Ed: Ok, let's see.

Ed: The only thing I did right was having the courage to try, because anybody can get crippled by fear and we just don't do the things we should in our lives. But anyway that's a whole philosophical tangent that has really nothing to do with this. So lets see, history, background: started in the business in '91. I got a job at a company called Mindcraft as a result of knowing people, and going to college with a group of guys who were doing programming for Mindcraft while they were in college. We all met around a Gauntlet Machine actually, which is kind of like a classic video game story. It was free gaming day first week of college freshman year, and I show up to the club and we meet around a Gauntlet machine. These guys later got me to work at this place, and then later got me this job. I started in Customer Service. I don't want to say its a Cinderella story so I'm going to tell the whole thing and you can cut it how you like.

Ed: Oh god! Lets hope not! Started as a Customer Support guy just answering phones and I was only answering phones for a few minutes out of the day but you're there for 8 Hours so I'm reading magazines in-between. Eventually I went to the boss and said "Listen, for free I will write your game manual. You know, just give me something that's related to the game that I can do, and if you don't like it you can throw it out. I mean, It's not like you're paying me any extra money, I don't want an office I don't want anything, I'm just going to work at my folding table where I'm working now.

Ed: And what boss isn't going to say yes to that? So I ended up writing the manual for a Game Called Siege, and then I was out of the Game Manual Writing business as they didn't have anything else so I said why don't you teach me the World Editor, I know you need some Maps and I know you need some Scenarios let me do it, again, same thing no raise, no nothing, I'll do it in-between. My first priority is answering phones, etc, etc. And that's how it went, I ended up doing the entire game of Siege, which was kind of a Real Time Strategy game before we knew to call it that. It was all about attacking and defending castles. I ended up designing the whole game, from my desk, in customer support. At the end of that, the boss called me in and said "look I don't know why I'm paying you to do customer support", he gave me a raise, moved me into a cube, and the rest is history. I got into design at that company, and the company was a little less than organized so I found plenty of holes to fill; I was yet another finger in the dyke. I started on production work and started writing schedules and making task lists, just little things for everybody so we could actually get the games done. That went on from about '91 until the end of '93.

The beginning of '94 I decided that it was time for a change and I applied to a bunch of companies and got an interview with Westwood Studios and got in and began working for them in the beginning of '94. I was the producer on Command & Conquer, which were big shoes to fill for a kid like me at the time and I was just like "Okay, I'll give it my best shot!." It turned out being the producer of Command & Conquer, was really awesome; it was great work and it was really hard work. You had ten hour days, as the normal and 12-14 hour days were the only slightly less than normal. And we just got to invent, there was no straight RTS at the time except for Doom 2 and Warcraft 1 was just coming out, it was really just a crazy frontier-like time. I ended up doing that plus the swords and the expansions for that game, and I also got assigned to Red Alert. I was a Producer on Red Alert, and I did the expansions on that game. Actually, I did a couple expansions before I left them, when I decided that it was really just time to move on. I went off and worked at Origin for a little bit, I actually worked with Sid Myer, and Sid Myers company BRAXES doing Sid Myers' Gettysburg and a little bit on Alpha Centari before I got called over to the Awesome Office boards. Ultimate 9 was in trouble, and they needed my help. I was actually helping from Baltimore, they were sending me production documents and I was red lining them and sending them back. Richard Garriot liked what I was doing so much that he actually said "look I really want you to come here and do this full time". And it was just an amazing opportunity to work with some amazing people. I had just done a tour of duty with Sid Myers' company, and now here's a chance to work directly with Richard Garriot on the stuff he wanted to do. So I did that for a while. The really short story is that Origin's focus was moving towards online games and away from single player gaming, and that was causing a lot of stress and frictions in the Ascension team. I decided that I was going to take a break from the entire industry and bailed out for a little bit. By a little bit I mean two weeks, as I was scheduled for a Hawaii trip where I ended up just deciding that I wanted to start my own gaming company.

Ed: Cause I couldn't stop thinking about it. I was thinking, "oh yea I'm gonna be a carpenter, I'm going to do something completely different and just start over and just reinvent myself", and then I was just like "I have too many games left in me."

Ed: So, went back to it. When I got back home I started writing business proposals, etc, etc, etc. I felt I've always been very blessed. I have a wonderful nuclear family, a mom and a dad who really love me and would take care of me if I really failed. And having that trampoline underneath you is sometimes all you need to shoot yourself into orbit. What's the worst that's could happen? I'm would live with Mom and Dad for a couple months while I get a new job. So I really gave it my all. I had a ton of savings because I was a single guy, and I just had no expenses, had a ton of savings and poured it all into this, and here we are, here's Liquid.

Ed: We started four years ago. We started with Battlerealms, we made a kind of deal with Crave. It was a four project deal with Crave and the first project was Battlerealms. We pieced Battlerealms together, and when Battlerealms came out it sold 375,000 units which I thought was a phenomenal first entry for a virtual no-name in this industry who was kind of making his way. Didn't have a huge brand name on it, and it released in the same month as the XBox, GameCube, Empire Earth, Yuri's Revenge, and Sim 3. That was quite a bit of competition for the marketing dollar and we still managed 375,000 copies which was just awesome, as well as critical acclaim.

So, after that we took a step back and we couldn't turn this down. Vivendi Universal Games (VUG) came right on the heels of Battlerealms before we even got done talking about Battlerealms 2. VUG came to us and said how would you like to do the Lord of the Rings game? We were just like, oh my god this is just the coolest thing ever!

Ed: Exactly, ok, yes, and yes, and please more yes! It was phenomenal, it's like what I said earlier to you guys, Lord of the Rings in a lot of ways its why I'm here. It's the spark, Dungeons & Dragons was the fire, or D&D was the fuel that turned it into the fire. Absolutely Lord of the Rings. Without Lord of the Rings I wouldn't have even entered the portal of that level of imagination. In so many ways it was this wonderfully heart swelling thing and our big concern was that we wouldn't be able to do it justice. We went back and forth with VUG for a long time saying, " you know, if you want us to do this game we have to have enough time and enough money to do it right." Because we're not going to put out another piece of crap with the Lord of the Rings title on it; in the past the Lord of the Rings franchise has had a dubious history of Mediocre titles.

Ed: Absolutely. To try to pretend that you're doing that is a travesty. You just have to take pieces that you can and try to make as great a world as you can because to try to take it in its entirety is overwhelming. Lord of the Rings is something where you have to learn to breath the water, you've got learn to hold your breath longer and longer because its submersive. You start reading about one thing, and it's tied to six other things. It's the one property that exists in this world where the more you learn about it, the more there is. It's like the internet, it just spiders out and you can't do one piece of it without taking on all of these other pieces at the same time.

Ed: Absolutely. We were trying to do a lot in this first game. I think if we had tried to do all of the Lord of the Rings, all three of those books in one thing, I think we would have just had a real sloppy mess. I really do, I think there's so much evolutionary story happening that you just can't put it all in one game and expect it to be good. There's just so many different units and different settings. It makes more sense to grab a smaller chunk and do it well, than to try to grab it all and do it poorly.

Ed: *screams* YEA! YEA! You get to watch the Balrog come out of the ground and walk around and this is just, one item of the puzzle that we're going to have. I mean Sauron and Saruman are playable.

Ed: Oh it hurts. Every decision is a painful one. It's almost like you have to start with leaving everything out, and then look at it from the other direction: what can we bring in now. It's almost like you have this flood, this dyke, and you're poking holes in it and you're letting streams through because there's just so much. I know that might sound cheesy and your fans will probably think I'm super cheesy, but it's true.

Ed: Right, you have to take these tiny pieces of it and the challenge is not just what do you take from this rich, rich world, but rather the challenge is that the pieces you do take have to work as a Real Time Strategy Game.

Ed: It gets to the point where, the challenge was: ok here's the little thing we need to build and there's the rest of the table full of pieces and what do we do with all that table, and there are entire sections that we had to save for a later game. Like the First Age. The whole First Age is Super Fantastical, but it's like, ok we can't do that right now. People don't even know what that is!

Ed: Yea. There's so much detail you can get into. It's like: here's the dwarves and the orcs, that's a whole thing there. And oh, here's the migration from after the First Age, and how the Dragons came to the North and how the Balrogs came to the South. My god there's so much stuff! What we ended up doing was setting some really arbitrary parameters and we said ok lets imagine it's three books, how far forward do we want to go beyond the three books and how far back, and where do we stop and end. So we're sort of breaking it at Return of the King but it's still too much, we just think we're stretching ourselves to do Helm's Deep, but it's just a good stopping point. It's a good chapter end, or a book end and now it's feeling like we're going to start with the re-emergence of Sauron at Dul Goldur, which happens quite a time before The Fellowship and there's going to be a lot of fast-forward... *makes a Btzzt sound* another 400 years, and that 400 years is going to be perfect for an expansion pack at some point. You saw the map, and the map selection, that's why we set it up that way, so we could have that timeline presentation of all of that, and we can actually pop new ones in as you pick up new expansions, so as you're playing it's the same system.

Ed: You must have faith. You have to lay the foundation before you can build. The problem was, we're building core technology. We're testing, everything is coming together in the early stages, and it's very tempting to look at any individual piece of the game as done. But no! No, no! We just threw that in so we had a piece to play with but he doesn't even have his own skeletal structure yet! He's not moving right, y'know? There really were major differences between versions. I wish I could show you the last build, and then show you this build.

Ed: Its just like, we were laying the core foundation and all of a sudden it was: boom! And all the time we were making it into the submission, it was the same thing except no menus, no options, no map selection, half the units weren't in, half the models weren't in. Osgiliath was just this flat plain. It was just very empty.

Marcus: they completely cleaned it up. it looks so nice now.

Ed: Everything was just a first pass, a lot of it is just testing. You have to see what resolution looks right and you have the camera angles where it's an exact science: you have to do a mathematical equation.

Ed: Exactly. I think what really wraps it up is, and I've said it to these guys too, you've got trust the love. You've got to trust that the guys that are working on it don't want it to suck, and I know that sounds silly, but sometimes the most obvious thing needs to be said. You've got to trust that when you see something that you don't like you can bet your life it's not going to stay that way; maybe there's a little time until someone gets over their personal attachment to it, but then it just has to change. If you had seen the original builds.... I wish I could.

Marcus: its always fun to see the original builds and line them up. I remember once we had an old build for a game that was maybe a year and a half old, and we were looking at it going oh good god did we ever actually show this to people? You get a stomach ache looking at your own stuff.

Ed: It's not a lot, but some of the game dynamics have really changed. Some of the early game dynamics are very different, which in retrospect were really just too subtle--and this is why we moved away from them. We had these three different weapon types, blunt, piercing and cutting, and three armor types, leather, plate and chain, and we had three different combinations of all these. So it was like playing rock paper scissors with two hands, and you had wins wins, wins loses, and lose wins and lose loses. As every armor had its strengths and weaknesses, and it was a great system; it would be a great system for something like a Roman Legion game.

Ed: Yea. Their tech trees are identical.

Ed: You can ask Marcus how many times I would just not move on what this game was going to be, and I said you know what, until I know what this game is going to be, I don't want to start making it. Let us figure out what's special about each unit, let me figure out what makes a good Lord of the Rings RTS, and not just grab whatever is laying around. And in the early talks we had said we're not going to do that, don't make us do that. We're not going to take the Battlerealms engine and just put new art on it, and Universal was really cool about it. A lot of these games are really just a race to the biggest weapon, it's pummeling your opponent before he pummels you. It's like playing Flinch, its like I'm going to punch the crap outta you, and then you're going to punch the crap out of me, and whoever is still standing at the end of it beats the crap out of that other guy.

Ed: *laughs* So, what we're trying to do is get back more of the feeling that there are counters for stuff in ways that doesn't violate the Lord of the Rings. We had to stretch some things, like with archer knock backs and the like. We're not saying Gandalf is firing bolts of Flaming magic, it's really shown, the battles described are medieval. There are bows, there are swords, there are shields, and there are only so much of the mass market that will want that. When you think about the RTS market we're talking Korea, we're talking Germany, and Japan. We're talking about people who will demand a good RTS, regardless of whether it says Lord of the Rings, or Star Wars, or Command & Conquer or Warcraft. They aren't going to forgive a bad RTS just because it says Lord of the Rings.

Ed: So it's like lick one bone, run over lick the other bone, run back and lick the first bone, and like that you're trying to split the baby, and hopefully what you get is a good balance. You'll see where we took liberties with The Lord of the Rings but they still captured the flavor, the intent, the ethos if you will, and see where we've given on the RTS side and could have had air units, but didn't, and clearly there are no air units in The Lord of the Rings. I see where they've given up a little on the RTS but god it's still such a fun game.

Ed: Uhm, youre saying it was the best game of the show. To be honest, that's it. The proudest moment in my career, thus far, happened when I was walking through Fry's one day (Fry's is an electronics store) and I walk past the Video Game aisle, and I see a guy holding a nameless RTS, just an RTS that shall be nameless, and he called to his friend who was maybe thirty feet down the aisle, and he said to his friend "I think I'm going to buy this one." Then his friend literally puts down what he was looking at, jogs down to his friend, takes it out of his hand, grabs Command & Conquer and puts it in his friend's hand and says "This is the only game that you're going to buy!" I was just like, I can die now. It was the proudest moment, where this guy felt so great about this game that he couldn't allow his friend to buy anything else. That for me is the thing that makes me the most proud. It's really almost like a calling to make things that people really like.

Ed: They're in the wrong business.

Marcus: Yea, you talk to guys like that, and they really have just been in the business for too long or they got into it for the wrong reasons. There are admittedly a lot of people still in the business as a job, but some of the hours we do...

Ed: I got three hours of sleep last night.

Marcus: I'm working on one other project right now, and for the past three nights I slept in the office, under my desk or an hour in my chair. I do it because I've always loved games.

Marcus: It's actually really good. He's full of energy, there's points where Ed's energy is boundless and it's like oh how do I calm him down, but at the same time as long as you channel that for good you're fine. If the energy he has is used for evil then we're in trouble. Like I said, passion and all that stuff is fantastic. I've worked with guys who don't have it and that is bad. There are moments where Ed can get very imaginative about something and worked up about something going wrong, but everything is cool with him. He's good, it's good.