Carly Staehlin Interview - Part 1 - Part 2 here.

She's a girl and she knows her games. Does it get any better?

interviewed by frank

Meet Carly Staehlin, a woman of remarkable talents. She has had experience in almost every aspect of the creative process of designing video games, including stints as script writer, voice actor, director, and level designer. We here at Drunkgamers felt that it was time to get a female perspective on the gaming industry and the women who work within it. As such we asked Carly a few weeks ago if she would agree to be interviewed by two inebriated sots and she agreed, provided that she could get drunk too. We quickly concluded that Carly is "neat."

We sat down with her at Trudy's, a tex-mex restaurant known for their salsas and Mexican Margaritas. Accompanying Carly was her associates at NC Austin, Susan Kath and my former roommate and longtime friend of Carly's, Rand Van Fossen. Susan has also had many years of experience working in the gaming industry and we were delighted to have her feedback on the various topics that we covered that evening. Rand meantime got drunk. Gus and I represented the Drunkgamers staff.


FRANK: You've been involved in the gaming industry for some time as a writer, voice talent, producer, actor, and director among other things. Can you fill our readers in on exactly what you did, what games you worked on, in those roles?

CARLY: My first job in games was actually at a company called Crack.com. When I came to the company they needed voice talent work done for the Mac version of a game called Abuse, a nice 2d side-scroller. They felt that the Mac audience needed a better tutorial. But they wanted voiceover with it, so they asked me to do voiceover as well as some sound effects. I did that before I was [officially] working for the company, and I just did it at home. I submitted all the files, and they liked them and it got into the release version. That was in the fall of 95. The following January, I was still in college at the time, and I decided to go and do internships at Crack.com. I was in the Radio and Television and Film program at the University of Texas. One of my favorite things to do when I was in school was to find ways to get good grades without doing a lot of work. So that was one of the techniques I was employing at the moment. However, [the internship] turned out to be a LOT of work. I started...full time at Crack.com and initially I was doing voice talent production and script writing.

Crack.com...was developing a combination first person shooter and strategy game...a kind of battle tank shoot-em-up game. You would command an army of vehicles. Do you know the Apple game Rescue Raiders? A really old Apple II game. It's essentially a kind of modern (for 1997) rip off of Rescue Raiders. I was specializing in screen writing in college and so I was employing my educational background...for games. While I was writing scripts, I was looking for voice talent and Crack.com didn't have a lot of money, so I was already working for free and I was trying to find the cheapest voice talent I could find. I talked to people on the radio--I actually had this woman from 101X [radio station in Austin] come out to do audition for voice talent. A bunch of comedy troupes from Austin. We found this one guy at the Subway [Sandwich Shop] near work. He had this really great gruff, deep voice.

It was just like totally shoestring-budget kind of stuff. And I was using a studio mike and my office as the sound booth. And I was doing all the mixing down of the sound effects and of the voice talent cuts on my computer with Cool Edit. [Laughs] It was seriously low budget stuff.

I named the game. They asked me to try to think of a name for the game. They were gonna call it like "Transportality" or something. I picked Golgotha because of a quote from Shakespeare. Maybe Henry the Fourth, I can't remember. There's a quote from Shakespeare about blood and men running and the fields of Golgotha. It's the place in Jerusalem where Jesus Christ was crucified.

When I was working on the script I realized that I had to actually come up with the levels...the game has to take place over 18 levels and I had to understand what each level would be. Which essentially meant that I had to design each level. I went from level to level using countries as the basis: Italy, England, etc.

Engine movies have actually become quite popular: using your game engine and the humans or the avatars or whatever is in your game and using a camera inside the game engine to record movement. And you use your game engine to record clips instead of having them animated by a film house. But that wasn't very popular when we were working on Golgotha. And in fact it hadn't really been done. The first game I can remember that did it was Interstate 76; it was actually released while we were working on Golgotha. So I was trying to develop a way to do the same kind of thing for our game.

It was a nightmare.

First off, imagine narrative structure. The way that you get narrative information from characters is from characters, from human beings. And we had no human beings in our game. You never saw a human in the game. You had tanks and missile trucks, and jet planes, and vehicles. We didn't have enough processor power at the time to do all that stuff and do ground troops. Even if we had ground troops, they would have been so low poly-count, I would have had a flat polygon to work with as a face. No moving lips, no animations of the face, no animations of the body. It would have been really, really terrible. So I decided to at first do comic book [style cutscenes].

I found a comic book artist who was willing to work with us. We were going to do the scenes between the levels in comic book style with a lot of sound. And then I decided, before I left the company, to go for kind of an MTV style. Essentially it's like if you look at a music video, there's a lot of quick cuts, a lot of sounds that come from all directions in a 3d space and it tells a story in about two minutes. So I was going to show a lot of quick cuts of people doing things and then have tank commands and information and news clips coming in to your audio space from all directions so that you have a sense of things moving very quickly--of an infodump going on. But I had just gotten started on that when I graduated from school in December of 97. I figured I would be working for...Crack.com and all would be well.

But in January I started noticing that the company still didn't have any money. It was a self-funded independent game developing house. At that time there were a lot of them, and now there's only one which is Id software. During that time that I was at Crack I did the voice talent for Quake II. A friend of mine at Id called me up and asked me if I'd be willing to do some voice talent for him. I said, "Sure. Yeah, no problem." He said, "I want you to do all of the female player character sounds and the voice of the computer." I did them all at my Crack.com office and I did them all on spec. And actually, that was the first time I got paid. Because the whole time I worked at Crack.com I never got paid. So I actually got a check for the work I did on Quake II. A very small one, but it was actually a check. So January comes around and I'm thinking, "Okay, I'm going to start getting a paycheck at Crack.com." I was also doing press relations, internet relations, answering the telephone--it was a seven person company so everybody did a lot of things. And when I caught the drift that there was no money in this company and I was not going to get paid, I decided to leave.

The next job I had in the industry was in June of that year. I was asked to come to Origin on contract to write the fiction for the E3 demo of Ultima: Ascension and to do the dialogue for all the NPCs. I was hired as a community relations coordinator. Which nobody really knew what that was at the time; what it meant to be that. I knew [Richard Garriot, former executive producer at Origin] a little bit because Origin had published Abuse. I had met him a couple of times and so he told me he wanted me to come to Origin. He felt like interacting with your player base on the internet was the key to a good, strong relationship with the player base. A lot of people didn't believe him at the time. I was very into the idea because I was doing it and I saw the impact it was having, but the company as a whole hadn't adopted that as a mechanism yet.

I started working at Origin as the Online Community Relations Coordinator and for about 3 months I was by myself. I was the entire department and I spent those 3 months trying to convince the company that I needed to hire a department of people to help me do things like run bulletin boards and answer emails from the community and listen to suggestions and give information about the game and etc. and so forth. Well, a really fortunate thing for me happened in that after Ultima 9 shipped, which was the game that I was essentially supporting the community for, pretty much primarily for the first three or five months, they wanted me to do the same thing for Ultima Online. I told them I was going to need more headcount if I was going to be able to support that community because it was too big and it had gone so long without any kind of support, that the people were rabid. They were just not a friendly group to get involved with. At the same time, this guy in the marketing department was looking to expand his "empire." This...V.P. asked me what I thought about marketing. Which in general I'm not a fan of community [relations] being a part of marketing because although the activities are often similar in that you're engaging a public, the motivations for what you're doing as a community manager versus what you're doing as a PR person or marketing person are sometimes very much at odds. The PR person or marketing person always wants to sell you on an idea, on a game. "Everything's great, nothing's wrong." But the community person has to recognize that there are things that are unpleasant, or not what the customer expects and acknowledge it. And acknowledge it in such a way that you don't necessarily say, "Yeah we suck." But rather, "I hear you say we suck and, umm, can you tell me why you feel that way?"

The upside to marketing is that they generally have a lot of money. He was going to give me a raise and let me hire two people. I said sure. Because I'm basically driven by expansion myself. So I got to hire two people and I decided that I needed to hire a Community Coordinator (which would be doing the job of reading message boards, answering posts, interacting with the public very closely), and a Content Writer (who would be responsible for maintaining the website's content, keeping it up to date, writing stories, fiction, reading fiction submitted by the players, so on and so forth.) Susan [Kath] actually was my second hire. She was my first Content Writer. I brought her here from St. Louis.

I built this department. I built the idea of community relations, which has since been adopted by Verant, Sony Online Entertainment has community people, Asheron's Call had community people. And I don't take total credit for it because the idea of community relations was growing inside the computer industry as a whole, but I think the fact that Origin did it and that we actually executed on it and did a good job of it, I think kind of put a fire under the other companies to do the same thing. So I feel like that's one of my great accomplishments and I feel very proud of that. I did a good job at what I was doing and I showed people that I could manage people and that I could keep things organized. That led to the guy who was in charge of Ultima Online to come and ask me to be the producer of Ultima Online. So I did that for a year. It just basically meant keeping track of dates and bossing people around. After I did that for a year, I left Origin and went to Destination Games. D.G. was sold to N.C. Soft so our company became N.C. Austin. So there you go. Question number one. [Laughs].

FRANK: What projects are you currently involved in?

CARLY: I am involved in a new massively multiplayer online game that has no title yet but working title is Tabula Rasa. I am the design manager.

FRANK: Were you interested in video games growing up? If so, what games in particular?

CARLY: It started when I was about 12. We didn't have a computer at my house but my mom started dating this guy named Frank, who had a computer. It was very exciting for me because I was kind of a braniac kid myself and always looking for the latest and greatest. He still had kind of a crappy computer and he didn't buy any software. He would just pirate stuff from people at work and the first game he had me play was Leisure Suit Larry and the Land of the Lounge Lizards. That was a lot of fun. I liked Choose Your Own Adventure Books when I was really little and they reminded me of a Choose Your Own Adventure and so I was down with it. I played that and played a bunch of other games.

I loved arcades when I was growing up. I spent a lot of time playing Pole Position, Tron, and stuff like that. Frank actually bought a game for me which was an Infocom game called Bureaucracy, which was also an adventure/role-playing game kind of thing. And oh my gosh, loved it. I loved it so much. I really got a kick out of this game because the box included some additional materials like a couple of fake magazines and a super passcode thing and a bunch of stuff inside the box. And over the course of playing the game, you have to keep looking back over the stuff to see if there's a hint about how to solve a puzzle in the game by looking at your magazines. For instance, in the game, there is a mansion and this paranoid guy lives in the house and one of the magazines in the box is Paranoia Today. You read in it and you read some things that teach you how to talk the guy in the house to give you information or let you into the house. I just loved the fact that they were using this real life stuff to make the game work. Played a bunch of arcade games done for the PC. I had an Intellivision. The only game I can remember for the Intellivision was the skiing game. I really loved the skiing game. Later, I didn't have my own console until 1997 when I had a Playstation...maybe even 98. It was when Abe's Oddysee came out. That game made me get a console. I played a really great old game when I was in college called Fantasy Empires which is a multiplayer game. It's not an online game but four people play at the same time with the same computer, kind of a turn-based Take-Over-The-Empire kind of a game. That was a lot of fun because you could send private messages to other players. You'd type a message and they would get it when it was their turn. You'd get off the computer and go sit on the bed (this was in the dorm rooms) and people would have the t.v. on, and of course we would be drinking: Popov vodka and Ruby Red Squirt, yum, and uh we'd mix it in the mouth because we didn't actually have containers for mixing. So you take a swig of Ruby Red, take a swig of vodka, swirl it and swallow. That was the deal. So we played Fantasy Empires and drank Ruby Red Squirt and Popov vodka. We'd sit on the bed and wait for the other person to get the message. We'd always write ridiculous messages and wait for them to laugh.

My dad took me to Disney World when I was ten with my little sister. Maybe I was eight and a half, nine. My dad took me to Disney World with my brother and my little sister and me. He gave me thirty bucks for spending money. I went to the arcade. I played Pole Position the whole time.

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