Massively goes to WAR: The early days of Mythic Entertainment

Thursday afternoon Christian Bales and Josh Drescher sat down with us to discuss the Living Guild system in Warhammer Online. We did, at length, and you'll see the results of that discussion on the site later today. In the midst of all that information, though, we got to talking about their early days at Mythic Entertainment. Unlike many of the AAA MMO developers today, Mythic originally started out as a 'garage-style' development house.

It's hard to imagine today, walking the halls of EA Mythic's corporate office space, but the duo's tales of antenna-based internet service, hallway offices, and legacy code make for a great reality check on the modern MMO marketplace. Read on below the cut for stories that will make you very glad to be working in a cubicle ...

How long have you folks been working for Mythic?

Josh: Christian has worked for the company for, what, seven years?

Christian: Yup.

Josh: She got hired here the week before I did. When we used to work a couple of miles away from here, the original Mythic headquarters was two condos, basically, across the street from one another. We worked in customers support originally. We were in our little hobbit hut. This was before the days of wifi, and instead we had a radio transmitter that went between the one building we could afford to get high-speed internet into and the customer service building. So we had these two antennas that had to point directly at one another. We were on the ground floor and they were on the upper floor. So if anybody parked in front of the customer service building ...

Christian (laughing): If there was a delivery van ...

Josh: If anyone parked there, customer support got cut off.

Christian: We couldn't do anything.

Josh: So the first person that got there each day would have to park their tiny car there, trying to cordon off that section of the street. That was good. My first office was a hallway. We called it the hallbicle. It was a cubicle, we ... we didn't have cubicles, we couldn't afford them. I show up, and Jeff Hickman is there in cut-off jeans, a t-shirt, and socks, and he's got his feet up on the desk messing around with Dark Age of Camelot. I do my interview and I get hired, and I show up on day one.

He's like "Here's your desk, go build it. Here's your chair, go build it. Here's your computer, go build it!" You show up into the condo and Rob Denton, our COO, used to be lead server programmer and build operations manager. So if you showed up on a weekend he'd be here with a hardhat and a hammer, knocking holes in the wall to run cat-5 cable. He wasn't a carpenter, he's a rocket scientist by training, and he'd be like "Hi guys, how's it going? I'm rewiring the building, we need to add like five more people to this hallway!"

Eventually it wasn't just me there was like two other people in the hallway with me. Then they brought in our community manager and she demanded her own space. So we got booted from the hallbicle and I was put into the phone switch closet ... which was between two bathrooms and had a sink in it.

Christian: It had a sink? I don't remember that!

Josh: It was a custodian sink, so it had a mop sink in there. I was in there with all the phone switch equipment and all the server control equipment, and it was about 8000 degrees. That was my first office. We've been around here for a long time.

What did you guys do on Camelot after you moved on from customer service?

Christian: A lot!

Josh: The weird thing is, when you're a tiny independent company, you wind up doing a little bit of everything - so everybody basically at some point or another wound up being a content developer. Everybody wound up being a tester. We didn't have a QA department when we launched Camelot. We built that up over time - so when we were building our first expansion, I remember Hickman coming in with $50 Best Buy gift certificates saying "I can't really afford to pay you overtime, but for a $50 Best Buy gift certificate, if you'd just be willing to run back and forth over the zone looking for graphical bugs, that'd be great."

So he had all of us sitting there, and we'd start at one end of the zone, you'd watch your location indicator on the screen, and you would run in a straight line to the other end of the zone. Take two steps over, and you'd run back. Two steps over and run back. And that was how we scrubbed for graphical problems and things like that. And so, obviously, one of the main benefits of becoming part of EA is that we can have distinct roles now. Office furniture we don't build ourselves! We don't move our computers any more! Lunch occasionally shows up ...

I remember when we were first hired, and the soda was free! Rob actually was scared that it was going to kill the employees. So he eventually went "Soda is now 25 cents, because you guys are consuming an entire machine's worth of soda every day". We were like "My Mountain Dew is slightly tepid! Another one! Another one!"

Christian: I know, and they forgot that they had 24 hour customer support right near the soda machine ... we're like ... that's not good!

Josh: And then eventually we moved into this building and made friends with all of the accountants. Because believe me, nothing makes an accountancy firm feel happier about their location than having a bunch of video game people running around ... men in skirts, people with Mohawks, profane t-shirts ...

Christian: I used to walk around in my Tinkerbell slippers! They loved that.

Josh: Slowly but surely we've been driving them out of this building!

On one of the production podcasts, we recall men with boffers? In a parking garage? Was that here...?

Josh: We've done a bunch of stuff in the parking garage. We did the audio recording down in the parking garage that made people really happy, we did wait until after hours to do that though, because it's so unbelievably loud to hit a snare drum in an enclosed concrete structure... but yeah. We used to do, during tax season, we would run around with swords for a time, when there would be people in the lobby at the accountancy firm across the hallway...

Christian: Terrorizing the accountants... it was fun!

Josh: It's good - I mean, I wouldn't have wanted to move straight in to a Proper corporate business because there is a sense of like - everybody who's a leader on this team is somebody who's been with the company for five, six, seven years - some even longer. We've got people here who've been here for decades, at this point. So there is a sense of belonging to a lineage, of an experience that goes way back, into the days of MUDs and so forth.

Almost as a point of tradition rather than function, we have C code in Warhammer that came from our very first MUD. We grandfather in a teeny bit of code each time, so there's the genetic taste of some of the stuff that we did way back when, in every new thing we do. And there really is a sense of progression, of product.

What's does the grandfathered code in Warhammer do?

Josh: Little bits of network code, stuff like that - some of the comments, and so forth that Rob put into the old code way back when, things of that sort of... we could easily have replaced it with something else, but it's just ... to remember, "Hey, there's always a bit of code written by each of the lead programmers..."

Other things, we have a scenario in there, where it's impossible to tell unless you know what it is, but it's got the Narwhal model from Camelot frozen in the lake, and so you just see this horn sticking up, and if you bother to look down, into the ice, and you know what it is, you can make it out - we just imported a model from Camelot, and stuck it into Warhammer. So, technically now I guess GW owns the right to the Narwhal, which is an actual kind of animal, so I don't think you can own the rights to it. But still.

Imperator is always something that we've always found interesting conceptually, did anything from that game end up in Warhammer?

Josh: Not really, aside from code that's shared through all Mythic products. They were distinct projects, and obviously we postponed Imperator, we use the teams together, but we didn't merge any of the assets. Experience, obviously - things we've learned from building that game, we have leveraged here, good and bad, but you do that with everything. Experiences that we drew from Camelot, where we went "Man, there's some things we did really well!" - and some things that if we had it to do again... we might not do.

Christian: All good experiences though...

Is there anything in particular that, from Dark Age of Camelot, you guys thought "Yeah... next time, maybe differently..."

Josh: Not specific things. I think obviously there were directions that we took the game at certain points that we went, that kind of drove us away from the core focus of the game, and so that really is why, from the very beginning, Mark really drove the vision that the game is, purposeful. The RvR experience really is the centerpiece of it. It's the reason that, unlike Camelot, where it was effectively three distinct PvE experiences, with a shared RvR territory that was completely disconnected from the rest of the world - it was entirely possible to play Camelot without ever coming into contact with RvR at all. You could have no awareness that it even existed, aside from occasionally hearing mentions of it.

We wanted to make sure that we never ran the risk of disconnecting from that experience, because it is what makes us different from everything else. It is again, it's what our lineage is, it's what we know how to do, it's what we've always been doing, it's what we believe in fundamentally, it's what the philosophy of the studio is, it's what drives our product. The idea of integrating that experience into every part of the world, so that from the very, very beginning of the game, you're getting the opportunity to take part in that RvR experience, and that it's part of what you do every day. That was probably the core message, the core lesson that we learned from Camelot - both good and bad.

So even if you'd choose not to engage in that, you can always see that it's there.

Josh: Yes. You'll never be able to run through the world without thinking about it. Because, if you choose to never set foot in an RvR area, that's a purposeful decision that's going to require an actual effort from your part not to stumble into those areas, and not to walk into the thick of that battle. So it's deliberately inconvenient in some places because we want you to recognize that it's not so bad. It's the reason that, when you die, it says "Don't worry! Dying is part of the game!"

We don't punch you in the face, take half your gold, break all your stuff, say "Rah! Terrible person! We took away three days of experience! You should have known better than to die in our game!" That is one of the ancient principles of game design that we have gotten away from doing. Death is really not that big of a deal! That was something that even when we first were making Camelot we knew that we'd never level you down, but again - allowing people to take an experience hit from death, it's a bad feeling.

Thanks to you both for this retrospective.

	Did you enjoy this? Make sure to check out all of our previous Warhammer Online coverage, and don't miss any of the rest of the articles in this series as Massively goes to WAR!