Interview with an Evil Genius

The concept I've had in mind for years really, since leaving Bullfrog. Basically, at university, while I was actually on a rare holiday in Thailand on a really beautiful tropical island, that suddenly made me think about how it would be quite cool to actually be the Bond villain.

Then I kind of left it alone, like I do with a lot of ideas, and then when we needed something that was a bit more lighthearted - because Republic was very serious and gritty, and I think the company as a whole needed to do something that was fun and lighthearted - Evil Genius fitted the bill. So I dusted it off, we fleshed out the design, and then basically got a very talented team onto that, a separate team from the rest of the Republic team, led by Sandy Sammarco who's the lead designer.

For the last six months I've been fully back on Evil Genius, just guiding the final processes, making sure it's polished... Basically taking the time to do the polishing that we didn't have time for on Republic. So the learning curve is really shallow, the interface is really polished and intuitive, the tutorial is in place - there is a tutorial at all! - and things like that that we just didn't have time to do on Republic. We just had to get it finished, and Eidos wanted it finished for their financial quarter.

It's been nice having the time to do that. Hopefully gamers will appreciate that when they play it.

Yeah - well, that's how I got into games in the first place, from board games. I think that as designers, we can learn a lot from the elegance of board game rules. Board games obviously can't rely on flashy graphics or anything else, they are just their game mechanics. In effect, they are pure game mechanics distilled.

I think there are a lot of very clever games out there that people probably don't know about. I play a lot of obscure German board games and things, which have really great gems of great ideas - the problem is working out how to extract those ideas and apply them in the correct way to a computer game. I think if you do that right, you can get something amazing - and of course, the most famous example of that is Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley with Civilisation, with Railway Tycoon, with Age of Empires - all of these things are board game-inspired.

No, we tried to stay away from that... In fact, believe it or not, I've never actually played Dungeon Keeper! Of course I was there when it was being concepted, because that was before I left for university - it was straight after Theme Park - and it was a fantastic idea. But beyond the idea of actually allowing you to play the bad guy, and that being a clearly compelling thing to let the player do, that's about it as far as influence goes.

The most influential game - obviously a lot of films influenced us - but in terms of games, it's probably X-Com actually. It's a little bit of a left-field reference, but X-Com was a game where you had a base, you trained up people on your base and you sent them on away missions. That's basically what you do in Evil Genius; then people attack you. In X-Com it's aliens, in this it's the Forces of Justice. That's really, in terms of game inspiration, the closest thing.

We've got a combination of those elements. There are macro things you've got to do, so they give you these medium term goals to aim for, but how you get there is totally up to you. There are all sorts of different ways you can complete it, and there are lots of optional side-objectives to do as well.

There are a lot of different things you can do, plus there are three evil geniuses and they each come with their own special henchmen, and three Doomsday devices to build. Any of the Evil Geniuses can build any of the Doomsday devices, so there's a lot of combinatorial replayability there. It's a lot more led by the hand at the beginning, and it branches out more at the end.

Well, I'm sure it's obvious to you how multiplayer would work. There are two multiplayer modes we're thinking about - one is Evil Genius versus Evil Genius, which would be quite fun, and there's also Evil Genius versus the forces of justice. We've got a lot of plans in mind for the next game, and for add-ons which will include multiplayer.

We'll probably do some free patches as well as some add-ons and things; I'm not sure which multiplayer will be in, but it's quite an addition, so it'll probably be an add-on.

They both have their challenges. With Republic, I wanted to make an artistic statement; I wanted it to be viewed as serious, like the way that a serious art-house film would be viewed. Maybe I went overboard with it, but that was the intention. With Evil Genius... I've been involved in games with some humour in them before, like with Theme Park, which had things like the vomiting kids after they came off the rides, or if they'd just eaten burgers and they went past smelly toilets. People loved the vomiting!

The problem with humour is, it's very difficult to make sure it's international. It's very hard to make something that UK people will find funny - especially British people, who do have this very British sense of humour - and that will appeal to Americans as well. The way I ensured that was by making sure that all of our humour was slapstick humour. It's all done by the animations; there's no verbal humour. All the humour is implied, slapstick humour like Mr Bean, or Charlie Chaplin, and those are the sorts of things which I think are internationally reckoned humourous.

I was really surprised actually when Mr Bean did amazingly in America, relatively. I think that's because the humour is all visual, it's not verbal, whereas something like my own favourite, Blackadder, doesn't translate as well in the USA. We've made sure that all the humour is incidental, it's not all in your face; it's just incidental things that you'll notice and they're funny, like the way people animate and do things.

There are about 5,000 animations in there. We've got two brilliant animators, Grant Senior and Ian Wells, and they worked on the whole project for the entire two years - they're incredibly fast as well. That's one of the really big selling points of Evil Genius - the quality of the animation.

I've got in mind three types of people. One is the people who play Tycoon games. I think anyone who enjoyed Rollercoaster Tycoon or Theme Park or Sim City - that kind of game, building games - they should enjoy it.

I also have in mind people who like strategy games like X-Com and Dungeon Keeper. They should find a lot of things to enjoy - all the different ways of completing the game, and the different strategies you can come up with.

Then finally, non-gamers, or maybe gamers who don't play strategy games, but who love the whole spy genre, the spoofs, all that sort of setting. I hope they will like it for the humour and the world.

It's incredibly accessible - we've worked really hard to make sure that it's as accessible as possible for the lay-person, the non-gamer. It's pretty idiot-proof, as far as it goes! We tested it for hours - we had two months of a different tester coming in every day, general public members who we watched through the first three hours of the game and tweaked the tutorial and the whole learning curve. The game starts off pretty gently to ease you in, and gets pretty hectic at the end. You don't get overwhelmed at the beginning.

It's been very short, actually. Just over two years - two years, two months - from start to finish of the entire project. I think what's most pleasing to me is the fact that we hit every single milestone dead on time - which for us, as a creative developer... It's very hard for developers to combine creativity with schedules! We managed it, and I'm pleased, because internally it means we've learned from our mistakes on Republic in terms of our procedures and our processes.

Of course, the other thing with Republic was, we weren't just building a game - we had to build all the technology, we had to build the company. So looking back on it, it was inevitable that it was going to take a lot of years. I think if you see any new startup that also tried to do an ambitious game as their first game, if they didn't go under, it certainly took them a long time.

I don't think we were unusual in that. Looking back on it, we may possibly have bitten off too much - more than we could chew at the time - but we've stabilised the company with Evil Genius, and we have our next projects which are also dead on time as well, but which we haven't announced yet.

The way I'd describe it is, we've got 65 people, which has been our size for a while. That's two and a half teams; we have two full production teams, and a number of people that total about half a team, who are working on new prototypes all the time. Our second game is a signed project to a massive publisher which we haven't announced just yet, and another original title, which should be announced next E3.

No, we're well underway with an Xbox version and we'll probably do a PS2 version as well - probably not internally, but it's one we will do. It's well suited to that actually, strangely for a strategy game, because it's not an RTS - it's not mouse-intensive, it's all done by the simulation really, except for the henchmen.

So we'll just have you directly controlling the henchmen with the joypad, and the rest of it will take care of itself. It's not like trying to convert Command and Conquer or something, which would be very hard, and didn't work very well. But for example, we were very successful when I was involved in converting Theme Park over to consoles. That did very well, and I know Rollercoaster Tycoon has done quite well, and The Sims has done pretty well on console.

I believe that that's because they're not twitch-based mouse games - they're all simulation games. Evil Genius, at its heart, is closer to a Tycoon game than anything else; it sort of straddles lots of things, but it's closest to a Tycoon game.

Yeah, we've watched everything. My personal favourites are actually not... Well, they are spy movies I suppose, the old black and white Fu Man Chu movies. They were cool. Actually, also, things like Enter The Dragon - even though that's not actually strictly speaking a spy movie, it's got a mad evil mastermind, it's got an island retreat and all that.

Even things like Flash Gordon, strangely, in terms of the humour and the colour of the world, and also things like Ming the Merciless - he's an evil mastermind as well, I guess. No? Well, evil character, anyway!

There are a lot of little references [in Evil Genius] for those who are fans of those things. They're just parodies, the same way that Austin Powers is a parody of James Bond. They're very eclectic references; they're not from any one thing, there are little bits from all sorts of places.