Kotaku Splitscreen: The Human Story Behind Call Of Duty’s Zombie Mode

A long time ago I was lucky enough to be featured on the Kotaku Splitscreen Podcast and give a vocal version of how zombies ended up in Call of Duty. Maddy Myers and Jason Schreier were incredibly gracious hosts. They’re wonderful journalists that continue to do great things for the game industry. I was totally nervous but had a great time and feel fortunate to be able to have ended up on their podcast.

I’m amazed how popular “Zombie Mode” has become and how many hours people have been entertained by some of those big risks I took early in my career. I’m always grateful for folks who have spent their precious time enjoying it or tell me about their fond zombie memories. That’s why I make games. My goal is to entertain the world and make some of the most fun and memorable games and experiences ever created. I love playing games and want to give back by making them. Being able to achieve that by adding zombies to Call of Duty and pushing for it’s inclusion was no small feat and was it especially memorable to me how it all came to pass, as it was to the many other folks that helped make it happen along the way. It’s been interesting to see how zombies has evolved over time and has been included (or not) in each CoD release, but it seems to always stick around and remain popular. I remain very grateful on a creative and personal level that I could make it happen for everyone.

Feel free to give the podcast a listen directly from Spotify:

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And Further More, I’m Working on Halo 4

A while back Halo 4 was announced. As you might have suspected, I’ve been pretty busy working on the game. It turns out the campaign for a Halo game requires a pretty intense amount of effort. Who would have thought. I guess people are pretty into Halo or something.

I was actually the first designer hired at 343 Industries, but at the time the studio didn’t have a name. It was called something generic like “Halo Internal.” Woooo. In any event, I was the first designer to take the plunge (there were other designers that had come and gone, but they were pulled from other parts of Microsoft).

I didn’t start as a lead either. I was just coming off a crazy amount of Treyarch crunch (which if you ask around, is some of the most legendary crunch known to mankind) and was looking to get down on some level building, scripting and prototyping. You know, hitting reset on the ol’ work life balance button. However, after working at 343 for a bit, they asked me to be a lead, and being a lead on a Halo title is not something you tend to turn down. Don’t worry, I like to stay pretty hands-on with the tools in addition to having an outlook calendar full of meetings.

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Infinite Spawners

Hey! Non-fiction stuff for a second!

I recently finished Call of Duty: Black Ops on Veteran difficulty. Yep, the game I left during pre-production.

It’s interesting leaving a game two years ago and finally getting to play it. Overall I thought the game was a good experience. However, one thing that stood out was the use of infinite spawners in various places throughout the game.

It made me think back on a time I was being interviewed for a design position. Someone asked me what I thought of infinite spawners. I told them I didn’t care for them in general but that they can be used in the right context.

They thought I was wrong. I’m glad I didn’t end up working for them.

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Sometimes, Failure Is an Option

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

“I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.”

– Thomas Edison

Edison would have been a great game designer. He understood the importance of iteration, trying new things, observing the results and adjusting his techniques. One behavior I often see in our industry is little to no acceptance of failure. I’m not talking about a game sucking and being considered a failure, but instead of internal failures on game features, tech, levels, designs, and so on.

Here’s a few examples of failure I’ve seen first hand or have heard about across the industry and how they should have been handled:

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Social Games though the Lens of Farmville

I want to talk about “Social Gaming.” I find the phenomenon fascinating, especially since GDC was so heavily focused on the topic. Half the talks I went to involved social gaming talks and of course how much money they are making. And how large their audiences are. And how much bigger they will be in the future.

Hard to ignore. So, I started playing Farmville. I’ve been playing it for over a month now. I had stopped playing Mafia Wars a while back after getting my mother of all people hooked on it, so I figured it’d basically be the same deal.

Much to my surprise, it wasn’t. Farmville feels more SimCity than flash game. Cute graphics, sense of progression and economy, what’s not to like?

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Twitter

Oh, I’m trying the twitter thing now. You can find me at twitter.com/thejessesnyder. I’m sure I’ll be posting there a lot more than here. The blog will be the economy size version while twitter will be more the like mini-fun size.

You Down With 343? Yeah You Know Me!

I’ve been quiet for a while. Too quiet. The truth is I was deathly scared I’d accidentally post something about the team I work with and get fired over it. Man, these Microsoft guys are serious business!

As it turns out, I can now say I work for 343 Industries. Haven’t heard of em’? Soon you will. I have the privilege of working with some of the top talent in the industry, across the board.

Microsoft recently announced 343i’s existence at ComicCon ’09. They also announced some of the stuff we’re working on, like an anime series and something called “Waypoint.” They revolve around a popular intellectual property you may have heard about.

So in short, I got to work on Call of Duty and Nazi Zombies and now I get to work within the Halo IP. Not many people get to say that in their lifetimes.

E3 ’09 Roundup

Ahhh… E3 is finally over. It was a huge E3 this year which was great. I missed the classic pig party feel of E3 and I’m glad it was back. Anyway, here’s how my week went.

I flew in on Virgin since it was the cheapest fare a week before the beginning of E3. Now I’m officially a Virgin convert. It felt like flying on a limo and the price was right. Very choice. I caught “Slumdog Millionaire” on the way down from Seattle, which was a bomb-ass movie.

I met up with my buddy who lives in downtown LA. He does contract art from home in his sweet loft apartment. Ahhh, the good life. It’s also great because he lives within walking distance to the convention center, near great places to eat, and near lots cool hangouts. If you’re hungry, I highly recommend Bottega Louise (7th and Grand). It feels like you’re walking into an elegant European restaurant. The place has amazing food and it isn’t pricey.

I got my sweet all access pass for the Microsoft media briefing on Sunday then headed over to the Kotaku Party at the Golden Gopher with some Activision friends. We hung out there for a few hours, even after the free drinks dried up. I got a chance to meet some of the Kotaku guys as well. Mike Fahey was sitting in the back of the bar like the Godfather of the joint. He was super cool and always gave fair reporting on Treyarch, which I appreciate a lot. Good times were had by all, even if I was getting drilled about what I was working on and what Microsoft was up to. No about of alcohol will make me spill the beans though, I’m a human lock box! Although they knew about “Reach” the day before the briefing… hmm.

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Indie Games Galore!

Going to GDC always inspires me to go on an indie game bender. A few of us are sitting at this big award show hosted by the Independent Games Festival (IGF) waiting for the Game Developer’s Choice Awards and feeling guilty that we’ve played 0% of the games they’re calling out. Between the bunch of us we only heard of like three games they talked about…

So, within the next week I start getting games from Steam, downloading them for the PC or getting them for my iPhone. The one thing I found about a lot of these indie games I’m interested in is that most of the nominees (and some of the winners) haven’t even released their game yet. How does that work exactly? Does this happen in the movie industry too? “Well, no one has seen this movie yet, but here’s your award, I’m sure it’ll turn out great.”

Anyway, after getting back from San Francisco, I went on my yearly indie game binge. Here’s a quick run down of the games I played:

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Game Developer’s Conference ’09 Summaries

A group of us from various companies have decided to put all of our notes, summaries and recaps together from the ’09 Game Developers Conference and publish them for anyone to check out. We even split up on some talks when we were in San Francisco in order to cover more ground!

Yes, you can buy the audio and video for various talks through the GDC website. However, they’re expensive and I’ve always found it easier to find info if it’s all in text, since I can easily search for things I’m interested in. Plus I can skip around, come back to other sections later, read it on my iPhone etc. You’ll find that some people just put up their notes and outlines of the talks (me!) while other tried to tell more of a story of what happened. I’d be interested to find which format you all found more useful!

Anyway, feel free to share this with the world. It’s not complete yet as people are still adding their content, and there are a few more people who will be contributing, but there’s already a ton of talk summaries up to peruse at your leisure.

In case you missed the link above, here it is again.