The Corporation Accosts Ken Capelli
posted at 6:00 PM on Thursday, Febuary 1st, 2001
Introduction
Continuing Corp's fine tradition of kidnapping people with real jobs and subjecting them to stupid questions, we chloroformed Ken Capelli, lead artist of Planet Moon Studios' recent masterpiece Giants and forced him to talk to us. Little did we know that he's far, far scarier than we could ever hope to be.
Mr_Poppinfresh So, feel free to tell us about your $600 a day crack habit, Ken ;-)
PMS_Ken !
Rankinfile ok here it comes
PMS_Ken I thought that was a seekrit.
Rankinfile Ken Capelli, lead artist and $600/day crack-addict from California-based Planetmoon Studios.
Rankinfile Take 1
PMS_Ken I’m one of four artists - the other three are Shawn nelson, our Lead Animator, and Nick Bruty/ Bob Stevenson, the owners/ co-art directors. Really, I just work in games to support my craque habit.
Rankinfile Oh my god, are you from Canada?
PMS_Ken Hell, no. you trying to insult me?
Mr_Poppinfresh ahem
Subversive Yeah, what do you guys make again?
PMS_Ken We make Giants.
Rankinfile Good answer. Do ya ever get paid? And are you hiring idiots?
Mr_Poppinfresh Rank is going to need a new job very, very soon
Rankinfile Preferably a paying one
PMS_Ken Um, we do get paid... just enough to cover the craque habit and buy some threadbare t-shirts.
Tweety Ken, what would you say were your main influences? Science fiction wise
PMS_Ken Whoo. Big question. Overall, my influences come from early modernism, expressionism and surrealism. As far as fantasy stuff, I'm a big comic book fan.
Subversive Comic Books? *perks up* Which ones?
PMS_Ken Matt Wagner, John Romita Jr, Steve Ditko, Bernie Krigstein, Mike Kaluta.
PMS_Ken Movies and stuff: I grew up on 70's kung fu flicks and giant robot anime, and I'm a big fan of (Hong Kong) movies. I appreciate the low-budget aspect of them... the fact that they can go so far with so little… Most of it is good lighting and pacing, keeping it simple.
Rankinfile Does Giants have a parallel there?
PMS_Ken Yeah, I'd say there is a parallel there: the entire Giants team is all of 9 people, so we run kind of lean and try to make the most of our resources. The original team was 6 people (who did mdk at shiny) By the time I came on most of the game was designed and the art style was set... my role on Giants 1 was Professional Killer (i.e. help them get the game polished and out)
Mr_Poppinfresh Are the Shiny and Giants teams going to fight it out at E3?
PMS_Ken Nah, Shiny and Planet Moon are chums.
Mr_Poppinfresh You don't say!
PMS_Ken No really, we are!
Mr_Poppinfresh So the similarities are because of common tastes and not dirty poaching? ;-)
PMS_Ken hmmm :)
Rankinfile nice dodge, kenny boy
PMS_Ken Let's just say that we took long enough to get out that it wasn't surprising to see another game arrive with a similar look by the time we shipped.
Mr_Poppinfresh Yeah, I bet you went to a party at Shiny and woke up with no pants and the briefcase with the design docs missing!
PMS_Ken I can't speak for the Sacrifice team's influences, but their game looks damn nice. Really polished, I think.
Mr_Poppinfresh I enjoyed both. Different, but both good.
Rankinfile What does an artist do when on the team from scratch, then?
PMS_Ken Okay, so what I do as an artist at pms: just about a little bit of everything!
Rankinfile That clears that up
PMS_Ken Models, textures, buildings, weapons, some effects and animation, etc. Shawn does 99% of the animating, Nick and Bob had laid out/ built the worlds.
Mr_Poppinfresh Who was responsible for that monstrously ugly female smartie?
PMS_Ken Oof. I lay that crime on Shawn's feet. I think he's the one.
Rankinfile And the call to depict Kabuto as androgynous?
PMS_Ken C'mon. Would you really want a 20' dong waggling around on your screen?
Rankinfile Ya might've upped sales to women with a nice big weenie (“Hi, I'm Billy Williams”)
Mr_Poppinfresh Rank, are you getting into the Special Pellets again?
Subversive Hey, you almost showed nipples!
Rankinfile It's all I can afford on your payroll, Pops
Mr_Poppinfresh If you promise to never ask Ken for a "big weenie" again, I'll pay you.
Subversive I think you should be sticking to the equal opportunity exploitation.
PMS_Ken But like I said, by the time I came onto the game (on April 1, ha) most of the game was on the way to being locked down and it was just a question of finishing it all up.
Rankinfile So, are engine limitations presented early on, or do you enhance/adjust as the engine progresses? How can you conceptualize artwork w/o technology in hand?
PMS_Ken Well, as it's an art/design-led company the engine limitations are spec'd by the needs of design/ art.
Mr_Poppinfresh Must be nice for you, to have the bosses being artists as well.
PMS_Ken The artists and programmers each sort of work with each other to improve and enhance the engine as development glides along. Like, there might be some cool effect that a card can do or there's something cool that one of the engineers came up with and they'll pass it to us and say "Hey, check this out. Can we use this?" Or we'll think of some effect or whatnot that we'd like to see and work with the engineers to find some way of doing it. It's back and forth.
Mr_Poppinfresh The advantage of a small dev team.
Rankinfile Interesting...so the art guys are the ones with the big offices? As an artist, do you need to know the code to work on the engine itself?
PMS_Ken We're all crammed in here pretty tight, the lot of us. We don't have big offices, but we have Style, yo.
Rankinfile Word. Big gold chains, dawg.
Mr_Poppinfresh lol - the Cliffy B school of computer game design
PMS_Ken And no, we don't need to know the code, but we have a scripting language we use and have to have a good knowledge of how the art works, technically, to be able to pull it all off.
Subversive It must be frustrating to try and take advantage of and adapt to the problems of so many systems...I mean, do you think that consoles are taking predominance in the market, as they have a static platform?
PMS_Ken It's not really that frustrating, now that the hardware cards are getting better and better. We tend to aim for the high spec, the cool features, and then work down from there. I think we all develop on geforce or geforce 2 cards... the programmers have 3dfx cards on secondary systems to check things out on.
Mr_Poppinfresh 3Dfx being relegated to "secondary systems"...not sure whether I should laugh or cry
PMS_Ken But I'd really prefer to have one solid spec to develop to... which segues nicely into the console question... As far as console vs pc goes, I think it's cyclical.
Rankinfile Cyclical? How so?
PMS_Ken Like, when the Genesis and SNES started to wane and pc's became more powerful/ cheaper, pc games became more viable. It shifted back when the PSX came out... whenever there is a new generation of systems coming out you'll see a shift toward consoles.
Mr_Poppinfresh I wonder if the X-Box is powerful and modular enough to break the cycle by being the best of both worlds. I mean, a company like Bungie doesn't jump ship and abandon their (mac) fanbase for nothing
Rankinfile LucasArts/Obi-Wan fans feel like it (abandonment) happened to them... (very debatable of course)
Rankinfile Is PMS going to focus that direction or dev for the console and PC world?
PMS_Ken Planet Moon is looking at the console market. I can't say whether we'll abandon pc wholesale, but the pc market is really hard to make games for and is really hard to sell into. The pc game market is very extreme... either you're #1 selling 1,000,000 units or you're off the chart selling 5000 units. And a lot of the top sellers are either mainsteam licensed products (who wants to be a millionaire, Barbie, Deer Hunter, etc) or sequels off of previous hits (Mechwarrior, Quake, etc.) The attractiveness of the console market is the single, static hardware spec and the larger audience of game buyers.
Rankinfile I imagine the profit margin on PC games is really low.
Mr_Poppinfresh Unless you're Blizzard, in which case you paper your bathroom in money. I fear for the future of the computer game
Rankinfile How many units has Giants pushed?
PMS_Ken We don't have numbers back from all retailers or from interplay yet, so we can't really say. Let's just hope that the reviews we've gotten (all great) influence the numbers.
Mr_Poppinfresh Way to push your own game
Rankinfile heheh. Ken Capelli, Lead Artist and Marketing Guru for PMS
PMS_Ken Heh.
Mr_Poppinfresh If he doesn't throw that into every conversation they take his water bowl away ;-)
PMS_Ken Well, it's part of the business. You can't do this for too long without learning something about how it all works.
Rankinfile Ken, how long have you been in the gaming art business? What kind of background, professionally and academic, do you have?
PMS_Ken I've been working in games for about 7 years, 6 as a lead/ art director. I have a BFA in Illustration and I've been fiddling with computers since I was 13. Writing my own dorky little BASIC games, etc.
Mr_Poppinfresh Dorky? Last I checked, Diablo II was considered dorky by the majority of the population, let alone Revenge of the Pocket Protector in BASIC =D
PMS_Ken Dorky. Like, D&D character generators, dungeon games, a couple little shooter thingies.
Rankinfile Dork!
PMS_Ken Text entry games, that kind of thing. Mostly just stuff I did fiddling around with my commodore 64.
Rankinfile now we know how old you are =)
Mr_Poppinfresh the C64 was a rite of passage for the truly hard-core gamer. Playing Dig-Dug on that thing ruined me
Rankinfile Something ruined you
PMS_Ken I still have my c64... and my c128, and the portable "executive" c64, and my Amiga 500.
Mr_Poppinfresh hahaha
PMS_Ken Every now and then I just feel the need to play Lord of Conquest or Mule or Wizard's Crown or something.
Subversive I still have my old Texas Instruments in the attic somewhere.
Mr_Poppinfresh You win, you win
Rankinfile You oughta port giants to the c64
Mako I bought a TI-99/4a at a flea market.
Mako The fifty-dollar rebate expired before I was born. >_<
(Editor’s note - this would be where everyone but the relatively aged and now depressed Tweety busted laughing.)
PMS_Ken Before Planet Moon, I worked at Accolade, which became Infogames North America.
Rankinfile Speaking of, what past projects have ya been on?
PMS_Ken I started out there as a junior artist straight out of art school, mostly working on sport games (a few revs of baseball, football, golf games) before landing myself on an original project.
Mr_Poppinfresh When was this?
PMS_Ken 1994. "Deadlock" and "Slave Zero" are the two games I shipped there as lead artist/ art director.
Mr_Poppinfresh Hmm, that's almost old enough to be the start of Daikatana
PMS_Ken That's about right.
Mr_Poppinfresh You worked on Deadlock?!? Oh my god!
PMS_Ken I was the lead artist, yep.
Mr_Poppinfresh I loved that game! I *sucked* at it, but that didn't stop me!
PMS_Ken The cyth... those were my babies.
* Mr_Poppinfresh swoons
PMS_Ken My wife, Heather, worked on Deadlock as well.
Mr_Poppinfresh Send her my drooly adoration
PMS_Ken Will do!
Rankinfile So what are you doing right now? Besides the Giants patches and whatnot, has PMS started work on a new project?
PMS_Ken We're working on a releasing a Giants demo right now, and then we'll be doing some stuff with the nv20.
Rankinfile As in tech demos?
PMS_Ken Hard to say exactly how involved it'll be. But the card does some really amazing stuff and we'd love to take advantage of its capabilities.
Mr_Poppinfresh I bet you sleep with one under your pillow.
PMS_Ken i carry it around with me. it's my new best friend.* pms_ken dangles keychain
Mr_Poppinfresh hehehe
Rankinfile What about a game...anything you can shed on future PMS projects?
PMS_Ken Giants 2 is on the horizon, but we're still figuring things out. Platform, schedule, etc. We're still reeling from releasing Giants 1. PLUS, we're looking to move to a new office sometime in the next 6 months, so that's provide an interruption.
Mr_Poppinfresh Giants 2, eh? Has that been announced, or is this actually an exclusive?
PMS_Ken I don't think it's a big secret that if Giants 1 does well enough that we'd follow up on it.
Rankinfile You're not tired of that world?
PMS_Ken God no. It's so lush!
Mr_Poppinfresh I don't think I've ever heard the line "...and me balls are saggy!" in another game. Can you EVER get tired of that?
Rankinfile Good point
PMS_Ken Personally, I'm really looking forward to getting on on the ground floor with the next project.
Part Two can now be found here.
Discuss your $600 a day crack habit here.
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