Neal Hallford on The Making of Betrayal at Krondor

[ERYFKRAD]

Any codexer can cover this panel?

 

[Sacred82]

Really enjoyed the last update. Reading about your trials & tribulations you always come across as a level-headed guy who would be cool to hang out with.

 

[nealiios]

Reading about your trials & tribulations you always come across as a level-headed guy who would be cool to hang out with.

Not so sure about level-headed, but flat-headed is a distinct possibility. When I was in kindergarten, I frequently won the eraser races. (Do you whipper snappers even still do that sort of thing, or did that go out with greased bear wrestling too?)

 

[Rhuantavan]

Part IX's up! http://nealhallford.com/post/149955183368/krondor-confidential-part-ix

Krondor Confidential - Part IX
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
– Virginia Woolf, A Room Of One’s Own

Only a few months after my grandmother Flora Hallford passed away in 1976, my much-loved Uncle J.L. did something so utterly heinous, I almost never forgave him for it. At the unbelievably ancient age of fifty-two years old, utterly without asking my permission, he married my Aunt Marianna.

Ten-year-old me was incensed beyond belief. He’d broken a basic uncle/nephew contract that the party of the first part wasn’t supposed to go and change things for the party of the second part. He was supposed to know this. I was used to him in a very certain way, in a specific set of circumstances. His purpose in life was to be my father’s wise older brother who lived with my grandmother, and looked out after her in their little place in Stilwell, Oklahoma. He told jokes. He told stories. He tattled about shenanigans that he and my father got up to when they were both young bucks. He wasn’t supposed to go out and have relationships, or fall in love, or cavort with women for God’s sake! I was scandalized beyond belief. I thought that was the worst he could do…and then he went one step further. He announced that he’d be selling my grandmother’s quaint little house on Chestnut Street in order to move in to a new house he was building for his new bride. It was the first time I’d become acquainted with the idea that someone could sell off a part of your soul.

At first I didn’t even want to walk into J.L. and Marianna’s new house, feeling in some sense that it was a betrayal of my grandmother’s memory, but once I got inside I could appreciate what they’d done. The interior was big and bright, and appointed with all the modern conveniences of the late 1970s including the retro-cool swag lamps and ceiling fans. A long hall radiating away from the living room led to the bedrooms, one of which was the place where the Atari 2600 was kept, and where I’d soon have my first encounters both with Pong and Dungeons & Dragons. The most important part of the house, at least to me, was almost like a secret, semi-hidden away next to a secondary bathroom and a laundry room that were down a step from the dining room. In a dark corner next to a washing machine, was a door that was often closed, but which led into into a place that for me was my equivalent of Narnia. It was my uncle’s holy of holies, his inner sanctum.

There are moments in your life that are formative, that stick with you for the rest of your life. For me, the moment that I first pushed through that door and stepped into J.L.’s study was something that burned into my brain, and created expectations that are with me still. His office was a simple room lined with bookcases, all of which were overflowing with tomes on science, and religion, and history, and classic works of literature. At the far end of the room, from a single, gauzy-curtained window, the ray of god was radiating down on his typewriter and a freshly varnished desk. Though it might have been my uncle’s room, I’ve always felt that it had been created just to give me that moment of inspiration. Although it would still be a few more years before I started to accept the idea I was meant to be a writer, it was definitely here that I’d first formed the idea of what a writer’s life should look like.

————————————————————————

By the start of 1993, a lot of changes had happened within Dynamix. Jeff Tunnell – co-founder of the company and the person who’d been the original brainchild behind acquiring the Riftwar license – had departed in order to start Jeff Tunnell Productions. Almost immediately following his exit, Dynamix had undergone a series of rapid-fire administrative shuffles that John Cutter and I had referred to as the “company hierarchy of the month.” We often joked that the tree of who reported to whom was being decided upon by a robotic corporate slot machine hidden somewhere in a basement in Oakhurst. For John this meant growing frustration over trying to establish a proper line of communication with upper management while I was left with more and more responsibility within the team. Fortunately forKrondor, we were both pulling in the same direction.

While the circus of management changes had been a point of consternation to some, another decision was to prove slightly more controversial. After years of doing business at the Atrium building in downtown Eugene, it was decided that the company would be relocating to the larger and nicer Riverfront Research Park that was going up near the University of Oregon. Although it was clear we were growing fast enough that space was needed for new bodies, many employees were used to the convenience of the Atrium. There was a restaurant downstairs, and we had easy access to a gym. A bus stopped in front of our building. Within a few minutes easy walk there were restaurants, bookstores, banks, the city park, and even the city’s civic center. Everything was right there for just about anything you wanted to do. Moving to more spacious digs would mean giving many of those conveniences up, so it was a painful choice for some. For me, however, the choice was not so difficult. I’d seen the cramped conditions that had developed at the “Sierra Bunker” when they’d grown beyond reasonable capacity, and had no desire to see the same thing happen at Dynamix. It was even closer to my apartment. Better still for me, it was an opportunity to relocate to a better space for myself. I was being offered an office all to myself. My deliverance was nigh. Finally, I was going to have a door.

The move itself was relatively painless, and thankfully I wasn’t required to do anything more than put labels on my stuff to indicate where things would be going. I also got to requisition a few things for my new domain, so I gleefully requested two bookcases, plus something I’d dearly been wanting since my move to Dynamix – a pair of wall-sized whiteboards. As documents and files and staplers and paperclips and other things went out in boxes, I made a private list of things I’d need to pick up or bring from the house in order to make my office truly my own. A shopping trip was in order.

The chairs we had by default at Dynamix were horrendously uncomfortable, so I popped by an office supply place and dropped $300 on an adjustable leather office chair that remained with me for years thereafter. I also found a pair of matching brass halogen desk lamps that I liked that were very chichi and Scandinavian design – the hot trend in interior decoration at the time. Target yielded a reasonable desk fan that I could run all day without having to worry about it disturbing other people, and I priced private mini-fridges but discovered we weren’t allowed to have them in our offices. Zipping by a garden store I snagged a pair of monster-sized philodendrons, a hanging basket of wandering jew, and some kind of tree-in-a-bucket thing whose species I can’t quite identify, but seemed an absolute necessity to have at the time. Then too there were the slightly more decorative things from home like my geode collection, a handful of my gargoyles, my replica of Muiredach’s High Cross that I’d bought in Ireland, an Eye of the Storm Plasma Lamp, and a fistful of Dungeons & Dragons and Call of Cthulhuminiatures.

The supplies for my geek lair at work were coming together nicely, but I still needed a deeper reference library than I’d been working with so far. Certainly I had a ton of books at home – my apartment was really just a private library where I happened to sleep – but taking titles to the office meant I wouldn’t have them at home when I needed them, and there were some important topics on which I had virtually no information at all. A bookstore visit was going to be necessary, giving me a valid excuse to make a road trip up to Portland to visit the best bookstore on the West Coast…possibly the best bookstore anywhere in world. It was time for a pilgrimage to Powell’s City of Books.

Spoiler

My wing-man of choice for this particular expedition was Chris Medinger, a level designer on Betrayal at Krondor who we’d brought up from QA. Chris was a passionate MUDder whose online character Ixacoatl was infamous for his thievery, backstabbing, and murder, but in person he was a sweet, super-chill Buddhist with a coal-dark sense of humor and a love for horror anime. Like myself he was a voracious reader, and I’d had the pleasure of spending many hours with him talking about our favorite authors including Glen Cook (to whom I’d introduced him, starting with The Black Company). A trip anywhere with Chris made for interesting conversation, and this excursion was no different.

One recurring topic that came up any time he got into my car was his general disapproval of my music collection, most of which he considered entirely too pedestrian. We had to disagree on Kansas, Boston, Chicago, and Asia – basically his rule seemed to be that if a band named itself after a place they were immediately disqualified from being any good – but he seemed okay with my Yes, Rush, and Peter Gabriel. For my edification on this particular trip he brought along a Primus album so that I could be dazzled by a real bass player in action (I’m afraid I failed to be suitably impressed.) We followed that up with something I’d had in my car glove compartment for a while – the audio book version of Marc Okrand’s “The Klingon Dictionary” – and we spent the rest of the trip trying to wrap our tongues around useful phrases like Heghlu’meH QaQ jajvam (”Today is a good day to die”) and majQa’ (”Well done.”)

Strangely enough, the store clerks in Portland were not prepared to serve us in Klingon.

Five stories tall and occupying a city block in downtown Portland, Powell’s City of Books is to the bibliophile a Gothic cathedral, Tutankhamen’s tomb, the lost library of Alexandria, and a Shanghai opium den all rolled into one alluring, irresistible package. Hippy greeters toss you a map upon entering the store, and suddenly you’re regretting that you didn’t pack your fedora and whip because everything about this place screams that you’re on a grand adventure. The air is redolent with a mixture of old paper, fresh ink, coffee beans, jasmine, and just a hint of patchouli oil. The wooden floor boards on the upper levels have been masterfully tuned to creak beneath your feet in exactly the right way to make you think you’re on a pirate vessel about to raid the greatest treasures of mankind. Everywhere you look the bookshelves seem to go on and on and on forever, groaning with the weight of titles on every topic in every language you could ever imagine. Powell’s is a paradise, and when I die, this would be the kind of heaven in which I’d wish to awaken.

Suffice to say, I’m a wee bit fond of the place.

Of course, I didn’t absolutely have to drive all the way up to Portland to find books on medieval and renaissance history. I could just have easily have visited the dozens of great bookstores in Eugene and found myself perfectly serviceable reprints of Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror, Geoffrey Ashe’s ten thousandth book on the origins of King Arthur, or even rustled up an annotated copy of theThe Decameron with extensive footnotes about the relationship of the Black Death and the collapse on feudalism. All of those things would have been fine and good, except for the fact that I already owned the easy-to-find stuff. This time around, I was looking for meat. I wanted facts, and figures, and data that would help me breathe even more authenticity into the Midkemian universe and spur ideas for some of the still unwritten sub-quests. As was usual with every trip to Powell’s, I didn’t leave empty-handed.

My first find had been the massive, ponderously named A Glossary of the Construction, Decoration and Use of Arms and Armor In All Countries And All Times – Together With Some Closely Related Subjects by George Cameron Stone. Filled with definitions and illustrations of classic weapons down through the ages, the inspiration for many of Krondor’s weapons came from this classic tome published in 1934. (The moredhel lamprey, for example, was based on a serrated edge weapon that originated in India.) War in the Middle Ages by Philippe Contamine and History of the Art of War, Volume III: Medieval Warfare by Hans Delbruck became grist for the mill while thinking about the second siege of Sethanon, and also played a hand in furthering the now notorious subplot about experimentation with gunpowder in Midkemia (oops…sorry Ray). And lastly,The Medieval Underworldwas a terrific help in my thinking about crime, the function of the Mockers, and the plots of the Crawler. (And had the official Betrayal at Krondor sequel Thief of Dreams ever been produced, that research would have played an even greater role the unfolding of events.)

Back in Eugene, the Krondor team began to settle in to our new offices on the second floor of the Research Park. As we’d had at the Atrium building, we had an entire curving wing of the building to ourselves, but with far more space. All of the lead and senior team members got offices of our own while the folks we were bringing up from QA got a long, glassed-in room that was probably designed to be a private conference room, but which we called the Fishbowl.

To the doors at either end of the suite we affixed signs warning unwary visitors of our unofficial team motto: HERE THERE BE DRAGONS. It was a warning that was well deserved. We were some of the oddest in the oddball kingdom of Dynamix. Newfangled card reading plates had replaced the swipe slot readers at the Atrium, leading to the competitive creation of a number of new approaches for opening the door without removing cards from wallets or carrying them on lanyards. Lead programmer Nels Bruckner in particular had a maneuver I suspect he’d picked up from a local lap dancer.

Like the rest of my colleagues, I settled into a new routine, often spending my lunchtimes either parked on the trickling stream called The Millrace that ran in front of our building, or sometimes wandering on to the campus of the University of Oregon to have a sandwich with the poetry-writing college girls, and guitar-playing hippies beating out folk ballads from the 1960s.

On the first day in my private office, I shut off the lights, opened the blinds, and took a seat in my ridiculously comfortable chair. Before me lay a wide open swath of grassland that rippled in the breeze, punctuated by a small construction ditch that had filled with rainwater. A mallard duck happily paddled around in the middle of it, quacking with contentment in his tiny kingdom. We were both exactly where we needed to be.

 

[Neanderthal]

Where do I know that name? Oh ah BaK credits. Kept doing that while reading. Great stuff, man knows how to set a scene an bring it to life.

 

[Infinitron]

CRUNCH TIME:

Krondor Confidential - Part X
“Pray thee, spare, thyself at times: for it becomes a wise man sometimes to relax the high pressure of his attention to work.”

– Thomas Aquinas


At the beginning of a game project, everything seems possible. You start with notes scribbled on napkins, and sketches, and whiteboard flowcharts, and excited conversations with your co-workers about all the things you can envision it becoming. Sometimes you get lost while driving because you’re so absorbed in designing a system or constructing a narrative that you literally forget that you exist somewhere outside the world of your game. But at some point along the way you begin to confront reality. That great idea you had in the shower can’t be implemented, or at least not in the way you imagined. Things have to be cut not because there’s a logic problem, but because the budget is running out, or a deadline is looming. This bright, brilliant thing that you dreamed at the beginning turns into meetings, and lists, and checkboxes, and spreadsheets, and deadlines, and deliverables. Suddenly it’s 3:00 AM as you’re staring at a computer monitor at your Sisyphean bug list, and you want to travel back in time to assassinate that imagination-drunk version of yourself that’s committed you to living in this nightmare. You swear if you survive you’ll never do this to yourself ever again…and yet you somehow always end up right back in the same place.

I can’t recall any specific point at which John Cutter declared that we were in “crunch.” We were all keenly aware during the last six months of Betrayal’s production that we’d bitten off a project that might have been more ambitious than was entirely sane. We were months behind schedule, and significantly over budget. While the testers seemed to enjoy the beast we’d handed them, the world was far larger, the text more expansive, and the number of combinatorial possibilities of gear and strategic choice more complex than anything Dynamix had thus far handled. Gradually we’d all adjusted our lives to the longer hours, the truncated weekends, the cancelled plans. For most of the rest of the team the sacrifice was higher than my own because they had wives, and girlfriends, and children at home who needed them. For me, the only thing that required my attention was the world of Midkemia, and she was a very, very demanding mistress.

The first night that I curled up under my desk in my office at Dynamix, it occurred to me that I’d never really had the best example when it came to leaving work at the office. While my mother came home every night, her responsibilities as a teacher didn’t stop at the schoolhouse door. Dinner at home was usually something fast and convenient, a Swanson’s chicken TV dinner with the awesome chocolate brownie in the corner. After that she would be on the couch for hours grading essays and math tests and science quizzes until she allowed herself to drift off during the ten o’clock news. During the rerun of Gunsmoke or Star Trek on TV, she’d come alive again to help me with my math homework, or to tackle whatever still needed doing around the house, usually not turning in until two or three in the morning. It’s not as if she had a choice not to do the work – it’s the cruel reality of school teaching that it’s a thankless fifteen-hour-a-day job – but I think it impressed on me that it was okay if your work came home, that it could take over your life. Maybe that was the reason why I didn’t think there was anything wrong with my working eighteen hour days, seven days a week during the last few months of Betrayal at Krondor’s production. The work simply had to be done – whatever the cost.

Often I wasn’t alone at the office in the middle of the night. Frequently our programmer Steve Cordon would be two offices away, grinding away on a seemingly unsolvable problem only to discover in the morning that he’d not only cracked it, but he’d knocked a dozen other problems off the bug list at the same time. We were so used to leaning on his expertise that one night John walked into his office to ask him a question…only to discover that Steve’s wife Michelle had joined him for the night and was dressed in a revealing negligee, and the two of them were asleep on the floor. All I could think about it at the time was that I wished I had similar companionship for my own office floor.

As the crunch wore on, my days became a blur of meetings with Tim McClure, Chris Medinger, and Joeseph Muennich, all assistant designers who’d all come up from QA. Tim tended to the inventory items and spells, making sure that they got placed everywhere they needed to be. Chris & Joseph meanwhile wrangled with the 3Space world editor as they laid down traps, triggers, and inter-party dialogues, doing the level-editing sorcery that translated our graph paper maps into playable realities. Meanwhile I lived with fixing typos, and broken quests, and filling in bits of text in places we hadn’t originally anticipated. I spent afternoons fielding questions and clarifying issues for QA (and being gleefully happy that our testers were reporting that they were learning new words thanks to the game). All the while, I was also chipping in on promotional articles for the official Sierra Online magazine, and co-authoring large chunks of the manual. Every day it seemed like I had a new ball to keep in the air in order to keep Betrayal chugging towards the finish-line, but I kept my head down and kept plugging, ignoring the fact that day by day I was losing more and more of my edge. As I struggled against mounting exhaustion, I downed liters of Mountain Dew and Jolt every day, believing that I could bully myself through, that I was indestructible and capable of achieving anything I needed so long as I willed it hard enough –

The pain began in my stomach.

At first I thought it was something I’d eaten, a dull burning nausea sitting in the pit of my gut. Slowly it began to grow like a fire, getting hotter and hotter until the sensation changed, becoming sharp and pulsing. My breath was getting heavier.

Getting out of my chair, I walked next door to John’s office, realizing that on top of everything else that I was slightly dizzy. I clung to his doorframe for support.

“I’ve got to go to the ER,” I croaked out.

“What?” John turned around, giving me a confused look. I could tell his head was still deep in whatever design issue he’d been wrestling with. “What?!”

“Something’s really wrong. I’ve got to go.”

“Do you need me to…”

“I’ve got to go,” is all I said, then I walked out of the office.

To this day I don’t really remember much about getting into the car or the drive over to the hospital, though I do remember being thankful that Eugene was a relatively small town, and that the ER was not far away.

The triage folks got to me fast, though likely a little faster because of the symptoms I’d reported at the desk. They remarked that I looked very pale, and I could tell because of my mother’s visits with doctors that they were treating me as a potential cardiac case. I felt pretty certain that aside from the breathing I didn’t really have all the right symptoms, but if they chose to jump me in the line for it, I wasn’t going to object to being seen earlier rather than later.

In just a few minutes I was on a cold ER bed in a hospital gown, trying to calm myself down. Blades of red-hot pain were jabbing into my stomach at random intervals with no signs of letting up, and I was attempting to revive my long-neglected Zen practice, but the environment was not conducive to relaxation. Screams were coming from behind a curtain just a few feet away. Three police officers and the ER personnel were attending to someone having a psychotic episode as they ran through the same deranged litany over and over and over.

“Louise! Help! I’m too fucking smart! I’m too fucking strong! Get me off of this planet!”

Intermittently he’d spice things up with references to George Bush and the New World Order, but he’d always come back around to the same chain of invocations to Louise and his own despair of being on planet Earth. With each one of his shouts, I felt inclined to agree with his desire that he get offworld.

In time I heard someone call for Seroquel from behind the curtain, and I recognized the name of the heavy-duty anti-psychotic thanks to long discussions with my neuropsychologist brother Gene. Within moments of the drug’s administration, the disturbed patient continued with his same litany, but the words grew steadily softer and slower until at last he must have drifted off to sleep.

With the shouting man conked out, the ER seemed eerily quiet, and I suddenly realized that it had distracted me from my own distress. Desperately I just wanted to take a nap, but my stomach wasn’t about to let that happen.

After a bit longer, the curtain to my bay was thrown back and a young doctor stepped in, giving me a quick look over.

“How are you doing?”

“I’m guessing better than him,” I said, nodding over towards the Louise shouter.

Quickly the doctor examined me as I went over my symptoms, and he posed a series of questions. He asked if I was under a lot of stress. I replied that I was working on a million dollar project that was four months late. Check. He asked how much I was sleeping. I told him about two to three hours a night. Check. He asked me what I’d been eating, to which I replied that I’d been living pretty much on company-supplied pizza and Mountain Dew for three months. Check.

He looked down at a pad and started writing a note, then handed it to me.

“You’re not going back to work for a week.”

I blinked. “I…what? I gotta go back to work. I’m…”

“You aren’t going back to work for a week. Your vitals are terrible. I’d hospitalize you, but the hospital is full, and I don’t think that’s necessary in this case providing you get some rest and eat something proper. No pizza. No soft drinks.”

“I can’t miss work!”

“It’s either this or the next time you leave work, it’ll be in a hearse.” He tore off the prescription he’d been writing. “Valium. This might help you sleep. I’ll write you a note for your boss too.”

The call to John had been easy, though it was no surprise to me given the man that he was. Any other boss out there might have fought my doctor’s orders given our deadlines, but John’s only concern was my well-being. “You just get better, and we’ll take the slack while you’re out,” was all he said. “We can get along without you for a few days.”

I’d been running at a full burn for two years while eating, breathing, and sleeping Betrayal at Krondor. I’d made Midkemia my world, and almost wiped my out my own existence in the process. Walking away for even a week was going to be tough for me, and I’d have to remember who I was outside the context of Dynamix.

For the next five days, my co-worker and best friend Chris Medinger and his girlfriend Risa took extravagant care of me. Dropping by my apartment several times a day to clear up, make me dinner, and attend my every whim, they made sure I was following the orders I had been given. When they found me illicitly using my Mac to try and work from home, Chris confiscated the power cord and refused to return it to me until my doctor-imposed vacation was deemed to be at an end. I do not exaggerate when I say that I believe that Chris and Risa saved my life.

Sometimes you need to let your friends help you when you don’t know how to help yourself.

The day after my return to Dynamix, things got back to normal fairly quickly, though obviously everyone around me was concerned. John took it easy on me. I found that several things that had backlogged as I’d spiraled in to my stress crash had been taken care of in my absence, and John had even taken over writing some of the non-mission-critical messages when players explored empty houses. He had some truly funny stuff, and it was a pleasure to actually experience story in the game that hadn’t run directly through my hands. Somehow the project had gone on without me without disaster.

Towards the end of the day, a knock at my office door announced the arrival of our company CEO Tony Reyneke. In the whole time I’d been at Dynamix, I’d never been in a one-on-one conversation with him, and was surprised that he’d be here making the time for a personal visit.

“I just want you to know that we were all really concerned for you,” he said. “You’ve got a really important role here. The game play is great, and so is the art, but I think this game is going to succeed or fail based on your story. You’ve done a great job.”

And with that, as he walked out of my office and down the hall, I remember turning back to my computer and muttering to myself.

“I know you just recovered from exhaustion and an anxiety attack, but this whole game’s success is on you, Neal. No pressure.”

No pressure.

 

[DavidBVal]

I love these articles, there should be a book collecting them.

 

[Sacred82]

I love these articles, there should be a book collecting them.

The Many Words of Neal Hallford

 

[Darth Roxor]

At first I thought it was something I’d eaten, a dull burning nausea sitting in the pit of my gut. Slowly it began to grow like a fire, getting hotter and hotter until the sensation changed, becoming sharp and pulsing. My breath was getting heavier.

Was this perhaps an influence behind the silverthorn poisoning text?

 

[Neanderthal]

Pity that all this crunch stuff still goes on decades later. Still him an his team crafted someat for ages, an in a lotta bloody ways theres still not much competition for BaK, an i'm still waitin for a game that'll gi me same experience. Mighta been a messy birth but him an his crew helped bring a new medium into popularity.

 

[nealiios]

I love these articles, there should be a book collecting them.

I've kicked that idea around, actually. My Amazon single about the derailment of the Sunset Limited started off as a Facebook post, then I later expanded it. Only thing is, not sure who would buy it. Pretty much all of the people who are most interested are probably already either directly following my blog, or are catching the reposts from Infinitron and Rhu here. I've been using my Patreon partially as a gauge to test the level of interest if I went that route, but given that it hasn't exactly caught fire after seven months, not really sure there's a paying audience out there. But I'd love to do it.

 

[nealiios]

I love these articles, there should be a book collecting them.

The Many Words of Neal Hallford

The Many, Many, Many, Many, Many, Many, Many (Oh God Will He Ever Shut Up), Many, Many, Many Words of Neal Hallford.

 

[sstacks]

Neal, Himself: A Man and His Mouth

 

[Beautiful Clown Painting]

You should publish it, it's really good prose. I suggest that you inscribe its intimate content in a larger historical frame.

Such as:
Pioneer on the frontier of the video game revolution: a personal testimony.

 

[nealiios]

You should publish it, it's really good prose. I suggest that you inscribe its intimate content in a larger historical frame.

Such as:
Pioneer on the frontier of the video game revolution: a personal testimony.

Thank you. If I were to do it, it would be in a longer volume including write-ups on my years at New World Computing (Might & Magic III: Isles of Terra, Planet's Edge), the never-released RPG "Elysium" from Cavedog (which I co-designed with John Cutter again, and I hooked up with Chris Taylor, Greg McMartin, and Jeremy Soule), Dungeon Siege, and maybe one or two other projects. The Krondor series will probably be the longest single series because it had so many impacts on my life and career that came out of it.

 

[Beautiful Clown Painting]

Didn't know that you worked on Might & Magic III and Planet's Edge, they are both incredible games.

 

[Rhuantavan]

You should publish it, it's really good prose. I suggest that you inscribe its intimate content in a larger historical frame.

Such as:
Pioneer on the frontier of the video game revolution: a personal testimony.

Thank you. If I were to do it, it would be in a longer volume including write-ups on my years at New World Computing (Might & Magic III: Isles of Terra, Planet's Edge), the never-released RPG "Elysium" from Cavedog (which I co-designed with John Cutter again, and I hooked up with Chris Taylor, Greg McMartin, and Jeremy Soule), Dungeon Siege, and maybe one or two other projects. The Krondor series will probably be the longest single series because it had so many impacts on my life and career that came out of it.

You have my money!

 

[DavidBVal]

I love these articles, there should be a book collecting them.

I've kicked that idea around, actually. My Amazon single about the derailment of the Sunset Limited started off as a Facebook post, then I later expanded it. Only thing is, not sure who would buy it. Pretty much all of the people who are most interested are probably already either directly following my blog, or are catching the reposts from Infinitron and Rhu here. I've been using my Patreon partially as a gauge to test the level of interest if I went that route, but given that it hasn't exactly caught fire after seven months, not really sure there's a paying audience out there. But I'd love to do it.

I wouldn't consider Patreon a good gauge for product sales. Maybe it's a generational thing but I don't like the Patreon concept much (either as consumer or as producer). I'd buy it in a heartbeat. Also, I think nowadays there's print-on-demand solutions that would allow you to start without investing on printing costs.

 

[SausageInYourFace]

Come to think of it, its surprising that there isn't a big market for books, particularly autobiographies of developers, that deal with that historical period of the video game industry. There isn't a lot out there to learn about video game design in this time aside from a few blogs, ethusiast forums like the Codex and Matt Barton interviews. You guys should all sit down and write everything down as long as you still can, otherwise future generations will have a serious gap in their knowledge of the history of that medium and the RPG genre in particular.

All your memories will be lost, like tears .. in rain.

 

[Crooked Bee]

I guess that may have to do with the low status of the video game industry as a whole - so that, to this day, no one really considers video game history (or video game design history) worthy of being chronicled, or video games a "serious" kind of entertainment more generally. Exacerbated by the fact that most video game pioneers are of the same mindset, too, with the rare exception of people like Warren Spector (who hasn't published anything either, aside from a couple of postmortems). You would probably expect someone as megalomaniac and egocentric as Richard Garriott to have published several books of memoirs already, but no dice. I guess that might also have to do with the absence of a large enough market of fans of older video games - compared to other low-brow entertainment like old pop music for example.

But yeah, it'd be great if there were more books about video game history by people who were actually making that history.

 

[Infinitron]

I guess that may have to do with the low status of the video game industry as a whole - so that, to this day, no one really considers video game history (or video game design history) worthy of being chronicled, or video games a "serious" kind of entertainment more generally. Exacerbated by the fact that most video game pioneers are of the same mindset, too, with the rare exception of people like Warren Spector (who hasn't published anything either, aside from a couple of postmortems). You would probably expect someone as megalomaniac and egocentric as Richard Garriott to have published several books of memoirs already, but no dice. I guess that might also have to do with the absence of a large enough market of fans of older video games - compared to other low-brow entertainment like old pop music for example.

But yeah, it'd be great if there were more books about video game history by people who were actually making that history.

I would expect some of these guys to at least publish their memoirs after they've retired. Easy to forget that most of them aren't actually very old. Even the founding generation of game development are still in their 50s, early 60s tops. So in a decade maybe things will look different.

 

[sstacks]

but no dice.

Dear me I love a good unintentional pun.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

http://nealhallford.com/post/153147504973/a-ghost-town-of-my-own

A Ghost Town Of My Own
“By first light their brown Rambler had been crammed with all it could hold, leaving only just enough room for the two of them to squeeze into their pre-allotted spaces. Blearily he’d clambered through the crowded back to claim a perch atop a dented aluminum cooler, keeping an eye through the dusty back window on the only home he’d ever known.”

— The Tome by Neal Hallford

RAMBLER MAN - While this isn’t the Rambler which belonged to my family, it’s nearly identical to one which my parents owned when I was in high school. Easily a quarter of my childhood was spent in the backseat (or lying across a monstrous ice cooler in the back window) of a wide variety of different models of station wagons.

For one month every summer during my childhood, my father would temporarily forget that he was the head of a perfectly ordinary suburban-living family. In early July he’d randomly open up a road map, pick a highway he’d never been down or a place he’d never visited, and then he’d announce to the rest of us where we’d be heading for our summer vacation. Often we wouldn’t have even that much notice. I can remember at least one occasion on which I was awakened shortly before dawn, told to pack, and that we’d be leaving in half an hour for the Deep South – not a particular state or a city mind you, just the Deep South. As far as I can tell, with other families this would have been sheer madness, but for us it was just part and parcel of being a Hallford. My father wasn’t big on elaborate plans, but preferred instead to follow his nose wherever it lead him. As you might imagine, we ended up on quite a few unintended adventures along the way.

Riding in the back of the family station wagon (of which my family had three over the years), I saw a lot of the United States. Dad liked to get off the main roads whenever he could, and we spent a lot of time bumping around on state highways that had fallen into disrepair, or uppity cow paths that only dreamed someday of being called roads. In particular we found ourselves frequently being drawn to Civil War battlefields which were a passion for my father, and which became a fascination of my own as I grew older. Dad shunned the big cities and glitzy attractions, instead favoring broken down old towns, fading glories, and greasy spoon diners. Never in all my life did I ever see him ever crack open a book on history, but instead I think this was his own Aristotelian way of exploring the past, through direct contact with people and places that made up our country. I think he was trying to trying to find something that was on the verge of vanishing, though to be honest, to this day I’m still not sure if he ever found what he was looking for. Regardless of that, we all enjoyed the ride.

One thing in particular that became a hobby of mine over the years was to spend time in the filling stations of tiny towns in the middle of nowhere. Inevitably they always had the coolest stuff on the shelves that you couldn’t find anywhere else. Jackalope heads. Bigfoot castings. Sometimes you’d get lucky and they’d have a tiny little museum with mermaid skeletons or two-headed calves or little carved aliens. I loved the sheer humbuggery and imagination of all the roadside attractions. Sometimes you could get a bored station attendant to tell you a ghost story while you paid your bill, or even better, they’d sell you a stapled-together collection of local folktales (usually written by the station owner himself.) In time the discovery of these roadside spook stories became an integral part of my enjoyment of our vacations.

By the time I hit high school and the family vacations had come to an end, I’d become increasingly interested not only in the stories from these small towns, but also in stories which I’d heard whispered in passing by my father’s family, most of them involving the Hallford homestead. There were stories about my Uncle Owen and his new bride being haunted by ghostly horses on their wedding night. My grandmother claimed to have clearly seen her dead mother walking through the field of her house, and also found herself trying to pick up a ghost cat that wasn’t there. A nearby house of another family member reputedly had doors that could not be locked or nailed shut, and even my deeply fundamentalist, God-fearing mother has told me tales of spending the night in that house, witnessing doors opening and slamming on their own accord while accompanied by the sound of a child’s footsteps.

While collecting these family ghost stories was a fun pastime for me, I kind of felt like the ghost parade had passed me by. The Hallford homestead had burned down years before I’d even been born, and the property on which it sat was a place that I rarely visited. Even my uncle who owned the property for most of my young adulthood preferred to leave it unoccupied, and refused to let anyone rebuild on the site of “that house.” For years I vowed to sneak out and spend the night on top of the hill where the house once stood, but circumstances always seemed to conspire to prevent me from doing so. On my last encounter in that field, an angry bull almost trampled me while I was inspecting what little remained of the chimney.

In order to find some spooks to claim as my own, I turned my focus on my hometown of Sand Springs, Oklahoma, a bedroom community just seven miles west of Tulsa. In my neighborhood, we had our own version of the boogeyman known as the Bulldog Man (upon whom my first radio drama would be based). Kids at my local high school told stories about “Mr. Green” who was killed during the construction of the auditorium, and who to this day is still said to haunt the thespians of Charles Page High School. Another friend claimed to have been in a trailer by the lake when it was attacked by a creature that he described as something like a werewolf.

Clearly there were stories to be found in Sand Springs, so naturally I decided to seek out a chapbook similar to those I’d found in so many communities all over the U.S.. While we had several gas stations in town, none of them carried the kind of curiosities to which I’d become accustomed on the road, so it was clear that the best place to start would be the Sand Springs Cultural and Historical Museum.

SAND SPRINGS CULTURAL & HISTORICAL MUSEUM - The centerpiece of downtown Sand Springs, the Sand Springs Museum is an Art Deco masterpiece, and is just one of the many legacies the Page family gave to my hometown.

The Sand Springs museum opened in the 1990s in the building that had formerly housed the Charles Page Memorial Library. Constructed in 1929 by the wife of Sand Springs’ philanthropic founder, Page Memorial is a magnificent example of Art Deco which dominates the center of my hometown. Resembling a glistening white mausoleum as much as it does a library, its exactly the sort of place that a book loving ghoul with a goth streak can truly appreciate. I spent many happy hours in its marbled interior as a kid, and any excuse to go back has always been a happy occasion for me.

Tracking down the museum director, Ruth Ellen Henry, sometime in the late 1990s, I told her about the kind of books I’d found in other towns, and wondered if there was anything similar available for Sand Springs. We were, after all, many times larger than most of the towns from which I’d collected my earlier chapbooks, so surely someone had written some of these tales down.

“No, Neal, not that I’m aware of,” she told me at the time. “I guess that just means you’ll have to write one yourself.”

And so the search began.

I asked friends for more details about the legends I’d heard, and also about any tales which had escaped my notice. I combed through local newspaper clippings and book catalogs. I found out that my high school drama teacher, Roy Briscoe, had taped an interview with a local television station about Mr. Green, so I managed to snag a copy of it to add to my collection of local ghost lore. I poured all my references into one document – only to discover that I hadn’t discovered much.

The Tale Of Mr. Green - An excerpt from a Tulsa TV special “Okie Ghost Tales” which ran on KTUL Channel 8, featuring the story of Charles Page High School’s most famous ghost.

The truth about most ghost lore is that you don’t really end up with ghost stories but with ghost anecdotes. Most things amount to somebody’s brother’s cousin’s boyfriend saw the Bulldog Man once, or “I heard a spooky sound in the auditorium one time.” You don’t really get much in the way of complete narratives with beginnings, middles, and ends. I finally realized if I was going to do something with my community’s ghost stories, it meant I had to approach them as starting points of tales rather than whole stories by themselves.

As I began to line out the stories I wanted to tell, I realized that what I really wanted to do was create a unified mythos with them. These wouldn’t just be a series of stand alone ghost stories, but they’d be united by a place which bore some resemblance to my hometown, but which was not my hometown (and the name change of the city to Adams reflects this alternate history.) Instead, it’s a dark ride re-imagining, with an alternate history that’s built up by these stories, a kind of terrifying puzzle being built through each short story, each taking place in a different time period in the town’s history.

The first story I’m intending to publish is “The Tome,” which takes place in the early 1970s, and in many ways it is central to mystery of what the town is, and how it got the way it is. It should be available for sale in the next few weeks.

 

[Neanderthal]

Always found folklore interestin, mainly because o down to earth an communal nature on it, which is someat thats dyin out in modern age. Old village I used to live in had a local legend o a dragon, mentioned at beginnin on Ivanhoe it got so famous, an you could see why wi crags standin stark over dark forest o Wharnecliffe, an cave where dragon where supposed to lair in that great spur o rock. Think it were really someat to do wi a money grubbin local landowner from way back who got sued in court but legend persists.

Best bit o Witcher were that fourth chapter, steeped in sticky summer heat and haze o distorted light and vision that lingered over the golden fields of Murky Waters. Something really primitive an enchantin about all of that dreamlike exploration of folklore an superstition.

 

[LESS T_T]

On the progress of BaK Remastered demo: