Mr. Kassis Interviews Ron Dimant
By Mr. Kassis - 4:16 PM on Tuesday, August 08, 2000
The Corporation talked with Rob Dimant, CEO of Ritual Entertainment, developer of Heavy Metal FAKK2. Dimant comments about FAKK 2, Bungie, Microsoft, RTS's, and more.
To start off, tell the fans a little bit about yourself and your role in the Heavy Metal FAKK 2’s development.
I’m the CEO of Ritual Entertainment, and I’ve been with the Heavy Metal project since its beginning.
Great. We’re very excited about that one; the screenshots look great.
It’s a very, very cool game.
How close is the final product to the original design documents?
What original design documents? (laughs) Developer joke….
So it’s pretty close…pretty far?
We actually had a lot of material to begin with. I’d say we had a pretty big effort initially on a lot of the character design. There are a lot of great characters and monsters in the game, and we’ve got a storyline that we’ve stuck to since the beginning of the game. Obviously a lot of aspects have changed since people playtested the game. You know, "This would work better in this level" and "Maybe we should move that…", but in general, from the time we actually completed the design doc ‘til the day which we finished the game, we have stuck very closely to what we were trying to achieve.
How on schedule were you during development all the way through? Any major hitches?
I don’t think we really had any major hitches. We had the advantage of starting this game after we finished Sin, and Sin was really our first tech game. In this game we really focused on content rather than technology - we have some great technology. We started with the Quake 3 engine, of course, and that was a great start, but we also had about two years worth of our own technology which we developed with Sin. So what we have in FAKK 2 is about three and a half years of collective development on our end on top of the Quake 3 engine, and a lot of very strong content.
What was the transition to using the Quake 3 engine like?
It was pretty smooth. During Sin we actually transitioned from Quake 1 to Quake 2, which wasn’t fun. So we knew when we started with Quake 3 that we were starting with an engine and we were stuck with that engine all the way through. Id, of course, never released Quake 4 in the meantime, which is a good thing.
Do you think you would have transitioned had they released a Quake 4?
I think there would have been the temptation, but from our experiences from before, we never would have done it.
So that was a major development hiccup you avoided this time around?
Yeah, the development has actually gone very smoothly. From the start of FAKK 2, the day we started production, ‘til the day we released it, is pretty close to 18 months of steady work.
How far behind is the Mac version?
Two days behind the PC version.
That’s quite close.
Yeah. Apart from testing, which we haven’t started yet, the Mac version is literally a day or two behind the PC version.
So has Apple been enthusiastic about you developing games for their platform?
Very supportive. Apple has been very good to work with.
Steve Jobs has been enthusiastic about getting good games to the Mac.
Yeah, they definitely seem to have a very consistent theme at all of their expos now--showing games. They showed Quake 3 Arena at MWSF, and at Macworld New York’s keynote last year they had Halo. At this summer’s Macworld keynote, they brought Alex Seropian on stage and made a commitment.
Speaking of Alex and the Bungie buyout/sellout, do you have any reactions to that?
I have nothing but the best things to say about Bungie. They are a model of a successful developer to me.
I’ve been a Bungie fan since Pathways… I know what you mean.
From the first trade shows, where I used to wonder, "Who the hell are those punks?" to being bought by Microsoft, they’ve done nothing but excel. I think that the acquisition of Bungie by Microsoft is-maybe some developers are jealous, I don’t know- but, to me, it just goes to show that they were a jewel.
Is there any kind of big/major buy out in Ritual’s future?
Uh…Anyone listening? (looks around-laughs) We love making games, and they’ve been given the opportunity to continue doing that with one of the most powerful companies in the world funding their development.
Those games now…I mean, you’re not going to be able to get those games everywhere. Any game that is published by Microsoft, of course it could be a dog and not sell at all, but we’ve got other companies in Dallas like Ensemble, they wrote Age of Empires, we’ve got Id, but we’ve definitely seen what Microsoft can do for a company. And Ensemble, their first game was Age of Empires, and they did very well. We love them in Dallas. They came from nowhere. We were all thinking, "Who the hell was Ensemble?" and then they come out with this kick-ass game and it did very well, deservedly so, and Microsoft was the powerhouse publisher behind that. And Bungie- great games. I’m sure that Alex, with his commitment to quality that he has shown for the past 7, 8 years, there’ll be more of the same great stuff.
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