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| - Second-party Silicon Knights shares its design philosophies and more in this site developer profile. by IGN Staff OCTOBER 19, 2000 IGNcube's Developer Profile features are designed to highlight key software houses making games for Nintendo's next-generation console -- first-, second- and third-parties included. In the paragraphs below, we bring you everything we currently know about the hottest Gamecube developers in the industry today -- how they got started, who was involved, what they've done and what they're doing. Get to know the companies pioneering the cutting edge software you'll eventually be playing. This week: Silicon Knights The History Development house Silicon Knights was officially incorporated as a company in 1992, but the story behind the firm's success begins shortly before that in 1991. Two Computer Science majors at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario Canada, Denis Dyack and Rick Goertz, looked to break into the games industry with a twist on the standard formula. They had an idea to create a smart, intuitive interface for a real-time combat game with strategy elements in the era of the Atari ST and the Amiga, and went forward with it. The project caught the interest of publisher Strategic Simulations, Inc. and a game was born. The title, called Cyber Empires in the US, would go on to boast a five-player mode, something virtually unheard of in its time, and sell in five different languages across Europe. "It was critically acclaimed, but the sales figures were average ¿ it didn't do huge numbers," explains Silicon Knights' president Denis Dyack on Cyber Empires. "It was a hot-seat multiplayer game so we actually split the screen much like people do on consoles now." In 1992, shortly after releasing the game and incorporating the company, Silicon Knights was just four people and already underway with a sequel to its first title called Fantasy Empires. The game would expand on its predecessor with an improved interface and graphics and enhanced AI. One year later, in 1993, the company would release Dark Legions for PC featuring multiplayer support over a modem connection -- a title that would earn the company an Editor's Choice Award from magazine PC Gamer. It wasn't until 1996, however, that the name Silicon Knights would be recognized by mainstream gamers and it was all due to a huge PlayStation hit called Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain. The brainchild of Dyack and company art director and writer Ken McCulloch, Kain was an isometric RPG published by Crystal Dynamics that stood out thanks to some beautifully crafted visuals and a very westernized storyline. In a period when nearly all RPGs came from Japan, the title proved that a North American take on the genre could be executed with exactly the right balance of content and gameplay. With Kain a franchise was born, but unfortunately for Silicon Knights it was a franchise fraught with outside politics and a fight for ownership. In 1997 the relationship between Silicon Knights and publisher Crystal Dynamics dissolved and one year later reports surfaced that the Canadian development house had filed a lawsuit against its former partner. The suit alleged that Crystal Dynamics, then at work on its own sequel in the Kain franchise, had stolen the concept for Kain 2 from a secret project that Silicon Knights had been working on, and it also proposed an injunction to keep Crystal Dynamics from marketing its follow-up. The suit was privately settled, enabling Crystal Dynamics the rights to use the franchise and its characters for future sequels, so long as it was noted that developer Silicon Knights was the series' original creator. Rather than dwell on the subject, Silicon Knights reluctantly made a company decision to leave its beloved franchise in the hands of its former partner and press forward with a new franchise of its own. That's exactly what it did and In 1998 Too Human, a massive, four-disc, futuristic PlayStation RPG was born to life. Too Human made the rounds at the 1999 Electronics Entertainment Expo and impressed crowds with its amazingly detailed visuals and artistic presentation. The ambitious project described by our PlayStation sister site: "Set in 2450 AD, this psychological thriller deals with the themes of symbiosis as humankind reaches new stages of evolution. Taking on the role of hero John Franks, players can cybernetically enhance themselves, increasing fighting power, strength, and increase damage points as they progress through more than 80 hours of gameplay. Players also are encouraged to take steps throughout the course of the game to determine their own outcome and eventually one of several different possible endings." The title was all set to come out in January of 2000, but then something unexpected happened: Nintendo signed Silicon Knights as an exclusive second-party and Too Human was subsequently terminated as a PlayStation game. Company president Denis Dyack comments on the cancellation of the 32-bit version: "I think certainly when you work on a project for a long time and especially Too Human on PlayStation, it got a lot of people excited, and we had put a lot into it, so at that level when you stop development on the PlayStation there is always an 'Oh Man,'" says Dyack. "But at the end of the day, where we're going now is taking us in such a better direction and what we now know and how we're going to apply it with the better technology, the better understanding of gameplay, control and content -- there is no question in anybody's mind here that it was the right decision to stop the PlayStation version." It was around this same time that Nintendo lifted its embargo on information surrounding Silicon Knights' top-secret N64 game Eternal Darkness, a 3D "psychological thriller" with stunning high-resolution graphics and a dark theme. The title, which enables players to control several different characters ranging from a special forces commando to a monk, takes place across time itself and looks to out-scare the Resident Evil franchise with a few tricks of its own. First on innovations is the inclusion of a Sanity Meter, which documents how much sanity a character has left at any given moment; as you can probably imagine, as soon as the meter starts to run dry, weird things begin to take place. Be sure to check out our full preview of the game right here. Eternal Darkness for N64 was recently delayed from its scheduled Halloween 2000 release date to Q2 2001.In the interim, Silicon Knights is putting the final touches on the ambitious project and preparing for the next-generation console wars. It is already well underway with Gamecube development, and its first title is widely believed to be a hugely enhanced version of its original PlayStation title Too Human. Nintendo recently debuted an updated look at Silicon Knights' efforts during its Space World 2000 show in Tokyo, Japan. Too Human for Gamecube was on display in FMV form and boy did it look pretty: Silicon Knights on Design and Philosophy Silicon Knights has grown in size considerably since the company was founded in 1992 and is now ready to put its artistic resources to the test. "We're hovering around 60 employees now and we're definitely hiring, but we're very picky about who we hire," says Dyack. "We're growing because we need to grow and the next-generation console systems are going to let us do so much more. We're so excited about Gamecube right now and we have to hire to move forward in that direction." Dyack likens Silicon Knights to a guild -- an organization of individuals working together toward one common goal; a group that shares internal resources collectively but also guards its inside knowledge from the outside world. "What they used to do in guilds was teach things that nobody else knew how to create. And they also did things differently than anybody else out there. It was a very open environment with knowledge inside the company, but that knowledge could never be let outside," reveals Dyack. "So we bring people in here at Silicon Knights and believe it or not most of them don't have any previous experience making games, and we prefer to have it that way. We'll bring people in here with no experience and we'll train them just like a guild would ¿ we'll train them in our craft, because that's what we believe game development is, much more than a science." While Dyack says videogame creation is an art form, he concedes that it's also primarily unexplored territory -- that game makers are only beginning to understand what's possible in virtual environments. "We believe that videogames are the next form of entertainment period ¿ they're going to overshadow movies and overshadow music. What that means is that we're at the beginning of a paradigm change where all of these things are starting to occur," Dyack says. "And because we're sort of at the start of the wave, we strongly feel that we don't know much about games yet. We're going to learn more about games as we continue to make them, therefore for everyone at Silicon Knights we've created a guild philosophy." The guild philosophy puts the people that create software at Silicon Knights above everything else. Computers and development stations are like $20,000 pencils, according to Dyack, who adds, "without the creative force behind them you'll never get good games." The company design takes inspiration from The Book of Five Rings, written by famous Samurai Miyamoto Masashi in the 17th century. The book breaks everything down into five separate categories -- Earth, Wind, Fire, Water and Spirit, a theme commonly used in modern RPGs. Silicon Knights has adhered to a similar design. Explains Dyack: "We break our game design into those five areas, so we have Game Design, Art, Technology, Content and Sound. Those five areas combine to make a game what it is." So why join up with Nintendo exclusively, especially when Silicon Knights has been a multi-platform developer for so long? It was a matter of meshing well with Nintendo's own ideas of design and how games should be created. "I think no one better melded with our philosophies in the entire industry than Nintendo did. Their commitment to quality; their knowledge of games ¿ we've probably learned more in the last two years that we've been working with them than we have since we've been started." Silicon Knights' ongoing relationship with Nintendo works only to the company's benefit, as it is often given suggestions and ideas from NCL and NOA. "In some sense, I would say Nintendo itself is very much like a guild of its own," says Dyack, "and now that we're working with them we're exchanging ideas on a constant basis which just, at the end of the day, creates better games." Silicon Knights on Gamecube and the Competition Hot on the heels of the Gamecube unveiling in Tokyo, Japan and the full release of system specifications, industry publications erroneously reported that Nintendo's console was out-powered by the competition's offerings based on spec-to-spec comparisons of the numbers. Charts that compared Gamecube's realistic polygon performance versus X-Box's theoretical numbers in non-play environments sprung up everywhere, and it's something that Silicon Knights feels does an injustice to Nintendo's hardware. "One of the things that Nintendo has done that is pretty revolutionary in itself, I think, is giving out the real performance numbers," says Dyack. "They are real ¿ and actually I think they are really conservatively real. I do not think that even the majority of the development community understands what Gamecube can do." Dyack predicts that the coming Electronics Entertainment Expo will silence skeptics. "We see so many comparison charts where sometimes it's just so unrealistic and we know that people's opinions are going to change after E3." The company's director of technology James "Spike" O'Reilly seems to second Dyack's opinions, and also touches on ease of use for potential Gamecube developers. "The entire design of the Gamecube hardware in general ¿ Nintendo has put so much thought and effort into making it an easy tool for developers to use, and very easy to realize your artistic vision on the actual platform," states O'Reilly. "I don't think a lot of developers are going to be able to realize the full power of the X-Box or PS2 without a substantial amount of work and as I result I think you'll see better games on those platforms late in their life. And you'll see better games earlier on in the life of the Cube." While Microsoft has repeatedly stressed that it plans to release the most developer friendly and powerful console on the market, Dyack remains unconvinced. "Though we definitely haven't seen the final X-BOX specs, my guess is that it's going to suffer from the same problems that a typical PC does," he says. "I think there are going to be bottlenecks on the buses and the overall polygons that Microsoft is talking about just aren't real numbers." And on PlayStation 2 he offers: "The PlayStation 2, from what we hear, is so inherently difficult to develop for and I think that the RAM limitations are going to really make it a problem." The problem with both systems, according to Dyack, is that they are trying to do too many things at once. They are spread across as "entertainment" machines as opposed to game players. And that's what separates the Gamecube. "I think that's where Gamecube shines undeniably and where it's going to really make a difference is that it was specifically made just for games. Not only is the technology fantastic, but the way the technology was organized is brilliant and will really outshine the other platforms," Dyack states. "The Gamecube is going to be a great tool to bring content to everybody, and a better tool to do such things will make the games better." But will Gamecube's relative ease to program for also be its ultimate downfall? Will developers be able to max out the Cube right off the bat, leaving no room for bigger and better products down the road? Dyack doesn't think so. "No, I'm sure that's not going to be the case," he says. "The Gamecube is no different than the other platforms in that sense. There will be a learning curve ¿ it's just the difference of a nice, easy jaunt for the Gamecube versus a rock-climb for the other systems." In fact, Dyack seems confident that Nintendo's hardware will reign supreme in the next-generation wars. "In my opinion, no one is going to touch Gamecube. I think it's going to be dominant from a technological standpoint, but more important than that from a content standpoint people are going to be very, very surprised by how strong everything is. I think you're going to see a really big showing at this E3 and people will be just shocked at the level of quality that you can obtain on the Cube. It's going to be huge." Outlook Very Strong. Silicon Knights is in a quiet period right now, but we believe the company is about to come into its own -- much more so than it did with its Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain. Its N64 psychological thriller Eternal Darkness, playable at last year's Electronics Entertainment Expo, impressed us enough to name it one of the Games of the Show and we expect it to fill a major genre gap when it finally hits the console in 2001. Meanwhile, we are even more confident about its position in the next-generation market. Games like Too Human for Gamecube are just the beginning of software that will set Silicon Knights apart as a company that regards story content just as highly as it does gameplay mechanics, visuals and sound. And it's exactly that design philosophy that will make the developer a favorite for the story-driven gamer, and for anybody else seeking something more than the standard adventure. -- Matt Casamassina
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