MIKE SUAREZ

mike@mikesuarez.com

I see game creation as an art. Some games are whimsical distractions, some are life-changing explorations. The single-player experience is as immersive as reading a book or listening to a piece of music. The multi-player experience can be as visceral as a game of tag in the backyard or as exquisite as the interplay of a jazz quartet. The designers, engineers, graphic artists, musicians, and various support people involved in game development deserve more respect. It’s fascinating to work with the talented people who can give game characters uncanny behavioral intelligence, create ambient sound that captures the essence of an exotic place, or animate an explosion in a battle scene that makes me think I have dust in my eyes.

When games are released into the world, I look at them as engines of joy and learning just like music or film or literature. There is one profound difference. Gamers engage in a variable conversation with a game—with the creators, with distant players, and with themselves. Whether you play Farmville or Call of Duty, you not only get to have fun but you can learn a bit about yourself and the world through your own actions. And if you want, the world can learn a bit about you, too.

Today, GTA, Call of Duty, and Halo create incredibly immersive game experiences. But in the early days, half of the immersion was supplied by your own brain. Take EA’s Starflight, for example. The graphics were nowhere near sufficient to create the immersion you might get in today’s high-end console games, but a delicate balance of gameplay, graphics, and sound managed to captivate.

I remember the first time a huge alien warship (a small sprite) pulled up alongside my ship (an even smaller sprite). I hailed the aliens on the comm frequency and the conversation didn’t go so well. Time slowed down as crucial seconds ticked by and I fumbled to raise my shields and start firing.  It had that split-second tension of a Western gunfight. Another time I was on foot, doing some planetside mining, and I saw a strange shape quickly closing in on me. The ship’s scanner said it was a cross between a bear and a carnivorous ox. I couldn’t help but laugh at my uneasy imaginings of that hideous creature galloping my way.  

What was on the screen was not compelling. There was no VISCERAL immersion like we experience today. But the interface, the timing of the audio and visual cues, and my own imagination all combined to make me feel like I was actually on that surface and in big trouble. Watching the cluster of pixels that was ME struggle to get back to the rover in time was genuinely exciting.  

I think Starflight was a kind of precursor to sandbox games like GTA. There was plenty of room to wander. One could spend hours cruising in and out of solar systems, zipping through wormholes.  And if you wanted more structure you could follow the storyline and complete missions.

Starflight was also an ancestor of casual games with virtual goods. You could easily pass the time mining strange planets for money—or collect, trade, and sell the cool artifacts you discovered. 

As far as space-themed games go, you can’t really compare Starflight of 1985 to Halo or Eve Online today. But you have to tip your hat to Binary Systems for delivering an emergent, seemingly unscripted sandbox experience on a primitive PC.

It wasn’t multi-player and it had only bare bones assets but that game made you BELIEVE. I suspect that Starflight and other early classics have something to teach about how to design games for another device with restrictive architecture: the smart phone.

It has never been more fun to envision, create, and distribute a game than right now. Today’s market is a huge new global audience—all ages, both sexes, five continents, myriad devices. I’d like to see games better reflect the broad tastes of the audience, and introduce diverse themes and fresh gameplay mechanics. But more importantly, I think it’s time games have more soul. What is soul? In this instance I’m talking about something that makes you feel and makes you think, long after you’ve stopped playing. I play and appreciate all kinds of games, from time-wasting diversions to wonderful, immersive worlds. But I think the technology and the talent are finally in place to create more soulful experiences. I also think the definition of a game is changing. A guided journey with a goal need not be the only model. The act of playing music may be a better metaphor for the joy that can be had from a game experience. Lately I’ve been working on designs for “casual storytelling apps” for smart phones. I’m hoping they can bring the soul.  This project looks like it has some soul:   http://vimeo.com/18527095

EA 1987: This company invented the game publishing model, innovating moment to moment. Trip Hawkins, Bing Gordon, and Don Traeger were inspiring. I saw the Earl Weaver, Chuck Yeager, Madden, and Jordan v. Bird titles come together. Met some amazing people and long-term friends, like Stan Roach and Kelly Flock.  

Activision 1990: A warm, fun place to work, pre-Kotick, with lots of laughter in the office and socializing outside of work. Lunchtime hoops went way over an hour. The Manhole was our big hit. The corporate culture was full of characters and did not discriminate: Lucy Bradshaw and several other talented women in the industry got their start here. I had a great crew led by Michael Latham and Wayne Townsend.  Inspired by working with Jeff Tunnell at Dynamix, I eventually left to become a developer.

Pacific Gameworks 1992: Started my own company with Bret Hamilton. Working with Greg Zumwalt and Mark Waterman to create our stunning (at the time) 3D hoops tech was thrilling. Don Traeger and Stewart Bonn at EA gave us our first big contract: Jordan In-Flight. Being an indy developer was empowering but really tough.

BMG Interactive 1995: The huge conglomerate got in and out of the biz quickly, but I reunited with my old mentor Don Traeger, met Sam Houser, and attended the Grammys. I loved working with external developers like Mark Long at Zombie and Ramy Weitz at Pixel.

Segasoft Networks 1998: Heat.net was a pioneering social game network. I confess to once playing Sin multi-player with an invisibility cheat. Heat had a visionary business model but Sega ran out of patience. I worked with superstar marketer Sarah Anderson.

Rockstar Games 1998/2003: All the intensity and excitement of early EA but more fun. Geronimo Barrera, Kris Severson, and I started the SF office.   Working with Sam and Dan Houser, Terry Donovan, Jamie King, and Gary Foreman in New York was challenging, often hilarious, and ALWAYS inspiring. I’m extremely grateful to all of them.

Mumbo Jumbo 2006: Burned out from hardcore games, the casual space was a fresh start for me. At MJ I learned about the female audience, digital distribution, and mobile. Mark Cottam, Ron Dimant and Jay Dinucci were really fun to work with. Matt Lichtenwalter, and George Bray were intensely passionate about games.  In 2009, I left to pursue entrepreneurial goals once again.

I started in video games in 1987 at Electronic Arts before it went public.  It has been a fascinating journey since then and I feel fortunate to have been a part of the industry from the very beginning. Playing and studying games on all the various platforms over the years and helping some cool ones get built has been the most fun you could ever have and call it a job.  Today, video games are a big part of our mainstream culture and I’m just as interested and fascinated by them as ever, maybe more. Though the industry is several decades old now, it’s really just getting started as a popular art form.  I’m really looking forward to the amazing games that are surely coming, and with a little luck, I’ll get to make a few of them.

THE KILLIONAIRES is a new collective for indie developers.       I joined because I have a soft spot for the indie developers in our business.  A lot of innovation comes from the independent developer community, even more than ever with the explosion of casual gaming and the arrival of the iPhone.

I recently worked on a game design that included transmedia elements.  Transmedia creates content for several platforms at once. As opposed to the current licensing system that typically generates works that are derivative and inferior to the original property, transmedia applies a ‘distributed storytelling’ approach. Transmedia storytelling is the process by which a narrative unfolds across multiple platforms (video games, film/television, comic books, new media, etc) in a self-contained yet complementary fashion. In the ideal form of transmedia storytelling, each medium does what it does best - a story and its corresponding narrative ‘world’ might be introduced in a film, expanded through television, novels, and comics, and its world and characters literally explored and experienced through game play. Each franchise entry is self-contained to enable autonomous consumption - one need not see the film to enjoy the game, and vice-versa. The transmedia approach generates multiple revenue streams and allows the content to be created, distributed, and consumed in any chronology across all media platforms.

I’m editing a GRAPHIC NOVEL called RUBICON with Mark Long. It’s a kind of Seven Samurai story with Navy SEALS in Afghanistan. The art is by an unpublished Italian artist named Mario Stilla. It’s my first original graphic novel and I’m really enjoying it. So much so that Mark and I are co-writing a prequel titled SHINJUKU.

The series is based on a larger-than-life former SEAL who is a bad ass and absolutely hilarious. He’s like a Seth Rogen character as a SEAL.