*DOH!*

[ThunderPeel2001]

Errr.... here's the Fate of Atlantis interview I did with Noah Falstein. Never before seen by human eyes (apart from ours). Apologies for not bringing it to light sooner...

 

Noah Falstein FOA Interview (Co-designer of Fate of Atlantis) Circa 1998/9

 

Thank you, Mr Falstein, for taking the time do this!

 

• Who came up with the Fate of Atlantis storyline?

 

It was mostly Hal Barwood. FoA was Hal’s first game at LucasArts, so I helped more on the design, but his writing experience was so great that he ended up doing most of the storyline and just about all of the dialog.

 

• What restrictions were placed on you when it was decided to there would be a new Indiana Jones storyline? I’ve heard that George Lucas insisted that the plot be plausible and not too fantastic. Is that true? If so, were many ideas thrown around before one was chosen?

 

No, George didn’t have much to say at all, he has always given LucasArts (and their predecessor, Lucasfilm Games) a very free hand. He didn’t want the story to interfere with any of the existing background from the movies, but other than that there was very little involvement on his part. George and Hal knew each other from long ago – I met Hal when he was at Skywalker Ranch to work with George on a movie that never entered production – so he talked to him more than I did, but I never heard of George contributing anything to FoA.

 

George did suggest that we consider using a finished screenplay that had almost become the 3rd Indy movie. It was very different from The Last Crusade, and I think it was a wise choice to abandon it. We struggled with it for a couple of months before abandoning it to work on our own concept. We scoured the Lucasfilm library for suitable mythological things for Indy to go after, and finally narrowed it down to Atlantis and Excalibur. But we liked the idea that Atlantis lent itself to so many different exotic locations, so doing something set mostly in England wouldn’t have been as much fun.

 

• Which areas of Fate of Atlantis did you and Hal Barwood both work on? Was it even or did you work on different areas (plot, puzzles, dialogue etc)?

 

Hal was the project leader, I was a co-designer. That means that he and I worked on the basic structure of the game pretty equally, but he was the one who ran the project and carried it through to completion. Accordingly, it’s really his game. To take the movie analogy, it’s as if we wrote the screenplay together but he went on to direct the movie. Because of my background I think Hal listened to my design instincts even when his own ran counter at times, but he did much more overall than I did – I wasn’t even at LucasArts when the game was finished. I take full credit and blame for the three pathways though – it was an extension of some ideas I’d started to work on in Last Crusade and Hal was hard to convince because it meant a lot more work to finish the game than if there had been only one path. But it was one of the most popular aspects of the game, to judge from the reviews and player comments, so I feel vindicated.

 

• What was it like working with Hal Barwood? How did his background in films help shape the project?

 

It was a tremendous pleasure. Hal is extremely talented, and very knowledgeable about all sorts of things. He’s the first person I’d want on my team if I were in a trivia contest. He and I have continued a friendship that began from working on the project, and we’re currently planning a joint talk at the 2002 Game Developer’s Conference.

 

His film background was a huge help in making the storyline of the game come alive. In particular, I think Sophia Hapgood, who was largely Hal’s creation, is one of the more intriguing and believable characters in video games – much more human than Lara Croft!

 

When we first started working together, Hal kept calling the game a film – he would make offhand comments like, “I think the overall design of the film is good, but shouldn’t we...” I remember one time, several months in, when he started telling me about a project his writing partner Matthew Robbins was working on, “He’s directing a game about a dog...” when he actually meant film. It was a critical moment for me to realize he’d finally made the transition.

 

• What game designing experience did you learn from working on Fate of Atlantis?

 

Well, I think the most significant thing about it was the idea of having multiple paths that the player chose without knowing the choice was made, essentially made it a self-adapting game. Hal estimated that the three pathways cost about 1.5 to 2 times as much to make in terms of time and money as a single pathway would have – and we’ll never know whether that was worth it financially. But creatively it was important, and I know Louis Castle at Westwood used the model and took it several steps further when he made the very successful Bladerunner game a few years later. I’m glad it was out there for people to learn from.

 

• How was working with a big team on Fate of Atlantis different to your experiences working with a small team on Last Crusade? Were priorities changed for the second game?

 

Since I was only involved closely in the first months of the project, I never really did work with a big team for that. I was working as the first Project Leader on The Dig (they went through 4 before it came out) while Hal was getting the project together, and that was a large team too. Overall though, we had about ten people involved with Last Crusade and roughly twice that for Fate of Atlantis, so it wasn’t a huge difference. Games today have really grown, with teams in the dozens, so you have to spend more time managing them and less on the game itself.

 

• Indiana Jones was the first LucasArts game to be a "full talkie", how did this affect development? Was it difficult dealing with the new technology?

 

You’d have to ask Hal, but I know that his movie producing/directing experience made it a lot easier than it would have been for me. We’d also done quite a bit with Monkey Island II, so there was some good in-house expertise by that point.

 

• How hard was it casting Indy's and Marcus’s voices, and how pleased were you with the final results?

 

I don’t know about the difficulty, but I think they worked pretty well.

 

• What is your fondest memory of working on Fate of Atlantis?

 

Probably the early research, and working with Hal in general. I remember how excited Hal and I were when he first showed me a book about Atlantis and we realized it was just the sort of thing we’d been looking for. The early story and puzzle brainstorming meetings were great fun.

 

• What are you most proud of in the game? Is there anything you would like to have changed or was there anything you wanted to see in the game that was cut out?

 

As you’ve probably guessed, I’m proud of the multiple paths. Also, I think we did a good job incorporating the Atlantis mythology. It was fun to research, and I’m personally convinced that the theories involving the explosion of Thera and a tidal wave that destroyed Minoan civilization on Crete are likely to be true. I’ve seen a scholarly analysis of what we did on the web somewhere, and it’s great to see that at least a few people appreciated the background we put into it. Even the map in the background of the poster and game box is of the correct part of the world, in an appropriate language – Latin I think, but it’s been a while.

 

• It appears there was an amazing amount research involved with Fate of Atlantis, for example a lot of the locations in Crete look exactly like they do in real life. Did you actually visit any special locations to research the game?

 

I’ve mentioned the research before, it was a lot of fun. Lucasfilm has a great picture-oriented research library – for instance, for the Grail Diary we were actually able to find an example of what a telegram from Italy in the early 1900’s looked like. But no, I never have gone to most of the locations in the game, and I don’t believe Hal has either. At one point we discussed setting the game partly in Tahiti and trying to get the company to send us, but that only happens in movie development.

 

• After being so involved in the mysteries of Atlantis, what do you really think about the lost city? Did Plato just use it as a way to let his ideas be known without being persecuted, or do you think there is some truth to his tales?

 

I’ve pretty much answered this above. I’m a big fan of science fiction, but in this case I believe the legend of Atlantis was just overblown from the few simple comments Plato made. It does touch a basic cord, there’s something very human about the story of a great civilization that dared to do too much and was punished by the gods. But in trying to make up stuff about Atlantis, we continually would find that someone had done so before us. It was in fact a little eerie at times, when we put an Atlantean artifact in the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg purely because we liked the idea of that place as a location to visit, only to read about just such an artifact in that location a few weeks later. But the pragmatist in me is just more convinced by that how easy it is to make up plausible stuff.

 

Perhaps you could answer a little Fate of Atlantis trivia for Indy fans too?

 

It’s been a long time, sorry about the spotty memory:

 

• Who's face did you use for Sophia (the one digitised next to Harrison Ford's in the Archaeology article)?

 

I don’t remember. We did use several of the employees at LucasArts as models for various aspects of Sophia – I remember in particular that Sue, our marketing person, had beautiful thick hair and used to flip it over her shoulder, and the animators gave Sophia the hair (turning it from black to red) and the flip. One of our artists was the model for the Nazi guard on the cover.

 

• What was the hidden room next to Sophia’s office used for? Were many other puzzles/rooms removed so late in the game's design?

 

Don’t remember. There were several parts of the game that were trimmed during production. I think Atlantis was originally larger.

 

• In the opening section of the game, the user is supposedly monitored so that Sophia can recommend a path to them based on their playing style. Since there is only one multiple solution puzzle in the opening act, how else were they monitored? (The first time I ever played the game I was recommended the ‘Wits’ path, but every time since I have always been recommended the ‘Team’ path – and I don’t know why!)

 

We just had the one puzzle – we considered doing more, but were afraid that as it was, we were reading too much into the actions of the player. That’s why we had Sophia essentially ask you if you want to go on the path your action recommends. It’s the puzzle for getting into her theatre. If you move the boxes around to solve the maze, she recommends the wits path, if you successfully talk your way past the guard, it’s the team path, and if you fight the guard it’s the fists path. But the actual choice is made when you either agree to Sophia’s assessment or choose another description of yourself. That way we made sure the player chose what was best for them.

 

• Have you had a chance to look at The Infernal Machine? If so, what did you think of it and its attempt at merging traditional adventure puzzles with action gameplay? Do you think games like this and Revolution’s In Cold Blood are the inevitable way forward for the adventure genre?

 

Yes, Hal gave me a personal copy. I think it’s quite good, and I love the feel of the story and Hal’s use of dialog. So much dialog in games is very lame. It also shows some of the differences between Hal’s sensibilities and mine. He loves action games on consoles, and I tend to play more PC strategy games. I would look at the action-adventure as a useful sub-genre, but not necessarily the only or the best “path” forward.

 

• In an interview, Hal Barwood said that he placed very little importance of getting the character from one major location to another. Some fans have claimed that this can remove some of the feeling of achievement once a location has been completed. How do you feel about this sort of design?

 

I pretty much agree with Hal on that one. You can’t please everyone.

 

• Do you still keep in contact with Hal Barwood?

 

Absolutely! Hal and I regularly have lunch together, and end up having great wide-ranging conversations about games, evolution, space science, etc.

 

A humongous Thank You for taking the time to do this!!

 

No problem!

[ThunderPeel2001]

Sorry folks. I didn't check back to the site in time for the feature... and then I forgot. If only I hadn't lost the Hal Barwood interview that went along with it...

[ThunderPeel2001]

I'm kinda surprised no one has said anything :/ It's the last of a series of interviews I did about Indiana Jones (apart from the one I did with Barwood which has unbelievably gotten lost in the mists of time -- although I do remember he said he thought Infernal Machine was better than Atlantis). Is it worth retro-actively adding it to the article? You know, "for history"?

[Ascovel]

My excuse for not saying anything before is that I wasn't registered in the forums when I've first read this and I forgot about it later on.

 

So what I can say about the interview now is... well, it's very interesting to learn how exactly did Hal and Noah work on this together. Noah compares Hal's work to that of a movie directors, but it seems to me that it was more of a producer's job in those times - supervising those small teams mostly to just get the job done.

[Gabez]

This is great work, thanks Thunderpeel! I'll add it to the article as soon as I have a chance.

[Kroms]

Seriously, great job ThunderPeel. I haven't been using the internet much lately so don't feel offended if I don't take the time to thank you (although I should) - God knows how long this must've taken you. But really, fantastic job. Big thanks to Mr's Barwood and Falstein as well.

[ThunderPeel2001]

No worries, I'm really glad people appreciate it! It's a crime that I lost the Hal Barwood one *sob* - but there was that big "Making of Fate of Atlantis by Hal Barwood" thing in Retro Gamer wasn't there(?).

[s-island]

Of course there was! And it's in our article. Which you of course already know since you've read it.