Anna Kang began her work in games as a business development director at id Software ten years ago, where she discovered her passion for the industry – and where she met John Carmack, who would become her husband. She founded her own studio, Fountainhead Entertainment, in 2000, which most recently developed mobile games -- Doom RPG and Orcs & Elves.
In November, Electronic Arts will publish a DS version of Orcs & Elves, and Gamasutra talked to Anna about the development of the new franchise inspired by the tabletop RPGs John used to design for her as birthday gifts, the success of Doom RPG, a possible migration onto the console, and about developing games with her husband.
Games On Deck: How did you get into mobile gaming?
Anna Kang: It’s kind of interesting -- the really funny thing is, a lot of what people think about [my husband John Carmack] is true. He is kind of a hermit, so for a long time he would refuse to carry a cell phone. After we had our child, I was like, ‘you really have to have a cell phone!’
So I got him a cellphone, and John, being John, started fiddling around with it, and checking into the technical specs. Down to the bone, all the way down to his little hair, he’s a true geek, and if he could have, he probably would have taken it apart and reassembled it!
He realized that the hardware on the phone was sophisticated, and then he was really disgusted with the games they had for it. He bought lots of games, and I saw this huge bill and I was like, ‘what is this?!’ And he was just playing around, complaining that there should be no reason why the games suck so bad, because the hardware is so advanced. And we kind of talked about it, and John said, ‘would your company be interested in making some cell phone games?’
It was a good time, so we tossed lots of different ideas together. The Doom movie was coming out and [we thought] a Doom game for the cell would be perfect to help market the movie. It’s a known IP, and people love the Doom universe and it makes sense. So John talked to the other partners at iD, everyone thought it was a good idea, so the first foray into cell phone gaming was Doom RPG.
Doom RPG
GOD: What was the design process like?
AK: John had this concept to make the game fun. He wanted to make sure that the cell phone user interface complemented the game, rather than trying to force a game that wasn’t made for the cell phone. We were in Hawaii for a vacation -- this is a habit of his, he works well on vacation. The really funny thing is, for our honeymoon we had to ship two computers to the hotel so that he could work! It’s one of the endearing parts about it. He can’t be without his computer, because he just loves to code, so he must code every single day!
We were on vacation in Hawaii, and that’s where he wrote it. I think it was over the weekend, because we usually don’t leave too long. It was like, a four-day extended weekend -- we left Friday and came back on Tuesday, or something, and in that weekend, he had done the engine for Doom RPG. He was like, ‘here’s the engine, go for it!’
So we took what he did, and in about 4 months we put together Doom RPG. We had never worked in the cell phone environment before, so there was a lot of learning. It was always fun working in a Doom universe, and we were really kind of amazed at how many people really liked Doom RPG. Generally, we thought it was a fun little game, and a lot of people really really liked it.
A lot of the people who love Doom were able to see it on the cell phone, and it was fun to see the monsters again. We were able to create a couple new things, and it’s a nice, fun little game, but we never expected to get the attention it did. We were pleasantly surprised. After that, John said, ‘wow, this was a really quick development!’ We were able to quickly turn around an idea in half a year, and he was used to these massive development cycles.
So the idea was, let’s continue doing this, because this is kind of fun! We were able to put together a game so quickly, and it’s I think Doom RPG on the cell phone sold well over a million, maybe two million, so it’s doing amazingly well.
GOD: So you decided to do Orcs & Elves?
AK: The idea was, we can’t really do a lot of experimentation on really high-budget PC or console games. There’s only so much innovation we can do until the risk factor is a little bit uncomfortable, but [we could] play around with the cell phone, because the development is quick, the budget is much more tolerable and so the idea came – let’s do a brand new game, let’s see if people will take to something that no one has heard of before.
