Dear Reader:
GDC: Mark Cerny Discusses Marble Madness, Pixel Talks Cave Story, Ron Gilbert on Maniac Mansion
Mark Cerny on Marble Madness…
- “If I could just get one penny out of that quarter (from arcade plays), that’s be, like, millions of dollars. We made the game, but we wouldn’t get those quarters.”
- “We were forbidden (by Atari) from telling people we were making these games.”
- Cerny set out to make the first arcade game with “solid and clean” 3D graphics
- Marble Madness was partly inspired by mini-golf
- the first idea involved a touch-screen to place bumpers and guide a ball around the course
- the second idea involved a two-player marble racing game with motorized trackballs that would actually spin in conjunction with the ball on screen
- plans for dynamic playfields, with bumps and obstacles that chased the player, were also canned
- breakable glass supports, black hole traps and teeter-totters were done away with as well
- “I wanted to do this abstract Escher-esque game where nothing had eyes, and here they were saying ‘That’s not a marble, that’s a happy face!”
- the arcade version was the number one-earner for six weeks straight in 18 arcades Atari tracked
- “You got one concept – asteroids and a spaceship, go! – and we were in an environment that required that commitment to that idea.”
Pixel on Cave Story
- “Maybe it made a mistake in coming to the world too lat. When the game was completed, and I thought only older gamers could enjoy this, but after this was released I realized many young ones seemed to enjoy it. Cave Story is perfectly capable of being enjoyed in the current market.”
- “It’s easy to start a game, but to complete a game is difficult. I decided to adopt the retro style to complete it more easily.”
- the main character’s clothing and features were designed the way they were in order to make the character stand out from the background
- small changes in level visuals can help define different areas
- “It doesn’t have to be extreme. You don’t have to give up just because resources are limited.”
- small touches can also increase the interactivity and liveliness of the enemies
- sound effects are just as important as well
- “the ears want just as much information as the eyes.”
- “When a player starts playing, he wants to play the game. It can be an epic story, but don’t have it all at the beginning. Let the player enjoy the game — if he enjoys the game he will be playing the game, and that’s the time he wants to know the story. Start with the game, not with the story.”
- item drops, weapon upgrades and puzzles the player can solve are all important in gaining the attention of the player
- the beta for Cave Store features an increased role for the Balrog boss, centralized story around the character of Sue, and let the player control a frog prince for an extended period
- you originally had to collect coins to buy weapons upgrades
- the true ending of the game was made when testers wanted something more difficult to wrap up the game with
- “I had the urge to create a more difficult [level during development], but up to this point I tried to suppress this feeling — I thought it would be too difficult.”
Ron Gilbert on Maniac Mansion
- the game “Popularized the point and click interface.”
- Ron believes he “coined the word ‘cutscene’”
- “(Maniac Mansion is) My favorite game, and it’s very personal to me — not because it’s a great game, but because it’s a very flawed game, and those flaws make it special to me.”
- inspired by George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch
- the external house and internal details, such as the spiral staircase in the library, are taken from the ranch
- “We kinda figured the game would just kind of write itself after this. We didn’t even know the genre — it wasn’t an adventure game at this point. It was an amorphous game where you just went around and did stuff… I tried to imagine the gameplay and it didn’t make a lot of sense to me. Watching my eight-year-old cousin playing King’s Quest made Maniac Mansion fall into place.”
- “Dave was loosely modeled after me. Wendy was modeled after a real person, and she worked in LucasFilm and did the accounting. Razor was named after [artist] Gary [Winnick]’s girlfriend Ray. This was a genius idea we would come to completely regret later on in the game.”
- there was no design document, just a paper map of the mansion with an acetate overlay to show items, and a list of the characters and their abilities
- “It was complicated, and it was an unintelligible mess. As the game was coming together, we realized we’d made a huge mistake.”
- “There’s this point where you’re in so deep you just want to scream and there seems to be no way out. In retrospect I think it really was the right solution.”
- “One of the innovation that Maniac Mansion had over the Sierra games were scrolling screens. This presented a big technical challenge for me. I spent months — months! — hand-tuning 6502 assembly to get that screen to scroll and now I could just do it in PowerPoint.”
- the line “Bernard! Don’t be a tuna head!” was supposed to be “don’t be a shit head!”
- on instances where the player can lose items before they’re supposed to use them: “It’s not that we were trying to be cruel or vindictive, it’s just that we were being naive. It was so easy to wire this stuff up we didn’t think through the implications.”
- the NES version credits included a line for the designers of the “NES SCUMM system.”, which Nintendo misunderstood and objected to
- “Why would we insult their console machine like that? …in the end we just shook our heads and removed it”
- “It’s really easy to look back at games like Maniac Mansion through this lens of nostalgia, and look at what they came and make assumptions about what they were before they became anything, but for us, Maniac Mansion was just a game. We loved it, and we hated it, and our only dream for it was that it wouldn’t run the company out of business. We had a bunch of fun ideas but we didn’t have a vision for the future. We just wanted to make a game and not get fired. We had no idea what we were doing, none whatsoever, and I think that’s an important lesson, because sometimes you just need to do things, and sometimes thinking too much and knowing too much can hurt more than it can help.”