Cosmo3D Visits Funcom! (Part 1)

Look out lads - get ready for some jaw-dropping action! We went to visit one of the world's largest independent game developers around - and now present part one of our Visit To Funcom series. Read on for a clue on how they are working up there, discover new and unveiling stuff about upcoming games such as the highly-anticipated online role-player Anarchy Online, and a funny little "baby-Q3A", No Escape. So hold on to your monitors and read on!

Written by Axel "Cosmo" Sjøstedt and Anders "Twilight" Steinlein, published 1st September 2000

If you by any chance don't know, Funcom is mainly known for the adventure game The Longest Journey (rated 10/10 by BarrysWorld and 9,3/10 by GameSpot) as well as the PlayStation racer Speed Freaks (Speed Punks in the US). They have yet to see their most exciting time though, as the already-mentioned Anarchy Online approaches worldwide release with great expectations from fans as well as the press. Funcom actually is one of the largest independent game developers in the world. The strangest fact, however, is that they have their headquarters here in Oslo, Norway! That's where we are! What a great opportunity for us to visit them, don't you think?

Knock, knock on the door

It was the last day of our summer vacation, the sun shone, as did the expectations. Having discussed various aspects of the comany and their games the days before - we felt quite prepared. Two young journalists met on the Skøyen train station outside Oslo, ready to dive into the world of Funcom! We even bought some nice flowers...

Their offices are located in a relatively fresh business area in the outskirts of the town, with really nice-looking environment. However, as we were told on the phone, there was no big sign or huge bulahubas on the building - so we actually worked hard to find the right place! Anyways, we found it, entered, and walked up to the third floor. After a short wait in the so-called reception, their PR executive Marit Lund came down. We introduced each other, handed over the flowers, and quickly started the tour.

Starting the tour

We passed beneath the scary sign (see picture 3), and were told that the graphics-department was put behind the stylish windows. We passed a few Coke-machines (apparently a must-have), before we started off with a quick trip to the world builders. In addition to the Norwegians, this section has some Australians, Americans, British, and other Scandinavian people. You also might be interested in knowing that the builders will consecutively expand the worlds with new areas and various buildings while the four-year storyline of Anarchy Online progress. (Yes, the game will be finished four years after the release! More about that in the next part of the series.)

After seeing the world builders, we passed the programming-section, after which we walked past the No Escape-ward, covering the eight-people crew working on this sweet title that you will hear more about later in this article. Speaking of the number of people, the Oslo department of Funcom has around 100 employees, including all PC developers as well as the PR, support, and the chief-in-suit-with-ties-bosses. The Dublin quarters, that houses the Playstation development crew - has about 20 on staff. As you've probably figured out yourself, the rather big place was split into various departments, each with its own common task. Enough talk already. We walked down to the floor beneath to visit the sound department.

The sound of music!

We knocked on the first door, and found Tor Linløkken sitting in his little studio playing with the music in Anarchy Online (pic 6). After a quick talk, we courteously said goodbye to him. We entered a bigger room with carpets on the wall, and met Bjørn Arve Lagim - the main man behind the music in The Longest Journey! We boasted a bit about the music in TLJ, and asked him if Anarchy Online will have the same qualities on the sound side too. He assured us that it would have an astonishing set of sounds. A bit more than the basic MIDI-files in Ultima Online and other games in the genre, and indeed some more variation! Hurray!

To prove it, he played the whole theme for the Clans for us! It lasted for about a minute, and started with that native-hero-feeling-thingie. It did in fact remind us much about the Rouge Spear theme, and of course some Hollywood-clichés ( back to that hero-thing). ;-) Some more silent music, with that spiffy bass, followed. Bjørn specified that it wasn't fully finished yet, but we were really impressed by what we heard! Not to mention that we were allowed to listen to the full theme! :-)

Testing, testing

Next up were the "entertainment room" (picture 8) - a nice little recreation centre for the employees, as well as the place for occasional "target age group testing". The room housed a couple of old arcade machines, a bunch of Sega and Nintendo consoles and a little home-cinema set-up for pizza evenings, as you may see in the background of the picture. We were told the room is frequently being used as a resting room, as we experienced ourselves… We later discovered someone was actually sleeping there - after we had been messing with the lights, taking pictures, talking and laughing. Sorry pal! ;-)

Moving on to the room next-door, we got to see the actual game-testers in action. As we entered the room, they were actually playing Anarchy Online! Marit had previously said that we couldn't take a look at the game at this time, so we were pretty excited to actually get a glimpse of it! We did in fact see some really juicy stuff during the approximately two minutes we got to see it in action. How does i ncredibly detailed graphics running "not-so-bad" at a PII-400 with TNT1 sound? The scenery didn't just look good though. It seemed extremely well designed, with a much more natural feel to it than we had ever though. Adding to that a cool, smooth transfer between the selectable 1st and 3rd person views, you got yourself a nice-looking game. Additionally, what we saw of the interface in use seemed really clever (the MUD we saw was different from the one on picture 10).

Marit was also kind enough to let us see No Escape in full-blown action. Steve Reberg fired it up (check out picture 9), and we first watched the main- and character specific intro movies. Man, were they funny! The first character - a negro rapper - struggled to get his 3-foot tall hair into his small helmet, while a robot-character wanted revenge after he got kicked out of a science lab. Darn funny. Let's talk about the actual game for a minute. The players - or the contestants in a TV-show really - battle it out at a "small planet" where they've got all sorts of firepower at their disposal. Ranging from plasma cannons and atom bombs to zappers, this game houses some funny-looking eye candy. Not to mention the hilarious Atomic Bomberman-like death-effects (see picture 11).

You may have understood it, but we have to point out that this is not going to be a splatter-game. It is designed with younger people in mind, but from the looks of it, this will be a game everyone can enjoy. The game is presented with a third-person view, and as mentioned, the levels are like small planets. You can keep running, and before you know it you'll be back where you started off. Sweet. Just like in other shoot-em-ups, you pick up weapons and power-ups along the way, but you actually get a dollar-score after how well you perform instead of just frags. As far as Steve could tell us, these points weren't anything else than high score - ergo, you can't use them to buy better weapons. Look forward to the release of the game later this fall.

After the testing, we talked quite a lot to Marit, Steve, and another Swedish tester named Alf Yngve. As mentioned, the computers they were using at that time were two PII-400 with first generation TNT cards. They could tell us they also had a couple of PIII-700 with Voodoo5 5500, as well as "all the graphics cards you only dream about". Moving away from hardware, we talked about their hours, and how tired they actually get of playing games after a while. As some of you may know, Funcom were developing a real-time strategy game called Steel Rebellion, which got abandoned some time ago due to quality-issues. We were told that Ground Control actually borrowed, stole or whatever :-), many of Steel Rebellions ideas...

Moving on

We thanked the game testers for their time, and moved on. Next stop - the Java developers. As you may know, Funcom has a range of Java-games at their website. If my memory serves us right, that were actually what they started doing in the first place. Marit could tell us Java development were something they were going to continue doing.

After checking out the Lara Croft-poster in the Java-room, we went to the motion capture room. We took a look at the special sensor-floor and the gear, but more interesting - some of The Longest Journey storyboards hanging there. As you may see at the picture, the space-sequence is one of the scenes we are looking at… As we were about to leave the room, we bumped into Ragnar Tørnquist! If that name doesn't ring a bell, we might add that he is the man behind the just-mentioned The Longest Journey. We congratulated him on a great game, and watched him play a bit Q3A. On the question of what Ragnar were doing these days - Marit could tell us he is involved in developing the Anarchy Online-story. A good sign indeed!

After some chitchat, we quickly hurried on, as we really didn't have much time left. Next up, and actually the last stop on the tour, was the support department. Their job is to sort the bug-reports, sending them to the developers, answering questions, and such. Tor André Wigmostad (see picture 14) also told us the delightful news that they were going to support the Linux platform. The Linux version of Anarchy Online will apparently be fully developed and supported in-house, but he could of course not say anything of a release-date at this time.

Final Stop?

And so the tour was over... Or, was it? As we were on our way to meet up with lead designer/producer/supervisor Tommy Strand, we got to actually take a look at the graphics department behind those funky-looking windows (picture 15-18). Christer Sveen was hard at work designing some fat, flying monster-thingy while Øyvind Jernskau and Renate Andersen were taking a closer look at some of 3D Studio Max's advanced features (check out the pictures). As you can see from the first picture, the back wall was covered with a set of photos of some Clan-folks, some monsters, and of course - some topless women. Wonder if they are going to be incorporated into the game... ;-)

Finally, the time had come. We were about to talk to Tommy Strand. He was attending a meeting, so we hung out chatting with Marit while waiting. While chitchatting, she told us the average age in the company are 28 years, and that they've incorporated a policy to encourage young talents to go for education before getting a job. While waiting some more, we saw a piece of paper hanging on the wall, with the words "Anarchy Online" and "LIVE" on it. It was apparently top-secret, so we didn't manage to extract any more information regarding that... ;-)

After a few minutes, a young man with a big smiled approached us. It was Tommy. What interesting titbits regarding Anarchy Online could he tell us? Want to know what inspired the design of the game? How the story will evolve? What about how saving and server-hang-ups will be handled? You will have to wait for our next and final part in our Visit To Funcom series. Coming to a browser near you - very soon!

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