Recently fellow blogger Chris Karr and I trekked over to the Wideload Games office to interview Alex Seropian. If you haven’t heard of Alex Seropian, you’ll certainly know some of the video games he was instrumental in creating: Halo, Myth, Oni, and Marathon, among others.

Alex was the cofounder of Bungie Studios, a Chicago-based video game company which was acquired by Microsoft in order to create games (such as Halo) for the Xbox. After Halo was released, Alex left Bungie and Microsoft to create a new game company called Wideload Games in 2003. Wideload is currently in working on its first release–a game called Stubbs the Zombie–which breaks the mold of your typical zombie video game.

As I walk into the office, Alex is very friendly; he walks right up and starts talking with us. I don’t immediately realize who he was; I expect to see an old eccentric guy who has the scars of being through the creative yet rough video game industry.

Instead I meet a normal guy, even looking a bit young given his accomplishments so far. Indeed, he is only in his mid-30’s. It makes me wonder what I’ve been doing with my life.

The Wideload Core

As I walk to the back of the office to begin the interview, I find that it isn’t your typical boring office space. It is an older building, with high ceilings, and real hard wood floors. It almost seems like they took a large studio apartment and converted it, keeping the big kitchen.

It probably isn’t hard to fit the whole company into that space; there are only eleven full-time employees. So how does a company that small create a major video game? “We have a unique development model in games where the core team comes up with the idea and designs and manages the project.” says Alex. “We bring in a lot of contracted talent…I think we’re the first company to actually start ground-up designed to operate that way.”

“…[we] keep the guys in a tight, small group so we can turn around, discuss an idea, and not have any sort of politics or bureaucracy to it. It makes things fun and fast. I like it a lot.”

Sweet Home Chicago

Wideload Games’s talent also includes some former Bungie employees. “There are six of us, actually five of us came back to Chicago from Seattle and one of the guys was already back here”, says Alex. Hopefully this means some of the classic Bungie humor and gameplay will continue on with Wideload.

Bungie originally started out in Chicago; Alex started the company in his senior year of college when he was going to the University of Chicago. So it makes sense that Wideload Games would be located here. For Alex and the employees, this is home.

The Chicago location isn’t completely atypical. Video game companies such as Midway Games, High Voltage, and Day 1 Studios can all be found in or around Chicago. Alex states, “We’re not the interactive, entertainment hub of the world, but there’s a little amount of community–there’s the Chicago chapter of the IGDA (the International Game Developers Association)”. And Alex says he thinks it’s easier to keep staff with the company than out in California.

Stubbs the Zombie

Currently Wideload Games is working on its first video game called Stubbs the Zombie, which I talked about briefly in a previous Eat My Bomb entry.

The premise of the game’s story is that Stubbs was originally a travelling salesman (a normal human of course) in the 30’s, but he wasn’t a very good salesman–and managed to get himself killed. A few decades later in 1959, a billionaire industrialist entrepreneur decides to build the city of the future on Stubbs’s grave. And Stubbs turns into a zombie to take revenge against the city that was built on top of him.

This game is a different than other zombie games because instead of you killing zombies, you are the zombie; you play Stubbs the Zombie in the game. Alex explains why they choose this unique idea for the game. “There’s so many games out that in order to get attention, you need to do something different…There’s a ton of zombie games out there and they have their own little section they reside in and it’s something that immediately rooted in the familiar; we all know what a zombie is, right? But to be a zombie is completely different, yet it’s all based on rules that are familiar to everyone. That was the genesis of the idea: What if you played the zombie?”

Alex talks about how Wideload comes up with this kind of game concept. “…we have a creative direction and try to do stuff with humor, so for us that means doing the unexpected…We want people to look at a game that we do and a. think it’s different and b. recognize that it’s something that came from us. Strategically, we’re trying to create a brand around Wideload that informs the project decisions we make.”

More Details about Stubbs

Stubbs, the main zombie character in the game, is really neither a classic slow-moving George Romero zombie or a fast sprinting Dawn of the Dead remake version. “One of the big design challenges [is] for us to use zombies. Zombies usually aren’t very smart, they don’t use weapons, they usually get mowed down in large numbers.” Alex explains.

“So how do you make that interesting to be a game protagonist, right? So we did a few things. [Stubbs] is not a slow, lumbering Romero zombie. He’s got some speed to him…we think of him as king of zombies. He is, you know, the shit when it comes to being a zombie.” Alex goes on to say that Stubbs can jump higher, take more bullets, eat more brains, and is stronger than any other zombie.

Stubbs also has some special moves: he can sneak up behind people to eat their brains, he can rip off a guy’s arms and beat him to death with them, and he can bust through doors. He can rip out parts of his guts and use them as grenades, and rip off his head and use it like a bowling ball.

Also, Stubbs can rip off his hand and use it to control other characters in the game. So even though Stubbs can’t use guns, he’ll be able to take control of characters that do have guns.

There’s also a multiplayer component for the game; on the Xbox, two players will be able to create cooperative mayhem at once.

Interestingly, while I was chatting with Alex there was an actor in the next room jumping around, yelling something unintelligible–it was very loud as the noise echoed off of the hard wood floors and open space of the office. Alex said they were evaluating actors for the game. I’m guessing they were going to be doing some motion capture–he mentioned this in his blog (check out his blog for some screenshots, too–pretty cool stuff).

When asked about a release date for Stubbs, Alex said they haven’t officially announced an specific date yet, just a general time frame of this fall (2005). However, he said if you thought hard enough you could probably figure it out. Hmmm. Zombies, in the fall…Halloween, perhaps?

Console Wars and Apple on Intel

Of the new consoles coming out, Alex doesn’t have a single favorite. “The [Xbox] 360 is a fairly obvious step for us because we’re doing an Xbox game, but the Playstation 3 is pretty cool too. They both have an order of magnitude more RAM then we’re using now; it’s going to let us do some really interesting things.” says Alex. “It’s weird this console cycle was so short–it only lasted five years.”

Back in the Bungie days, Alex started out developing video games on the Macintosh. “I still use a Mac, too. I’m a Mac person.” states Alex. And now with Wideload developing games for the Macintosh, what does Alex think of Apple switching to Intel processors? “[the news] blew my mind!” Alex exclaims. “…I have a lot of faith that [Steve] Jobs is very forward-looking, and I’m sure has something neat up his sleeve.”

As I leave the Wideload office, I can only help but think how very cool it was for Alex to invite a couple of bloggers into his studio for an interview. I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy of Stubbs the Zombie to review.