Here’s Part I of my interview with Alan Wilson, VP of Tripwire Interactive. I had the pleasure of visiting the offices of Tripwire on December 5th, 2013, the very day they launched Killing Floor’s Twisted Christmas event. Needless to say, it was an awesome experience. So sit back, read on, and pay attention to details on how to win yourself a copy of Killing Floor or Rising Storm, courtesy of the fine folks at Tripwire Interactive!
Tyrus: Today I’m with Alan Wilson, VP of Tripwire Interactive and Mike Schmitt, Senior Marketing Manager for Tripwire Interactive. First off thanks for taking your time for me guys. I really appreciate it.
First thing I’d like to ask, is why did you guys choose Roswell Georgia of all places to start a studio? Were there financial incentives or other reasons for you all to set up here?
Alan: If we’re being completely honest, it came off the back of Make Something Unreal Contest in 2003 and rolled into 2004. And in 2004, some of us that were running the mod, started to think, “What do we do if we win?” And we really hadn’t thought it through. We were just a mod team – some of us had full-time jobs, some of us were still in school, you know, whatever. It was the complete random mix you get with a mod team. (laughs)
So were thinking “What do we do?,” because we’d have a free engine license. And one of the questions to come up, was “Where would we do it?” Someone said, “Hey, let’s go to London.” And I said, don’t be ridiculous, London’s incredibly expensive, we’d have no money, so it’s got to be somewhere cheap. And of the four of us – you had me in London, Ingmar in Amsterdam (which was nearly as expensive as London, so we ruled that out)… which left Bill and John over here. Bill was in Baltimore, but said he didn’t think that would be the best place to set up shop. John had worked on America’s Army in Monterey and moved back here (Roswell, GA) in 2004. And we all said, “Okay, that’ll do!”
To be fair to the state, we actually did a little more research and realized that first off, you had Atlanta as a major travel hub, it’s got a climate we could live with, and you mentioned incentives… the state was just bringing (as we were looking) in incentives for movies, t.v., and videogames. Videogames were just an afterthought that they put in. And the state actually has a 30% tax credit, which is complicated to navigate and manage, but it is a huge boost. Now it doesn’t make the difference between surviving or failing, but it makes the difference in how fast we can grow, and that – that’s the key part for us. It gives us the opportunity to worry less about our growth. If we do it intelligently and don’t go mad we can actually grow. When we first started off, there were two of us in an office down the road, now there are forty of us here. We’ve gone from a company turning over no money, to turning over many millions. It’s been good for us, and we hope it’s good for the state.
So all those reasons kind of just piled together, and we were just like, “Where are the four of us?” And we were like, “Ah, let’s go with Georgia.” Now we do have to explain to others back at home that, yes, we live in Roswell, and no, there are no aliens in it! Except for me of course, but I’m a legal alien. (laughs)
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Tyrus: Of the original team, are the majority still here?
Alan: It’s a mixed bag… Of the original mod team itself, there’s still a few people here. Our lead level designer, Adam Hatch, was also our lead level designer on the mod, back ten years ago when he was (I think about) thirteen. So we’ve still got some of the original mod team. But like mod teams, quite a few of them simply vanish – some of them in the middle of production, some of them later. And I understand, life catches up to you. It’s not that often you get to take a hobby and make it into a full time job. Only a few people are that lucky, and we know we are.
We think something like fifty people went through the original Red Orchestra mod. Of those fifty, there’s probably about ten here at the moment, and probably two or three we use as contractors. Something like that, would be a rough guess.
Tyrus: Thank you.
So with you and John, where do you think your responsibilities have changed since the mod days?
Alan: Yeah we were joking about that recently. We sort of realized that we’d gone from what was a mod team where our responsibilities were to get our own bit of work done and try, you know, remotely, from 5,000 miles away, stick forks in other people and try and get them to finish whatever they agreed to do.
And as a small company, that stepped up a bit, worrying about cash and all that as well. We realized recently that now we’re a mutli-million dollar business with forty employees and outsourcing contracts around the world along with funding third-party developments. And you just have to ask yourself, “Oh dear God, where did all this come from?”
Our personal responsibilities just kept growing. I always did the PR and Marketing. That was fine when we were a mod just tooling around and when we were a small company but you just can’t keep doing all that stuff… otherwise, apart from doing it all until you squeak, you’re just not going to do it all right, you can’t. You have to decide which bits you want do and which bits you can delegate. Thank you Mike!
(All laugh)
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This morning we had an update for The Ball and Killing Floor: Twisted Christmas and I actually realized I can hand the off Press Release to Mike. I’ve got someone who can actually do that stuff. I’ve got someone who has made that a profession and not me making it up.
Now I also do talks at colleges about working in the videogames industry. You can start at a company or you do it yourself. We’re now eight years in as a business, and you start to realize that some of it is bloody scary. You are responsible for the money. You are responsible for a whole bunch of people’s jobs – houses, lives, wives, children. You can’t forget that what started out as doing some stuff on a mod, with the wife calling out, “Hey are you coming down for dinner?” has kind of moved on a bit. In fact it’s unrecognizable.
But it’s been a hell of a ride. It’s been a lot of fun.
Tyrus: That’s awesome. It sounds like you have a really good sense of where you’ve come from – you’re very appreciative. Do you feel like you’re living the dream?
Alan: Oh yeah. We don’t make it any secret to anybody. We’re doing what we want to be doing. We’ve had discussions in the past with investors and people who’ve wanted to buy into the business and we’ve realized that what matters most to us is really that we are controlling our own destiny. And we made that decision early on. There’s a whole lot of ways we could have gone in the early days that would have been easier on us. But we wouldn’t be doing what we wanted to do.
I joke with people, but it’s only half a joke – I get up in the morning to make games and play games. Pfft! And that isn’t working! (laughs)
We know we’ve been extraordinarily lucky, but what I tell people is that you make your own luck.
Tyrus: Right.
It didn’t happen just because we were lucky. We made a whole bunch of decisions and took a whole lot of risks. And it got really scary at times.
Here’s an example – I moved my wife and kid over here in 2007 and realized that sometime after that the company was very, very close to the line. We don’t make too much of a secret about that. In the early days, it was really creepy. We were at one point within weeks of running out of cash. And you want to put that into real terms, businesses go bust all the time. Who cares?
But in my personal case, I was on a Visa. I would have had forty five days to leave the country… I had no cash left, so I couldn’t actually pay for my belongings to be shipped back home. I had a house in London that someone else was living in, so I had nowhere to live, and you’re going, “If that happens… it’s not funny.”
So I tell people stop and think what you’re doing. What risks are you prepared to take?
(laughs)
Again, in all honesty, we probably didn’t think that through. We found ourselves taking these risks and realizing just how much shit we could be in after the fact.
(All laugh)
And we’re going, “Ahhh, right.”
So if I can help anybody… John and I do a lot of mentoring and tell others that you really need to think things through. And we’re really happy to do so. Because realizing what a hole you’re in, through the hard way, is not that nice.
Tyrus: Thank you.
So you guys have done some publishing. Is that an avenue you want to continue to pursue?
Alan: That’s a tricky one. We love working with other teams. Especially when they have similar mindsets. We don’t work with other teams that don’t. Otherwise, you’ll end up with some culture clash and obviously that’s not going to work. We got The Ball and Dwarfs!? and Zeno Clash in stores. Those are all great teams and we enjoyed working with them.
But we’ve realized that the publishing business is different than development. We’re geared up primarily as a developer. We realized that if we’re going to do publishing a lot, then we actually need to build a publishing business as well, because it’s a different kind of thing.
Development is about investing a pile of money over a period of years and making a game. Then making enough money from the game to cover what you’ve just done and keep you going forward. Publishing is different in there’s smaller pieces and you’re not going to make as much money by publishing other people’s games, unless you’re an evil shit-bag publisher.
(All laugh)
There’s been a few of those over the years!
But part of why we did Xeno Clash for example, is because we saw the ACE guys getting stuck and getting some shit deals. Because we didn’t come up in the games industry, we like sticking forks in bits of it to see what happens. And that’s frankly what we were doing with the box publishing. We published Killing Floor here in the states ourselves. And we published Xeno Clash. And we’d do firm meetings with retail stores, and you get about seven seconds of attention from some buyer who knows it all. But I have to sympathize, as the guy has got to see God knows what piles of crap stuck under his nose and people asking him to “please stick this in your store, someone will buy it!”
I do sympathize. But on the receiving end, it’s kind of like trying to get an audience with God or something. (laughs)
Except that this person’s not as nice.
So we’ve been through all that. And we do enjoy it. But that whole side of it, especially the retail space for PC gaming is just disintegrating. I mean, Walmart has what, a three foot stack? And in Gamestop, I struggle to find any PC games there.
Mike: It’s usually buried behind the used stuff.
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Alan: Yeah. And we’ve decided that we can’t bother with that in the US now. I mean, console games are a different thing, but we’ll see how that plays out with digital having a big impact. We do get a lot of requests from other teams to help get their games on Steam. I think if we had a bunch more time, we’d do it. But the last few years have been so hectic, with Red Orchestra 2, Rising Storm, and all we do with Killing Floor… Then we have Killing Floor: Calamity coming out this year… well, with all of that stuff you no mental capacity left.
So we haven’t stopped doing it, but we’re cherry-picking, frankly. If there’s a team we’re mentoring, that we can really help, then we’ll do it.
Tyrus: Prior to the interview we discussed the indie movement in the games industry and where Tripwire fits in among that. A big part of Sony’s schtick is that they’re “embracing” indies. Do you see consoles as a potential market? And do you guys intend to remain a PC-centric developer?
(Alan laughs)
Tyrus: And I didn’t mean to put you in a corner or anything! (laughs)
Alan: No, that’s fine. Killing Floor: Calamity will be released on OUYA in a few weeks (editor’s note: The game is live. You can check it out here). Yeah, we’ve looked at the PS4 and Xbox One, of course. Particularly Sony, we looked at putting Killing Floor on the PS3 a while back. But it’s just not the right time – the right piece hasn’t come up.
The games we develop on PC, for PC… we use everything that is good about that platform, like mods for our games, Source Development Kits (SDKs), and we’re using that machine to its full ability. The same goes with consoles. We need to look at the PS4 and Xbox One and go, “What are the cool things we can do there?” Because there’s no point in just lifting a game, as far as we’re concerned, and just throwing it out there.
Just the other day, I was playing a game (which will remain unnamed), and it was ported from console to PC. And you know what? The controls were shite. You could tell that the controls weren’t designed for a keyboard and mouse, and they hadn’t bothered to go the extra mile.
Sony has been making big noises that they want independent developers. And the team has discussed that. I don’t think anyone’s going to argue that we’re an independent developer. Whether we’re now too successful to be called “indie” is another matter. (laughs)
People that are courting us, like Xbox, they put out a list of their indie developers. I was kind of amused to see that Crytek made that list as indie, but hey, go figure.
Now whether or not Steam Machines will be considered consoles is another thing entirely, but it’s pretty obvious that we’ll be supporting that wholeheartedly. But if you like the traditional consoles, then yeah, we’re bound to end up doing something.
When we do it though, we want to do it right. We don’t want to put out a half-assed port. It’s insulting to the customers, and that’s something we try not to do too often, although we do succeed from time to time. (All laugh)
Well, I think there’s a lot of miscommunication that goes on. And I can honestly say that as a fan, we expect a lot. (All laugh) Maybe too much, at times. And there seems to be an increase in developer abuse from fans. What do you think of all of that?
We’ve always had a close relationship to our fans. And it is hard to maintain, it’s hard to do it right. As anyone who’s been involved with any kind of communication knows, the more numbers you’re communicating with, the more opportunity there is for someone, somewhere to get you wrong – misunderstand, mishear. Or, you know, just want to troll.
When you have, say, a thousand fans, that may not be as much of an issue. But when you have three or four million fans, there’s a pretty broad range of people out there, and greater chance for someone to get upset.
I think we’ve admitted in the past that we’ve probably lost sight of that slightly, just as we were buried in the run-up to the release of RO2. And we looked back at that and, we have, by our standards, slightly lost touch. So we went back to the Red Orchestra fans and asked them, “What did we do right? What did we do wrong? Where should this be going?” And when you ask those sorts of questions, you get everything. It can be very hard to figure your way through that as to what you should be really doing. But you try. Inevitably, we don’t get it all right. All we can do is try our best.
At the end of the day, we’re doing what we enjoy. And people enjoy playing our games. So we want to do that stuff right, as hard as that may be.
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Tyrus: We briefly touched on the topic of mod support and SDKs. Is that something you all hope to continue in the future?
Alan: Oh yeah. We wouldn’t be here today without mods… that’s just so ingrained in how we do it. Going back to the topic of consoles, one of the things we asked Sony is, this is how we do this with SDKs. How do we do this on your platform? Because, if we can’t, it’s a whole piece of what we do that’s missing.
Sure it costs extra in terms of money and time. But at the end of the day, if it’s built into your development, it’s not impossible. The toolkit we use basically has to be tidied up, documented, and released with the game. That’s really what we’re doing. If you do the two things separately, it will be a huge job, it’d be an absolute monster. Doing it the way we do it, is basically developing the tools for someone who basically hasn’t just written the code for it. It is a big piece. It has to be tested each time. But for us, it’s this whole thing about enabling people to have fun with the game.
We come from that mod team background… that contact with the fans, the customers, the community, it matters too much.
Look at Killing Floor, for example. That game’s nearly five years old. Yet we sell now more than we did five years ago because people can do such mad stuff with it. We learned that lesson very early on from Epic with Unreal Tournament. There was a toolkit you could use, for free, by simply buying the game. We realized that we shipped potentially half a million units of Unreal Tournament for them, with the mod.
So, of course it’s worth it. It generates more sales. We’re just closing up a mapping contest for Rising Storm and doing judging for that. And you look at the quality of the content – it’s superb content. It’s all extra stuff for the game. It’s free stuff for the game. And we haven’t payed for it.
People did it for the love of it, for the fun of it, for the hell of it. We get extra content for the game. The very best, we bring it in-house and make it official and publish it with the game.
People forget, even with Steam Workshop, only a small percent of people actually play custom content, unless you take it and present it to them. Mods five, ten years ago – very few people who would buy a game would actually go looking for that stuff. So you’d kind of have to push it to them. But by allowing that kind of stuff, it just keeps the game alive. It keeps it real interesting, it keeps it going.
We started doing our own events with Killing Floor because we realized with all that content getting generated… it gets people coming back.
So why don’t we generate some mad content for the game? And all of this stuff just feeds off each other. I have no idea how many maps have been created for Killing Floor now. It’s smaller for Red Orchestra and Rising Storm just because the games are bigger and more complex and it’s a bigger undertaking, but there’s a ton of content out there.
That keeps the game going. And frankly it also keeps our interest up. You see what other people do with the things you’ve created, then you go, “Oh! That’s a cool idea! We could really use that.”
We’ve been known to bring in some of the best mods and mutators for Red Orchestra and Rising Storm and build them full-time into the game because they’re just so good. And that keeps us on our toes, it keeps us learning. And to a large extent, that keeps the game fresh for the developers, which makes a huge difference.
Stay tuned for part two! And leave a comment below for a chance to win a copy of Rising Storm or Killing Floor, courtesy of the fine folks at Tripwire Interactive! I’ll be announcing winners this time next week here on the site.
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