Hellgate: London Q&A

1Up has posted a two-page Q&A with Flagship Studios chief visionary officer Dave Brevik and art director Phil Shenk about their diabolic action RPG, Hellgate: London. Here’s a quick teaser:

Q: I think there are a lot of people who are really interested in understanding how the process of making a game works. From your perspective, can you give us a little walkthrough…for this game in particular, take it back to when you first started working on Hellgate. You left Blizzard, you guys were all sort of working out of…was it Bill’s apartment or something?

A: It was Tyler [Thompson]’s house, and luckily his wife was in grad school so she was gone most of the day. The artists were in the basement, and the programmers were in the kitchen, and Ken [Williams] and Bill [Roper] were kind of around the dining room table, and those were good times. There was mariachi music playing next door and it was hot in the middle of the summer, but it was fun. Even at the time, we were saying we were going to look back and say, “These were our garage years and we’re going to be able to wear that as a badge of honor and say how proud it was to work back then.” But back then, the idea we had basically was we wanted a first-person shooter with RPG elements, basically Diablo from a first-person perspective — or, that changed into a sort of third-person over the [shoulder] perspective — but we wanted to bring the camera in and get that close-up feel, but have the random levels and the random items and the character advancement and all that stuff that we did in Diablo.

We started basically with a pretty simple premise. We did make a thick design doc, but we don’t hold to that very rigorously. It’s sort of like, “Here are some ideas,” and we go off and make a game and it evolves organically.