Kotaku
OK, Rod. Cliffy B. I have to ask...
"No, he's not gay!"
...what kind of shampoo does he use? His hair is always looking lovely.
"Oh. I don't know the brand. Or where he gets his highlights done. I'm American Crew, by the way, if you need to know."
Noted.
I'm chatting with Rod Fergusson, producer on Gears of War. We're sitting in the VIP room of the Perth Convention Centre (well...the Convention Centre cloak room...Kojima and his posse were hogging the VIP room), and I'm taking the chance to ask as many questions about Gears as I can cram into twenty minutes.
I start with his background. Rod is still one of the new boys at Epic, having come across from Microsoft Game Studios only after work on Gears had begun: "I'd been with Microsoft for 10 years at that point, and I was the Microsoft producer for Gears of War", he says. "Six months in, Epic was looking for a producer on their side and they were having problems filling the role".
In steps Rod. "I just kind of fit the bill", he continues, and the move had its advantages. "When Microsoft asked for things, I knew why they were asking. I was able to bring processes over that Epic didn't necessarily have in the games development environment; having more of a focus on milestones was really useful I think".
I ask if the success of Gears surprised him. Not that success was ever in doubt, but, you know. I ask anyway. "It surprised us all, it exceeded all of our expectations", he beams. "There was a significant amount of muscle behind it in terms of trying to market it, so we were hoping it was going to be a strong title".
"But we just got plaques from Microsoft, saying 'Thank you for your contribution on the fastest and biggest selling original title ever', and my wife says 'there you go, there's your resume on a plaque right there!'". Wish my resume was on a plaque. It'd look awfully proper.
Surely being responsible for such a high profile game was a little stressful, though. "Yeah, even before we got near the end there was a lot of pressure" he says. "There was a decision taken to reveal our ship date and make it public and that sort of ratcheted everything up". You don't say. A great showing at last year's E3 calmed the team's nerves, but Rod's making it sound like having a publicly-known shipping date isn't exactly a pleasurable experience.
It's coming up on 3pm, and having forgotten to eat lunch, my tummy rumbles. Wishing I'd eaten earlier, I focus my sense of longing on Rod and ask if there was anything left on the cutting-room floor he wishes had made the final game. "I think probably the biggest is the Brumak", he mourns, "it became one of our marketing pieces and really represented the game, but then the part of the game we were going to use it in got cut. We feel bad we weren't able to deliver on that".
To get back on the happy-brick road, I ask him what it is about Gears that he's most proud of. "For me, because it's a personal pet feature, its co-op. I just finished Rainbow Six co-op, but they've turned off all the briefings and they've turned off all the story. Or look at the Halo experience: 'oh, I've got two cloned Master Chiefs running around'. So for me being able to deliver co-op in a way that's relevant to the story, that's what I'm most proud of because that's the way I game".
Moving onto downloadable content (as in when is more coming and what will it be), Fergusson is a little more coy. "I'm not commenting, but we're Epic, we've done that in the past and if you're a betting man it'd be a reasonably safe bet that well be doing it in the future". But you did comment! And you're about to comment some more! "But we do have a title update coming very soon, that'll probably be announced in the next few weeks or so". Or sooner.
Something that really bugged me about Gears on my first playthrough was the story. Not its quality, necessarily, but the way it seemed to have been cut to pieces, as though we were only seeing acts 1, 2, 4, 7 & 9 of a 10-act play. "It was about getting the right game, polished and out, at the right time", he says.
"Yes, [the story is] not clear at times, and yes, there are story elements that could have been expanded on, but part of it is that Epic is traditionally a multiplayer kind of shop, so we were trying things with the storytelling that were experiments, and we weren't sure if they were going to work". Example: they didn't want "talking-heads" custscenes or moments of plot exposition.
"Jerry O'Flaherty, our art director, HATES talking head cinematics, so he wanted everything to have action and everything to have motion. Which was great from a cinematic perspective, but it wasn't great for retention. People were saying "what's the light mass bomb? Why am I doing this?".
Fergusson says that while the experiment had its merits, they've learned some lessons from it for "anything we decide to do in the future". "We still value that we didn't want to do talking back and forth", he says, "but we've learned that if you're going to do story elements with lots of action you need to repeat it more. We could have said what the light mass bomb was a few more times".
"Anything we decide to do in the future"? Please, elaborate. "We designed Gears to be a transmedia product" he gushes (this is the topic of his conference address). "The game is one element of a franchise, it's not meant to be the franchise. The movie is just one thing, there'll be more to come. Geographically the world has been unexplored, we've only dealt with a 36-hour time period in what could be generations of time".
I point out then that while Gears has focused on the story of Marcus Fenix, he doesn't seem to be as memorable or pivotal a character as those other gaming franchises are built upon. Could future Gears titles forgo Marcus and focus on another aspect of the war entirely? Like he says, it's a big world. "That depends on the medium", he says.
"There's a lot of his story to tell, he's our hero", Fergusson continues. "We see Marcus as our core, central hero, and by the same token we see Dom as a key part of that as well. But sure, that doesn't mean we won't see books or something about Cole or some character we haven't encountered yet".
Which leads us to the Gears movie. I ask if he's involved at all. "I don't know. I don't have title or credit like Cliff does!". Does Cliff already have a cushy "Executive Producer" chair picked out? "I don't know, probably! I was involved, along with Cliffy, Jerry and a few other guys, in putting together the creative guidelines for the film team".
These "creative guidelines" stipulate what can and can't be changed to the story and characters by the film's producers. I ask how tight a leash they're going to keep on the IP, and just how many of these "rules" they're passing on. "We had some, but we looked at Halo knowing they had a tome. That seems like a great way to not get a movie made".
"We asked ourselves what's really important, what are the core relationships and what's meaningful: stuff like Marcus and Dom's relationship, how the Locust are portrayed", he says, and this is the stuff the film must focus on. They're not so particular that Marcus needs to have black hair, but he does need a friend called Dom and they need to be fighting big, ugly monsters that come out of the ground and are shooting at you.
Does this worry you, though? Adaptations of games aren't exactly known for their faithfulness to the original story/universe. "That's the great thing about Stuart (Beattie, the film's writer), he's already played the game loads of times. In fact, he's already written a treatment, Cliffy's really excited about it and Stuart really gets the game, gets the universe".
Oh good then. Since we're talking about co-workers, I ask what it's like working with Mark Rein. "He's great", he says. "It's funny, to me I find Mark Rein to be a little like Simon Cowell, in the sense that he may not say whatever he wants to say in the best way he could say it, but usually what he's telling you is honest, and it's right".
With Rod due on stage any second now for his talk, I throw in one more question. The Elite 360. How big a secret was it? Did you guys know about it? "Yeah, we had no knowledge" he says, chuckling. "Its funny, my wife said we needed another console so my son can game in his room, and I said 'wait, I need to find out if there's another console coming! We were looking at all the web pictures, same as you".
