Making video games is very difficult. It can take years of work to ship even a small game. One aspect that can be particularly time-consuming and resource-consuming is building a custom engine, which is why many developers use Unreal, Unity, or another engine they already have to speed up development. It’s very common, but a really wild example from the days of the PlayStation 2 came to light in a recent interview with Glen Schofield, director of the New The Callisto Protocol.
Recently the Callisto protocol was released to… mixed reviews, shall we say (our own Ashley Bardhan liked how ambitious it was, despite some annoying spikes in difficulty). Anyway, to promote the new horror game, director Glenn Schofield went around doing interviews and stuff. And two weeks ago he made a video with Wired in which he answered random tweets about game development. There he revealed a fun trivia about a popular one Lord of the rings Game he worked on at EA.
in the the Wired VideoSchofield (who previously attended Empty room and call of Duty) answers a question about why developers don’t make their own engines anymore and use existing technologies instead. The director explains that it’s just too bloody expensive and time-consuming to do this today, and that it’s almost always better to take an old engine and reuse it like he did at EA.
You know, when he was a producer on Beat ’em up in 2003 The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, his team spent a year working on a new engine for the game. But things were slow and the game had to meet a tough deadline. So he looked at the various other engines that EA was using for its games at the time to find a technology that they could reuse. And oddly enough, he came to the conclusion that the latest Tiger Woods Golfspiel had the perfect engine.
“Lord of the rings It’s about large areas and then a kind of castle at the end or something, a fortress. what is so Tiger Woods!” Schofield explained, “Long ranges, and at the end you eat where you’re done. And so we took them Tiger Woods engine and turned that into one Lord of the rings Engine.”
Well, that’s funny and interesting enough in itself. But one final bit came to light on Twitter earlier today. It turns out, According to a former EA developerthat some modified Lord of the rings The visual effects code was later reused on a PSP Tiger Woods Game to create plumes of smoke when the ball bounces.
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Apparently the code of the PSP Tiger Woods The game also contains references to Gandalf and others LotR characters too. As always, game development is chaotic and endlessly fascinating.
