hen the $1,000,000 Make Something Unreal contest was announced, modders around the globe collectively spit out their Mountain Dew in shock. John Gibson, Allen Wilson, Bill Munk, Ingmar Spit, and the rest of their team decided it was time to take their mod, Red Orchestra, to the next level. The team worked tirelessly for several years and it all paid off the day their mod took first place. Now they have formed Tripwire and plan to release the full game this March. We spoke with Gibson on how his team almost fell apart. Why they had to deal with the shady Russian underground. And how the million dollar prize was just a myth in the end.

GI: How did you meet the original mod team?

John Gibson: Originally I had been working on a mod for Unreal Tournament 99, this was before Unreal Tournament 2003 came out, and I really wanted to move up to the latest tech. I didn’t want to be stuck. At the time when we were developing The Third Reich it was a little late to be developing a mod for the old Unreal Tournament so I was really looking forward to getting my hands on the new tech. Basically, one of the problems that I’d had in former mods was just that the art team wasn’t very good.

I was a programmer and it was like no matter how good you make the game play, if it looks bad no one’s going to play it. So I went to all of the mod websites of mod teams that were starting up for Unreal Tournament 2003 and I found the Red Orchestra team. And I was just amazed at how good the artwork was. I hadn’t seen anything like it from a mod team before. I figured no matter how bad the programming team is if their art’s that good we can make a successful mod out of this. So I solicited the leader of the mod and, at the time, I think he said he had like seven programmers. I’m like, “Well, do you have room for one more?” And he said, “Sure.”

That’s one of those things you come to find out on a mod team. Yes, there’s seven programmers. And of seven programmers, one or two know how to do anything. And maybe one of them is any good. It’s kind of funny because after I joined, within two weeks there were two programmers.

I had a decent amount of experience programming with the Unreal engine and basically I found that a lot of the guys were so bad that letting them program in the game was causing more problems than not having them do anything at all.

GI: So what kind of programming experience did you have at that point?

Gibson: It’s kind of interesting the way I got in to modding, especially programming. I had been going to school for programming, but my background was really in sound and music. I was actually a professional musician. I had a band with a record deal and we toured all over North America and all that kind of stuff. But the band never got mega big or anything. We were a metal band and had the unfortunate pleasure of putting out a metal record right around the time Nirvana and all that stuff was getting big. We were a little late to the metal party. The band kind of tampered off. And I had found a mod team for Quake 2. They were doing a mad called Some Old Game.

They basically took Wolfenstein, Quake, Quake 2, and they put it all together into one mod. It was kind of weird. But they needed music so I answered an ad that they put up in a game news website and got the job to do the music and sound effects for the game. That was another experience I had being too late to the party. It was a Quake 2 mod a year or two after Quake 2 mods were even relevant. Quake 3 had been out for a year and here we were working on a Quake 2 mod.

We had been working on it for a long time and about three months before we released it the only programmer on the team quit. So at the time I had been going to school for programming and basically I said, “I’ll just give this a try.” I had been playing around a bit with the Quake engine’s code and it was like hieroglyphics. I just couldn’t get it. It was funny. I opened up our mod’s code and within the first day I was just in and doing things.

The very first thing I coded was like a grenade that could blow up a wall or something and the very first time I had programmed something in it was like a light shown down from heaven. You know, “Ahhhhh.” I found my calling. I was hooked instantly. And from that point on all I wanted to do was program games because it was just so enjoyable. It just felt like what I should have been doing my whole life.

GI: Do you feel with Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45 now that you’re on top of the game? You’re using Unreal 2.5, correct?

Gibson: With Unreal 2.5 I feel like we’re at a crossroads now as far as the tech goes. Unreal Engine 3 is right around the corner. So if we released our game right after a lot of Unreal Engine 3 games came out I feel like we would be considered pretty low end. Where we’re at right now it’s like if we waited four or five months it would probably be too late to release an Unreal Engine 2 game. But the engine still looks pretty good. I look at it like this. It’s going to take another two or three years before developers really master Unreal Engine 3. There was that recent news about Frame City Killer where Namco said they’re going to have to go back and redo all the art because they’re not familiar with the engine.

Pretty much, we have a mastery of Unreal Engine 2 – as mastered as you can get. We’ve been working with it almost as long as any developer outside of Epic. There were a lot things we were able to do, especially once we won the engine license and were able to dig into the engine code. There was a lot of stuff we were able to do that frankly we might not be able to do in Unreal Engine 3 for another year and a half until we really got our hands around the engine.

President of Tripwire John Gibson.

GI: It sounds like you joined the original mod team after they had formed somewhat of a foundation. Had they already decided to enter the Make Something Unreal contest?

Gibson: Without sounding too conceited… the game really wasn’t actually playable online until probably a month after I joined. I like to say “The art development started before I joined. The code development started after I joined.” That’s being a little mean.

One of the co-founders, Jeremy Blum, who left the mod before we won the contest, one of the things to his credit that he did was take on anybody. I mean, he recruited massive amounts of people. When I first joined I said we had seven programmers, and there was a total of 60 guys on the team. But it ended up being a pretty good tactic because out of those 60 guys you had 20 guys that were really talented. So we were left with a really talented group of individuals.

There are a lot of rumors about Red Orchestra, and one of them is that we were a bunch of evil money grubbers that got together for the sole purpose of winning the MSU contest and that was all we cared about. Couldn’t be farther from the truth. We had probably eight or nine months of development on the game before the contest was even announced. When it was announced we all had a meeting and said, “Should we enter this thing?” And everybody’s like, “Yeah, let’s just do it.” It wasn’t one of those things where we looked at each other and said, “Yeah, we’re going to win this thing. Let’s do it.” Our thought was that there was probably going to be lots of other really good mods, but we’re going to do this thing just for fun.

There were five phases of the contest and during the first phase we didn’t feel we were ready so we sat out. And we watched the other mods come out and it was one of those epiphany moments when we realized that we were six months to a year ahead of every other mod in the contest – just in terms of development and polish. They were fun. But almost every other mod was UT 2004 with jungle models or terrorist models. They really hadn’t changed the core gameplay. They just put a little bit of different artwork in. And we realized, “Man, we could win this!”

We had a meeting and we said, “Let’s try to win this thing.” From that point on that was our goal. And that caused a lot of internal conflict in the mod. People do mods, for the most part, because they want to have fun and learn how to make games. Within the Red Orchestra team there was a huge division between the people that just wanted to have fun, and the people that were serious and wanted to turn it into a career or something bigger. I guess I was the leader of the faction that wanted to turn it into something serious and make it something bigger. And the former lead, Jeremy, he was more of the leader of the group of people that wanted to just have fun with making the game. That was a constant struggle over the development of the mod. It caused a lot of fights. A lot of people quit the team. A lot of people left and came back.

So we entered the second phase of the contest. We won that. And then there was a long period of time between the second and third phase of the contest. Several of the team members got hired by game studios – myself included. I had actually gotten hired by the America’s Army team and worked on the game for about a year. I was working on a realistic Unreal engine shooter. They were working on a realistic Unreal engine shooter. The skill set really matched.

I think over the period of Red Orchestra’s development probably twelve guys got hired by game studios – and even hired to work on competing products. We got guys hired to go work on the first Brothers in Arms game. The entire programming team got hired by the America’s Army team. So that was one of the biggest challenges keeping the game together. Now we’ve got all of these highly talented people. How are we going to keep them all together? They’re all getting hired by game studios.

GI: So how did you get the team all pulled back together to finish your original project?

Gibson: One of the things I found working at a game studio, it’s a great job, but my first love was Red Orchestra. I really thought that some day it would become something more. If it won the contest, it could go on to become a retail game. And there was potential to even start a company around that. So I left the Army game to refocus the Red Orchestra team on winning the contest and to be able to take it to the next level.

Basically, we lost some key people. But the people that we really needed stayed with the team. I’ll just put it that way. We had the key players in place when I came back.

Essentially, Red Orchestra won a couple phases of the contest, and I hate to say this, but we actually started to believe our own hype. This contest lasted almost two years. Epic had extended it several times. And everybody got kind of complacent. They’re like, “Oh, we’ve won the two phases that we entered. We’re just going to keep stomping everybody and win this thing.” Originally, I had said we were six months to a year ahead of all the other mods. Because of that complacency, the other mods caught up. There were some really really amazing mods that started entering the later phases of the contest.

GI: What were some of the competing mods you were nervous about at the end?

Gibson: There was a mod called Frag Ops that had some very interesting elements. Almost like RTS elements where you could earn points and build things. I was really neat. Troopers was one that was really good. It was a Star Wars mod. They had infantry guys, X-Wing fighters, and destroying the Death Star. There were some really creative mods like Air Buccaneers. Damnation was a single player mod that was really good.

I told the team at the time that we’re going to lose this. The other teams have stepped up and we’re going to lose. The other guys were just getting too good. So we had a team meeting and I think this is where we got back on track. I told the other guys to go play all of the other mods. If one mod is going to beat us, I want you to list the elements these mods are going to have that will beat us. So we compiled a list of what we thought the mod that would beat us would have. We took the top ten things and went back to the team and said “Let’s be this mod. Let’s take everything we think they are going to have and put it in our game.” That’s essentially what we did.

The number one thing was vehicles. The mods that we thought were going to win the competition had nice vehicles. When switching from UT 2003, which did not have vehicles, to UT 2004, which did have vehicles, we stuck with that non-vehicle game play. And it was kind of hurting us as far as the contest was concerned. So that was the thing. We’re going to make the best vehicles out of any UT engine game. And there was some other lesser things as far as polish and bug free. But vehicles was the number one thing on the list. I guess it worked. (laughs)

GI: Apparently! So, can you describe what it was like when you were waiting around for the announcement and then finally realized you were in first and got that million dollar prize?

Gibson: It’s very important to me that people know this. We did not win one million dollars. Nvidia and Epic have done a lot of nice things for us. They helped us get our foot in the door to the industry. But people, whether it be the press or the people holding the contest have not done a lot of denying that, no, the grand prize winner did not get a million dollars. It makes good headlines for articles and press releases. But we did not win one million dollars. The entire sum of the prize for the contest was one million dollars.

GI: And that includes the Unreal license?

Gibson: Including the Unreal license, that is correct.

GI: Can you detail everything that went into that one million dollars?

Gibson: There were like five phases and 20 prizes awarded per phase. Each prize was going from $500 to $10,000 or $50,000 for the final phase. You have to realize that 19 other teams won prize money in every phase. For the final phase, we won the $50,000 and we also won $50,000 throughout the other phases. Grand total, we actually won $100,000. So over the entire contest, it all equaled one million dollars and that included the Unreal license which is worth about $300,000 or $400,000.

The reason I am so adamant about this is that I get hate mail from fans. They literally say stuff like, “You greedy *%&#’s won a million dollars from Nvidia you should give your game away for free!” I get hate mail like that all the time and people think that we won this contest and had this fat bankroll to make a game studio with. The reality was much different than that. We were very excited to win the contest. To answer your question about what it was like to win. It was the best feeling of my life, maybe aside from having my daughters or getting married to my wife.

One of the interesting things we found out about the contest was that most of the mods were financed projects. Several were professional game studios or people working at professional game studios being made to make their mod to try and win the contest. There were actual professional game studios that we beat in the contest. They put their own development studio money up to pay people because they wanted to win the license for their game studio. We didn’t win a lot of money but that is how big the engine license is.

GI: After you won the contest, did you decide right away that you wanted to make this into a full blown game? With the money that you did end up winning, did you do some splurging or did it go right back into the company?

Gibson: Well one of the pitfalls of staring up a mod just for fun and then trying to turn it into a business is: Who owns the game? No one. And there were 60 guys that worked on that game so when you split $100,000 between 60 guys, that’s not a lot of money. The four leads saw that we had $30,000 between us and we said, “Hey, let’s start a game studio.”

We pretty much knew we wanted to start a game studio. In the last six months of making the mod, us four leads quit our other jobs. I had a nice job over at the Army games and I quit to work on the mod. We pretty much asked our families to support us because we wanted to win this contest and start a studio. I would work for 18 hours a day. I would literally roll out of bed and get on the computer and start programming. My wife would bring me breakfast and then she would bring me lunch. I would only leave my computer to take care of business and sleep. That went on for months on end. That was our dedication. That’s how bad we wanted it.

GI: What advice would you give young up and coming modders who want to emulate what you’ve achieved?

Gibson: This is something that I’m amazed that other people haven’t learned yet, but it’s killing the mod scene. They gotta stop releasing stuff before it’s ready for the public to see. It’s so hard because you work on a mod for a year, year and a half. It’s very unthanking work when the public hasn’t seen it yet. It’s very hard to be motivated. It’s difficult because you want to show the world want you’re doing.

What happens – and I learned this on other mods – you release a buggy alpha, no matter how good your ideas are, no matter how original they are, no matter how fun your concept is, if your execution is poor, you’ve left a dirty taste in the mouths of every fan that will ever try your game again. So many mods are doing this.

I’ve recently started downloading a bunch of Half-Life 2 mods because I’m heavily into the scene, and I was amazed that even some of the more popular ones were terribly unpolished. As hard as it is, they need to buckle down, take another four or five months, and get the thing up to a beta before they release it to the public. Because then what’s going to happen is if they’ve got an original concept, all of their fans aren’t going to be run off by their buggy, incomplete and semifunctional gameplay.

We waited very long to release Red Orchestra. Even as complete as Red Orchestra was when we released it, two and a half years later we still hear people say on forums when we’re talking about the retail game, “Oh, I tried the first beta of Red Orchestra and it was really buggy and I never tried it again.” Even though a year and a half development happened after that, all of those bugs are squashed, the game became very polished, that still bites us in the rear. So that’s my one piece of advice to modders. Please listen to that. Please do not release a buggy, partially finished alpha because you’re only hurting yourself and you’re hurting your team by doing that.

GI: There are a lot of people out there who have played your mod. What upgrades can they expect from this retail version?

Gibson: The original plan was to reuse a large portion of the mod code to save time and just fix things and polish it up. But as we went back and looked at it we were like, “Man, the stuff we did two years ago was just crap.” (laughs)

One of the main things that we wanted to address when we were given this second chance to do the game right is all of the main complaints that the fans had about the game. What were some of the things that fans thought were weak in the game?

GI: What were some of those things?

Gibson: For instance, player movement. Players felt stiff. They didn’t feel right. So we wanted to take all of those things that the players had complained about and turn them actually into our strong suits. That was one of the first things we did was just redo the player movement from scratch. There are all kinds of things that the player can do now. They can dive. This is something that you’d usually see in a third person game like Max Payne or something. Guys can dive out windows or over obstacles. It’s not really an element you’d see in this realistic kind of game. Diving is something guys can really do. If somebody throws a grenade in the room, guys are jumping out windows trying to get away.

There were a lot of things in the mod that were clunky. The fans were right. You would have to push like three or four different buttons to do something. We’ve really tried to streamline the whole player movement functionality.

I like to say we’ve done everything bigger and better and more. We had seven vehicles in the mod. We have 14 in the retail game. We’ve got more weapons. We’ve got more player variants. We’ve got more maps.

To use a Battlestar Galactica term, we “reimagined” a lot of the maps. We’ve got maps that we’re fun in the mod, but have been completely redone from scratch. When you do that you can keep all of the elements that people liked in the original level. And we’ve created a lot of new maps.

Plus the vehicle gameplay has developed into something that you really can’t see in any other shooter like this. Obviously, there are other games that have vehicles, but they always seem to take this completely different approach. Our game is really anchored in realism.

GI: I noticed that when I saw the game earlier. You have to manually reload the bolt rifle, there are no health packs, etc. What influenced this sim-based design choice?

Gibson: Basically the philosophy of pretty much every World War II game ever made has been, “Let’s make the player feel like they’re in a war movie.” And I’m not here to dog that. That is fun in its own respect. But it’s been down so many times. It’s like, “How many different ways can we make people feel like they’re in Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers or Enemy at the Gates or something like that?”

We wanted a unique location. Russia, that was it. At the time when we released the mod there was no other World War II game that had even touched on Russia in a first person shooter. After the mod came out there were some others like Call of Duty that kind of touched on that. But there was nothing that focused on Russia. So we’ve got our scenario, but we wanted gameplay that was unique. Other games make people feel like they’re in a war movie, let’s make a game that make players feel like they’re really in a war. We want to take slices of those really intense battle moments that are realistic.

One of the levels we developed for the retail game is called Konigsplatz. It’s set on the final assault on Berlin. It’s essentially the Reichstag, this building in Berlin. Even though it didn’t have much tactical value it was a symbolic thing. The Russians wanted to capture that so bad and the Germans just fanatically defended it. I think it’s the set piece scenario in our game. Our lead designer took just thousands of pictures of the Reichstag and the surrounding area. We actually did the battle on a 1:1 scale. The entire area in front of the Konigsplatz is built from reference on the exact scale it was in real life. So we simulate that final assault of the Russians. For me it’s one of those moments. Every time we play test that level, all of us just look at each other and go, “This is the most intense time we’ve ever had in a multiplayer game.” You play a round of Konigsplatz and you’re just gritting your teeth for 20 minutes till either you win or lose.

GI: Can you describe the process you guys undertook to collect real data, images, and sound for the game?

Gibson: Really Allen Wilson has been our best source of information we’ve had, especially with the scenarios and a lot of the research. Some of the stuff, where he’s gotten information, you don’t even want to know. He’s got sources inside the former Soviet Union that get him Soviet documents that have never been seen in the West. When he gets them from these guys they’re like, “Do not ask where we got them.” We’re like, “Okay, we don’t want to know.” Don’t ask. Don’t tell.

One of the things we really wanted to do was have a realistic aiming system for the tanks and the tank sights. So many games just have either a third person perspective with a little crosshair or some view where you’re magically looking out the front of the tank while you’re driving it and aiming the turret. We really wanted the player to know what it felt like to be sitting in that tank turret, aiming it the real way, adjusting for elevation and things like that. But the problem that we found was that there were no pictures anywhere on earth of these World War II tank sights. We did an exhaustive search. Allen had to dig through British intelligence reports that are 60 years old. We have reference pictures that look like they’re drawn on a cocktail napkin. I picture a British spy in Moscow in 1946 taking the end off of a sight and scribbling down real quick what the sight looks like on a little cocktail napkin. Some of the stuff we’ve had to fill in the gaps where there’s just literally no information.

I’m kind of the team gun nut, if you will. Over the course of the development of the game I went out and bought almost all of the Russian weapons in the game to use for reference. So a lot of the stuff, like the weapons firing and reloading and stuff, we actually recorded off of the real thing.

GI: I’ve heard that you’ve had some specific game design rules when you were developing Red Orchestra to avoid some common FPS annoyances. What were some of those?

Gibson: Most annoying thing #1: When you walk up to somebody, you shoot them in the back with a rifle. They don’t even see you. You’ve got the drop on them. And then they turn around and kill you. I’m biting my tongue here not saying what game that happens constantly in. It’s very, very annoying. That’s one of the things we wanted to do in the game is have a realistic level of damage. If you get the drop on somebody, you’ve earned it.

There are other things too like “never force someone to either be camped in their spawn or force the other team to camp somebody in their spawn to win a round.” And I have no shame in saying this: that’s one of the things they do in the Battlefield series. You’re actually encouraged to camp people in their spawn to win the game. I just find that amazing that any gamer would find that enjoyable. There’s nothing enjoyable about appearing and then getting shot as soon as you appear. It’s just not fun.

I won’t say them all because then we’ll give away all of our secrets. We have these cardinal rules of Red Orchestra gameplay. You don’t do this. You do do this.

GI: What’s in the future for Tripwire?

Gibson: Well, a lot is riding on this for us and it’s essentially been a labor of love for the whole team. Especially the leads, we for the most part, financed the game ourselves. That’s pretty unheard of, especially for guys that aren’t rich. The whole team has been living on just what we can get by on just to make this game. Whether a million people buy the game or 10,000 people buy the game, we feel that we have made the best game we possibly could have. We all love playing it and we think other people will enjoy playing it. We won an Unreal Engine 2 license and also an Unreal Engine 3 license. I am sure you have seen the Unreal Engine 3 tech demos with Gears of War and UT 2007. We’re chomping at the bit to show the world what we can do with that. One of the fortunate side effects to this contest is we now have 35-40 of the best Unreal Engine developers in the world. We find that game studios from Japan to California are scrambling to find people with Unreal experience. A lot of big games are on UE 3.

GI: So if the game sells well, are we going to see a sequel using Unreal Engine 3?

Gibson: Definitely using Unreal Engine 3.

GI: Are you guys looking to develop on consoles like the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3?

Gibson: Oh yeah, especially with Unreal Engine 3. We would be daft to not do that. Unreal Engine 3 has been designed from the ground up to be very portable between systems. So we’d be almost silly not to do PC and Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Our license only extends to the PC version, but we have already had publishers approach us wanting to do next-gen games on those consoles.

You always hear that the money is in the consoles. Our goal at Tripwire is not just to make money. We want to make money because it enables us to make great games. That was one of the things we noticed when we started to work with Valve. Standard distribution models favor the publisher. Developers almost never see the rewards of their efforts. They’ve got all of the creativity. They’re doing all of the hard work. The only thing they don’t do is finance it. But because the publisher takes all of the financial risk, they get all of the financial rewards. There are exceptions. There are the Valves and ids and Epics of the world that have been very profitable. But for the most part the developers are lucky just to stay open even if they develop a hit. The DICE guys recently said that the console version of Modern Combat had sold a million copies.

GI: And it still wasn’t enough. Didn’t they need four million to make any sort of royalties at all?

Gibson: Four million copies sold before they’ll ever see a dollar of profit. Without going into too much detail, if Red Orchestra sells a million copies over Steam, I’m driving to work in a different Lamborghini every day of the week. (laughs) Not really.

Not to downplay the deal with Destineer. That’s great. We’re very excited about it. Obviously, getting the game into stores has been one of our dreams ever since we started making games. We want to walk into a store and see it. We’ve got a very good publishing deal with Destineer, probably one of the best publishing deals you can get in this industry. But the digital distribution deal and the way it’s structured, it so favors the developer. It puts the reward back into the hands of the guys that created the game. I just think that’s only going to result in better games in the long run.

At Tripwire, through our blood, sweat, and tears, putting people’s houses up for mortgage and everything else, we have been able to finance the development of Ostfront. And if it does well it will be very profitable for Tripwire. And we’ll be able to put even more into our next game. That’s how it should be. We’re not paycheck players. We’re in this to make great games.

Have we taken a big risk? Hell yeah. If this thing goes under there are guys that are going to be hurting. But we believe in the product and we’re willing to risk everything for our own game. Guys work a lot harder and are a lot more passionate when their own butts are on the line.