They’re Xbox hotshots now — but what lurks in the pasts of the game industry’s top developers?

Everybody starts small. Before his acting career kick off, Brad Pitt dressed as a chicken for the El Pollo Loco restaurant chain. Before he started writing, Stephen King worked as a school janitor — as did Kurt Cobain.

The gaming industry’s star players are no different, with diverse backgrounds full of unexpected details — Supreme Commander designer and Gas Powered Games CEO Chris Taylor, for instance, used to be a stand-up comic. And along with some unusual life experience, most have the odd game or two that could only really be politely described as a “learning experience.” Here at OXM, we’re not afraid to embrace the dirty truth, so we hunted down some of the big names in Xbox gaming to quiz them about their surprising — and occasionally shocking — pasts.

Graeme Devine

Why You Know Him: Lead game designer at Ensemble Studios, responsible for this year’s Halo Wars.

What You Didn’t Know He Did: Devine has been programming professionally since he was 16, when he worked on Pole Position home ports for Atari. After working with Rob Landeros on the abysmal NES Silver Surfer game in 1990, the two founded Trilobyte and released macabre puzzler The 7th Guest the following year. It was one of the first games to really take advantage of the CD-ROM format, with full-motion video and 3D graphics.

It’s that game’s 1995 sequel, The 11th Hour, that he’s less than happy with — though he laughs that “everyone looks at all their previous games and wonders if [they] could have been better.”

“With 11th Hour, we never really had a good connection between the story and gameplay,” Devine admits, “and we lost the family appeal that The 7th Guest had, too. As soon as we left the house and just told vignette pieces, the whole mystery of where and who you are was lost. I would redo all of that. Of course, I don’t hate the game — but I would change it!”

To say Devine is happy with his work since that game would be an understatement, and he feels his output from his time at id Software, in particular, was a highlight. “I wouldn’t revisit anything in Quake III,” he grins. “We nailed
that one.”

Jon Burton

Why You Know Him: Director at Traveller’s Tales, the company responsible for the Lego Star Wars series and the upcoming Lego Indiana Jones and Lego Batman.

What You Didn’t Know He Did: Burton has an unexpected history, with games like Sonic 3D Blast and Sonic R, as well as a couple of Crash Bandicoot games. However, he says, if there’s one game he completed that he could make changes to, it would be the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 tie-ins the company did for the Pixar movie A Bug’s Life.

“There are always elements of games that you aren’t happy with,” admits Burton, “and in our particular field — which is generally licensed games with strict street dates — we often had to make compromises to hit those dates.”

A Bug’s Life’s gameplay should have relied on players planting different seeds to solve certain puzzles, but Traveller’s Tales was told to aim the game at a younger audience toward the end of development. Instead of being a major element through the game, the seed puzzles instead led to bonus areas, meaning that much of the game’s content was never seen by most players.

Burton’s generally happy with Traveller’s Tales’ output — despite a few less-than-stellar reviews here and there. It’s just a matter of being able to recognize which parts of games worked and which didn’t. “I have to say, having looked through the games that we’ve made, very few [of them] contain gameplay elements that are just plain wrong. I have and still do revisit our old games and borrow ideas from them.”

Denis Dyack

Why You Know Him: President and owner of Silicon Knights, home of the upcoming Too Human.

What You Didn’t Know He Did: Dyack actually started Silicon Knights back in 1992. The company’s first few titles were strategy games for publisher SSI; SSI held the Dungeons & Dragons license at the time, allowing Silicon Knights to produce Fantasy Empires in 1994. Success came with the release of Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain for PlayStation and PC in 1996, followed by two GameCube games: Eternal Darkness and Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes.

And Dyack has no shortage of regrets, either. Which games could have been done better? “All of them,” he sighs. “In each case, there were areas that we would have liked to improve upon. For example, mouse control in our early hybrid RTS games, no load times in Legacy of Kain. These are only a few things that I think would have made a big difference for each game we created back in the day.”

Never let it be said that he doesn’t learn from mistakes, though. Silicon Knights is a company that values the response from gamers, and puts it to good use. “We take everything we’ve learned in the past and work it into every game we are making. In this way, the reactions we received from Legacy of Kain, Eternal Darkness, and Twin Snakes are all melded into Too Human to make it the best possible experience.”

Michael Mendheim

Why You Know Him: Producer on EA’s Def Jam: Icon, currently president of IconX Entertainment.

What You Didn’t Know He Did: Mendheim created and co-designed the Mutant League series of sports games. The first game, Mutant League Football, sold well enough to spur the creation of a TV series, but things went a little sour with Mutant League Hockey. After working with 3DO for a few years — developing, among other things, Army Men: Sarge’s Heroes — he went back to EA for Def Jam: Icon.

It’s this game that Mendheim feels the least happy with, noting that there are “elements in the game that could have worked better,” and adding that he feels “disappointed” with the end result. “We spent [so] much time setting up rules for how you could or couldn’t fight with the music — and on how the environments looked and reacted to the music — that we constrained the designers’ ability to create a fun, deep fighting mechanic,” he comments. “We ended up with a less than stellar fighting game.”

The Mutant League series is the one that got away, though. “Out of all the games I’ve directed and produced, I still have a great fondness for Mutant League Football and would love to revisit that franchise in the near future. I wish I owned the property,” he sighs, “but I don’t, so it’ll probably never happen.”