IGN

: This is a first person experience game, we saw it unveiled at The Game Awards back in December; give me the quick elevator pitch.

Loading

Loading

Loading

Loading

: That sounds an awful lot like the Sandra Bullock film Gravity.: When I first started working on this game, I just wasn’t aware of Gravity. When I started using the metaphor of the destruction of my personal life, and the destroyed space station, it became really clear that this was a game I really, really wanted to make, an experience I wanted to have, and a story I wanted to tell. About a month into working on this I discovered Gravity. I didn’t know about it beforehand, and initially I was devastated because you want to be original as much as you can, even though that’s next to impossible when you’re creating things. I was devastated and I was like “you can’t make this game anymore.” But at that time in my life I was really rebelling against being told who I am and what I can do and what I’ve done – so I just kind of said “f**k it,” there’s room for everyone. Gravity is not the first space disaster piece of entertainment, and you could certainly say Gravity is derivative of other things in some ways, but that’s not the point. The point is that it’s a story I want to tell and I’m not going to shy away from doing that because there’s some similarities to it in a really great movie. If people compare Adr1ft to Gravity, that’s awesome. It’s actually been helpful for us because people’s expectations have been set for a game experience like an Oscar-calibre film. Initially it was devastating, but I’ve just accepted it because I know what we’re doing is very different. I see people online all the time saying “oh, so basically Gravity the game.” Well, it’s not “basically Gravity the game” – it’s a space disaster that happens to have a main character who’s a woman. I only had two choices [laughs]. I didn’t want to make the traditional space-marine game. It’s just not something I was interested in. I think when people play the game they will see that we’re trying to do something different.: But you weren’t inspired by the film at all?Adam Orth: No, not at all. It was maybe a happy accident I guess, although it didn’t feel happy at the time. I definitely had a minute where I’m like “I can’t do this.” But it passes.: You sort of alluded to this when you talked about your personal life, but where did the idea for Adr1ft come from?: I had an idea for a space disaster game, and then the whole Twitter controversy [Xbox One “deal with it comments] happened. When you’re creating something, my personal belief is that you have to put as much of yourself into it, whether it’s painful or exhilarating, or happy – whatever it is, that’s the best art. I felt like, “if I’m going to do this, I’m not going to flinch at all.”: Is [making the game] a therapeutic experience for you?: I wouldn’t say it’s therapeutic because making games is a very long and not an immediate process at all. I had a lot of opportunities to talk about that stuff [Xbox One comments] when it happened and I didn’t because I knew I was going to make this game. I don’t think anyone cares about that stuff anymore. This is my personal statement about it. It’s just the way I chose to funnel it into my creativity.: You’ve already alluded to it, but you found yourself in a bit of a pickle on the internet. Leading up to the Xbox One’s launch you were an employee at Microsoft working on T.V stuff. People were very up in arms about the idea of this console having to always be online. You tweeted “Sorry, I don’t get the drama around an ‘always on’ console. Every device now is ‘always on.’ That’s the world we live in. #dealwithit.” You are no longer at Microsoft obviously. Do you think it was the hashtag that pushed people over the edge, or was it you replying to people, going further down that rabbit hole you had opened up for yourself?: I think it’s a little bit of both. It’s a super unfortunate thing that happened, and obviously the results were traumatic in a lot of ways. I don’t really think about it a lot anymore, although I do still hear about it on the internet. It’s definitely some people’s favorite past-time. I’ve talked about this, and have done a couple lectures about this. I definitely disrespected some people by having a sarcastic conversation with a friend – it’s not an excuse in any way, it’s just what happened. I shouldn’t have done it publically. I should have done it over a beer at a bar or something. It was an unfortunate event that – thankfully – is behind me, and it’s gotten me to where I am now.: Do you regret it? Would you not take it back even though it was a terrible thing, or do you wish you could take it back?: I would never take it back because you can’t take back life. You can’t do it. It sucked. It absolutely ripped my life apart but, when things burn down new things grow – that’s how I choose to look at it.: You locked your Twitter account for a while, but eventually came back.: Well, when it happened I think I got more than 10,000 Twitter followers within a couple hours. It was crazy. I locked it down because I didn’t know what to do.: How bad did it get? How much did the internet outrage seep into your real life?: I don’t think anything I could say about it here would be any different than what I’ve publically said about it already. I appreciate the desire to want to find that out from me in this interview but I think that it’s such a painful thing – not only for me but for my family too – that it’s just not worth getting into. It sucked that it happened, and I’m upset that I offended people. Somebody told me today, “find me someone who hasn’t said something stupid on the internet – you’ll never find them.” We all make mistakes in life, and it’s about how you recover from that and what you do next. That’s really what Adr1ft is about.: Are there any audio-logs or Easter eggs that say “deal with it” in the game anywhere? [Laughs].: No. I’ve got a sense of humor about the whole thing, but it’s just not that kind of game.: You’ve got Oculus Rift support. It seems like it could be an incredible Oculus Rift experience on the PC. Is that the ideal way to experience this game?: I don’t want to say that because it’s a very different experience. Initially I just approached the VR [virtual reality] thing as extra immersion, “immersion plus,” which it does give you. But what I wasn’t prepared for was how it actually elicits emotions when you’re having – well it’s really hard to describe. It connects you to the game in a fundamental way because everyone knows, or has their own idea, of what being stranded out in space feels like. When you’re able to even challenge the way someone thinks about that, or meet it, it’s very powerful. I’ve had some people try the game in virtual reality who were moved to tears. I don’t think it’s because we’re making this amazing artistic thing. I think we’re tapping into a primal emotion in people, with the subject matter and the situation, and then you add in this way to be in it in a way that you’ve never been able to do before – as a developer, that’s cool. It’s so powerful. We planned for VR from the beginning, and we’ve designed the game to support that. We feel really fortunate to be at this moment of excitement about it because very soon there’s going to be a bunch of platforms out there that support this game, and we can’t wait to get them out.: We just saw at GDC this week Sony unveil the latest version of Project Morpheus. They gave it a target release date of the first half of 2016. Is Morpheus something you guys would come back with an update for later down the road?: Yeah, absolutely, if Sony was interested in something like that. We’re definitely talking to them. We have Morpheus kits, and it’s something we’re super excited about. I’ve always been a PlayStation fanatic, so getting this game on PlayStation in a new way is really important to me personally.: You mentioned the tears with Oculus. Has anyone ever thrown up playing this game? Because it’s a zero G space game with an Oculus Rift.: No, actually, it’s the other way; people never get sick with our game. In my experience using VR, Adr1ft is unique in the fact that you’re not grounded to the floor, you can move in any direction, and it’s slow and dreamy. That allows for some really non-queasy gaming [laughter]. We’ve had people refuse to try this demo because they get sick all the time. I just force people to do it, and when they do it they’re like, “I feel great, nothing happened, it was great.” So, I think there’s a mix of happy accident and stuff we’re working on to try to do that – but it’s very non-queasy. We’ve probably had more than 500 VR demos of Adr1ft so far, and I can only count on one hand the people who’ve gotten sick.: Is there a significance to the fact that there’s a number 1 wedged into the middle of the name of the game?: I haven’t really talked about it before, but it’s not a big stretch to understand that you’re one person. You’re alone, and one is the loneliest number. I’ve taken a lot of s**t about it on the internet, believe me. But it doesn’t matter because, who cares? No one cares. If it means something to the people creating it, that’s all that matters. If you’re not going to buy the game because there’s a one in it, you’ve got bigger problems.: Somewhere there’s a marketing manager, perhaps at your publisher, who’s just cringing right now. “What do you mean it doesn’t matter what the game’s called?!” [Laughs].: That’s just the way it is. It means something to the game. It’s just there. Deal with it [laughter].: You’ve had an eclectic career. You were a recording artist, you toured, I’ve heard you’re friends with Rivers Cuomo. You have this big music background. How did you end up in video games?: It’s actually not that big of a stretch. I’ve always been a gamer. Me and my brother used to get new Atari cartridges and play the games and take out magic markers and paper afterwards and draw up brand new levels and send them in to Atari. Every three weeks later we would get a form letter back, always with stickers and patches and other cool stuff. It’s always been a part of my life, just like music. I was a musician in Los Angeles, professionally, for a while. I signed a publishing deal to write music for film and television. I begged my published to find me game-work. This was in the mid-late ‘90s, and the music business had no idea. You couldn’t tell record company people about it because that wasn’t even on their periphery at all. So, I got a job doing music for the PlayStation One James Bond game Tomorrow Never Dies. At this time it was a bit of a wild-west in the Hollywood video game making business. Unbeknownst to me, they had already hired somebody else to also do the same thing – a guy who was hugely famous then and now, Tommy Tallarico. They sadly informed me that the music I had composed, recorded, performed and turned in would not be going into the game, which was soul-crushing. I was burnt on it at that point. You’d have to start all over again, and I couldn’t do that. So, I became a tester. I floated around the Los Angeles area and I worked at every interactive studio at the time. But what I really wanted was to be a tester at Sony Santa Monica. I was incessant about bugging them constantly, and I finally got a job there. I was testing on Twisted Metal: Black, and I became friends with David Jaffe, and everyone at that studio. He [Jaffe] pulled me out of test and made me a junior game designer. My first real game design job was working on Twisted Metal: Black.: You worked on God of War with David Jaffe, you worked on a few Metal of Honor games at EA.Adam Orth: Yeah, I actually left Sony Santa Monica to go work on Medal of Honor because I was really passionate about that.: And then PopCap to work on a bunch of their IPs, LucasArts on a number of things. It just shows that if you are really serious about getting into game design, become a tester.Adam Orth: People ask me all the time how to get into the [game] industry. That’s how I got in. I don’t know if that advice is dated or not anymore, but it’s a great way. You get this foundation that you don’t get anywhere else. You get to learn the business and learn about each discipline. You get to learn about the coders and engineering, about design, art, audio, production – anything that happens in a game development studio. So if you apply yourself there, and you’re good, you can get out there. Over the years I’ve put a lot of people into test positions who are now game designers at big places. Somebody gave me a shot, and I’d like to help people out too. It’s awesome when I can take a guy off Twitter who seems reasonably bright and engaging, and get him a job testing at Naughty Dog, working on The Last of Us. Somebody gave me a shot, so it’s my duty to pay it forward. Otherwise, what are we doing here?: Is game development inherently a pretty nomadic life?Adam Orth: It can be. We’ve all read the stories. I’ve seen some pretty terrible things in my career of AAA game development. It’s hard because A. it’s kind of the nature of the beast, and B. it should never be. More and more I compare it to the film business. You have to have the stomach for it. I’ve seen people with families bouncing around, chasing these things and getting laid off. Like the Kotaku story that recently came out that told this long story about this family that kept going places and getting laid off, and they kept having more kids and they needed a new house – to me, no game job is worth doing that to your family. Nothing’s worth doing that to your family. But you have to admire the passion of these people who want to do it. Being in the game development industry is a gift. We have the greatest job, it’s amazing. But the reality of the nomadic nature [of the lifestyle] definitely exists, and it’s hard to have security on these giant teams and projects. I guess it’s also hard to have security when you start your own studio. It’s all about how you manage that risk and what you’re willing to sacrifice for those things. When you exist in the big AAA realm, it can be nomadic for sure. I’ve seen friends and colleagues moving all over the place.: Do you think that the middle-class of games is dead or dying? Games we would see in the original Xbox and PlayStation 2 era. It does seem like it’s gotten very much either AAA or indie titles.Adam Orth: Well yeah, the risk of making these mid-tier titles is too great. Who’s going to make those now? The larger companies aren’t going to do that, and the little guys can’t do it. If you can do it, it’s a risk. Is it a new IP, is it continuing something? I think there’s smart ways to do it, but from a development standpoint, if you take a $10 million dollar game, the risk of return on that investment is too great. That’s why people won’t do it.: Do you think we’re [the video game industry] in a healthy position right now? Are you worried?: I see the video game industry thriving right now. It’s just different. There’s no middle in this big AAA console thing, but look at mobile. There’s more games than ever now. That might be a bad thing but I don’t see the game industry being in a bad position.: At Microsoft you were a member of the core design team responsible for overall feature design on Xbox One with focus on interactive television. Are you happy with the way T.V functionality turned out on Xbox One?: It’s hard to say. My experience with the whole Twitter thing makes it hard to go back to that stuff. I don’t really watch a lot of T.V, so it’s not really a part of my life. It felt good doing at the time. I hoped it was something that would take off, but it doesn’t seem like, right now, it’s going somewhere. I think there’s space for it, but how’re we going to do it? How’s it going to be done? I think there’s a lot of smart, talented people who want to make it happen. I think it just wasn’t the time, and for whatever reason it didn’t work. I don’t think that it is something that is a dead idea – I just think it hasn’t been done correctly yet.: As somebody who was on the team that worked with that, are you saddened or disappointed that for various reasons the non-gaming features of the Xbox One have been minimized or brushed aside over the last year or so?: This is going to sound terrible, but I’m not really familiar with all the features on the Xbox right now because I don’t use it a lot. I don’t really have time. I’m spending every waking moment making Adr1ft, and I’m sadly out of touch with those things right now. So I don’t know if I could give you the best answer.: What’s the number one lesson you’ve taken from your past game development experience and applied to Adr1ft?: Never give up. Ever. I’ve been doing this for almost 18 years now, and I’m right now doing the thing I’m most inspired and interested in. Sorry every other game I’ve worked on [laughter]. If you believe in something, you can’t ever give up on it because once you do, what’s left? The death of dreams is a horrible thing to think about. I’ve been lucky. I’ve had a really interesting career, and I’ve been able to work with some amazing people on some amazing things. But now, for me, this is the beginning. I want to keep making these kind of games. We built our studio around the idea of the FPX, and it’s really important for us to hopefully be seen as a leader in making high quality products in that area. We’ve spent so much time in the AAA side of things, and we learned so many good things there. People often talk about AAA like it’s a negative thing – it’s not. There’s great, amazing AAA games. We learned all these amazing things and we can apply them in a different way. We’re seeing that we can do new and different things. Having taken the gun out of your hand, and then how do you interact with the world in an interesting and cool and meaningful way is super challenging. That’s what inspires us every day. How’re you going to get an immersive first-person experience where you can interact with the world and do something cool, sell a fantasy to someone, and make them want to keep playing and keep feeling and have a great experience with video games.: There is no combat in this game.: There is no combat in Adr1ft. There is not a single weapon, there’s not a single bullet – there’s not even another single living person. The enemy in Adr1ft is the environment.: The first-person experience subgenre seems to be taking off, with games like Firewatch and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, as well as Adr1ft.: To me, it’s ridiculous to even be mentioned with those games.: I’ve seen those games; I don’t think it’s ridiculous at all. They all look fantastic, including Adr1ft.: Well, thank you. Those are the games that inspire me and are the things I’m looking forward to the most. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve played Proteus or The Stanley Parable. Those games are just so inspiring to me. They showed me that you don’t have to do the same old thing. It’s not a new lesson. Proteus was a huge inspiration for Adr1ft – just massive. I can’t stop with that game. I’m obsessed with it. Having these smaller, immersive experience games that are out there – it’s great for everyone. I don’t think anyone out there is going to have a problem with a massively interesting and fun high quality immersive experience that’s not 65 hours. I often talk about Adr1ft being like going to see the director’s cut of Interstellar at the best IMAX you can. It’s like a $30-$40 night. You’re going to be entertained for 3 hours and maybe go back and see it again. That feels like a premium entertainment experience to me. I think about Adr1ft a little bit like that.: Why do you think this subgenre [first-person experience] has taken off? Is it a reaction to years and years of corridor shooters?: Personally, for us making it, it’s totally a reaction. We don’t want to make those games anymore. I love those games; I play those games; I devour those games; I don’t want to make them. There’s enough games that have violence and shooting out there, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just, at the end of the day, when you’re done developing your game, what do you want to say? How do you want to portray yourself and your team? How do you want to give the player a new way to interact with the world? I’m going to hammer home on that. It’s very important to us. I just can’t shoot anyone in the face anymore [laughter]. I can’t do it. The other guys on my team feel the same way, and we’re totally united with that. That’s not to say that there wouldn’t ever be any violence in our games, but I don’t want to put the player in a position where they’re committing violent acts. There’s a lot of interesting ways to make games that don’t require violence. That’s not a new concept either.: When the game comes out this summer, how do you want people to remember Adr1ft?: Hopefully in a couple ways. I want people to remember Adr1ft in the fact that they had a great mechanical experience. Maybe Adr1ft is not really “fun” for people – it’s very stressful. Tense, stress, frightening, claustrophobic sometimes. I want people to feel like they had a good game mechanic experience, which I think we have. Using oxygen as a shared health and propulsion resource makes every movement count. There’s these little micro-decisions that are hopefully meaningful to people. I would hope people key into that. It seems like people playing the game now really like that. I want people to remember that it was beautiful to look at. It’s got a great engine [Unreal Engine 4] that’s exceeding our expectations for the way the game looks. From the narrative, I want people to feel like, hey, this is not a normal video game story, and is maybe unique in that way. I want people to maybe think about, after they follow the journey of this story, that maybe they have a quiet moment or two of reflection upon, “how would I do that?” or “maybe I can take something away here.” It’s not a teaching thing, it’s not about learning. Hopefully you took something away from it where you pause for a minute and go “that was different and cool, and I want to maybe try that again.” I want to actually take this opportunity to really hammer home, because a lot of people don’t understand that we’re making a traditional game. They think, “oh, it’s not only VR?” I don’t really know how that happened [laughter]. I kind of know how it happened, but it’s a strange thing. It’s actually a traditional game first, but even better with VR. Don’t forget that.