, and that's the effect you want for an expansion. There is certainly plenty of new gameplay in Alien Crossfire, and Chris did add new AI to account for the additions. There were of course the usual budgetary constraints ¿ the money just wasn't there to put a whole new look on the game, for instance, but I think they did a great job and made a really cool expansion.

IGNPC: Please describe the work environment at Microprose when you started there. How had the environment at Microprose changed by the time you left?

BR: Microprose was always a very pleasant place to work, and filled with friendly creative people. It has always had a somewhat older staff than the stereotypical development studio-when I arrived at age 23 I was the youngest by far of Microprose's programmers, artists, designers; most were in their late twenties or early thirties, which meant a mature and relaxed work environment. The reasons I left had nothing to do with the work environment at Microprose; at the time, the management regime was out in California, and didn't put a lot of confidence or priority in the Maryland operation, which is where most of the problems arose.

IGNPC: How many prototypes do you like to make before committing to development of a particular game? Is prototype code and art thrown away en-masse or replaced piecemeal, as necessary?

BR: My own style is usually to commit to a game topic & genre before rototyping, so I'm less likely to be throwing things away "en masse". It's more of a piecemeal process, though over time that can produce some fairly radical changes in direction.

IGNPC: Please describe your first playable prototype for Alpha Centauri.

BR: It was simply a map generator for the new planet, devoid of anything else. I was looking at ways to generate planets where the climate could change during the game in meaningful and somewhat predictable ways.

IGNPC: Game development is a very fun job, but there are times when pressures mount and hours skyrocket. Usually this happens later in the development cycle, after a release date has been announced, and the rush is on to get those last features in, hunt and kill bugs, and perfect balance. How have you weathered the high-pressure cycles of game development?

BR: Well fortunately I'm pretty comfortable with end-of-project pressure -- I actually enjoy it to a certain extent, the "buzz" of seeing it all come together and feeling like we might have a hit game on our hands. I'm also very conservative in my forecasts, and try to avoid biting off more than I can chew, so I've managed to avoid getting into too much trouble. One important talent for a game developer to have is the ability to "hold it all in your head", meaning the ability to balance all the different aspects of a huge game, not just the different gameplay elements but all the other aspects of the development as well. That way you can prioritize things properly and compartmentalize things when you need to.

IGNPC: How did you meet your wife?

BR: I met her at a "Live Action Roleplaying Game" down in Washington D.C.-a weekend event where you get about 80 people together at a hotel; you're each handed information on a "character" you will play, special abilities you have and special goals you should try to achieve; and then you're turned loose for the weekend to play out a story. The game in question was run by some of my Microprose colleagues (including Doug Kaufman, also Sandy Petersen now of Ensemble Studios), one of whom had also invited my future wife to the game. It was a "Three Musketeers" game, I was playing King Louis XIII of France (!!!) and she was playing the Duchesse de Chevreuse. When we met, she was teaching elementary school in Greenwich Connecticut; now she's chosen to stay home with our two boys.

IGNPC: When did you get married? Have your first kid? Where did these events fit in the chronology of your games?

BR: We got married at the end of August 1994, less than a month before Colonization was due to master, so our honeymoon was only a week long (some are still amazed we had even that much time). But Jill had to leave immediately after to start her fellowship abroad, so I was alone for the last month of Colonization (which, from Microprose's point of view, was a good thing!) We had our first son in October 1995, with about 6 months to go on Civilization II, which certainly added an interesting twist to the plot. Fortunately most of the key creative decisions had already happened, and sleepless stupor was par for the course anyway at that point in the project. Our younger son came along in October 1997, which was considerably better timing given that the company was in kind of a "rest period" following Gettysburg.

IGNPC: Are there collaborators other than Sid, recent or ancient, with whom you have particularly enjoyed working? Can you share any stories about working with them?

BR: Doug Kaufman and I have always had a magnificent collaboration. Doug lives, breathes and sleeps strategy games at least as much as I do, and we have similar ideas about what makes games work. I find it really helpful to have a feedback process going when designing a game, and over the years Doug and I have developed the familiarity and trust which makes this possible. He had a really key role in the success of Civilization 2, and I wish we'd had him throughout the Alpha Centauri design cycle (fortunately we managed to get him in at the end as a consultant, in which role he made great contributions). Doug and I are both fanatic poker players, so we're always sitting down to play head to head "pot limit" poker for whatever stakes we can afford at the time...we both think of the recent movie "Rounders" as a life-changing experience!

Jason Coleman came to have a huge role in my life almost without me noticing it. I first encountered him as a playtester on the Colonization team; nothing really out of the ordinary at first, but I'd start to notice that all of the really -hard- bugs were being isolated by him, notably the very last bug on the project which was totally intermittent and (we thought) impossible to reliably reproduce, but he managed to get it down to "look, I do these 12 things in this exact order and boom, it happens every time" which of course meant we were then able to fix the thing. I then went off to England for a year and completely forgot about Jason. When I returned I was re-introduced to Jason. I remember asking someone "Hey, isn't he that really smart playtester?" and the answer was "Yes, now he's a really smart multimedia programmer." In my absence, Mike Ely had "discovered" Jason's programming talent. Shortly afterwards, I was looking for someone to help me out with some end-of-the-project programming on Civ2, and Jason came to mind. Civ2 turned out to be kind of a dream assignment for him (wasn't it to us all?) and so we hooked up. Of course the more I worked with Jason the more impressed I was, so from there he came to Firaxis as our senior programmer where he built all the critical code libraries, then moved into making key parts of the game work better and look better. Now he's someone I can turn huge parts of a project over to and know that what he comes up with will be cool. I predict you'll be hearing a lot more about Jason in coming years.

I've also had notable collaborations with Bing Gordon, which I mentioned above, and with Tim Train, who not only spun off the Alien Crossfire expansion but also has been able to fill in the gaps in areas of a project that I wasn't able to concentrate on and who has the fortitude to keep reminding me of new ideas I've previously rejected.

IGNPC: Thanks for taking the time to share all of this I'll be eagerly watching for your next game!

-- Mark Harrison

[Editor's Note ¿ IGNPC would like to thank Mr. Harrison for all of his hard work on this piece. If you get a chance, you should definitely head over to his site at www.markongames.com. We suspect that you'll be hearing a lot more about him in the months to come...]