A Dice Studio Profile Behind the Mirror's Edge
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BEHIND THE MIRROR’S EDGE: A DICE STUDIO PROFILE ™ DICE STUDIO PROFILE ◗ INTRODUCTION ◗ FIRST ROLL OF THE DICE ◗ ANGLE OF REFRACTION ◗ TWO BECOME ONE AND PROSPER ◗ YOU GOTTA HAVE FAITH ◗ LIGHTING, CAMERA, ACTION ◗ LOOKING INTO THE MIRROR 165 FOREWORD 166 BEHIND THE MIRROR’S EDGE THE ART OF DICE THE ART OF DICE Five years ago I was at EA Partners and got the chance to move to DICE to work as the Senior Producer for Battlefi eld 2. Sweden became my home and I have stayed here ever since. The reason I wanted to come to DICE is the same reason that I’ve stayed. The people. To the outside world I guess our games are the most signifi cant thing. But to us here at the studio, it is who we are. What sets DICE apart from other studios is our culture. People come to DICE to change our industry and to make unique and innovative entertainment. To try the new, the weird, the different. Games take years to make and take a lot out of you. If you are lucky, you get to ship three or four games in your career. Life is too short to make bad games. The people at DICE always want to experiment. Like any other place that experiments, there are a lot of failures, but sometimes, there is something brilliant that does change games and that’s what we live for. B a t t l e fi e l d changed the way people played shooters online. We believe that Mirror’s Edge will change the way people think about Movement. Breaking new ground isn’t always easy. You have to keep on trying and not give up. One of the “beliefs” in the gaming industry was that all action games had to be in third- person. We heard over and over again that Mirror’s Edge should be in third-person, that what we wanted to do was not possible and that the art style was too different to be accepted. Mirror’s Edge, there were a lot of doubters– but Owen O’Brien and his team had a vision and they stuck with it, and in the process have changed games. Great people are really hard to fi nd, but we have lots of them at DICE. That is why we make great games. The evidence is in your hands. I hope you will experience a new breed of fi rst-person gameplay as you free run, fi ght and puzzle your way through the unique world of Mirror’s Edge. Enjoy! DICE STUDIO PROFILE – Sean Decker, DICE General Manager ◗ INTRODUCTION ◗ FIRST ROLL OF THE DICE ◗ ANGLE OF REFRACTION ◗ TWO BECOME ONE AND PROSPER ◗ YOU GOTTA HAVE FAITH ◗ LIGHTING, CAMERA, ACTION ◗ LOOKING INTO THE MIRROR 167 BEHIND THE MIRROR’S EDGE BEHIND THE MIRROR’S EDGE ROFILE P Game development isn’t a sprint. Game development isn’t TUDIO even a marathon. Game S development is a sprint, ICE followed by a marathon, ending in another sprint that you repeat over and : A D over until the job’s done. No single individual makes a game of course, but DGE Owen O’Brien was brought to DICE specifi cally to E S help create a new franchise that wasn’t based on the ’ company’s incredibly successful B a t t l e fi e l d brand, which has 17 million plus copies sold to date. As the Senior Producer on Mirror’s Edge, he’s sat month IRROR in, month out with the team, shaping and suffering M the daily rhythm of success and failure that over the course of 18 months has created a coherent and THE beautiful-looking game from the initial sparks of long- discussed ideas, a video animation, and a handful of character sketches. EHIND B “It’s been hell for leather for the whole team for over a year now. They have really worked hard to create this game from nothing,” says O’Brien of the development process. “The internal reaction to the concept very quickly went from ‘We’re not really sure this will work’ to ‘We want this and we want it now before someone else does it.’” At this point, we can’t wait to play the game but we’re going to have to be patient for a few more weeks. O’Brien and his team “We got the bug count down into single fi gures can’t wait either—to fi nish the game and have a well-earned yesterday,” he says. Thousands of bugs have been holiday. They’ll have to be patient, too. And to experience fi xed to get to this point of almost completion. Now the story behind Mirror’s Edge, we’ll have to leave the future that the fi nal fi nishing line is in sight, Mirror’s Edge behind anyway and head back to the early 1990s— back to only requires its fi nal polishing and honing before it’s the days of the bedroom programmers. released into the holiday market. “We set out to try and do something new with this game. A fi rst-person game where the focus is not on the experience of fi ring a gun, but on the experience of being the action hero. There are already great fi rst- person shooters out there and there are plenty of third-person action adventures. We wanted to create something more visceral and personal. Mirror’s Edge looks different, sounds different, and literally has a different perspective on the action adventure genre. We’re a game that’s not about weapons or vehicles. We’re probably the exact opposite of what people are expecting from a fi rst-person game. We are about freedom; freedom of movement, freedom of thought, freedom of expression.” 168 BEHIND THE MIRROR’S EDGE INTRODUCTION DICE STUDIO PROFILE ◗ INTRODUCTION ◗ FIRST ROLL OF THE DICE “We’re probably the exact opposite of what ◗ ANGLE OF people are expecting from a fi rst-person game. REFRACTION We are about freedom; freedom of movement, ◗ TWO BECOME ONE AND freedom of thought, freedom of expression.” PROSPER – Owen O’Brien ◗ YOU GOTTA HAVE FAITH ◗ LIGHTING, CAMERA, ACTION ◗ LOOKING INTO THE MIRROR 169 170 B EHIND THE MIRROR ’ S EDGE : A DICE STUDIO PROFILE ourselves if we spent all the money on beer,” Nyström jokes. He’s nowtheonlyoneoffoundersstillworkingatDICE. Nyströmjokes.He’s ourselves ifwespentallthemoneyonbeer,” we realized we would probably kill “Actually the game sold really well, much better than we thought. So after about a year, game— Mandorff, and Olof Gustafsson, didn’t rst take things much more So seriously after either. successfully completing their fi Ulf Axelsson, Andreas Liliegren, Fredrik (DICE), Entertainment Creative Illusions Digital of founders older slightly four The Atthatage,Ididn’ttakeanythingvery seriously.” take gamedevelopmentvery seriously. didn’t “I 1991. in back Silents, The name the under operating coders demo Swedish small-town some with up hooked who “It recalls was Markus only self, Nyström supposed a of to student his be artist former a 17-year-old job for the summer,” Pinball Dreams for the Amiga home computer—they decided to spend their profi tsonbeerandpartying. profi fortheAmigahomecomputer—theydecidedtospendtheir BEHIND THE MIRROR’S EDGE FIRST ROLL OF THE ™ Instead, they got on with making more games. A couple more successful pinball titles later, DICE absorbed another small outfi t of cowboy developers, which resulted in Benefactor (a puzzle/platformer for the Amiga) and the never-released Sega Megadrive shoot-em- up Hardcore, which was prematurely wiped out by the sudden 16-bit console crash. DICE’s approach to business remained chaotic in other aspects, too. “A bunch of us wanted to travel around the world, but we hadn’t got our game completely fi nished. So Andreas, who was the programmer, just DICE STUDIO PROFILE printed out all the source code and, whenever the testers in ◗ INTRODUCTION Sweden had a problem, he had ◗ FIRST ROLL OF to work it out manually wherever THE DICE he was in the world, and phone ◗ ANGLE OF them the fi x,” Nyström laughs. REFRACTION “The game only consisted of ◗ TWO BECOME a couple of thousand of lines ONE AND of code. Now that would be PROSPER impossible. Now it’s millions ◗ YOU GOTTA of lines.” HAVE FAITH ◗ LIGHTING, CAMERA, ACTION ◗ LOOKING INTO THE MIRROR 171 ROFILE P FIRST ROLL OF THE TUDIO S ICE Then, somewhere in New Zealand, when making the regular call to see if there were any more bugs, the travelers got the all-clear. “What shall we do next?” came : A D the question from DICE HQ, which by this time was located in the Swedish port city of Gothenburg. “Andreas leaned DGE out the phonebox to ask us, and me and Olof shouted back E ‘Car game!’” Nyström enthuses. “We were all fans of car S ’ games, so although we needed to develop a 3D engine and a physics engine, we thought, ‘How hard can it be?’” The result was PC and PlayStation racer Motorhead. IRROR Released in 1998, it sold over a million copies, including M plenty of OEM versions, which were bundled with the then just-exploding PC 3D graphics card market. It was THE another case of right place, right time for DICE, which was starting to make waves that were being felt far beyond their Scandinavian heartland. EHIND B “At that point, we hadn’t yet done a deal with EA, but we had spoken to them,” says Nyström, presciently. “I remember Some of the cool artwork on being in London for the ECTS game show.