We basically have 18 months to go from some nice art and a little bit of AI and turn that into what became Gears 1. That's what I did. Again, it was probably at most an 80-person team to get Gears 1 done. We had to pull a bunch of people off Unreal Tournament 3 and focus on Gears, so instead of parallel development we essentially made it serial development. We hit lightning in a bottle, we had no idea what we had, it was a miracle project. If you were look at the glideslope of the [chart tracking] bug [fixes]—people talk about having a glideslope landing pattern. Ours was a base jump. It was basically this nightmare finish. We have thousands of bugs to we have no bugs was like…weeks, which was crazy. BioShock Infinite aside, it probably ranks as one of the hardest projects I've ever shipped in my life. That was a true test of "OK, what does it take to rally a team?"'They're like 'So, we have this thing, it's called Gears of War, you haven't heard of it, we're working with Epic Games and it's something that we'd like you to jump onto.' I was like "OK, cool.' That was…January 2005? I go onto Gears 1 and it's on fire. It's just not going to ship."
VICE Games: I think three times you've mentioned being near projects on fire. I want to make clear that's true of most projects. They're all on fire at some point. What's the quote? It's a miracle that any game ships, given how difficult it is to make a game? That notion of a game being on fire, what are some of the takeaways you've brought to being a studio director?Part of the fire is also ambition, when you look at what you want to make and when you need to do it. Anything can be solved with reducing scope. If you look at the iron triangle—there's resources, money, and time—you have to manage this triangle. You could always go "It's not looking good, therefore I can't add anymore resources and I can't add time, so what I can do is cut scope." But you have a certain bar, a certain threshold by which it's a viable game, so you can't cut too deep. You'll do that along the way. And we use anatomical things [to talk about this]: "Oh, we're just in the muscle now. We haven't hit bone yet." That's how you talk when you talk about cutting features."Part of [a game's development being on] fire is also ambition, when you look at what you want to make and when you need to do it. Anything can be solved with reducing scope. If you look at the iron triangle—there's resources, money, and time—you have to manage this triangle."
VICE Games: You mentioned the Gears 1 artists finding a way to sneak a nearly-finished work into a different part of the game. Is that common?Yeah. Easter eggs are a way to sustain your game. It allows you a news beat. Six months from now, you can put out a "Hey, I saw this easter egg" or "There's this thing you didn't find yet" and that people get excited about the game again. We see easter eggs as a positive thing.In the past, we've been very deliberate. The thing that's changed is the wild wild west. There's been a lot of missteps around that. It used to be just that, people saying "I'm sneaking something in, hopefully my producer doesn't catch me. I hope the lead artist doesn't catch me. It'll be my little secret." Then, we've literally seen games pulled off the shelves and cost millions and millions of dollars because somebody snuck something in the game they weren't supposed to sneak. Once that story happens, you have to be upfront with the team. "You love easter eggs, we love easter eggs, we're all on the same page. All I ask is that you just vet them through something. Make sure your lead knows, make sure your producer knows.We'll dedicate time to it because we believe in it, but it can't be under the table. If it's under the table and it's found and it causes an issue, it's all on you and you have to know that." So we just made it more official. Nobody's sneaking anymore. I mean, it comes down to philosophy.Some developers love putting each other in the game? I feel a little weirded out by it. If you go look at all the gravestones in BioShock Infinite, it's probably all team member names. I think people still sneak their names in? I try to tamp that down a little bit. I don't want to be heavy handed, but it feels weirdly self-indulgent when you're like, "Oh, it's Fergusson & Fergusson Law firm!" It just feels weird in a game, where somebody is like "I have to put myself in this game now." It feels self-indulgent and I don't like it, but I'm pretty sure if you were to check every gravestone in Gears 4 you'd probably find somebody there.VICE Games: I guess I never thought about the notion that 20 years ago, people weren't scavenging through game code. That's a more formalized process now. A game is released and people are combing through betas, and there's a whole phrase for it: datamining. That's an extension of the easter egg philosophy going back to the Atari 2600. I guess I shouldn't be shocked that easter eggs are now in a spreadsheet and there's a pitch process for them.Yeah. Before, on Gears 2, there was downtime, so while you were waiting for a build, you'd have hours where you'd be like, "OK, I made a bunch of fixes." Your team gets smaller and smaller and smaller and eventually you end up with your dirty dozen. These are the only people who can touch the game because we don't want to shake the jello. These are the trusted 12. So they'd make fixes and they're waiting for bugs to come in and basically they'd be like "OK, I'm sitting here for a couple hours, I've got nothing going on, I'm going to open up my level and start to create an easter egg and play with it."When you look at the Gears 2 cowboy hat easter egg, that was just Dave Nash sitting at his desk going, "I'm kinda bored, so I'm going to put this in." He showed it to me we cleared it, and it's probably one of my favorite easter eggs. But it was just him going, "I'm at my desk waiting for the next bug to come in, might as well do this while I'm waiting.""Every game I've been on, in order to make it, you've had to cut. If you look at Gears 1, at the end there's a scene where on enemy flies off on this giant uberreaver [the Hydra]. The artists were like, "We're so far along, we've got it almost done, but we can't put it in the game and get the AI done," so they were all sad I had to come along and say "Hey, we're cutting this." They found a way to put it back in."