MachineGames Looks Back at 10 Years

What has been the best thing about working at MachineGames?

Kristoffer Kindh, Senior Level Designer: The best thing about MachineGames is the culture and the people who work here. Everyone has the mentality of one big family of developers that want to make great games together and have a blast doing it.

Jocke Sohls, Senior Game Designer: I love the sense of freedom we have when we are working; no idea is too crazy to suggest and get honest feedback on. Not all of these crazy ideas actually make it into the games for various reasons, but you never feel like you shouldn’t try to make it happen anyway!

This goes for local management staff but also for outside from higher-ups in the company that let us take an established franchise like Wolfenstein and say, “Ok, but what if there were robots?”, “What if you went to the moon?”, “What if you were decapitated but survived?” and many other even more outrageous events that take place in the games.

It has been a very refreshing experience and obviously a lot of fun.

What has it been like working on Wolfenstein, the franchise that birthed the first-person shooter genre, and a series that a lot of gamers grew up with?

Jerk Gustafsson, Executive Producer: Being entrusted with Wolfenstein was the greatest honor of our professional lives. Many of us got into game development because of id Software and their games. We've idolized those guys forever, and to be working alongside them is a dream come true. We also love B.J. and wanted to honor the character id created. For us, he is the same guy you meet in Wolfenstein 3D. We've just fleshed out dimensions of him that were never explored in the original game.

John Jennings, Production Director: I joined partway through the development of The New Order and some of the team were, at times, struggling with understanding "What exactly is this game that we're making? Is it a stealth game, or is it an all-out-guns-blazing combat experience? Is our tone tongue-in-cheek or are we a serious game?" As playable levels came together, and we got closer to completion, we all began to understand that the answer was "All of the above.” The New Order had something of a unique tone, and was a game that proved hard to categorize for many people when it first arrived, and I think that's part of the reason why it's so fondly remembered by many people.

Kristoffer: The first game I ever owned was Wolfenstein 3D. I was hooked from the start so working with it has been amazing. I would say that the best thing about it has to have been researching and figuring out where we wanted Wolfenstein to go – the direction, the gameplay and the tone.

Jocke: Wolfenstein is a well-established franchise that has been around since forever in the games industry, but it is still open enough for interpretation to allow for the aforementioned freedom in the design. I love that we successfully managed to find a balance between the emotional and, at times, really heavy story segments and the completely out there action segments. And, contrary to what one would perhaps believe, it works! Both sides fit the franchise very well and complement each other beautifully! BJ is also a great character as he is both the generic “action man” hero stereotype while at the same time being a pretty complex and caring character. Same thing here; these two things shouldn´t work together in theory, but they totally do!

What are your favorite scenes/levels/characters that you’ve worked on over the past decade?

John: For me, my favorite experience was working on the cable-car escape from Castle Wolfenstein in The Old Blood. It was the first level that I'd worked on at MachineGames all the way from initial block-outs that we took to a near 'completed' status. We were working on it as part of a big internal milestone that was going to be demoed to the entire Bethesda employees group at a sort of "internal E3" that we do once a year and, six weeks out from the date, I was somewhat panicking! Seeing the team focus, come together and deliver a great looking and memorable scenario was a great experience for me. It really helped me understand what our teams at MachineGames can produce. We packed a lot into that 30 minutes of gameplay!

Tommy Tordsson Björk, Narrative Designer: One of my favorite scenes during the Wolfenstein II production was when BJ went undercover as an actor auditioning for the role of BJ himself in a movie in order to infiltrate the space station on Venus. Of course he got pulled into the actual audition and was faced with the producer of the move, the ultimate evil himself: Adolf Hitler. It was an extremely challenging, but also very entertaining, scene to write. It felt especially good to be able to humiliate the fictional Hitler a bit, portraying him as this feeble, insane, and really rather pathetic, evil old man.

Axel Torvenius, Art Director: Developing the Nazi machinery and robots has been the target of much love in the studio among both visual artist as well as animators and sound people. Fleshing out a unique look for our Nazi sci-fi machinery and soldiers has been very challenging because we have been trying to take inspiration from real WWII Nazi aesthetics while mixing it up with chunky sci-fi components. It was a great collaboration between so many departments and people at MachineGames. I would definitely call that out as an aspect in the IP that has been great fun for a lot of people to work on.

Jocke: For me it was the courtroom combat scene in The New Colossus. It was extremely fun to just go all-out crazy there with huge amounts of enemies and Super Soldiers dropping in through the glass dome above. It’s an extremely challenging fight, but also a very fun one in my opinion. It actually almost ended up being even harder than it is. My initial plan was to have a Zitadelle drop in as the final enemy to cap off that fight, but the fight was already hard and hectic enough so we dropped that idea.

Kristoffer: The Ausmerzer was really fun to work on in The New Colossus, but I would say that working with Wolfenstein: The New Order as a whole was a favorite moment as it was what started it all for the studio.

Is there anything you’ve wanted to include in a game but haven’t had the chance to?

Axel: One of the coolest ideas that was unfortunately cut was a map called the Kolossmen. The idea in short was that the Nazi regime had four humongous vehicles the size of large oil platforms or smaller cities being used to pacify the US when they took control. These 4 Kolossmen were later retired in the desert. BJ´s job was to attack one of these, infiltrate it, fire it up, and drive it through the Grand Canyon while fighting an entire Nazi army before crashing it into the Hoover Dam.

Jocke: There have been some levels planned for the games that have had to be cut or scaled back for various reasons that I would have loved to see make it into the games. For example, we had an idea for a driving mission as you escaped the asylum in The New Order that had you in a car chase with Nazis, robotic motorcycles and helicopters. It had a lot of promise, but we never managed to make it be as fun as we wanted so we ended up cutting that section in the end.

Kristoffer: The player-equipped flamethrower was something that was planned for Wolfenstein 2, giving tribute to the amazing flamethrower from Return to Castle Wolfenstein. It would have been great to have that to play around with during different gameplay moments.

What have been some of the major learnings since the studio was founded?

Jerk: Youngblood was our first foray into multiplayer and it helped us learn a lot from both a gameplay and from a technical perspective. Understanding that "doing the technical learning at the same time as doing the gameplay learning" may be too much of a challenge is possibly one of the biggest takeaways we took and it’s one we won't need to go through a second time in multiplayer development.

Axel: Make sure you know your strengths and weaknesses. Identify which people are good at what and let them do that, and not only let them work with that specific subject, but let them expand upon it and grow. Cultivate ownership and the nerdy interest some game developers have for their passion. You can have the best idea in the world, but if you don’t have talented people to execute on it then it’s just an idea scribbled down on a piece of a paper. Your team is never stronger than the people you have in it, so make sure to be careful with who joins the team and make sure that people feel motivated and are enjoying the area of expertise they are assigned to.

In videogames it is often very hard to convey subtle ideas and things written in too thin lines. When those nuances are being executed on well, it becomes very strong and memorable, but it is important to be aware of the hardship in that approach.

Is there anything you would have done differently with the Wolfenstein games?

Axel: Not hold back! Over the years and the long production, counting all of the Wolfenstein titles we have developed, I think we have become bolder with each title. It has been a long process finding our style and expression; for each title we’ve been pushing the world and the IP further and refining the world, the mood, and the style. And if I could back up time and redo things, it would definitely have been to prioritize the big monstrous aspects of our fictional Nazi regime. I think that in the beginning there was a lingering thought “Can we really…?” and that thought has more and more developed into “Let’s make it insane and times 10!”

It is easy to get stuck in a mindset that there are limits, which from a creative and artistic philosophical point of view, isn’t true. There are plenty of technical aspects of course, but how spectacular and extraordinary a story or setting is really has no limitations. For an example, when we took BJ to Venus in The New Colossus. “OMG are we going to Venus? The amount of work it will take, the amount of content etc., etc.” is the first thing that might come to mind. But when we dissected it, there was nothing that separated that map from other maps in the game. It’s an exterior with interior spaces and some unique assets for sure, but with the style, mood, choice of colors and materials, and then the story being told… voilà, we were on Venus. And even though we’ve done several titles with some quite extreme visual set ups and locations, and some pretty far out story telling moments, it’s still easy as a creative developer to get stuck in that boxed up mindset.

Jocke: We have had stealth gameplay in all of our Wolfenstein games, and I have to say that type of gameplay is what has worked the least well, unfortunately. I would like to go back with some extra time and really focus on making that gameplay style shine as much as the action if I had the opportunity.

Another thing I would like to spend some more time on is making sure that the players understand certain mechanics better. That is on us as we didn´t explain them well enough, so I would love to have an opportunity to fix that.

Kristoffer: I would have loved to expand the universe a bit more in those games, exploring other parts of the world where we could create amazing stories and locations for the players.