Rock, Paper, Shotgun has an excellent interview with Robin Walker and Charlie Brown, key members of the about-to-be-released Team Fortress 2. I expect big things – BioWare Austin has pretty much stopped eating out in favor of TF Lunches. Many topics are covered, including why the game took 10 years to make. My favorite snippet:

RW: Not really. The arc of TF2 is something that’s probably familiar to a lot of amateur developers or designers. When we got here the first thing we built was overly complex, very hard core, almost impenetrable to anyone who wasn’t familiar with FPSs in general. And as we found as we played it, wasn’t more fun because of it.

One thing that we forget frequently is that, as we make games more complex and intricate, we often are making games for ourselves and people like us. We also make games that are denser and harder for people to pick up. MMOs are especially prone to this – every feature you add to an MMO adds complexity, and if that complexity is evident to new players, the project is that much denser and harder to pickup.

A parable: for a long while Doom was the largest selling FPS of all time. People, in retrospect, forget how limited the original Doom was. You couldn’t jump. You couldn’t crouch. Maps weren’t really 3D – you couldn’t build a bridge that crossed over another bridge. And you couldn’t really aim up and down. But it still sold great, with 10s of millions of downloads, a healthy number of purchases, and a sequel that was even more successful than the original.

Well, as the next generation of games came out, the control scheme got closer and closer to what we have today – Quake, Unreal, and Duke Nukem 3D, among other games, added in jumping. Then crouching. Then true 3D spaces. Then aiming, followed shortly by mouselook control. And the funny thing is, these games actually sold LESS well as the games got more complicated to steer.

The next big hit in the shooter market? Deer Hunter. You couldn’t jump or crouch in Deer Hunter – YOU COULDN’T EVEN MOVE. You stood in one place, waited for a deer, and clicked on it. I’m not kidding. It took 2 guys 3 months to build. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies. I was working on UO2 at the time, and remember my producer wandering in and idly wondering if we shouldn’t be building an MMO aimed at the Deer Hunter market.

Was it a game that ‘real gamers’ had serious disdain for? Absolutely. However, it also introduced a whole new market of people to the idea of shooting things with your mouse. Ultimately, games like Deer Hunter undoubtedly grew the market, instead of narrowing it. And, in my point of view, this is what Valve is hoping the new direction of Team Fortress will do as well.

Original comments thread is here.