ByJoe McCloud
In a world where real-time strategy games and first-person shoot-'em-ups rule, Kronos Digital Entertainment is taking a chance with a different type of game: Meat Puppet. This beautiful, gore-infested, Crusader: No Remorse-like actionfest-with-puzzle-elements promises plenty of hours of gameplay.
|
|
David Sears, Meat Puppet's producer/lead designer, agreed to talk to us about himself and this exciting new title.
|
PCGames:
I'll begin by asking how you got started in the game industry.
|
David Sears:
Actually, I began covering the video-game industry as a journalist at Compute magazine, before they shut down for good. I started there in '91 and was a freelancer for about a year. After that I did the design for CyberDreams' I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream before I went to Virgin in '92.
|
PCG:
I imagine it must be pretty difficult being both the producer and lead designer on Meat Puppet. How do you juggle the two jobs without cracking?
|
David Sears:
(laughs) I guess you just throw it all up in the air and then run for cover! No really, we've all been really busy and the whole team has been putting in crazy hours for the past eight months. Because it's such a big game, we would have had our hands full anyway, but the main reason we're so busy is that everybody's pretty fanatical about what they're doing. It's been a big sacrifice for everyone--it's pretty much no goofin' off, eat at your desk, work 12- to 14-hour days for a year, and still try to stay ahead of everybody else. Without giving you all the juicy insider political tales, we, like many other teams, had our problems, though the team we have now really came together beautifully.
|
PCG:
So everyone there is self-motivated?
|
David Sears:
Yes. Everyone is very self-motivated, very intelligent, and loves doing games.
|
PCG:
It sounds like you've got a phenomenal team, and the game shows it as well.
|
David Sears:
Thank you. It was out first isometric game and we wanted it to be huge. There was a point six months ago where we could have cut the game in half, but everyone said, "No, let's do whatever it takes to keep it all together." So it's not all about just being efficient, but wanting to do the whole thing. Hopefully we'll go on vacation after this.
|
PCG:
While playing the game, I noticed that it's very dark and almost Giger-esque. Was his artwork an influence? What was the inspiration behind Meat Puppet?
|
David Sears:
Our art director, Max Chapman, is a very dark and twisted individual, and that's what we relish most as far as content goes. The story, too, is really odd. We wanted to do an art deco, techno, organic direction. The reason for that is, in the future when L.A. is destroyed by The Earthquake, they're going to look for on architectural theme to rebuild it all, and since deco is the sort of predominant L.A. heritage, we think they'll build on that. I guess the things that have survived in the past have been the sort of art deco buildings, so we thought it'd be really cool to resurrect that as an art direction for a game set in the future. Of course, other games have done that, but ours is a little different.
|
PCG:
What else do you think makes Meat Puppet a unique game?
|
David Sears:
I'd say we pushed the genre in a lot of areas. Of course it's very, very violent, it's got a little vulgarity in it, and it's targeted at adults. But what really makes it unique is the blend of simple puzzle solution and action refinement. Mechanically, you can jump and have all these gymnastic abilities. You have projectiles you can track over the screen, and you can snipe ahead. There's also smooth-scrolling, stackable environments, so we can have a virtually infinitely high level. Our levels can be huge or they can be very tiny, and we played with that a lot: You can enter a room as small as a closet or as large as a blimp hanger. It's an RPG-type world, which is unusual for an action game, and we gave it sort of a linear background, but give people the ability to explore after completing their missions. Those are the main things.
|
PCG:
In the past, certain games have run into legal issues because of their titles. Did you run into any problems with the title of your game from the band by the same name?
|
David Sears:
We get that question a lot, but no. We actually didn't come up with the name--our president did. We did a legal search, and no one owns it. In fact, the band The Meat Puppets doesn't own it as far as we could tell from our search. Since then, they may have copyrighted or trademarked it, and we may change the name, but I'm not too worried about it.
|
PCG:
Because you're under the Playmates umbrella, do you have any plans to release a toy line if the game's successful?
|
David Sears:
We only discussed a toy line in the sketchiest of terms. And I guess it would boil down to a success thing. We are talking to the company about a sequel, though, and based on the response we're getting, I'd like to say that it's likely. But they haven't committed.
|
|
|