Mike Schramm

In a West Loop loft, Wideload Games' lead designer Patrick Curry is showing off the company's new game, Stubbs the Zombie: Rebel Without a Pulse. "Eating brains is important to Stubbs," Curry says, as the 3D-rendered titular corpse attacks and devours the craniums of his enemies on a big-screen TV. Eating brains lets you do things like reach inside your torso and pull out "gut grenades" that turn your enemies into undead allies. At one point, Stubbs even pulls off his own hand, throws it at an enemy and mind controls the poor guy into a suicide mission. "It's totally different from any other game out there," says Curry. "There's nothing like Stubbs at all."

And the same could be said about the studio he works for. Chicago-based Wideload Games and its founder, Alex Seropian, have gotten very good at doing things differently.

Before the demo, Seropian talks about the first videogame company he founded, Bungie Studios. They're well known for making a little game (you may have heard of) called Halo. Videogames are big business lately, and Halo is one of the biggest. It stayed in the top ten of the eleven-billion-dollar industry for three years, and its sequel, Halo 2, beat movie-box-office sales--a first for a video game. Both Halos were critically acclaimed, sold millions of Microsoft Xboxes, and consumed millions of hours of gamers' free time. But for a man who had both hands in two of the biggest videogames ever, Seropian started small.

"I had an Atari 2600," he says about his first encounter with the medium. "Actually I didn't have an Atari, I had the Sears knockoff version, the Sears Telegames." After hours of playing Atari, he dived into programming at school. "They must have had like eight computers," he remembers, "and the amount of RAM each of them had was taped on the side. So we'd all run in there and try to get the ones with the 16k of RAM"--high-powered back then; today, about enough to hold ten seconds of a song on iTunes.

At the University of Chicago, Seropian majored in math, but wasn't sure what to do after graduation. "I had started little, I guess you could call them businesses. I was selling chemistry notes, doing stuff like that. But I kind of wanted to start my own company." He sought advice from his father, who "suggested I get a job so I could get some experience, and once I had some experience, maybe go start a company, which I guess kind of solidified it for me. `You want me to do this? I'll go do that!' So I started the company my senior year in college."

His first released game was based on (and named after) Operation: Desert Storm and, like all of Bungie's other releases, Seropian sought a level of depth that wasn't common to videogames. "When the war broke out, I kind of started trying to learn about the Middle East and the area, trying to put all that kind of information in the game. It cost about $2000 to do, and I published it myself." Though it wasn't close to the successes he'd have later, it did just fine. "I made enough money to try it again. And that's when I met Jason."

Fellow programmer Jason Jones that is, who Seropian met at the University, and co-founded Bungie with him in 1991. "He was basically doing the same type of thing, where he was just writing a game on his own," says Seropian. "It was pretty cool, and he thought what I was doing was cool, so we decided to go into it together." Their first release was a multiplayer-only action game called Minotaur. "Minotaur is my favorite game that we did at Bungie," Seropian says immediately. It was an intensely complicated action fantasy game that combined a broad range of inventory items with a control scheme that took up twenty keys on the keyboard. "When you first played the game, you were just completely lost, had no idea what to do. It was the opposite of being accessible," Seropian says proudly. "But there was so much depth to it."

It's also notable that Minotaur was the first game of its kind for the Macintosh computer. Macs are notoriously unfriendly to gamers--even today, most developers don't release their games in a Mac format. But Bungie started by releasing only for the Mac, and they're still recognized among the "Cult of Mac" as the premier Mac game developer. "I think one of the reasons people liked Bungie so much," says Seropian, "was that we were a Mac company, and there weren't really that many people that were just making games for the Mac." But he swears it wasn't a genius business plan to target an under-appreciated niche. "I could probably tell you all sorts of stuff that would make me look real smart. But it was that I had a Mac, Jason had a Mac, we were into the Mac."

Their second game was a spin-off of Minotaur called Pathways to Darkness. Again, it did well enough to keep them in business, but better things were just around the corner. "Pathways did well enough for us to actually hire people, get an office," says Seropian. "But Marathon was really kind of a breakout."

If Xbox fans claim "Halo is God" (and they do), then Marathon fans know Marathon is whatever created God. It was a first-person-shooter unlike any shooters before it. Features that Bungie has made common in games like Halo (secondary weapons, back story, strong network play and a modification community) first showed up in Marathon. Even years later, the game still has a rabid following--players set record times running through levels, and post movies of themselves beating the game at lightning-fast speeds. Message boards everywhere rang out with "Frog blast the vent core!" (a phrase yelled by one of the game's characters). Bungie itself even placed a "Vidmaster Challenge" to fans, taunting them to make it through the game without firing a single shot, punching switches and using grenades instead of regular guns. When it was discovered this wasn't possible in some levels, the game was changed to comply with the rules of the challenge.

Combined with Bungie's Mac cred, the company forged a strong bond with customers early on. "We didn't really think of them as customers, I guess. We were thinking of them as `hey, you're into this game, we're into this game,'" Seropian says, remembering the long hours Bungie's staff spent playing Marathon while they were trying to make it. "A real big part of the culture at Bungie," he says, was that "the people who called us up weren't just people who had sent us $40 at some point. They were people that we had something in common with."

That's something that's not always common anymore, especially in an industry that has grown as big as videogaming. "The game industry really has matured," says Seropian. "It really grew out of a hobby. And as games have become more mainstream, you get people that are playing games that are sort of outside that core group, but back when we were doing Marathon, the people that were playing it were very much like us."

After Marathon (and two sequels, Marathon 2 and Marathon: Infinity, both now available as source code online), Bungie made Myth, a gore-filled fantasy-based strategy game, and Oni, a third-person action game featuring a futuristic fighting female. Both were well received, but didn't make big splashes like Marathon had. Myth was a great strategy game, but its depth kept it from reaching a bigger audience. And while Oni implemented some good ideas, including a smooth and innovative combat system, it ended up shipping a little unfinished. "I loved Oni," nods Seropian, "and I think it was the first game that my wife every played, beginning to end. Twice." But, he says, Bungie didn't get to complete it to their satisfaction, "because in the middle of that project, that's when we got acquired by Microsoft."

Because, by then, Microsoft had heard of another of Bungie's projects, named after the ringed, halo-like planet the serves as the game's setting. What became one of gaming's biggest console shooter franchises started out as a top-down view, real-time-strategy PC game. "Basically a science fiction RTS game," remembers Seropian. Early on they decided to create a vehicle system, where individual characters could drive around. "We got the jeep--the `Warthog'--working, and you could get in it and drive it around. And we were playing around with perspective." Seropian and his team found the game had a vibe of its own. "When you got into a vehicle, we put the camera closer, and we started putting it closer, and said, `Wow, this is really cool.'" The game "started having the feel of a shooter that could be really different. So we pushed the camera all the way in. And that was right around when we first showed the game off at Macworld." Even during development the game picked up attention from everywhere, including a back room at Microsoft, where Bill Gates' company was working on their very own videogame console. It was Bungie, however, that made the first move. At a Microsoft tech demo, says Seropian, "we went and saw what they were doing, and realized that to go from PC to Xbox, based on the hardware that was in the machine, might be something that we could do, based on the opportunity. And so we actually called up Ed Fries [then vice president of game publishing at Microsoft], and said `Hey, went and saw your Xbox thing. We don't know if you know what we're doing here, but maybe we should talk.' Those guys all got in an airplane, came on out, and said `Yes, let's talk,' and the rest is, as they say, history."

Microsoft acquired Bungie in 2001, and Halo became a household name (as did Xbox, though some say that's because of Halo). A year later, Seropian left both the company he'd founded and his partner Jones, to return to Chicago and start a family. After considering an exit from the competitive industry ("Being an independent game developer is hard!"), he decided that if he was getting back into videogames, it would have to be in a different way.

"To make a game these days, if you want to do a console game with some story and depth to it, it takes a lot of people. And that's really where all the expense is." Most of the idea work (as opposed to the production) is done by "above-the-line" talent. "The big idea with Wideload is that that's who we are," says Seropian. "We're the above-the-line talent. We're the guys who are coming up with the idea, fleshing it out, getting the technology that's going to drive it, designing, prototyping, getting the project into production." And everyone else necessary to make the game is hired contractually. It helps that in a place like Chicago, not a traditional media production community, Seropian can use talent wherever he finds it--Los Angeles, Austin or even India. "And that's a very very different way of doing a game than has ever really been done before."

And it has its advantages. "We estimated we saved about thirty-five percent of the budget by doing it this way," the math major calculates, "because the guys that we needed for four months for the project, they were only on for four months. They weren't on for fourteen." And the structure of Wideload helps them make better games as well. "On Stubbs we had a shortfall in schedule; we needed to add a bunch of people to do all our scenery objects. We were able to make a few phone calls and find a few guys to do scenery objects, whereas if we were trying to juggle internal resources it would have had ramifications somewhere else." There are drawbacks, also, to having employees spread around the world. "Our media is very visual. So we've done a lot of work setting up tools so that if somebody draws something, everybody can see it right away. And every creative endeavor involves a lot of iteration. You do something, you look at it and go `crap,' you redo it, and you go `less crappy,' redo it, `almost good,' redo it--`uh, interesting,' and you keep redoing it. And so the quicker you can do that, the faster you get to `awesome,' and time is money, so that if you don't have enough time, you can't do it fast enough, and sometimes you don't get to awesome. The quicker you can iterate on something, the better."

Stubbs the Zombie showed up in stores the last week of October to rave reviews. "You get to play the zombie," Seropian says, savoring the reaction. The game takes place in a 1950s futuristic theme park (think postwar Americana with flying cars), and Stubbs is actually Edward Stubblefield, a traveling salesman who happened to get himself killed and buried underneath the theme park's grounds. "You pop out of the ground on opening day, and the game takes place over the course of one day, during which you manage to destroy the town and turn everybody into a zombie," Seropian gestures with manic glee. "So it's pretty cool, it's a lot of fun."

Curry thinks people will love getting a chance to eat brains, too. "Everyone has spent twenty years of their life killing zombies," he laughs. "It's just such a common theme: zombies, but from a totally unique perspective." What kind of zombies did they put in Stubbs? "We created our own mythos," says Curry. "We don't follow this director's rule of zombies, or this game's rules. We had a lot of fun coming up with our own rules about what zombies can and can't do." Coming up with their own rules, it seems, is something Seropian and his company know how to do.

(2005-11-08)

Also by Mike Schramm

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