Creative Minds: Joe McDonagh

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Joe McDonagh is the kind of guy who proves that genius is one percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration. After cutting his teeth at both Lionhead and Elixir he's just completed one of the strangest, most ambitious projects ever conceived with Bioshock at Irrational Games (now renamed 2K Boston). You may have heard of it?

In the second interview in our Creative Minds series, we find out how hard work, board games and tea bags can get you further in the games industry than you'd ever have thought.

Could you describe your role at Irrational and the kind of creative decisions you make.

"I remember pitching the game to one publisher who later told a friend of mine that it was 'just another fucking PC FPS that's going to sell 250,000 units'."

"I remember pitching the game to one publisher who later told a friend of mine that it was 'just another fucking PC FPS that's going to sell 250,000 units'."

Joe McDonagh: I'm a senior designer. I'm responsible for a chunk of a game and my only responsibility is to make it fun by hook or by crook. Right now I'm scripting a level using the Unreal III Editor. That means placing enemies in the world and telling them what to do. It's about controlling the pace and the flow of a level. It's about creating interesting and unusual gameplay moments and tying them together in a coherent whole. I also do some writing, although I'm not a writer.

Tell us how Bioshock came about and your specific role in its conception and development.

McDonagh: Bioshock was a long time in the making. Ever since System Shock II the team had talked about everything they wished they'd done differently. Ken spent years pitching the game to publishers but no one was interested, incredible as that seems now. I joined Irrational in December 2004 and my first job was to get a publishing deal for the game (I worked as the Business Development Director for the first six months). I remember pitching the game to one publisher who later told a friend of mine that it was 'just another fucking PC FPS that's going to sell 250,000 units.'

This sort of attitude really pissed me off. System Shock II, for all its critical success, didn't sell very well which turned buyers off. Something I realised very quickly was that as much as your boss won't ever know that you turned down a future game of the year, he will know that you signed up a turkey. You don't get fired for not taking risks. That kind of mentality is driving the industry into a creative cul de sac.

What's it like working at Irrational? We get the impression it's a company not averse to taking creative risks.

McDonagh: It's the best games company I've ever worked at. Irrational's mission statement is to focus on a small number of original games of the highest quality. This involves taking crazy risks (an underwater dystopia based on Ayn Rand? Are you kidding?).

In terms of the nuts-and-bolts of putting a game together at Irrational, how does it work? Does this differ from other companies you've worked for?

McDonagh: Every studio has its own dynamic, but we believe that original games require a lot of iteration and sudden changes of direction. It can be terrifying and ageing at times. But it's impossible to sit down at the start of a project and say this game will be XYZ and it will be fun. Bioshock for instance started out on a tropical island with Nazis.

You have a high level direction, but most of the time you get something working, then realise it's rubbish. You then work away at it until it's fun. Sometimes the best things are total accidents (think about the rocket jump in Quake).

The magic of game design lies in rigorous analysis, careful research and thousands of hours of play testing. Elixir took the same approach; we just weren't very good at it.

There's a lot of passion. I remember Ken and Nate (Wells, the Technical Art Director) shouting at each other about the Splicers' 'morphology'. Passionate debate is the anvil on which great ideas are formed.

Now the industry is maturing do you think there's less creativity and innovation around?

McDonagh: Yes I do. I'm bored out of my brains playing the same games again and again and again. I mean take the new Zelda game. I haven't bothered playing it. Why would I? I've been playing Zelda for years. I hope things change because I can't see myself playing infinite iterations of Dune II and Doom for the rest of my life.

I understand you had an interesting interview with Peter Molyneux and Demis Hassabis to get a job at Lionhead. Could you tell us more about this episode.

McDonagh: I was doing a marketing job in the games industry and to be honest with you, I hated it. Marketing terrible games is soul destroying. I felt like I was selling my peeps down the river by pretending that Mediocre Football was the greatest thing ever. I did something which in retrospect seems totally bonkers. Peter Molyneux was setting up Lionhead so I sent him a letter in a bottle. Literally. I dyed the paper with tea leaves, burnt the edges and wrote it in a calligraphic font. I used the ship wrecked metaphor to describe my situation. It got his attention and he invited me down for an interview to be a Level Designer.

I went down and he and Demis interviewed me. After university I spent a year in sub Arctic Northern Japan and kept sane by designing a Play By Mail Game. I think I had about 100,000 words of documentation and I brought that with me. I also had a board game I'd been designing for fun and we played that. They seemed to like that and in retrospect I can see why. I believe that Game Designers design games. They don't sit around waiting for someone to pay them to do it. Later Demis left Lionhead and invited me to set up Elixir with him as one of the founders. It was an offer I couldn't refuse.

What were the early days at Elixir like and what did you bring to the company in terms of creative input during this time?

McDonagh: It was thrilling. There was a sense that we could do anything and that Republic would be a great game. It was an intoxicating time for us. We won a bunch of game of the show awards at E3 in 2000 and I think we all thought we were on the cusp of gaming greatness. How wrong we were. Republic became a five year death march.

My role was Design Manager which involved trying to corral wayward brilliance into something tangible. I clearly failed. I did the final redesign of Republic. By the time I got to it it was an unintelligible mess of high falutin ideas, lofty ambition and the occasional glimmer of something extraordinary. Myself and a gentlemen called Ade Carless patched it up and gave the team something they could make, albeit mediocre as it was. I've never played it. I'm still staggered that the company ever shipped it. It just didn't look possible.

Republic: The Revolution was an ambitious project. Given the length of time it took to make do you think it was too ambitious?

McDonagh: With the benefit of hindsight, I would say it was laughably so. I remember screaming arguments about whether the citizens would all have dynamic eyeballs or not. The country had to have millions of people in it. It had to have a dynamic weather system. It even had to have a night sky that accurately depicted the sky as you were looking at it from Novistrana's fictional location in the former Soviet Union.

No concessions were made to financial or production realities. Very few of the team had ever shipped a game (myself included). And the concept wasn't mass market enough to justify the millions of pounds we spent on it. As I write this, I'm chuckling because I can't believe we even attempted it. It was unmitigated madness.

For you what were the best features of Republic? What did you take from the experience that helped you subsequently?

McDonagh: Having never played the game, I can't tell you. But I can tell you what we set out to achieve, most of which I still believe to be important. We wanted a world that had real morality, unconstrained by the monochromatic ideas that plague most games. Bioshock mines this vein which pleases me no end. It's time games grew up and stopped treating gamers like dribbling idiots incapable of understanding anything other than moral absolutes. We wanted it to be free-roaming and non linear. Post GTA, this is now de rigueur in games. Bioshock bought into this idea, albeit to a lesser degree. We wanted to use the technology to simulate an entire country; I believe that you should always be looking for ways to use the technology to do something new and extraordinary.

How did you feel when Elixir closed and what happened to you between then and you joining Irrational?

McDonagh: I was really sad. I invested four years of my life into Elixir. I was one of the owners. I had a lot of great friends there but I also felt the kind of relief you feel when a suffering elderly relative slips away in the night.

I jacked it all in a year before the end and went traveling. I went to Australia to follow the Ashes in 2001. I fell in love with it and decided I wanted to live there. I ended up working for a company called BigWorld in Canberra. I was there for about 18 months. I needed a break from game design.

The last game I'd worked on, Alpha, was canned in the most brutal and sudden fashion and it took a lot out of me so I worked as a business guy, which I found surprisingly fun. I then became friends with Jon Chey who's half of Irrational (Ken Levine being the other). They'd just finished Tribes Vengeance and were about to finish Freedom Force Vs Third Reich and SWAT IV. Ken needed someone to help him do the deals so I came on board. I've now come full circle and I'm back to design again. I guess I've still got unfinished business.

So what does it take to be a creative person in this industry? Do you think anything's changed since you started it all?

McDonagh: I would say that a good game designer should have a combination of different talents. You need a good analytical mind to understand what works and what doesn't. You need clarity of thought and expression. You need to be a leader. You need to really know your shit when it comes to games and I don't just mean Gears of War and Halo. I mean nerdy RPGs, table top wargames, chess - anything that you can play. I read this transcript from GDC at the end of which the presenter admitted to not 'having time to play that many games anymore.' I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

The first Creative Minds interview, with ex-Rare man Martin Hollis, can be found here

Mark Walbank