WORMWOOD STUDIOS [ENG]
Hoy os traemos una entrevista que hemos tenido con un Estudio de videojuegos independiente, WORMWOOD STUDIOS que son conocidos principalmente por PRIMORDIA
BTW: First of all, we´d like to ask you why you decided to start your company, any particular motivation to start it? Did you have any kind of inspiration?
WORMWOOD STUDIOS: I've wanted to make, and tried to make, computer games since the mid-80s when, as a kid, my grandfather (a NASA engineer) gave me an old computer and taught me to program in BASIC. Starting in around 1991, inspired by "Hugo II, Whodunnit?" as well as classics like King's Quest V and LOOM, I became inspired to make an adventure game, and tried several times between then and the early 2000s. Anyway, for most of my life I've been making games under various "company" names, and Wormwood Studios is the first to pan out.
BTW: You are a really huge group, with lots of different kind of people, how did you meet eachother?
WORMWOOD STUDIOS: Actually, the core Primordia team was very small: just me, as writer/designer (Mark Yohalem), the artist (Victor Pflug), and the coder (James Spanos). I'm from the United States, Vic's from Australia, and James is from Greece. About two weeks after starting the project, Vic asked for help from a writer, which is how I got involved. A couple months later, we needed a focused coder, so we recruited James. Vic and James knew each other from the Adventure Game Studios message boards, but I didn't know either of them before the project. Dave Gilbert (in charge of Wadjet Eye Games) later approached us about publishing the game, and he found the composer and most of the voice actors. I believe he knew all of them from the New York City indie game scene or from his childhood.
BTW: Primordia is your more known game, with a very original story; basically i´s about a future without humanity and robots with self-consciouness creating their own religion worshiping mankind as gods. How did you come with that idea? In your website you mentioned you got inspiration frpm Borges; could you be more specific about it?
WORMWOOD STUDIOS: The original idea about a post-apocalyptic game involving robots came from Victor, and I think he was inspired by Beneath A Steel Sky and Machinarium, as well as his personal fascination with robots arising from his dabbling as an electrical engineer. He originally envisaged the game as a kind of a slapstick comedy in which robots behaved more or less identically to human beings, but when I got involved, I suggested we take a more serious angle. I drew upon a bunch of sources. One of them is a poem of my great aunt's, called "The Inheritors." Its opening stanza goes: I sing of the race that came to be After man’s brief tyranny Over all beasts ceased, And we became a theory In another species’ pre-history; Endowed, as theories often are, With false glories and iniquities. The truth is, we lost our vision. In the man-pit of night We fought for light; And with faith in fission Lit one blaze too bright. The world will never see such flames again, Nor know the dream and worth that was in men.
That was probably my main inspiration, but then there were several others. In terms of the setting, a not very good novel called City by Clifford Simak (which involves robots and dogs trying to understand what a human city was), a wonderful series of short stories called The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem, and the excellent RPG Fallout. In terms of the story, the imitable but peerless Planescape: Torment and the novel The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
Borges's influence would be three things. The most obvious is the name and concept of Memorious (and by extension Memento Moribuilt), which come from "The Library of Babel" and "Funes the Memorious" (as it's translated in English). More generally, I have always been in reverent awe of Borges's "secondary storytelling" technique, where he tells a story about a story, rather than just telling the primary story directly. Primordia is in a sense a story told by robots about the story of humanity as they understood it. Finally, I admire the way Borges wove philosophical and even mathematical concepts into his stories, and I tried to do that with Primordia.
BTW: Was hard to design the game? Any advice to people that may like to start creating their own game?
WORMWOOD STUDIOS: You should pick an engine well-suited to the game -- AGS works well for adventure games -- and should start small. We thought we would be able to make Primordia in three months, and it took us almost three years. Most of my efforts to make games aimed at sweeping RPGs (mostly inspired by the console RPGs I played as a kid, later by the PC RPGs like Fallout and PS:T). Those projects are way too big. Aim small and finish your projects, and you'll develop good skills, good habits, and a good name. That will make your take off much faster than mine!
BTW: We heard that you strongly support fan-based translations. We certainly think that without those works lots of original works would never be seen out of their original countries (not only videogames but also films) . Any words to those that compare translating with piracy/stealing bread from the artist´s mouth?
WORMWOOD STUDIOS: A comparison between translation and piracy is a moral outrage. The work of translation is among the most humane undertakings. The translator is simultaneously a poet, a diplomat, an anthropologist, a philologist, a medium, and many other things. One of my great mentors, the late Professor Robert Russell, spent much of his life translating Misericordia -- for example, struggling to find what "curtajo" might mean -- and this work was in a sense a brotherhood with Galdos or even a marriage to the novella. Very few people read Misericordia in English, but if even one more person reads it -- especially one more person who would not otherwise have had access to it -- then my late friend and teacher has performed an act of grace, weaving another thread into the fabric of our culture (a fabric that is always subject to violent forces that would tear it apart).
The translators who have successfully worked on Primordia (an engineer on the Paris Metro, a Colombian avid adventurer, a German university student, and a team of Russian hackers) and even those whose work never got over the finish line (an Israeli programmer, an Indonesian high schooler, a pair of Korean salarymen, two separate Poles, another Russian academic)... to me their generosity is staggering. Far from being "pirates," they are like welcome guests who arrive at your home bringing gifts from afar and then carry your story with them across the oceans. I love that each of them brought his or her own unique life and voice to the game. Primordia's story is woven from strands I've gathered from many different places (my great aunt, who was equally at home in Mexico City, Tel Aviv, and New York City; the Pole Stanislaw Lem; the Argentine Borges; and so forth) and the game drew on the gifts I received from so many people (my grandfather the NASA engineer; the thoughtful Russian beta tester who made the game so much better; the teachers who taught me to love words and writing). It means so much to me that the game would resonate with people from around the world, and that they should add their unique voices to its story, because translation is an act of creation, not an act of duplication.
Anyway, I'll stop getting myself worked up!
BTW: What´s your next project? Will we be able to see a new project from Wormwood Studios? Maybe a Primordia 2?
WORMWOOD STUDIOS: We have a few things in the works.
One is an RPG called "Fallen Gods," inspired by my years-long fascination with Icelandic sagas, mythology, folklore, poetry, and history. I've been working on it for about five years now. Hopefully it won't take five more years to finish. The game's mechanical inspirations are two games from my childhood, the single-player board game Barbarian Prince and the Lone Wolf gamebook series.
We have a small adventure game called "Strangeland" that is nearly done that is about the alienation caused by grief. The immediate inspiration for me was the death of my grandparents earlier this year.
We also are still dabbling with "Cloudscape," a much larger adventure game that we started years ago.
The only major project I've finished since Primordia was the portion of Torment: Tides of Numenera that I wrote (a few large characters, and several of the game's choose-your-own-adventure segments, called Meres). Because PS:T was such an inspiration to me, it was a privilege to work on that game, especially since I got to work alongside so many people I hold in such high esteem.
BTW: Thanks for your time for answering all this questions; do you have anything else you´d like to say?
WORMWOOD STUDIOS: Just thank you, to you for giving your time and attention and voice to this game, and to your readers for their interest. We are very lucky to have people like you guys out there.
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