On 24/07/2012, Mark Terrano, the lead designer of Age of Empires II held a "Ask me Anything" session on Reddit. you can read a compilation of the best Q&A below!
Mark Terrano
Long read, but very much worth it
Reddit: Your bio says you did quite a bit of corporate programming for big companies like Mobil and GTE. How'd you make the leap from that world into game design, and what were the programming skills and languages that enabled you to do it?
Reddit: It was kind of a funny story – I was doing real-time systems programming and analysis for big companies like GTE and Mobil Oil. I made a really futuristic SCADA oil-pipeline control system running on PCs (state-of-the-art Intel486's at the time) during the day and in the evening was playing Doom2 on the network.
Some acquaintances of mine (David Rippy, Tony Goodman) meanwhile were running Ensemble Consulting and working on games in the evening.
One day someone at Mobil got snippy and thought that playing games after hours was a terrible waste of scarce system resources and complained about it. My manager was really apologetic but said he'd have to put an entry (negative) in my employee file about the complaint. I said, no worries about, I quit. He totally lost all color, he immediately backpedaled, Mobil counter-offered, he apologized, but my mind was made up - if there was a chance to work hard and be technically excellent by day and MAKE games at night that was where I wanted to be.
I started with Ensemble Consulting as a Delphi (programming language and development environment) trainer the following week and worked on a game in the evenings we were calling 'Dawn of Man' – that later became Age of Empires.
Reddit: I dont really have a question, more of a story that I would to tell:
First, I'd like to tell you how much the Age of Empires series (including Mythology), particularly AoE II and Conquerors meant to me. AoEII was the first game i played online, my first real interaction with an online community, and the gateway to my passion for history.
Me and my friends would stay in the computer lab after school to play some Age LAN games, and those are some of my fondest memories from school. I must've spent hundreds upon hundreds of hours playing Age, and to this day I consider them my all time favorite games. I read the entire History log explaining civilizations, technologies, unique units, etc. and then proceeded to ask my dad (who is a history buff) about specifics. Our many talks spawned a dream of visiting fortifications around the world, which I will finally get to do when I visit Malta, Rhodes and Crete this summer.
I was devastated at what happened to Ensemble Studios, and felt heartbroken that the people who made these games I loved had to go through that. Even though I never personally met any of the team, I always felt like I needed to thank them for the masterpiece they created, and this might be the best shot I get.
Thank you Mark, to you, the team that worked with you, and everyone else who made all these memories and great times possible.
Mark: Thanks so much for your story I once had a letter from a history teacher who said something like 'I was going to write you a letter complaining about all the things you got factually wrong in AOK, but then my students were talking about Trebuchets and Joan of Arc and I knew that with your game you would reach more students than I could teach in my lifetime - how could I complain about that'. While we tried to stick to history where we could, gameplay always had to win out - I hoped to communicate some love of histoy through play to everyone. Trust me that everyone who had ever been associated with ES was surprised and shocked at the studio closure. Hopefully in the long run it means a lot of other small studios like Robot and Bonfire and HPE can carry on what we learned in future games. Thanks again.
Reddit: Who decides what the in-game cheats are? Is it something the design people toss in or is there some sneaky intern?
Mark: Actually, in AOK everyone on the team who had a little time worked on putting in their favorite easter eggs and cheat codes. Each one was kind of fun and special and a couple of them have stories. After a few high-profile incidents in the game industry though, the publishers have become a lot more particular and now insist that all cheat codes and Easter eggs get approved and run through ESRB before they can go in the game. Lots of the cheat codes spring out of the need to test the game - so we can advance through the missions quickly, or automatically win, etc.
Reddit:enter
cheese steak jimmy's
ctrl + c
enter
[enter, ctrl + v, enter] repeat as necessary
welcome to my childhood.
Mark: That was a Cafe near Ensemble Studios where we would go get these massive cheesesteak sandwiches.
+1000 food to you sir!
Reddit: So, what's the story with VDML?
Mark: It was a real naked-person story, we were celebrating during E3 out at the beach when one of the programmers (whose intials may have been D.L.) decided to go skinny dipping. He was out splashing and having a good time while the rest of the guys sat around the coolers drinking beer - a good natured group of men and women came up the beach and struck up a conversation while the person got colder and colder in the water. Eventually chill overcame modesty he made a break for it and came out and got his clothes to put on. In honor of his naked run the Villager-Male-DL was created. All of our in-game assets were listed using that naming convention.
Reddit: How difficult is it to get started in the game designing business? where are some good places to start in Scotland? what are the most basic kind of qualifications i need to begin with?
Mark: Game design anywhere is difficult to break into. I look for people who have been active in the Mod community, have made their own games, and have a good design sense for lots of genres of games, not just one - but specific fluency in one area. As valve says 'T-shaped people'. More tips in other answers on this.
Reddit: I love everything about you and your company, sir.
I will have twelve sons and eight daughters, all bearing the names Mark Terrano. Then, another son named Joe who will be severely punished for not being as good as his siblings.
This is what you have earned.
Mark: Flattered - but you'll completely mess up all my Google vanity searches with those kids. Maybe you should go for unique names
Reddit: Are you a gamer? Do you like playing games or just designing them?
Mark: I'm a gamer - love playing games and designing them as well. Most of the time I'm busy playing games related to what I'm designing (both for competitive comparisons and to compare pace to other popular games in the genre). At home I love playing Skyrim (yes still) with my girlfriend - I do the killing, she does the shopping and crafting. I play board games with friends and family all the time too. At HPE we have board-game night every Tuesday.
Reddit: My question to you is how much time would you say goes into researching the topic of a game? More specifically, what kind of historical research did you do for the AOE series? I'm a total pedant, and I absolutely love little pieces of real-world information that make their way into games.
Mark: I love total immersion in a subject - for AOK I was already a fan of the historical period (SCA, arts, etc) I dove in and read everything from the domesday book to the encyclopedia of weapons. When working on a zombie game design I read lots of zombie fiction, played zombie games, and watched zombie movies. Sometimes the popular conception of a fictional topic is as important to know as the historical too. With the Age series we really wanted to have a sense of the history and culture - so having the encyclopedia in there was important to the team, and I pushed hard to have native speakers doing the voice prompts (and fortunately a group of Mongolian throat-singers was in the studio where they did the localization and we were able to get them to do the voice responses)
Reddit: Can you please tell me an interesting fact about AOE2 that I probably don't know. Whether it be a mechanic, or something that happened behind the scenes. I want to know.
Mark: One of my most memorable experiences with AOK was getting flown to the United Arab Emirates as part of a tournament held by H.H Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed he said ‘If I really want to learn something like UFC fighting or Age of Empires I just hold a worldwide tournament and invite the best players here” – they held one of the biggest AOE tournaments ever and he flew the finalists to the UAE for a multi-day competition with prizes.
We were treated really royally with adventure tours of the desert, and lots of gaming.
My interesting fact: Tahnoon told me he had been playing AOK with a prince in Saudi Arabia – I thought it was pretty trippy that our ‘Game of Kings’ was being played by real-world princes.
Here are some pics from back then; sorry for the low-quality - it was state-of-the-art digital cameras then: http://markopolo.smugmug.com/Travel/Mid ... 83&k=DpgQp
Reddit: Who chose the civilizations and units for AOE2?
If you could choose one more civilization to add to the game, which would it be and why?
How was the game kept 'historically accurate' (was there a historian on hand)?
Mark: I did ultimately - with lots of input from the Team, and some input from Microsoft geopolitical. There was some great fan suggestions for historcial peoples that we would have liked to put into the game and a few that were cut for geopolitical reasons.
Hmmm, I'll have to think about which Civ to add - the popular favorite was the early Jewish warriors (I'm sorry, blanking on what they were called) who really did wage some epic battles. Some decisions are technical - how much do we need for differentiation. Some decisions are business - which Civilizations might help sales in the particular country we hoped to have sales in. Some of the ones we wanted to include ended up making it into AOC - which was a lot of fun.
We were all history buffs - while we didn't have a speicfic Historian on site we all knew how to do research. Dr. Greg Street I think did an amazing job researching for the campaigns - I learned a lot about Joan of Arc from the research and writing he did there.
I was particularly interested in telling Saladin's story - the crusades was an incredibly interesting time and so different from what most people understand from the European perspective. I thought the historical stories and dramas were incredibly compelling.
One interesting footnote - the beautiful storytelling through hand illustrations and awesome voice-over was our second choice, we had originally imagined cut-scene videos but they were just too expensive to produce. I was really happy with the result, and the work (The Walker Brothers and other) artists did in bringing the stories to life through different illustration styles. And the audio with sounds, original compositons and voice overs really showed what you can do with game storytelling giving constraints.
Reddit: Excuse me, what is deal with the car cheat?
Mark: Lead Artist Scott Winsett's dream car Also, the toddler on the tricycle was his kid - Scott was really passionate about the Easter Eggs.
The laser guy from the original AOE was from an early test game that didn't ship I think programmer/designer Timothy Deen put him in and started the tradition.
Reddit: Wololo?
Mark: Hoyo Hoyo! I think that sound effect was one of the best Chris Rippy ever made for the game. I was really happy with the way priest play turned out in the game, I was even more amazed in tournament play to see how effective a pro-player could be with just a couple of priests and a single calvary. Back at ES I always wanted a key-fob that would Wololo people.
Reddit: Tell me about it! Not to mention, they're annoying as hell when used against you. I dreaded hearing Wololo almost as much as the evil trebuchet "whoosh-thuckthuck".
Mark: After a couple tournaments going into AOK we hired a few pro players full time - watching the incredible skill and understanding they had of the game was just mind boggling. Any of them could easily take on 5 or 6 of us and we were REALLY good at the game. If they got any kind of edge they could instantly exploit it until you were totally ruined. I remember watching Maimin' Matty Scadding completely wipe out a tournament player and their village with two priests and a horse archer. He actively managed their alerts to continually throw them off, and by converting individuals at the edges totally hid his presence in the fog of war. Half the guy's villagers were gone before he ever realized what was happening. Amazing.
All the pro players were incredible. Watching Korean teams play in the PcBaang was also amazing.
PS: Can be moved to this forum: viewforum.php?f=253
Mark Terrano
Long read, but very much worth it
Reddit: Your bio says you did quite a bit of corporate programming for big companies like Mobil and GTE. How'd you make the leap from that world into game design, and what were the programming skills and languages that enabled you to do it?
Reddit: It was kind of a funny story – I was doing real-time systems programming and analysis for big companies like GTE and Mobil Oil. I made a really futuristic SCADA oil-pipeline control system running on PCs (state-of-the-art Intel486's at the time) during the day and in the evening was playing Doom2 on the network.
Some acquaintances of mine (David Rippy, Tony Goodman) meanwhile were running Ensemble Consulting and working on games in the evening.
One day someone at Mobil got snippy and thought that playing games after hours was a terrible waste of scarce system resources and complained about it. My manager was really apologetic but said he'd have to put an entry (negative) in my employee file about the complaint. I said, no worries about, I quit. He totally lost all color, he immediately backpedaled, Mobil counter-offered, he apologized, but my mind was made up - if there was a chance to work hard and be technically excellent by day and MAKE games at night that was where I wanted to be.
I started with Ensemble Consulting as a Delphi (programming language and development environment) trainer the following week and worked on a game in the evenings we were calling 'Dawn of Man' – that later became Age of Empires.
Reddit: I dont really have a question, more of a story that I would to tell:
First, I'd like to tell you how much the Age of Empires series (including Mythology), particularly AoE II and Conquerors meant to me. AoEII was the first game i played online, my first real interaction with an online community, and the gateway to my passion for history.
Me and my friends would stay in the computer lab after school to play some Age LAN games, and those are some of my fondest memories from school. I must've spent hundreds upon hundreds of hours playing Age, and to this day I consider them my all time favorite games. I read the entire History log explaining civilizations, technologies, unique units, etc. and then proceeded to ask my dad (who is a history buff) about specifics. Our many talks spawned a dream of visiting fortifications around the world, which I will finally get to do when I visit Malta, Rhodes and Crete this summer.
I was devastated at what happened to Ensemble Studios, and felt heartbroken that the people who made these games I loved had to go through that. Even though I never personally met any of the team, I always felt like I needed to thank them for the masterpiece they created, and this might be the best shot I get.
Thank you Mark, to you, the team that worked with you, and everyone else who made all these memories and great times possible.
Mark: Thanks so much for your story I once had a letter from a history teacher who said something like 'I was going to write you a letter complaining about all the things you got factually wrong in AOK, but then my students were talking about Trebuchets and Joan of Arc and I knew that with your game you would reach more students than I could teach in my lifetime - how could I complain about that'. While we tried to stick to history where we could, gameplay always had to win out - I hoped to communicate some love of histoy through play to everyone. Trust me that everyone who had ever been associated with ES was surprised and shocked at the studio closure. Hopefully in the long run it means a lot of other small studios like Robot and Bonfire and HPE can carry on what we learned in future games. Thanks again.
Reddit: Who decides what the in-game cheats are? Is it something the design people toss in or is there some sneaky intern?
Mark: Actually, in AOK everyone on the team who had a little time worked on putting in their favorite easter eggs and cheat codes. Each one was kind of fun and special and a couple of them have stories. After a few high-profile incidents in the game industry though, the publishers have become a lot more particular and now insist that all cheat codes and Easter eggs get approved and run through ESRB before they can go in the game. Lots of the cheat codes spring out of the need to test the game - so we can advance through the missions quickly, or automatically win, etc.
Reddit:enter
cheese steak jimmy's
ctrl + c
enter
[enter, ctrl + v, enter] repeat as necessary
welcome to my childhood.
Mark: That was a Cafe near Ensemble Studios where we would go get these massive cheesesteak sandwiches.
+1000 food to you sir!
Reddit: So, what's the story with VDML?
Mark: It was a real naked-person story, we were celebrating during E3 out at the beach when one of the programmers (whose intials may have been D.L.) decided to go skinny dipping. He was out splashing and having a good time while the rest of the guys sat around the coolers drinking beer - a good natured group of men and women came up the beach and struck up a conversation while the person got colder and colder in the water. Eventually chill overcame modesty he made a break for it and came out and got his clothes to put on. In honor of his naked run the Villager-Male-DL was created. All of our in-game assets were listed using that naming convention.
Reddit: How difficult is it to get started in the game designing business? where are some good places to start in Scotland? what are the most basic kind of qualifications i need to begin with?
Mark: Game design anywhere is difficult to break into. I look for people who have been active in the Mod community, have made their own games, and have a good design sense for lots of genres of games, not just one - but specific fluency in one area. As valve says 'T-shaped people'. More tips in other answers on this.
Reddit: I love everything about you and your company, sir.
I will have twelve sons and eight daughters, all bearing the names Mark Terrano. Then, another son named Joe who will be severely punished for not being as good as his siblings.
This is what you have earned.
Mark: Flattered - but you'll completely mess up all my Google vanity searches with those kids. Maybe you should go for unique names
Reddit: Are you a gamer? Do you like playing games or just designing them?
Mark: I'm a gamer - love playing games and designing them as well. Most of the time I'm busy playing games related to what I'm designing (both for competitive comparisons and to compare pace to other popular games in the genre). At home I love playing Skyrim (yes still) with my girlfriend - I do the killing, she does the shopping and crafting. I play board games with friends and family all the time too. At HPE we have board-game night every Tuesday.
Reddit: My question to you is how much time would you say goes into researching the topic of a game? More specifically, what kind of historical research did you do for the AOE series? I'm a total pedant, and I absolutely love little pieces of real-world information that make their way into games.
Mark: I love total immersion in a subject - for AOK I was already a fan of the historical period (SCA, arts, etc) I dove in and read everything from the domesday book to the encyclopedia of weapons. When working on a zombie game design I read lots of zombie fiction, played zombie games, and watched zombie movies. Sometimes the popular conception of a fictional topic is as important to know as the historical too. With the Age series we really wanted to have a sense of the history and culture - so having the encyclopedia in there was important to the team, and I pushed hard to have native speakers doing the voice prompts (and fortunately a group of Mongolian throat-singers was in the studio where they did the localization and we were able to get them to do the voice responses)
Reddit: Can you please tell me an interesting fact about AOE2 that I probably don't know. Whether it be a mechanic, or something that happened behind the scenes. I want to know.
Mark: One of my most memorable experiences with AOK was getting flown to the United Arab Emirates as part of a tournament held by H.H Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed he said ‘If I really want to learn something like UFC fighting or Age of Empires I just hold a worldwide tournament and invite the best players here” – they held one of the biggest AOE tournaments ever and he flew the finalists to the UAE for a multi-day competition with prizes.
We were treated really royally with adventure tours of the desert, and lots of gaming.
My interesting fact: Tahnoon told me he had been playing AOK with a prince in Saudi Arabia – I thought it was pretty trippy that our ‘Game of Kings’ was being played by real-world princes.
Here are some pics from back then; sorry for the low-quality - it was state-of-the-art digital cameras then: http://markopolo.smugmug.com/Travel/Mid ... 83&k=DpgQp
Reddit: Who chose the civilizations and units for AOE2?
If you could choose one more civilization to add to the game, which would it be and why?
How was the game kept 'historically accurate' (was there a historian on hand)?
Mark: I did ultimately - with lots of input from the Team, and some input from Microsoft geopolitical. There was some great fan suggestions for historcial peoples that we would have liked to put into the game and a few that were cut for geopolitical reasons.
Hmmm, I'll have to think about which Civ to add - the popular favorite was the early Jewish warriors (I'm sorry, blanking on what they were called) who really did wage some epic battles. Some decisions are technical - how much do we need for differentiation. Some decisions are business - which Civilizations might help sales in the particular country we hoped to have sales in. Some of the ones we wanted to include ended up making it into AOC - which was a lot of fun.
We were all history buffs - while we didn't have a speicfic Historian on site we all knew how to do research. Dr. Greg Street I think did an amazing job researching for the campaigns - I learned a lot about Joan of Arc from the research and writing he did there.
I was particularly interested in telling Saladin's story - the crusades was an incredibly interesting time and so different from what most people understand from the European perspective. I thought the historical stories and dramas were incredibly compelling.
One interesting footnote - the beautiful storytelling through hand illustrations and awesome voice-over was our second choice, we had originally imagined cut-scene videos but they were just too expensive to produce. I was really happy with the result, and the work (The Walker Brothers and other) artists did in bringing the stories to life through different illustration styles. And the audio with sounds, original compositons and voice overs really showed what you can do with game storytelling giving constraints.
Reddit: Excuse me, what is deal with the car cheat?
Mark: Lead Artist Scott Winsett's dream car Also, the toddler on the tricycle was his kid - Scott was really passionate about the Easter Eggs.
The laser guy from the original AOE was from an early test game that didn't ship I think programmer/designer Timothy Deen put him in and started the tradition.
Reddit: Wololo?
Mark: Hoyo Hoyo! I think that sound effect was one of the best Chris Rippy ever made for the game. I was really happy with the way priest play turned out in the game, I was even more amazed in tournament play to see how effective a pro-player could be with just a couple of priests and a single calvary. Back at ES I always wanted a key-fob that would Wololo people.
Reddit: Tell me about it! Not to mention, they're annoying as hell when used against you. I dreaded hearing Wololo almost as much as the evil trebuchet "whoosh-thuckthuck".
Mark: After a couple tournaments going into AOK we hired a few pro players full time - watching the incredible skill and understanding they had of the game was just mind boggling. Any of them could easily take on 5 or 6 of us and we were REALLY good at the game. If they got any kind of edge they could instantly exploit it until you were totally ruined. I remember watching Maimin' Matty Scadding completely wipe out a tournament player and their village with two priests and a horse archer. He actively managed their alerts to continually throw them off, and by converting individuals at the edges totally hid his presence in the fog of war. Half the guy's villagers were gone before he ever realized what was happening. Amazing.
All the pro players were incredible. Watching Korean teams play in the PcBaang was also amazing.
PS: Can be moved to this forum: viewforum.php?f=253