How Lame Castle Went From A Weak Sony Dig To A Full iPhone Game

We spoke with Brad Johnson about how he left behind Lara Croft to start his own one-man game studio for mobile platforms. He describes the changing landscape of game design and how getting sued by Sony might be the best thing to happen to him.

For those who missed it, the name Lame Castle came from a Sony PSP commercial. Give it a look to see the game on an iPhone screen when the characters are talking about how stupid iPhone games are.

Long before Johnson took that quick reference and made a whole game out of it, he got his first gaming job at LucasArts as a tester. His first project? Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. After a couple years of testing, he moved on to Crystal Dynamics and became a scripter.

WORKING ON TOMB RAIDER

"I came on right when they were about to hit alpha for Tomb Raider: Underworld. So I went right into the thick of things having to hit the ground running. I had to learn on the fly. People were so busy with doing their own tasks that they could help me a little bit but, a lot of times what happens in games is that you kind of have to learn on your own. Just do it.

"So on Underworld I did a lot of scripting object work and then they started letting me do some programming. That’s how I started to learn. I was working with some programmers. They would teach me a few things. At the end of that project I did some DLC and a little bit more programming and I became a full time programmer on Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light. And what was really cool is they also let me design a level: the 'Jaws of Death' level with the giant zombie fish. I co-designed that with artist Chris Webb."

THE CONSEQUENCES OF GAME JAM

"There’s a browser game engine called Wild Pockets. The company hosted two Bay Area Game Jams in San Francisco, one in 2009, and one in 2010. Teams have 24 hours to make a game and present it. I teamed up with fellow Crystal Dynamics employees Chris Webb and Daniel Bryner and we ended up making two games for each Game Jam. We took home first place in both years. And then the second year our two games tied for first. To be fair, though, most of the people doing it were students so it was a little unfair. There were a couple industry teams but I can’t take all of the credit for winning both years. But everyone made some pretty cool games out of that.

"We thought it might be okay to participate in Game Jam just because they were little browser games, but they threatened to fire us from Crystal because we had worked on it. It was kind of a rough time at work. They brought us in and kind of yelled at us. A lot of us were unhappy and people heard about it. They were like, 'That’s pretty lame. Why can’t you work on little tiny side projects that you’re not trying to profit off of?' Anyway, they didn’t fire us. Everything’s all good. And they let us still put them out."

STARTING A COMPANY

"After the XBLA version of Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light shipped, I took off and started my own company called Be-Rad Entertainment. I’d been planning it for quite a while and saving my money up so I wouldn’t have to take on a publisher. I want to be able to do what I want and work on what I want -- to create my own schedule and not have any deadlines basically. My friends they have college loans and stuff so they have to have a job to be able to eat. I couldn't ask Chris and Dan to quit and start a little team, so I’ve just been contracting art and working with some other people for sound effects and stuff.

I think they’re some of the most extremely talented guys in the industry. They’ve moved on from Crystal at this point. Chris is at Sledgehammer Games working on a new Call of Duty, and Dan is a designer at Sanzaru Games, which made the Sly Collection. One day it would be really cool if I could work on another project with them but we’ll just kind of have to wait and see."

MAKING LAME CASTLE

I took a couple of weeks off after I quit Crystal and I went to go see Tour de France. Then I came back and started working. I liked Robot Unicorn Attack and Canabalt, and I just started prototyping a similar game. About two weeks into it I had a pretty decent prototype.

My friend emailed me and he sent me the link to that PSP commercial where they were making fun of the iPhone. He said, 'Hey, you should make that game.' And I said, 'Oh my gosh, yes!'



So I bought the domain name right away and I squatted on the iPhone name. My buddy threw in some temp art and just started working towards Lame Castle. We wanted to make it a little bit different so we threw in a bunch of new elements that these recent runner platformer types of games don’t really use. Most of them are just one level. You run forever and you get one score and you go back and replay that same thing over and over. So we added a bunch of levels that you can actually finish and then a bunch of different game modes."

[Try the game in your browser for free right now.]

LAWSUIT

"I checked the copyrights and trademarks and stuff and I didn’t see anything for Lame Castle so I think I’m in the clear. But someone told me that if they do sue me it might be the best thing to ever happen to me. I’d just get a bunch of press out of that."

UPCOMING PROJECTS

"I’m definitely going get out a few more smaller games kind of like Lame Castle over the next six months. But I do want to make them fun, and make sure there’s enough content so that people can play them for more than five minutes. It seems like so many iPhone games get put out and you play them for five minutes and you’ve seen everything. I don’t want that. I want people to play these games and maybe even replace their PSP or DS. I mean, those are great devices, but personally, I’m 30. I don’t really want to carry around five different devices. I don’t want to have an iPod MP3 player, a phone, and a PSP. I just want to have one device that does everything.

My overall goal is to make a bigger game for XBLA, PSN, or Steam. The way I want to get there is to take little systems and sections of that game, the bigger game, and turn those smaller sections into their own tiny games. Then, once I flesh out all of the systems for the big game by making all of these little tiny games, I’m going to put them all together and make one bigger game.  Hopefully, along the way I’ll be able to make a little bit of money to finance the bigger game.

I just want to be able to pump out a bunch of games using the same technology. And by having shorted projects I can tweak that more or less on the fly as opposed to having to wait for a giant release three years down the road."