2019 marks the 10th Anniversary of a little game called F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin. Since Monolith is currently doing some cool retrospective things about the game, this seems like the perfect time to do a bit of reflecting of my own.
F.E.A.R. 2 is a special game to me. You see, in my fourteen-year game development career, that was the only game where I was ever on a team from the start of pre-production to the final day of post-launch support. Most projects I ended up played a closer role – that of being dropped into a pre-launch product where my particular set of skills were required.
When Monolith started pre-production on what would eventually become F.E.A.R. 2, I was still a QA Analyst. During the game’s development, I would eventually move to a Production Coordinator title. More on that later.
(Note: The views and opinions expressed in this article are my own, based on my memories of how things happened during development. Because I was a fairly low-level employee, some of my information may be incorrect, but that’s how I heard or inferred the facts. I have no current relationship with Monolith or WB Games, and haven’t since 2011.)
One fun fact from early development: F.E.A.R. 2 started off life as two separate games. The original plan was to make a true sequel to F.E.A.R. for PCs, and a console spinoff in the same universe which would function as a complementary side story to the actual sequel. Development time, budget constraints, and who knows what else eventually compressed these two games into a single team.
That development crunch had a lot to do with how I ended up as a “Production Coordinator”. One of the other quirks about both F.E.A.R. 2 and Condemned 2 was that they were built on an extended version of the same Jupiter EX engine which had powered F.E.A.R. and Condemned. One of our tools engineers had even written a conversion tool that would allow artists to port art assets (lamps, carts, tables, etc.) from previous games across into the new games in development.
Unfortunately, the conversion process wasn’t a simple plug-and-play, it tended to require a bit of effort to get all of the texture maps and supporting assets working right. This took time away from the artists doing what they really needed to be doing, which was making new art objects. What was needed was someone with enough holistic knowledge of the game systems to be able to port everything from where it was to where it needed to be, fix up everything, and check it into source control. All without using the already scarce time of our artists or programmers.
Enter a QA Analyst with some time on his hands thanks to the “Scrummerfall” development method we were using, and who knew enough about our game engine, art systems, and source control to be mildly dangerous.
Eventually moving porting art into Condemned 2 and F.E.A.R. 2 became enough of a full time job that I was promoted to Production Coordinator. That title was kind of a misnomer, as I didn’t do any of the typical things involved with that role (which is usually a track to Associate Producer and Producer), but I suspect that they just didn’t quite know what to do with me at the time and picked a role. My complacence with that title would eventually come back to haunt me, but that’s also another story for another time.
Another fun and little-known fact about F.E.A.R. 2’s development: originally it was just going to be called Project Origin. This stemmed from an IP dispute between Monolith/WB Games and Vivendi Universal (VUG) who owned the shambling husk of Sierra Online and was the publisher of F.E.A.R. For reasons understood only by copyright lawyers, the deal originally struck by Monolith and Sierra was that Monolith owned the F.E.A.R. IP, but Siera/VUG owned the name. This meant that Monolith could make more games in the F.E.A.R. universe, but VUG could conceivably have made F.E.A.R.: The Western or F.E.A.R. The MOBA if they’d wanted to. This left us the development team to come up with a name that was evocative of the first game, but not necessarily a direct tie-in. Project Origin was the result of those brainstorming meetings. Eventually Big Daddy Warner got involved, threw lawyers and money at the problem, we got the name back, and the game because F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin.
We didn’t really feel anything from the start of the Great Recession in 2008. We were too busy working 60+ hour weeks trying to make a Christmas deadline that we didn’t hit. Eventually Condemned 2 shipped, and that team rolled into the F.E.A.R. team as we all tried to get the game out the door. Obviously, we didn’t make the Christmas release.
One of my favorite things about F.E.A.R. 2 was the soundtrack. Nathan Grigg is probably the most talented composer I’ve ever personally met, and he really outdid himself on F.E.A.R. 2. Some of the most memorable vocal pieces also involved the vocal talents of community manager extraordinaire Dayne “Hammer” McClurg.
I also owe a debt of gratitude to Condemned 2/F.E.A.R. 2’s producer Dave Hasle. He was the one who really allowed me to jump into my various new roles, and definitely gave me a major career boost. There were so many talented people who worked on that game, I can’t possibly name them all. A lot of them are still in game development, somewhere, though a fair number are like me and have gone on to other industries.
Oh, and one more development tidbit: those Quicktime events that both players and reviewers disliked? By and large, none of those started life like that. They were just regular fights that weren’t fun or caused some sort of weird bugs, but were found too late in the development process to make the necessary art/design changes to be fixed properly. Thus the QTE bandaid. Because eventually you just have to ship a product.
Sometimes I miss those days. The hours were nuts, and I basically ended up working 60 hour weeks from 2007 to 2011, but it was a really great team. But I also missed a lot of time with my kids, and screwed up my marriage for a while. Let’s call it a big learning experience, one that I don’t need to repeat. But I still smile everytime “Snakefist” comes up in my running playlist.