For a little over two years, from early 2000, until the company's takeover by THQ, I had the great pleasure of being part of the awesome creative team at Outrage Entertainment, well known as the creators of the Descent games, and a brilliant, friendly group.

Sadly, upon the completion of Alter Echo THQ closed the Outrage offices in Ann Arbor.

Game Designer

Scheduled for release by THQ, 18 August 2003

On-Line Previews & Reviews

Less than 10 minutes after playing this game I was convinced that this could be one of the best ___ of the year. "The best what?" The best ___. See, I'm still not quite sure which genre this game belongs in. It has tons of action; tons of slashing, Devil May Cry-style combos; a bit of shooting; and several other gameplay elements, making it difficult to pinpoint one particular genre. And let's not forget one of the game's coolest and most important features: character transformations...

Louis Bedigian, 06/09/2003, ps2.gamezone.com

The odd premise, solid gameplay, and trippy visuals make for a promising combination of style and substance...

Ricardo Torres, 06/16/2003, GameSpot

Single-handedly kick the ass of an entire planet...

John Houlihan, 06/13/2003, Gamer.TV

Time Dilation... a time-based Simon-says chain interface -- is addictive in the way an extreme game is. You know you can do better than the last time, and you feel compelled try just one more time.

Douglass C. Perry, 06/02/2003, ps2.ign.com

Some comments on Alter Echo and creativity in Game Design

Posted 14 July 03 on the IGDA Forums

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Originally posted by swatter555

...my question. If all our wishes come true and the people who run the gaming industry... (could) magically see creating original content can be the key to success, will they even be able to come up with original content on more than rare occasions?

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In other words, 'if game designers were free to create imaginative & creative content, would they rise to the challenge?'

Take a peek in another industry, that of paper role-playing games, where the products on the shelves are paperback or hardcover books; like Dungeons & Dragons, Vampire, Rifts, and my own game, Amber Diceless Role-Playing.

Within the pages of those games, and there are hundreds and hundreds, you'll find vast flights of fancy, untold new worlds, and marvels of interesting game design. Some are bad, most are at least interesting, and a few are magnificent. A great many are bursting with creative new ideas.

Certainly the designers of those games are capable of wild creativity... and, in many cases, they are exactly the same people who work in the electronic game biz.

There are two differences between the two industries. Between paper and electronic games.

The first difference is money. Creating a paper RPG involves spending the equivalent of what you'd buy for a new car. Building any kind of electronic game requires an investment of another two orders of magnitude (100 times as much).

The money translates into risk. If you had a rich aunt, who'd squirreled away a couple of million, she wouldn't be very bothered about investing in a paper RPG... but for the electronic game she'd be bringing out her team of lawyers, accountants, financial advisors, and none of them are keen on any kind of risk.

The second difference is the audience. In this case, I'll just compare paper RPGs with one slice of the market, just with Sony PlayStation2 games (the biggest, fattest, yummiest slice!).

In paper RPGs I'm selling to, possibly, hundreds of thousands of people. Make the hugest hit imaginable (such as Rifts from Palladium; soon to be a major motion picture) and you might sell 100,000 in a year, but your odds are dismal. The average new RPG sells around 600 copies in its first year of release. Six hundred bucks (hopefully they only invested the cost of a really cheap car).

In the shinning world of Sony PS2, the big winner is clearly ten million copies (if you don't know who I'm talking about, you need to do some serious research). A modest success will sell 500,000... enough so the development dollars invested might be recovered. Maybe.

Now, here's the big question. Is creativity rewarded in either of the markets? In either paper or electronic games?

The answer is... very rarely.

Most of the successful paper role-playing games follow well worn pathways. Clones of other games. Licenses. Follow-on systems. Sometimes there's a break-out, but the odds of any given revolutionary game becoming a huge hit are tiny.

And what are most of the successful Sony PS2 games? Again, copies of what people have seen before. Especially when it comes to things like controller button functionality (the vast majority of people hate to learn new layouts!), levels, etc.

Now, if you will indulge me, a very relevant, very personal story...

Alter Echo is a Sony PS2 game, coming up for release on August 18th, from THQ... and it is chock full of novel, original, quirky, cool and innovative new features.

When I started working on Alter Echo a couple of years ago, back at Outrage Entertainment in Ann Arbor (before Outrage was taken over by THQ), our small company was working on two games.

One of our games was Rubu Tribe, being developed for Interplay... and the small project that became Alter Echo was definitely the runt of the litter.

Those of us on the small project were ignored. Sure, we had to produce sketches, and code, and design documents, but all the 'senior' guys were focused on the big project.

While Rubu Tribe was in full production, requiring the majority of the designers, programmers and artists, Alter Echo was assigned to a tiny, tiny team: two artists, one programmer, one writer, and a couple of game designers (including myself)... and a funny thing happened.

We innovated! Every person on that tiny team came up with cool new ideas, with strange gameplay, and with completely gonzo story lines.

We didn't have forever until the focus shifted, until the powers-that-be started asking questions... but it was enough. Some of the bizarre stuff was just too cool, too obviously workable.

So, come August, I hope you'll check it out. Like it or hate it, you'll have to admit that our industry does have what it takes to be creative... as long as we have a chance...

Erick Wujcik
2002/2003 Lecturer in Game Design
Hong Kong Polytechnic University

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