It's time to dive back into our extensive interview with Simon Phipps and to learn more about his work on the Harry Potter games, Burnout Paradise, Need For Speed: Most Wanted, and remaking GoldenEye 007. If you haven't checked out Part 1 of our interview, then catch up on that first before heading back here to learn more about Simon's career!
Accio Harry Potter Games!
Retro Dodo: So, Simon, you touched upon Harry Potter in our previous episode. The original Philosopher's Stone game was amazing. I mean, I've loved Harry Potter since I was a child. I remember reading the book for the first time in the last year of Primary School; we read it as a class and it's been a massive part of my life since then. And I know for a lot of our listeners, the games have been amazing. So for me, getting to talk to someone who's worked on them is awesome.
Simon: Well, it was my 34th birthday and I was still working at Acclaim Teeside We were working on Shadow Man 2 and actually Guy had bought me the first two Potter books - Philosopher's Stone & Chamber of Secrets, and I read them and found them absolutely delightful. They kind of reminded me of the best of British fiction books that I ever read when I was a kid, because most fiction books when you're a kid in libraries were like 'Here's another boy who got a pair of football boots' and I was like 'I'm into Star Wars - that's not doing it for me.'
Retro Dodo: They're like Lord of the Rings, but easier to read and less singing.
Simon: Exactly, and I just I thought they're absolutely delightful and amazing and I'm really grateful for it. It would be about May 2000. After Teeside I went off initially and got a job at Infogrames in Manchester to work on a Superman game for the Xbox that I convinced them that they didn't need.
Retro Dodo: Hold up; you convinced them they didn't need the game you were working on for them?
Simon: Yeah, so they hired me, I came on board, and this was a new Superman game for the new Xbox. They were building up a new team. So I got together the proposal, put it together, had the brilliant fortune to meet with the editors and writers of the Superman comic because this was based on the Superman comic. And there is a difference between Superman as a comic book character and Superman as an animated character, which sounds like there's a plan. It's just TV writers can't be bothered to adopt the law of the comics.
I had the fortune to work alongside Nilo Rodis Jumeiro who designed most of Buzz Lightyear and most of Return of the Jedi and a lot of Empire Strikes Back.
Simon Phipps
Simon: So as I'm delving into this, I found out that in the Infogrames Sheffield office, which was the old Gremlin graphics building, they were already in full flow building a Superman game based on the animated series. So I was like 'Can I go over and see those guys and see what they're doing?' So I met Rob the producer and they have this perfect brilliant animated series Superman game. I was like 'You are solving 99.9 % of the problems that I'm solving for the comic book version for this new Xbox and I haven't got a team.' So I said to my boss Tim, 'Why are we making a Superman game? You're going to give me millions of dollars and build up a team to do this and you already make one over there?' Tim apolgised for hiring me under the wrong pretenses, but I'd just had an interview with EA and they'd offered me to become lead designer on Harry Potter games.
Simon: But yeah, so that's how my kind of route in to Potter was. I went down there [to EA] and had the biggest interview of my life. It was about eight or nine guys sat around the table, firing me off questions. I obviously knew Potter because I'd come to it as a fan. And actually all those guys I ended up working with and they were the loveliest bunch. So, yeah, October of 2000, I went and joined Potter as the lead designer. The core of it was actually the Bullfrog team that used all the sort of theme games and stuff like that kind of thing at EA Chertsey, and the plan was was that there was the movie coming out of Philosopher's Stone and EA had already got Argonaut on the PlayStation 1 Philosopher's Stone game which is where the Retro Hagrid Face Meme comes from.
Simon: And then No Wonder out in Seattle were doing the Game Boy Advance and PC games. They were building up the team internally at Chertsy with an eye to do the next gen titles; PlayStation 2 and GameCube games, but they would be delivered like a year later. So we working to I think a year's deadline for the first Potter movie, and then two years for the next gen version. So one of the things was I was starting to build up was a Philosopher's Stone timeline and adventure, taking all the stuff that I learned from Shadow Man and stuff like that.
Simon: At this point, the games were in this state that they were reflective of Harry Potter, but they were doing certain things that you go, 'Yeah, that's not exactly in the book.' But of course it was that sort of thing of 'we've only got the books to reference and a few little bits of merchandise that are off the books, and it's magic so you can do anything.' So one of the things that Guy and I did for the greater part of the first year was became what we term the 'fiction police', having to guide and work with the guys at No Wonder to go 'No no no no no no no, this is where the story comes from, this is what Jo Rowling wants, this is what she's put in. You can't have a spell that just teleports, you can't just have a spell that does these things because there are no precedents at all,' and we always got kind of like that, kind of like 'Okay you just can't have trolls appearing here because 'reasons' - there has to be a reason for it.'
Simon: So what we did was spent a lot of time with the guys at No Wonder, actually helping them turn it into a video game, rather than kind of an interactive experience. Because I think their early demos were beautiful looking and you were kind of going, 'Oh, and you can cast spells and this, that, and the other.' But I was like, 'Yeah, but where's the game, where's the adventure?' And then the Game Boy Advance one, we actually brought some of their team over and part of our team worked in with their team to create a kind of top-down adventure, a simplified sort of version of what we were ultimately aiming for on the next-gen games so that was kind of our involvement with that.
I've Got The Need For Speed (& Burnout Paradise)
Retro Dodo: From a creative perspective, it's great that you could then go from creating a magical world to working on being 'Most Wanted' in the Need for Speed world. The amount of times that I would go to my GameCube and I'd be like, 'Why is Need for Speed in here again?' And my dad had spent all night playing Need for Speed: Most Wanted, or he'd be playing Burnout continuously. I'd think 'I'm coming home from school; It's Monday, it's dad's day off. I'm sure he'll be out doing something. I'll play some Wind Waker or something,' and then he'd have a racing game on.
Retro Dodo: When Most Wanted came out, we would sit together and we would just spend hours and hours getting the decals on the cars right. And then you're playing Burnout and the explosions firing off was like nothing we'd seen before. You've come a long way from from working on the BBC Micro, you've come a long way from working on Monty Python - You go through Harry Potter, you then end up here. It's not like you just stayed in one specific genre. You've said 'I've done that; I'll have a go at massive explosions now!'
Simon: Yeah, exactly. So when I came on board at Criterion it was actually to start on Black 2, the sequel to their PlayStation shooter Black, which was this incredible sort of like 'everything's destructible' gun game. So I came in on that, and at that point the Burnout 5 team was building the Burnout Paradise that it became and this sort of small team... we were looking at what would be Black 2 for I guess would be next generations of PlayStation 3. We started building up how we'd approach it. I had the fortune to work alongside Nilo Rodis Jumeiro who designed most of Buzz Lightyear and most of Return of the Jedi and a lot of Empire Strikes Back. I spent about six months in the company of this wonderful man just trying not to fanboy as he's going, 'So well George came to me and went I need another type of trooper but it takes too long for the Storm Troopers to get ready so we need some kind of costume it's easy. Alright in that case I'll put the flip down lids on the scout troopers how's about that?'
Simon: Gradually over the weeks, one programmer or a designer or an artist would slowly disappear from the Black 2 team because the behemoth that was Burnout paradise was just getting bigger and bigger, and then there's kind of like a moment when I think it was myself and about two other guys sat in a room with a lot of post-it notes going, 'We're never going to get those people back are we?' So I had the fortune of then joining the Burnout Paradise team, kind of like when the game was in full flight, they knew what they were doing. They were just making it. And so what I ended up doing was acting in a support role, helping out with all manner of bits and pieces. So like the website, we then put together a video podcast and everything called Crash TV, which was kind of like a YouTube show showcasing what was in the game, what the team were working on, talking to fans and promoting it, because we actually had a whole year of free DLC because it was like... you use the existing game as a platform for experimentation and learning.
Retro Dodo: So was it the the same story with Need for Speed as well?
Simon: So what happened with Need For Speed was I came in around about 2009. I'd be working for Criterion for about three or four years, I'd been away from home for like 13 years by this point and I was kind of like I'm gonna make 2009 my year to come back home. I was the lead designer on the multiplayer portion of Need for Speed, working with a lot of the guys that worked on Burnout, and so it was kind of like how do you... again, you have an open world, you go online, you tool around with your mates - what are the things that you can do to battle and race and have fun and do stunts and everything like that, so that was my role.
The Name's Phipps, Simon Phipps
Retro Dodo: You've alluded it to a lot and its the last game I want to talk about... and it's a big one. Getting the call to remake GoldenEye - that's got to be one of the most exciting but scariest things of all time. GoldenEye being, I mean, I'm looking at my copy up here, one of the best N64 titles, one of the best and most pivotal shooter games of my generation. It's a classic.
Simon: It was terrifying.
Retro Dodo: You're remaking this, you're putting Daniel Craig instead of Pierce Brosnan. I mean, I would be absolutely bricking it at that point.
Simon: That's a big enough thing. But we want it with Daniel Craig instead of Pierce Brosnan. Okay, cool. Well, what we can do is we can really play up the physical kind of stuff because Craig's bond is really, really physical. There's that whole sort of immersion of being first person, so we really played into that. So when he's grappling with guys, you're seeing it from his point of view. He takes the guy down, really brutal. We were asked to make movement through the world very agile because of all the kind stuff that was in the first one and Casino Royale and everything like that. Brilliant. And then we were told 'By the way, we don't really want any of the locations that are in the new game to be the same as the ones in the original. Okay? Yeah, because we don't want Daniel standing in the place where Pierce is. It needs to be different. Ideally the characters and the storyline will be different because we don't want to retread that thing.' So it's like okay, so we're taking something beloved, we're being advised to rip all of this stuff out and then still go 'It's GoldenEye'. So we had a team on the multiplayer who were just sort of like 'We're just going to go straight in and we're going to concentrate on 'multiplayer multiplayer multiplayer.'
Simon: I remember having a meeting down here on productions where I literally broke down all the points in their story and the mechanics of how the story worked and said, 'Look it has to be a major superpower if it's not Russia it needs to be North Korea, China, or something like that kind of thing because they need to have access to nuclear weapons for this to happen or for that to happen. There was a whole lot of that, so it had the flavour of Bond, and we had new takes on existing locations.
Simon: There are character differences as well all the way through, and that was adapted. From the gameplay point of view, the thing that I kind of pitched when we first started was looking at the original GoldenEye... was that whole aspect of stealth because of course you could go through and you could literally take everybody out and it was like 'Well actually, you know Daniel Craig's bond is super smart, really efficient, very physical'. We also got hold of Daniel Craig's stunt double and actually a local guy, Damian, who did all of the opening of Hellboy 2 and is great at parkour. We got those two in motion capture suits in the facility and had them do all the takedowns. These guys had never met before but within minutes we were like 'Well we need you to take him down from over a balcony with an AK-47.'
Simon: So we started building the game up over the first year and then this little game called Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 came out which landed and went 'Oh, you think you're making a first-person game that's a bit stealthy and this that and other? This is how to make it really cinematic and action-packed!' And so almost overnight the demands on our game changed. It meant going through every level you know inch by inch going 'Where can we pack in an extra bit of spectacle, actual spectacle. Where can we bring in another exploding helicopter?' or whatever, and we ended up with a kind of fleet of designers and producers all working on various different levels, critiquing them adding more and more whilst the story was being adapted by Hollywood in a slightly different way. So coming into 2010, it was basically, 'You think you're sleeping in your own bed at night? No, this is going to be seven days a week all the way through September.'
Retro Dodo: So how did you feel being told that this is GoldenEye but you've got to make it 'not GoldenEye'? Was that a moral dilemma for you?
Simon: It was like 'This isn't any James Bond game.'
Retro Dodo: This is the James Bond game!
Simon: Right? So it was that kind of like leaning on everything and going through analytically and explaining why these things have to be in there. You're trying to stay true to it and hold on to it and say there is that sort of thing of... it's not just a beloved property that you're adapting from a movie into a game, but it's a beloved game that's also based on a movie that lots of people have got really fond memories on, and we are making it all modern and changing everything up and it's like, 'How do you kind of get all that lot in?' So yeah, that was quite challenging!
Thanks to Simon for joining us for our first-ever two-part podcast! Make sure to listen to the rest of the episode below to discover more about Simon remaking GoldenEye for the Wii and what's next in the pipeline!
