Jeff And Mike The Interview Guys

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Itis worth noting that despite being retired for nearly 25 years, Stanton still has the same fire, determination, and work ethic that carried him to six premier AMA Motocross and Supercross Championships. He is also pretty outspoken for the things he believes in, something that many riders today do their best to avoid, so he also makes for a great interview...

How many total former Team USA riders showed up?

I think we ended up with 32. We were at 38 and five backed out on me in the last week. So it is what it is. I was super happy to see everybody that came and showed up. What was the cool part, I had three people from the 1970 team. Dick Robbins, Mike Hartwick, Mark Blackwell, and guys like Brad Lackey, Donnie Hansen, they looked up to those guys. Then Rick Johnson and Jeff Ward, they looked up to Brad Lackey and that group. So it was kind of a ladder system of people that each rider looked up to. I looked up to Rick Johnson, Jeff Ward, Ron Lechien, and then Jeremy McGrath looked up to us. It was cool to hear the stories from each guy over the years that they raced. It was awesome. The interviews were awesome. We kind of paired up guys for the interviews. We had Ricky [Carmichael] interviewing Fro [Jeff Emig] and Fro interviewing Ricky. They were a hoot. So the whole night, once we got everybody seated and got everybody dinner, and the interviews started, it was phenomenal.

Following up on our in-depth, 3-part video series, The Story of Overwatch, here's our complete interview with Blizzard game designer Jeff Kaplan. While the series goes in-depth with the origins of Overwatch and includes stories from a wide range of Blizzard developers, we've included the full interview below.

Jeff Kaplan: Since May of 2002. That was the time period when they were just finishing up Warcraft III, so it was a really exciting time. That game shipped in July of 2002, and I ended up getting an additional testing credit on the game, which was the coolest thing ever. I just got to come in and play the game at the very end and give feedback.

I didn't know much about Blizzard before I joined, which is super bizarre. I was more into the FPS community. I had known a lot about Id, and Quake, and Doom; I followed all those games, and I was very into mod-making for Half-Life and games like that. And then I was super into EverQuest as well, and sort of stumbled into learning about Blizzard. It was weird coming to Blizzard and not having been previously a Blizzard guy.

Yeah, definitely. This was the era for me where I had to make tough choices in the store--you'd go and you'd buy it by the box of the game. You'd hold up one copy of this game vs that game, and I literally remember holding a copy of Starcraft 1, and I'm like, "Oh, wow, this looks awesome. I really want to play this...Don't have enough money for it right now, so I think I'll play this other thing." I just missed the train; I really missed this golden era of Blizzard games.

Yeah, I wasn't making mods per se, I was making maps. Half-Life 1 shipped with the map editor on the disc, and ironically the name of the map editor was "world craft," just to add confusion to it all. But it was an amazing program, and there was a really thriving modding community and mapping community going on. I had previously made maps for games like Duke Nukem, which had also shipped with a map editor on the disc, but it was really in Half-Life 1 that I got a feel for what it takes to make a map and have it run well and have other people playtest it. I

t was super exciting; I made a couple maps for that. Loved the community; there was this website called Rusted where people would explain how to make maps and how to get them to run better, and somebody would make their own compiler that would compile the map better. It was a big learning process for me that making games was not just the creative process but a very technical one as well.

So did you make maps for Half-Life 1 proper? Did you ever do any Counter-Strike stuff or any of the the other mods? Because the Half-Life 1 deathmatch community was passionate, but it wasn't really that big, right?

No, it was tiny. And I joke about the Half-Life 1 deathmatch scene because everybody has their pinnacle--if you look at your own personal history of gaming expertise, everybody has that moment where it's like, "This is where I peaked. I could have been a pro." For me, it was Half-Life 1 deathmatch. Any competitive FPS players is rolling their eyes right now. Like, "Really, dude? You could have said Quake 3 or Counter-Strike or something." But I swear I was god-like in Half-Life 1 Deathmatch. I could literally kill entire maps with the crowbar alone.

It was it was a super fun deathmatch mode, I really loved it, and that's what inspired me to make maps. In terms of Counter-Strike, I never made maps for that, but I was around in the scene. There was a mod for Quake 2 called Action Quake, and some of the guys who worked on Action Quake went on to work on Counter-Strike. There was a split: it was Action Half-Life and Counter-Strike were what was going to become of the Action Quake community.

And Action Quake was one of the greatest mods of all time. I was following those guys from the get-go, and I was around Counter-Strike back in the day when you could cycle weapons back to your spawn. So if your team was winning, you would kill most of the enemy team, and let's say there is one terrorist left. You didn't kill him, you took all the weapons on the map and you just cycled them all the way back to your spawn. Then you ran, you killed the guy, and now all the good weapons are waiting at your spawn. I was around in the pretty early days of those things.

Yes, and actually when I first joined Blizzard, I joined to work on World of Warcraft. The first order of business was getting World of Warcraft ready for E3, which was in the month that I had joined the company. So we did E3, and then it was all-hands on Warcraft III after that. As soon as Warcraft 3 launched, it was back to World of Warcraft, and it felt much more comfortable. I was really terrible at our RTS...I shouldn't say "was." I am really terrible at RTS games. But I love playing them. I'm one of those guys who just bull-headedly bashes his head against the wall and keeps trying, but I felt much more comfortable in the MMO space. So when we started working on WoW, it was a lot more natural for me.

They hired two quest designers to start at the exact same time. It was me and a gentleman named named Pat Nagle. And Pat has become kind of legendary at this point because there's a character called Nat Pagle in other Blizzard games. A lot of people tease Pat that he's named after Nat Pagle, but it's in fact the other way around.

Pat and I started literally on the same day and shared an office. Together we designed the quest system along with guys like Eric Dodds and Allen Adham; Allen's one of the founders of Blizzard, Eric is the game director on Hearthstone. So our little group designed the quest system on World of Warcraft, and in the early days, when we first started, we split up. Pat did Elwynn Forest, and I did Westfall. We were both experimenting; nobody really knew how to make a WoW zone or how to do WoW questing. Pat and I sat back-to-back in the office, and we'd always lean over and say, "Hey, I'm trying this out. What do you think about that?" It was really together that we came up with the questing system in World of Warcraft.

My favorite quest I ever made was probably the Green Hills of Stranglethorn, because it's gone down in history as the worst WoW quest ever made that I will never live down. I would say that at least once a week somebody at Blizzard brings it up to me, and points out how horrifically bad that quest was. And it's sort of become a talking point in Blizzard history--it was a quest with good intentions--the goal there was to get players to interact socially with one another. I think it's the type of quest that a very junior designer with high aspirations tends to make. I'm just imagining a zone where strangers are meeting each other for the first time, exchanging and trading pages so they can all complete their epic quest. But I really didn't take into account the inventory systems in the game, and the other headaches that it would entail. It was a very good learning lesson for me, and even though I think it's one of the worst quests--I believe it's since been removed from the game--it's sort of become legendary at Blizzard of, "Here's what not to do in the game."

I think there were around 15. It was actually a short story. Usually, the week between Christmas and New Year's is very quiet around the studio; a lot of people go and travel and see family. These days the studio actually shuts down for that week, but back in the time when I made that quest in 2003, we were a very small company and I didn't go anywhere. I stuck around, and there was nobody in the office. So I just sat there writing this short story in the voice of Hemet Nesingwary, who's named after Ernest Hemingway. It's all super pretentious, but I thought, "Here's this great story, and somebody's gonna really love reading it. I'll do all these great pages, and I'll socially engineer this great moment." But it's just kind of a joke how bad it all is, looking back.

It must be very strange looking back at what Blizzard was back then. Presumably it's very different to the company that exists now in 2016. Take us back, what kind of scale are we talking about in terms of the people who were working here?

When I first joined Blizzard, there were 200 people in the entire company, and at the time that also included Blizzard North, which was up in San Mateo. At a later time North came down and moved into the Irvine office. These days we're north of four thousand people worldwide, and that number shocks a lot of people, but it includes offices in Seoul. We've got a partnership in Shanghai. We've got an amazing European office in Versailles. An amazing European Support Center in Cork, Ireland. A really talented group that's here in Austin, Texas. We've got a small group up in San Francisco so it's a big, global company now.

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