Denis Loubet’s “Origin” Story: Endame
Over on the Drawmycharacter Facebook page, Denis Loubet posted a continuation to the story of his time at Origin Systems roughly two weeks ago, which I totally missed remarking upon at the time. As it happens, the fun that characterized the start of his work at the studio didn’t last:
Later Origin was not as fun for me. The company filled several floors of office building, and the different projects were totally insulated from each other. You could no longer know everything that was going on because everyone was in one tight clique or another and jealously guarded their turf. We still had fun, and I even got a trip to Jamaica out of the Ultima project group. When EA bought the company we knew our days were numbered. So I took advantage of the EA sabbatical policy and went on a trip around the world! That was cool! 🙂 I visited EA sites in Japan, Australia, England, and Canada, on my trip. I’d do it again in a heartbeat!
But the advancement structure was not for me. The only way I could advance at Origin was to go into management, and I hated that idea. At this point I was just another artist. I had not been invited to work on Wing Commander III, and felt unappreciated. So when Ellen and Stephan Beeman invited me to join them at Illusion Machines Inc, I jumped at the chance to be a big fish in a small pond again.
Here’s the last thing I did at Origin that I’m proud of. The intro to Ultima 9: Ascension. The visuals of the first part of the intro are pretty much all mine, except the dragon was modeled by the amazing Robert Frye. The second part was animated by the talented Micheal Morlan using my Blackthorn model. The final stained-glass window sequence at the end was done entirely by me in Lightwave, as opposed to 3D Studio Max. Of course, the sound guys bestowed the other 50% of coolness to the video with their awesome sound tracks. 🙂
He goes on to link to this copy of the Ultima 9 introduction — which is pretty good, it must be said — at YouTube. What’s interesting about the above is that the decline that Loubet perceived at Origin predated the EA buyout, and I would think it roughly corresponded with the company hitting its zenith during the production of games like Ultima 7 and (as Loubet mentions) Wing Commander 3.
(I’ve been told by a few people that it was highly unusual for teams working on different projects at Origin Systems to closely associate both at or outside of work; the marriage of someone from the Ultima team to someone from the Wing Commander team was almost viewed as a Romeo and Juliet story.)
Fascinating.
I wonder what (or who) was responsible for the culture shift from Band of Brothers to Office Space. A damn shame.
I think that the cultural shift was a natural consequence of Origin’s success and growth as a company. Many companies, across pretty much all industries, go through the same process. I wouldn’t say that it’s inevitable, but it would take a lot of conscious effort to avoid it.
As projects get more complex, the number of people required to work on it increases dramatically. And with large teams sizes come large budgets and the “we’re all close friends working on something cool” vibe vanishes pretty quickly. The stakes get a lot higher, and now a single poorly-received game can virtually ruin the company.
Back in the Apple II days, they could more easily manage multiple games at once. They could have a small team of 5 or 6 people working on one game; a company of 25 could have 5 games in the works at once. Development cycles were shorter, and it was more common to share individuals between projects.
It’s no coincidence that this culture shift occurred as Origin transitioned to PC-exclusive development. There’s a sizable jump in the team sizes with Ultima VI and Wing Commander, and then again with Ultima VII and Wing Commander II. Wing Commander III, of course, has a credits list that wouldn’t look out of place attached to a game released in 2013.
Once they left the 8-bit computers behind, Origin was always on the cutting edge of PC technology; pretty much everything from Wing Commander onward would only perform well on a high-end PC at the time of the game’s release. I think that Ultima VII was the first game to require an 80386 processor to even run — Wing Commander and the Worlds of Ultima games ran (sluggishly) on an 80286, but were missing some features due to limits on addressable memory on that processor (such as the animated hand on the control stick in WC, music in the WoU games).
The development cycles of Ultima VII and Strike Commander probably had a huge influence on the culture of the workplace. Many of us will remember the print ads for Ultima VII – “The quest continues fall 1991” (released April 1992).
Strike Commander is, of course, infamous – print ads read “The assault begins fall 1991” while the game was released in April of 1993. A year and a half delay now is considered annoying but barely raises an eyebrow. In the early 90s, it was unheard of. The Wikipedia entry for SC states that “The Strike Commander project has taken more than four years and over a million man hours on background development. Very little of this production time turned out to be actually usable in the final product, as at least one and possibly several complete project ‘reboots’ were required to refine the graphical engine to a playable state.” When Strike Commander was previewed, the landscape graphics were absolutely amazing, compared to the ugly flat polygons in games like Falcon. By the time SC actually hit the market, Comanche: Maximum Overkill was wowing gamers with its voxel-based landscape. Comanche also ran acceptably well on a 386DX system, whereas Strike Commander was barely playable on anything less than an outrageously-priced 50MHz 486DX.
I think that it’s highly likely that Origin lost a lot of money on Strike Commander. Ultima VII shipped 6 months late (which I remember being unusual at the time). The “Worlds of Ultima” concept was a failure — the intent was that after investing in creating an engine for a mainline Ultima game, these Ultima spin-offs could be made on a much lower budget. From what I understand, both Savage Empire and Martian Dreams each cost more money to make than did Ultima VI. Likewise, Serpent Isle cost more to make than did Ultima VII, which is probably another reason that Arthurian Legends and whatever other Ultima VII engine games that were proposed never saw the light of day.
This kind of stuff will kill any “band of brothers” culture at a company.