FWA Feature: Exigent and the future of gaming in India - Part 1: Paul Steed

“Exigent. It comes from the Latin root exigens and means both demanding and absolutely necessary. If you’re reading this then you’re thinking about using an offshore art outsourcing studio or looking for help with all that next gen content you need to create. Consider Exigent for one reason: experience.”

That’s an excerpt from the little box of text on Exigent’s website. Exigent is an outsourcing company that deals in video game art. See that last line about “experience”? They’re not kidding. Blessed with a tightly-knit staff of people from the teams of the Quake games, NFL Gameday and X-Men Legends games (to name a few), these guys know what they’re talking about.

Earlier today, a friend of mine and I got invited down to visit Exigent’s new office in a neighbouring city (Noida) here in India. Spending nearly five hours at the studio at a stretch, we got to shoot the shit with a ton of talented people about the gaming industry on a global scale as well as with regard to India. Our first meeting was with Chief Creative Officer, Paul Steed, who’s an industry veteran and has worked at Origin Systems, EA, Id Software, Wild Tangent and Atari. Paul’s credited with a lot of awesome games, including Quake and Wing Commander. He also developed Betty Bad and is not only a regular speaker at GDC, he’s also on the advisor board for the event.

An extremely smart and interesting individual, Paul’s discussion with us was a mix of both, serious talk regarding the industry and Exigent itself with regard to the PC and mobile gaming scene (which he thinks are the future of gaming) and other gaming topics in general. Oh, and Bullet Witch. (Yes, I still love it)

Before you go any further, I’d like to point out a couple of things.

1. No one held back. There was no PR bullshit of any sort. People called things as they saw them.

2. This blog’s name is Flame War ADVANCE.


Ishaan: What is Exigent and what exactly is it that your company does?

Paul: All right, here’s what we do. I’m based in the States. I left Atari in September. Now, here’s the thing: While I was at Atari, I would meet people like me [now] who worked at outsource companies, and when I had to ask them a question, a lot of the time, they wouldn’t be able to answer it, and I’d be like, “Why can’t they answer my questions? Why am I not speaking to someone like me?” They had a ton of problems with inconsistency and stuff.

Later, my partners spoke to me and said that they had infrastructure in India, so I met with a few folks in June and I was blown away by how dedicated you folks are to gaming. Now, we’re an outsource company. We hire people who love games. If you don’t love games, you can’t work here. Here at the office, we’ve got a mega-projector and systems and stuff. You know, you have to play games, you have to watch movies and stuff. We’ve got a PS3 coming soon, too…

But to answer your question, gaming is new to India. So, we have to teach Indians how to make games for an American audience. And it’s complicated because what makes good Indian art doesn’t make a good American game. There’s this cultural difference. So, our focus is to teach our staff about these cultural differences. Our ultimate goal is to have a game made by Indians that Americans buy. It’s sad, but most games are made either in America or in Europe.

Ishaan: What about Japan?

Paul: Japan is like ... you’ll never get into that market. It’s extremely tight. They don’t do online. They do mostly console gaming and handheld gaming. The future of gaming is really mobile games and PC games. There’s more computers in the world, there’s more cell phones in the world than there are consoles and that’ll never change. India’s interesting because the government’s really supporting broadband users. So by 2010, there’s going to be 20 million people with broadband. For me, the future is the global market not the U.S. market. I want to create a game for multiple cultures. The first step to this is creating an outsourcing company. I can use my reputation to get us some attention and get Indian gamers in a place where you can represent this dream.

Ishaan: So, does that mean we’ll be seeing something based on Indian mythology as well? Are you working at that?

Paul: Not yet, no. Right now, we’re just working on building up a reputation. We’re working on some pretty high-profile games for around 8 different publishers. Unfortunately, right now I can’t show you, but by this time next year, you’ll see a lot of it.

Ishaan: You’re a regular speaker at GDC. Would this tie in with that in any way?

Paul: Some of our titles have already been announced publicly but some haven’t. Well, strategically, it’s not a very good idea for one company to know if we’re working on something for another company. For example; I might be working on a project for SOE that EA doesn’t know about, or I might be working on a project for Activision that Midway doesn’t know about. They might think it’s weird. Everything is about security here. The games, you don’t say the name of games. Project Orange, Project Blue ... it’s kinda cool.

The difference between us and other companies is, we’re an outsourcing company that’s trying to beat China. China’s the country with the largest outsourcing, so it’s our main competition. And most importantly, my goal is to make a company that people go to because we’re good, not because we’re in India. So, we focus on training and hiring the right people with the right attitude. It’s all about the attitude. To me, you don’t need to go to through college. You don’t need a degree to work here.

Ishaan: Back in ’01, you said the same thing in an interview with Melanie Campbell. Do you still think that holds true today, especially in a country like India where formal education is arguably the most important step in shaping your career?

Paul: That has to change. If you want to make games, it has to change. Or you’ll need to open schools that support a substantial curriculum for making games. People are taking games seriously, but in the entertainment space, people often confuse games with movies. When you make games, you gotta be a little bit of a rebel. You need to be different.

The reason I’m in India is there’s this growth in India and China. A lot of analysts believe that India and China will be the top economies in the next five years. I mean, think about it. There’s more English speakers in China than there are in the U.S. because of their population.

The one thing about India is that there’s this newness in the game industry. It’s the same newness I felt when I first got into the industry.

Ishaan: Kind of like going back to your roots?

Paul: Exactly. I just got back from this gaming event, Chaos; and it was just this huge LAN party with a bunch of people playing games. I was really surprised by the amount of organization there … I mean, I could see this growing into another GDC. I’m on the advisor board for GDC, so I’m trying to get them to have a GDC India and a GDC China. So, they are going to be trying for the first time, a GDC China. If GDC China takes off, we’ll set up a GDC India.

[At this point, the effects of my friend’s joint (or whatever it was that he’d so obviously been smoking before we met up kicked in and he started to rave about how much video games today suck and sequels suck, using the MGS, Half Life and Tomb Raider games as examples.]

Paul: Well, there’s two factors to take into consideration. The thing about sequels is, when a game is being developed, no one knows if it’s going to be a success. When a sequel is planned, sometimes it doesn’t happen until the first game is nearly done. You get comments from the press before that. Then, the designer has to think, “OK, how do I top myself?”

Like, in the Matrix, you can kind of tell the second and third were just added on. They weren’t initially planning on sequels.

But there’s also you as a player. You change. You get used to the tricks. They don’t make you go “Woah!” any more. It’s harder and harder to make you happy. And you know what, sometimes people only have that one good game. They only have that one good character. Lara Croft was one of the first female characters out there. Now you’ve got tons of characters out there that are deeper. I mean, Lara Croft’s just really this big-chested ... almost a cliché. A bimbo that tries to sound smart because she has a British accent.

You gotta admit, sometimes your expectations – especially people like you guys, considering what it is that you do – your expectations can be sky-high.

Ishaan: Well, I’ll admit that the gaming community – and yeah, sometimes the press – has this habit of hating on a sequel before it’s even out. Like, take the Chrono series for example. No one would ever say that Chrono Cross was the better game. They all prefer Chrono Trigger, whereas Cross is probably one of my favourite games of all time.

Paul: Although, would you say it’s your favourite game because it’s nostalgic?

Ishaan: Oh, definitely. But don’t you think that’s a good thing? Don’t you think nostalgia can be used by developers to their advantage?

Paul: The thing with nostalgia is, it’s considered a thing of the past. You know, Atari has this habit of re-releasing all their old games and when people see it, they go, “Woah, dude! I remember playing this game!” You can’t take that game and compare it to a modern game because the graphics suck. But I know exactly what you mean … my favourite game is Warcraft II. It’s like comfort food to me! Or even the original Doom. You want to go back to that, but it’s hard to go back to it because you already know the entire game.

I think nostalgia’s good if you’ve got it on handhelds. It’s a small screen; you have these Doom 2-like graphics…

Ishaan: It’s more personal.

Paul: More personal. And I don’t think people do that enough when they make their mobile games. They don’t make them nostalgic enough. When you ask a publisher to make a game that’s nostalgic, they’re skeptical, because they think there’s maybe 10% of people who are going to buy it. The rest probably won’t care because they’ve never played the original.

Ishaan: It’s interesting you should say that because Nintendo’s been thriving off nostalgia for years. Their games practically ooze with nostalgia.

Paul: Yeah. Now, do you think they do that through the characters they re-use in some ways?

Ishaan: Definitely. You know how after Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask came out...

Paul: Now I feel nostalgic! [laughs]

Ishaan: ...and people liked it. Not loved it, but they liked it. And then you had Wind Waker, and everyone went, “What the heck is this?!” Not many people saw it as a true Zelda game. But it was.

Paul: Yeah, I think that way about games like Halo 2. I mean, you look at the game and you think, “It’s Halo, right? Hey, this time around, I want to kill things faster!” The future ... the real future of games – like what you’re touching upon – lies with the users. I mean, you guys dictate the content. You dictate the level of customization that you want.

You know, I was at GDC and Phil Harrison was giving his demonstration on Home and Little Big Planet? I was blown away. I could tell immediately where they were going with it and it was so effortlessly cool. You could make this game, get your friend to playtest it and publish it to the web. And that’s just brilliant. Brilliant. Because what’s going to happen is, the way people get hits on their YouTube ... that’s how many hits you’re going to get on your game.

Can you imagine going to school and suddenly; this one kid’s a rock star because everyone’s playing his game? Enabling the community to have access to making games is what it’s about. And that’s why we’re here, too. In India. It’s not that you can’t find good designers in the U.S., just that it’s so intellectually competitive here. We’re here because we want to teach as well as work on new game designs.

Ishaan: You said you quit Atari in September, right?

Paul: Yup.

Ishaan: I just happened to be going through the Exigent site and I saw a Bullet Witch poster around here somewhere. Were you involved with the game?

Paul: Yeah. Yeah, I was the creative director from the publisher’s side. We created the cover for it. It was my parting gift to Atari. [laughs] So, Bullet Witch is cool because, the way Atari works is, they take this existing title and they release it somewhere else. People come in, they try to fix it up for the American audience and you sell it.

Bullet Witch is a really cool title because it just came out of nowhere. At first, it didn’t look very good, then all of a sudden, it starts looking good and people like it. And it’s really fuckin’ hard.

Ishaan: I have the strangest obsession with that game.

Paul: Well, you know, just the general concept of a witch gunning stuff up … I love it. There’s some other cool ones. You guys have played Ico. Do you like Colossus ... Shadow of the Colossus?

Ishaan: Oh, hell yes.

[My buddy says it’s the closest Sony’s ever getting to Zelda. I say that might be Okami, not SoC.]

Paul: Is the PS2 dead?

[We both answer “NO!” in unison. Paul grins. My friend says that the PS2 is in fact lasting us for what looks to be ten years, just like Sony said it would.]

Paul: What happened to the PSP? In your professional opinion, why is the PSP not a hit?

Ishaan: In my opinion, what happened was that Sony just lost focus. They tried to do too much with it. And God, the price. You look at the PSP and you’re like, “Hey, do you even realize your portable costs as much as Nintendo’s next-gen home system?”

You have iPods for media and you have the DS for games. Why would you want a PSP? Dedicated devices are always better than all-purpose devices. The PSP was all set to kick the DS’s ass. And it would have, had Nintendo not released their tech demo of Nintendogs. No one knew what to do with two screens and a touchscreen before Nintendogs showed them.

Paul: That’s really interesting ... so, content. OK, would you guys like to meet some of our artists we have here now?

Ishaan: Just a couple more questions, if that’s OK with you.

Paul: Sure.

Ishaan: Gaming is an expensive hobby. And in India, it’s a hobby that not many people can fund. How does this affect you, and is there a solution for it?

Paul: Well, it affects me in a couple different ways. First I have to deal with the piracy. My take on piracy is kind of weird. I know I can’t stop it, so I don’t try to stop it. I just try to create a whole fanbase. If you can buy it, buy it. I was in China and I saw a copy of my book ... my first book, translated in Chinese and it had my name on it, and I was like, “Well, at least they put my name on it!” I don’t think people mean to steal when they pirate your stuff. I just don’t think they realize that it only increases the price.

Another way to see it is that we should focus our development on PC games and mobile games. You know, some day in the future, we’re going to go from Exigent to Exigent Interactive. And when that day comes, we’re going to be focusing solely on PC games. That’s what’s most accessible for audiences. You know, people talk about making the perfect game, but is there a perfect platform? What if you had the perfect game on the wrong platform? How many people wish they could take those SNES games and put them on your cell phone?

Taking piracy into consideration, you gotta pick your platform wisely.

Ishaan: Do you plan to pursue handheld games as well?

Paul: You know, that requires a certain expertise that I’m not sure I have. My expertise lies in telling stories. That’s my kind of game. I want you to laugh, cry and get pissed off when you play my game. Because if you’re not going through that range of emotions, it’s like, why am I wasting your time? Why are you playing my game?

And it’s not easy to do. Kojima-san, Itagaki-san ... they know how to get that feeling of… [trails off] You know, I partied with Itagaki in Tokyo, and he refers to his games as his children. Dead or Alive is his daughter. Gaiden ... Ninja Gaiden is his son. And I was so confused about his three-year old daughter and his other son, and I was like, “Dude, what is this from like, another wife or something?” and everyone else is like, “Shh, shh!” and I’m like, “What?”

“He’s talking about his games!”

“What? No!”

[Much laughter ensues.]

[My friend asks about cinematics and atmosphere in gaming. Why is it that games seem to be lacking in this area of late?]

Paul: In the past, cinematics used be rewards. They used to be pay-offs. Cinematic alone isn’t enough anymore.

Ishaan: Interactive cinematic.

Paul: Yeah, I want to be interactive. Like in Half Life, you can look around at the street and cars and in the cable cars. I think cinematics are still important. But now, there’s more of more ingame cinematics. Like in WarCraft III, you’ve got the game art cinematics and you’ve the rendered cinematics. That confused the crap out of me sometimes. When I was at Origin, our slogan was “We create worlds.” Wing Commander, Star Commander ... had tons of cinematics. You couldn’t reach that level of animation in real-time. I don’t think game developers are using cinematics as they should. I want to make games that are epic. I don’t think a game like Gears of War is epic. It’s so overrated.

[My friend says he thinks Halo is, too.]

Paul: Everything about Halo is ... so done before. Just that it was the only thing available for the Xbox, so it developed this cult following of fourteen-year olds who don’t know any better. I mean, think about it. You’re fourteen ... Doom’s already gone. Nobody’s playing Quake any more. And who the hell is Duke Nukem?

[Paul reminisces joyfully about Duke3d. Thankfully, there are no tears in his eyes.]

Ishaan: You know, it’s strange ... as far as FPSes are concerned; I’ve always been a PC gamer. I’d never touch a console shooter. But when Metroid Prime hit the GameCube, I played it extensively. I loved it.

Paul: Have you seen the one on the Wii? I was in Seattle and they gave us a special demo of it. Basically, you run around like this [motions with left hand to indicate the nunchuk] and you point your gun like this [moves his right hand to indicate the Wiimote].

Ishaan: Did you like it?

Paul: Oh, I liked it. Just that you gotta do it like this [rests both hands on his lap]. At first you think it’s this [stretches both arms out forward], but you just get tired. Oh, I like Wii Bowling. It’s so much fun. It’s stupid fun. You can turn the ball … you can twist it…

That’s the power of the Wii. You have a great tactile experience.

Ishaan: I just hope they manage to remain loyal to the core gamer, not just the casual ones.

Paul: Well, you gotta understand, the casual gamer is like, 44-year old housewives who don’t want to pay for anything. So how do you market a game to a 44-year old housewife who doesn’t want to buy it? A real casual game is at a mall, where you’re just hangin’ out, you know? And for years, my friend’s been going, “Let’s do the mall game and get all the girl gamers!”

And I’m like, “Number 1. Do you really want to ask your girlfriend if you can play on her PlayStation 2?” You don’t want your girlfriend on your Wii. I don’t want my wife or girlfriend gaming. I want her to go shopping. In the real world. You know, leave me with my games!

Following this, we wrapped up the interview quickly, so Paul could introduce us to his team of artists. With them, we discussed the relationship between technology and games, the decline of console gaming and the ugly truth behind screenshots.

As much fun as this interview might have been, I really doubt you guys want to read any more, so I’ll save that for part two. Stay tuned to Flame War ADVANCE!

[Update: Click here for Part 2.]