In case you haven’t seen Joe Danger yet, you’ll only have to watch the trailer to feel the light-heartedness that characterizes the game and the man. That’s rather fortunate for him: one’d better take things lightly when they spend their life falling down heavily.
This week at GDC in San Francisco I could meet with 2 of the 4 Hello Games people, the team that’s creating Joe Danger. Sean Murray and Grant Duncan were kind enough to let me play the game and answer a couple questions.
Me: What time was it when you had the idea for Joe Danger?
Sean: What time?? Hmm… We all got together in one place. We’ve all been friends before we started Hello Games. We kind of started out knowing what type of games we’d want to make without even really talking about it. We worked together and we’re friends as well.
Grant: The conversations we’ve had, the things we talked about. Crazy Taxi is one that came up all the time, like when you play Crazy Taxi you want to complete all the crazy boxes. They’re so difficult. Well Sean’s done it and I’ve done it: when we found that out it was fun because nobody’s done it.
Sean: We’ve got the same reference points. I think We’re all about the same age. You have that connection where it’s kind of rare where we can just talk about some obscure cartoon and it turns out we all watched it. It’s that kind of thing. You know you’ll be saying an hard quote, you know how friends are, and everyone instantly gets it, you don’t have to explain things. We actually get that all the time.
To get back to what we were saying, how we came up with the idea. We were all in the same place wondering what game we should make. Grant had a box of toys that he brought in from his parents’ attic. He brought them in to demonstrate ideas with Lego: “This is how my game would be like, it would be a 3rd person shooter…” and he’d have Optimus Prime in his hand pretending to shoot at stuff.
We had this toy we would actually play with. It was one of these things you’d wind up and let go. We’d just use it to play with this, not to mock anything out, build ramps, fire out windows, fire down holes. Playing with it, We realized nothing is quite like this in games, when you actually build things. Building ramps for your stunts is much fun, as actually firing it. We kind of started from there but also what we started talking about: when you’re playing with toys as a kid, you kind of have this world that you made up around it.
Grant: It’s what you imaginate when you’re playing. Especially if you’ve watched toddlers with toys in their hands, making them fight: nothing really happens, they’re just smashing them together, but in their minds a real fight is going on with a full landscape in the background. That’s kind of how we wanted to do things. What we created is hopefully our take on how a child plays with a toy.
Sean: we were talking about what this character was when we were firing this guy on a bike over these enormous ramps out the window, you know, compared to his size. What would this character actually be like? He crashes all the time but it doesn’t matter he’s always “one more go, I’ll go again!” And he’s never gonna make any of these jumps… We were building this little character in our heads and we started to wonder what he could be like.
Me: Maybe he could look like Tony Hawk? The guy who always comes back, no matter how hard he falls….
Sean: Yes, hehe. The thing Grant was saying about the levels and stuff, there’s a really random, almost surreal selection of elements in the game such as massive heads in the background with faces painted on them and things, but people don’t even notice.
Grant: When you were a child you’d always play with Cosmocats and Transformers at the same time and you’d have all these fixtures just because you’d have that many toys. It’s a bit like Toy Story where you have all these contrasting characters that don’t really make sense but it just works.
Me: It’s a bit of kid’s room, in a way.
Grant: yeah!
Me: How do you contribute to Joe Danger?
Grant: I do all the art, everything you can see. All the animations and most of the levels as well.
Sean: Yeah Grant does pretty much everything.
Grant: I make the game.
Sean: We (Sean, Ryan and David) do all the things that are hard to quantify. That’s the thing with programming. There are many things that you don’t think about. People that don’t make games or work in the industry find that abstract, what most of us spend their time doing. Like getting the handling right or the camera or the shaders or graphical style or whatever but that’s kind of what the three of us are responsible for. Me I’m, I guess, more into making the engine, that kind of thing, but I think overall all of us contribute to the design quite a lot. that’s the thing. We don’t have a designer.
Grant: Each and one of us will play the game and we’ll spend a lot of time just talking about our ideas and that’s pretty much the one thing that’s constantly ongoing, as we’re working. We’re constantly adding new things, evolving, changing. That’s why there probably are a lot of things.
Sean: Yeah I think that’s the thing. I was talking about how we all like the same kinds of games but it’s not actually true. What’s true is that Grant really likes platformers, Sonic in particular. Dave, who we work with, he really likes Tony Hawk’s. Ryan really likes racing games. I’m a lot into Sega games like Crazy Taxi and Monkey Ball but also things like Mario and I think it’s almost as if all these game types had collided.
The problem we have is that nobody ever says “no”. Dave will add his Tony Hawk style mechanic or whatever and it just fits in with what the rest of us are doing. Ryan’s trying to turn it into a racing game, and it’s fine, it kind of works out. We are that, we are kind of a band basically, a group of people that just add on top of everyone else’s ideas as we feed off each other.
Grant: It’s very strange. It wouldn’t be the same game if one of us wasn’t involved because we all have such a weird impact on each other, right? Things I do, even when I’m on my own working on the art, I would never have done just because someone said something one day and we just kind of bounce on each other.
Sean: I can see some of Dave’s personality in parts of the game. It’s weird and that’s something I always talk about.
Me: I don’t find it that weird… People wonder if games are art but i think the question is obsolete and the way you describe it is pretty interesting in that regard.
Sean: Yes but if you talk about a lot of mainstream games, games I worked on, what I felt -while I really contributed to them- is that they don’t reflect my personality. I think, when I got into games, I got into games playing games where I could feel other people’s personality. When I played Quake and Doom and Wolfenstein, I knew what iD would be like, you know. I knew John Romero would have long hair. I knew that he would have an ego. You knew they would like heavy metal and Nine Inch Nails, even before they put it on the soundtrack. You kind of felt like you knew what they would be like and what kind of things they were into, what kind of art style, what t-shirt they were wearing… and they did! And that made a big difference because you could… certainly as a teenager I could totally relate, even aspire to it almost.
Grant: Even if you didn’t like it, you’d still appreciate that. The game had a personality of its own.
Grant Duncan and Sean Murray
Me: That’s taking me to the next question: why did you choose to make games instead of selling vacuum cleaners?
Sean: I would say that none of us chose it actively. Like you start doing it at such a young age that you don’t really think about it. Definitely all of us got into it really young. You find it as a way of expressing yourself and then you stick with that, you know what I mean… Which I’m sure is the same for people that get into film making. You know, they pick up the camera when they’re still young, they’re not even thinking “this is what i wanna do”. They just find “I’m allright at this” and they get this feedback and get better.
Grant: They’re almost like playing with something. They found a camera and they play with it. I started playing platform games and taking notes. Then I came across level editors and started messing around with them, finding out how things worked and stuff. And it goes on and on.
Sean: There’s nothing like making something and then seeing someone sit down and playing it…
Grant: As long as they’re enjoying it!
Sean: Yes!… Well, even if they’re not. I used to make little games and my friends would play them and if it was rubbish, you could tell it was rubbish and you just wanted to make it better. There isn’t really anything like that. You get into that quite young and that’s what you wanna do.
Me: What do you mean quite young?
Sean: I started when I was like 6 years old or something. I started programming in basic cos my older brother was doing it. I got into it that way.
Grant: Well I didn’t start with computer graphics but I started drawing at a really young age, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and stuff.
Sean: I think we all started at that kind of age. Hello Games was formed but we didn’t know each other (except for Grant and Dave who grew up together). Somewhere, Hello Games was formed 20 years ago.
Thanks Sean and Grant!