Hi from "The Thing" developer!
Hi Guys, I just wanted to say that i am blown away by the number of people still enjoying or hating the game :) I worked on both "The Thing" and its sequel (never made it) and loved every minuete of making the artwork for the game. I know it was a little flakey from a game design and story perspective but it was awesome fun. C

The thing video game is my FAVORITE VIDEO GAME. YOU ARE MY GOD. Now... if you could scrounge up a few of your coworkers, outpost 31 has enough funds to make a sequel.... By the way... What was the coding language you used to create it?

"outpost 31 has enough funds to make a sequel...." Errr, what are you talking about ? Thanks for the visit, c, always nice to see a developer of the Thing game here. :) About my take on the game, I think it's too bad that some ideas were abandoned during the development and also that the game was not as random about the infection as people were led to believe when reading the interviews. By tinkering with the game, I find that it has a lot of good stuff but the final game didn't use much of it, like the fear and trust system. I was wondering, what were you working on on the sequel ?

Hey guys, the sequal was really going to be what the first game should have been. There are a lot of rumors as to what happened at Computer Artworks but I guess I can now lay the record straight. The first game was a big transition for us. Previously we have only ever developed on PC so to write a new 3D engine and tool chain for PS2 and XBox (cross platform) was the big cost on that game. As a result while we were developing the game for 2 years, only the last year was really spent making the game content. The tools ate up the first year. This is really common in games development, first game is ok, proves some mechanics and gets the public interested. The second game is normally what the team wanted to make of the first. The Thing sold very well 1.4M units which is decent and so there were never any problems with money from the franchise. The real problem could be in directly attributed tot he sucess in that when we made "The Thing" we were a company of 30 people working on 1 game. After the things sucess we were offered a lot of business....we had made it into the public eye. I even went to the US to collect an idustry spotlight award. Off the back of that we grew to 150 people in just a few months and signed up 5 projects. One of which was "The Thing 2" project. THING2 has everything the first game fell down on. Truely dynamic infection. Full transformation animation system (the creatures actually mutated) and a return to more characterfull thing creatures that had different behaviours.....rather that the non descript lumps of meat int he first game. I'm building up my website at the momment and there is a page on Thing2 so when its done I'll post a link. So what went wrong? Basically we finished thing 1 and then rolled right onto a sequel based on a verbal agreement with Universal that we were 100% making a sequel. We picked a superb team from the first game. We worked for about 4 months but Universal went quiet on us. They wouldnt sign a contract or pay us for the work so in the end we had to disband the team. About 4 weeks after we did this Universal suddenly started talking again and said they did indeed want the title. Unfortunately the team members that I had, were re-assigned to the other 4 projects and as they were key staff in the company with all the knowledge of our systems from Thing 1, they very quickly became indispensable on those teams. We ended up with just 6 guys working on Thing 2 rather than the 12 we were supposed to have. We moved on with limited resource and worked on this game for about a year in total. It was shaping up but progress was painfully slow with the fe people we had. Eventually in October 2003, universal started to get frustrated at the progress and sent us a warning shot by with holding a payment for the most recent mile stone........at this same time another publisher also did this with one of our other teams. The whole house of cards came down as the company had over extended its finances. We went bust.....just like that! I was gutted, best company i had ever worked for plus I had just invested 3 years of my life in "Thing " games and lived and breathed it.

That was really interesting, thanks. I've spoken to several members of the development team while I was trying to find the engine and all the people who had worked on the game that I contacted were very nice to me and had good memories of the game. All of them told me that they loved working for Computer Artworks and that they were very disappointed when the company went bust. It's too bad really, as, even if the first Thing game is (very) far from being perfect, you were only a small team creating it and there were a lot of very good ideas in it, notably in game dynamics. I think all of us here would love to see your Thing 2 page, Hofmiester. :)

Thats horrible! Hey. at least Gary can find the other members, and with their experience, "Gary's Mod" will be awesome!

I thought it was very well done, personally. Especially for a movie-based perspective. Great job! I really wouldn't mind seeing a sequel for it, if it ever does resume.

UPDATE!
I have added some information and artwork from the sequel that never made it here.......www.cumronashtiani.com Go to the art direction pages and its at the bottom, first game i directed :) Ron

WOW! That's all I have to say! Seeing this sequel go down the ranks is just disappointing, especially for us Thing fans. Damn the business straight to hell! :evil: You guys really had something special going there, only to get blown to shit. Pitiful.

Very interesting and it's too bad CA disappeared before this was made, I think that, thanks to the experience on the first game, this one would probably have been a big success. Some questions : - You talk about NPC interaction and trust/fear NPC to NPC on the Thing 2 page. Could you expand on that ? - Would the game have taken MacReady and Blake as the heroes ? So it would have been a coop game maybe ? :p - Was it planned that the NPCs would play a bigger role this time ? I think what bugged most people in the first game were the scripted burst-outs but also the fact that you would lose your NPCs without having any control on it (like at the end of a level, a giant explosion occurs and kills all your NPCs no matter what). Anyway, I know this is probably not a good idea to ask those questions as the game will never be made but I'm interested in knowing more. I've also visited the pages of your other projects and Redwood definitely had something of the Thing. The video was very impressive for a demo. It's funny because I was able to contact several people from CA who worked on the Thing and most of them always told me they had the feeling that there was unfinished business with this game and would love to have the chance to work on it again. I'm not seeing this too soon in the future but maybe if a Thing sequel is made... I've also pmed you about some stuff, I hope you'll have the time to answer. :wink:

Yes, the 2nd game would have been what the 1st should have been before we ran out of time. I did actualy contact Universal a couple of years back and me and some of the team were prepared to get back together if they would fund us to make the sequel but they wern't interested. To answer Gary's questions....... - You talk about NPC interaction and trust/fear NPC to NPC on the Thing 2 page. Could you expand on that ? NPCs would have an opinion of you and other NPCs based on you/their actions. This opinion would then govern their actions. For example if you told an engineer that trusted you to shut down a power system but there were neutral NPCs there that neither trusted or hated you they would react in one of the following ways based on their "class" Class = Soldier - he might become agressive if youy shut the power off Class = Scientist/Civillian - May become scared Class = Infected - May burst out By having classed of NPCs or personalitys and then having them effected by the actions of others led to some very interesting simulation. However it was a bitch to control in a game as all you NPCs could fall out and then it was game over so we still needed some scripting to keep it all under control. - Would the game have taken MacReady and Blake as the heroes ? So it would have been a coop game maybe ? :p Our plan was for Blake to be reunited with McReady around the middle of the game timeline. At the start of the first game, Mac was never found and so we had left this open. In the second game Blake would find himself in an impossible situation and at the last minute Mac would show up and save his ass. Form that point on the story of Mac and Blake would combine and you would start to learn where he had been. From that point the player would have some levels were you would have Blake and Mac in your squad and you could control either. The story would also split in places were Mac and Blake would need to break up to achieve an objective (Blake takes out the cryo tubes while Mac plants explosives) In this case you would play alternate levels as Blake or Mac with NPC team loyal to either or both. - Was it planned that the NPCs would play a bigger role this time ? I think what bugged most people in the first game were the scripted burst-outs but also the fact that you would lose your NPCs without having any control on it (like at the end of a level, a giant explosion occurs and kills all your NPCs no matter what). The second game had much deeper NPC AI and infection systems so that there wouldnt be any more scripted burstouts or killing off NPCs before the level ended. Anyway, I know this is probably not a good idea to ask those questions as the game will never be made but I'm interested in knowing more. I've also visited the pages of your other projects and Redwood definitely had something of the Thing. The video was very impressive for a demo. It's funny because I was able to contact several people from CA who worked on the Thing and most of them always told me they had the feeling that there was unfinished business with this game and would love to have the chance to work on it again. I'm not seeing this too soon in the future but maybe if a Thing sequel is made... Redwood was pretty much my secret "Thing 2" project under a different name :) unfortunately I couldnt get that off the ground either. EA seemed very keen for a while and then dropped out at the last hurdle.