PGC: Since you brought up the vacation thing, I remember you saying that after this is all done and the game has shipped, you were going to take a two-week vacation … you said you were going to Japan?

DD: I was thinking about going to Japan, yes.

PGC: Have you ever been to Japan before?

DD: Yes, several times. With EAD, we’ve visited there several times … four, I think now? And they’ve visited us several times.

PGC: Is this your first time getting to actually be a tourist down there?

DD: Yes! Usually when I go there, we work, and we work very late hours. And then I come home and sleep on the plane, and then get back to work in St. Catherine’s.

PGC: Has the cast of characters changed much you’ve first started working on it for the N64 compared to where it’s at now?

DD: There’ve been some slight changes. We’ve basically gone over and tried to look at what would be the most interesting and the most fun, but overall, there haven’t been any significant changes since we first designed it. Generally, the direction and vision of the plot line has been fairly anchored … that’s generally how we work at Silicon Knights when we start creating something. I think overall, that we’re very happy with the way it turned out.

With some of the extra time, one of the things we were allowed to do was really fine-tine and tighten every detail. And I think, hopefully, when you get a chance to play the game and when you finish the game, that you’ll see that more than just talk, we actually “walk the walk” and all those stories do come together and make sense. That’s not something that’s easily done, it’s not something they can really move around a lot. It takes careful planning and really meticulous checking of all the details, because we have the historical accuracy as well … we really want to check things in. As you saw in some of the demonstrations, someone was asking, “Dude, why did the Roman Centurion have his feathers perpendicular to the helmet instead of (like) the traditional Greeks”, and that was just a short time period in the Roman empire where that occurred. We wanted to be accurate that way too.

So, overall, it’s pretty much the same. There are always changes throughout gameplay. That’s one of the things, when you change gameplay, it’s going to affect … because this is not just a story where you get cutscenes and then all of a sudden you go to gameplay, and then you get more cutscenes. The story is so interwoven with the gameplay, as the gameplay evolved we were forced to change some things, but nothing major and nothing drastic.

PGC: After all the focus testing and tweaking, would you say that the Insanity system as it stands now is really integral to the gameplay, or is it basically kind of a gimmicky little thing to set the mood of the game?

DD: No, it’s definitely integral to the gameplay, and you really haven’t experienced the game enough to really understand the differences in how Sanity works, versus how Magic works, versus how Health works. They’re all complementary to each other. There’s definitely some Insanity Effects that occur over several levels, and until you play and until you realize what’s going on, it takes a while for it to all sink in.

One of the things, as I said earlier, the Sanity System is our opportunity to sort of, in some sense, play with the gamers and get them to react. While we were just in the other room there, we had one person go “Oh, you got me!” Which we always love, but the Magic system will complement the player, and allow them to play with the system and explore the system. There’s really a dynamic of how the system works, the combat system versus the magic system versus the sanity system … they do affect gameplay significantly, depending on what choices you make at the beginning of the game, it’s gonna drastically change the balancing. You’re gonna get to see different creatures, and see different encounters and storylines. It’s very different. We’re confident that it will be different, people should be satisfied … we hope. But we think so.

PGC: What do you hope to leave the player with in terms of how they feel and what they’ve experienced when they’re finished playing the game?

DD: I guess, we really strongly believe that the videogame industry, or the sort of medium of videogames is the next evolution in entertainment. We think that because it’s non-linear, and that the player can actually affect what you do in the storyline, which is what we’re trying to do with Eternal Darkness, the player will be profoundly affected, and basically feel like they’ve reached this … we’re trying to really reach this sort of aesthetic balance where the player forgets everything around them, and basically they just enjoy the moment, and they come back and say, “Wow, that was a great experience.” It’s like one of those times where you’re in something and you reach sort of this “flow”, and you get there, and suddenly you’re just like, “Wow, that was a great experience, I wanna play more of that. I want to do something more like that again.” That’s what we’re trying to achieve, ‘cause we want people to have that experience.

One of the things that we’ve researched a lot is an experiment called “Flow”. It’s a psychological research (into) what people do when they really enjoy themselves. Flow is a state where you lose track of time. So when you’re playing, if you lose track of time … you’ve had this. It’s kind of like, people say “I’m in a groove,” or “I really like the game”.

PGC: Game Time.

DD: Game Time. Exactly. That’s what we’re hoping to achieve. By combining elements of music, art, technology, story, and gameplay … combining all of those together, we think that it adds up to more than just the sum of the parts. It’s just this experience that people will just go, “Wow, that was really different.” So that’s a really long answer to a short question.

PGC: Have you found it difficult to balance actually having Eternal Darkness be a game, and the gameplay balance that needs to be achieved, in order to make the game fun, combined with the artistic, and trying to actually tell a story?

DD: That’s very difficult, especially because you have to start with … when you start doing something like this, you can’t just say, “Here’s our game, now let’s write a story for it.”

PGC: Although a lot of developers do that.

DD: The majority of the industry does that. What you have to come up with is a cohesive design for the game, the story, for everything before you start. It’s very, very challenging. However, I’ll tell ya, it’s great being part of the Nintendo family, because with the support we’re getting from Nintendo, those kinds of issues … they become very much easier to deal with.

I hope you can you can see the difference, between this and our previous game (Blood Omen), is that everything is much more coherent, much more brought together. And when you’re playing Eternal Darkness, hopefully the story will flow into the gameplay, and the gameplay will flow into the story, and there’s really this sort of mix. Hopefully it’s more seamless transitions, where you just think, “Oh, what’s happening now? Cool.” You know you don’t have control, because it’s letterboxed, but that’s all you know. Those are the kinds of things we’re trying to get. It is very challenging, but I really think that as game designers, we’re responsible for the content that we create. And because Eternal Darkness (as an example) is a “mature” product, we want through the storytelling and through the gameplay, and through what you’re doing, we want there to be repercussions of your actions, and we really want the player to sort of understand his environment. And if people start learning things like, again going back to the Roman Centurions, what their helmets looked like back then … or going to Angkor Wat with Ellia in Cambodia, those different locations, people will actually look at it and go “Wow, I just actually learned something from that.” That’s very important, because if people are going to play videogames as much as they’re playing, then I think that it’s important that they learn things through osmosis. I personally find that very interesting, and so do a lot of people at Silicon Knights. So that’s what we’re trying to do.

It’s the same sort of Shakespearean analogy, where Shakespeare would write dirty jokes for people in the front rows, cerebral metaphors for the aristocracy in the balconies. What he would try do by doing all of that, is that he would try to reach as many people as possible and touch them, where that’s what we’re hoping to do as well … by the gameplay, the graphics, by combining all these elements. We’re gonna say, hey the average game player is going to want to play this, but the non-average game player, or the person who never plays games, will sit there and look at Eternal Darkness and go, “This is really different. I might check this out.” And that’s what we’re trying to do, is grab them and reach them in. All that together combines into the sort of design philosophy we have.