Interviews
An Interview With Alex Seropian, The Man Behind The Chimp
June 30, 2008
Hail to the Chimp, the world’s first and only politically-themed, animal-based party brawler has hit shelves. The game allows players to choose between 11 animal candidates vying to become president. While the strong reviews have already begun to flow in, the very fact that the game has made it to market deserves a fair amount of respect. Not that the game’s creator, Alex Seropian or his company Wideload had to overcome massive odds or raise themselves up by the bootstraps. Seropian already did that nearly 20 years ago when he founded Bungie in a Chicago garage. Back then Bungie put out games like Gnop!, Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete, and then along came Halo, the game that literally created the Xbox market.
After shipping Halo, Seropian walked away from Bungie/Microsoft halfway through the development of the sequel. “When I came back to Chicago I wasn’t doing anything except starting a family, for about six months,” says Seropian. “I wasn’t sure I wanted to get back into this business because my passion is doing new original stuff and being independent.” But in 2003 Seropian founded Wideload, releasing Stubbs the Zombie two years later. Hail to the Chimp, the second title from Wideload, is the latest product of Seropian’s drive to create the games he wants to make while the industry moves onto the next sequel. Check out what Seropian had to say about the future of independent games, lucking out on the current election and his concept for the most expensive game of all time. Hit the jump for the full interview.
Das Gamer: What was the inspiration behind Hail to the Chimp?
Alex Seropian: Well, we started the project off with the idea that we wanted to make a party game. Specifically a game that four people around one TV, sitting on a couch can play and have fun. We wanted it to be really user friendly. We also came up with this idea for a cool game mechanic which was take a regular party game, which has you run around beat the snot out of each other, but at any time two players can team up to perform a super move. So the idea is to have a cooperative element to the game, where if you do cooperate you can have an advantage but it really is every man for himself. The cooperation comes and goes. That was the big idea that we had which I thought was pretty cool.
From experiencing the game it seems like you put a lot of thought into the individual characters in the game.
Alex Seropian: We’ve done a lot of work on that. The whole idea is its set in this crazy animal world that we’ve invented. The Lion who has been the king for so long has been ousted they’ve kind of thrown away monarchy idea and supported democracy and its all documented by GRR which is pretty much the animal version of CNN with all the things you that you may find – the scrolling ticker bar, fake commercial, debates and interviews, but its all funny – it’s all satire. The experience is cool cause there is this whole world - we built in rivalries, they all have back story, and it all comes out in the interviews, debates, or in dialogue in the game. We even made these political ads that run smear campaigns against each other. It’s this back story world that you would never get from a party game, and we don’t force it down your throat. You don’t have to watch a cut scene. There’s no linear aspect to the game at all.
Are you a political person yourself?
Alex Seropian: Well isn’t everyone? [Laughs] I do follow politics to some degree.
Who are you picking to go all the way?
Alex Seropian: Toshiro (the Octopus) actually.
I was actually asking about the other elections.
Alex Seropian: The human elections? I am of course. I’m a big Barack Obama fan. I have this theory that somebody should write a job description for a president of the United States and I find it kind of amusing that there isn’t one and we hold or elections basically in the same way that American Idol works, which may be not so bad. But from my perspective what you want out of a president is someone who has leadership skills, is smart, but also can be inspirational. And I’ve yet to see somebody like that who has a position that I also like until Obama came along.
Of the three candidates that were up until recently still in the running, what animals would they get if they were in your game?
Alex Seropian: Well I’m not going to tell you who I think they are but I will tell you who I think they would pick if they were playing the game. If they sat down to play the game with me, and this is my formal invitation to Senators McCain, Clinton and Obama to join me at Wideload in a game of Hail to the Chimp. In any case, here’s what I think: Clinton would play Crackers the Monkey, because Crackers is the Lion’s right hand man. He’s kind of the establishment, which I think Hilary would relate to. I think Obama would pick Ptolemy the Hippo because he does posses excellent oratory skills. And uh, gee, not to give away too much of my political bent but I’m going to stick McCain with Floyd the Walrus. Floyd takes his lead from a radio that he believes is channeling signals from super intelligent beings [laughs].
Was it a marketing plan or just coincidence that Hail to the Chimp is hitting shelves in the midst of an election?
Alex Seropian: Yes it is a coincidence but I think we are kind of lucking out in a sense because this election has made for great TV. It’s been great entertainment and it’s been in the forefront of a lot of people’s minds. And we have a game that’s politically themed but it’s not really a game of politics so much as it is a fun party game. But I think we kind of lucked out.
You left Bungie halfway while Halo 2 was still in development and founded Wideload what about the games industry made you want to pursue a more independent route?
Alex Seropian: There’s the sequels, then the movie licenses, budgets were just getting bigger, the finances of the industry have become more risk adverse with the risk getting pushed more uphill towards the developer. And I watched a bunch of small developers struggle. In the film business, you can start a project with three guys, three creative guys, make a screenplay and produce. And then you put something into production and you spend your $100 million on all these people and at the end of the project they’re no longer there. But in games the way it had been done is you would start a project with three people and then you hire all these people to spend your budget to make your game but they’re still around at the end of the project cause you hired them all.
Have you taken a different approach with Wideload?
Alex Seropian: Yeah so I looked at that and said I don’t want to do that, because I can just see it failing. So we came up with a model that is more like a film project. So our company is tiny compared to other developers. We have 25 people in the whole studio and we have two teams. The way we work is we have this core team, which is like the first three seats of each discipline, and we’ll start a project with that small team and we’ll take it to a prototype stage and then we’ll build a whole production team with contracted, outsourced talent. Hail to the Chimp is a great example, we’ve got this whole motion graphic stuff that makes up GRR news… And when you look at it, it looks pretty good, it looks like a 24-hour news show. The reason we were able to do that is because we hired the guys who did the graphics for 20/20 and the Today Show. We called them up and they were total gamers. That’s our whole model. We were really good at finding talent and making them teammates in a sense.
Do you think this will become an industry standard?
Alex Seropian: It sort of has. We’ve been doing this for about five years and at the time some people would look at me and go, that’s interesting and others would look at me and say, what are you crazy? We didn’t do it perfectly with Stubbs, but we did it pretty good job and with Hail to the Chimp we’ve done it really well. And a lot of people are doing it this way. Look at THQ, which is one of the biggest publishers in the industry, a couple years ago they decided to hire an outsourcing VP to find outside talent to assist their internal teams. It’s definitely a model that’s spreading a bit.
What’s the next project for you?
Alex Seropian: Well there are a couple things that are real exciting. We started a shorts team to create smaller downloadable games. And the first game out of that team Cyclomite will come out on InstantAction.
With Xbox putting up their dev kit and platforms like InstantAction popping up, is the trend to go towards smaller games?
Alex Seropian: You could argue that it has made a big impact on the industry already. I think it’s a huge market, potentially more to come.
After you left Bungie did you follow their progress at all? Did you miss it at all?
Alex Seropian: [laughs] Well I certainly miss hanging out with the people over there. I have a lot of friends, awesome people. I play the games, I keep in touch and keep tabs on those guys. It’s very flattering to me that something I cooked up in my basement is still going strong and is a very big thing. I find that very cool.
What made you want to get into creating games?
Alex Seropian: When I was in college, my senior year, I wrote a game, and I also interviewed for jobs and sat down one day to decide if I wanted to start a company that makes games or take a job. I remember, I sat down on the couch with my dad and was like, “What should I do? I’ve got this game and I kind of want to start a business to sell it.” And he’s like, “Why don’t you take a job, get some experience and then go out and start your company.” Which made me go out the next day and start the company. It was total old school, guy in his garage, I wrote a game on my Mac, bought a bunch of diskettes, made some labels, I got like $10 grand from my dad’s friends made some boxes and started selling it. I called up mail order guys and asked them if they wanted to sell my game, really hoofed it and uh…barely broke even on the first few.
Is the independent homebrew way of making games still viable?
Alex Seropian: I think so, that kind of stuff I think goes in waves. And right now we’re at the crest of very cool wave, which is the [console manufacturers] opening up their platforms for distribution. So somebody can make a game, four guys with sweat equity can make a game and get it on to Xbox Live Arcade or PlayStation Network and make some money. I have to think that those opportunities are gonna be around for a long time with the whole “Internet thing.”
Yeah, I heard the Internet is going to be big one day. How many developers do you think will succeed and make it to the “big leagues” or even make money off of the games they self-publish?
Alex Seropian: In my opinion, opening up XNA and the homebrew stuff won’t change the financial landscape too much. The thing I’m kind of curious to see work out, is as digital distribution becomes more popular and there’s a market for it expand and people are paying for those game s and the economics improve, it seems to me that we might end up trading, from a developer’s perspective, the ills of retail sales for the ills of these closed distribution networks. Meaning, right now its hard to get games on shelf space because there’s not a lot of shelf space and there are a lot of games and GameStop and Wal-Mart can exert a lot of leverage because they have a lot of shelf space. As the market for the downloadable stuff grows I think we are going to trade one for the other where you’re going to have Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony being the outlets that you are going to go to if your selling a game because they have the virtual space. Right now there isn’t any leverage being exerted by any one platform but as the economics improve, I can imagine that will change.
What made you decide to go with Gamecock as your publisher?
Alex Seropian: They’re really a perfect fit for us. We like to do original stuff, our business model revolves around us owning the IP and Gamecock is really supportive of that. They want to be in the same business. They want to do original stuff and they are very supportive of us making the games the way we want to make them.
Activision and Vivendi are merging. EA still seems interested in a hostile takeover of Take-Two. Are these mega mergers a good or bad thing for gamers?
Alex Seropian: The reality of our industry is that consolidation happens continually. If it’s Activsion and Vivendi today and EA and Take-Two tomorrow, its gonna be another pair getting in bed later. And that’s going to happen continually. People will come to fill their space. The interesting part from Wideload’s perspective, when you see two companies like Activision and Vivendi combining, it sort of changes the rules of engagement for that new organization. They’re sufficient in size now that it’s hard for them to justify going after smaller opportunities. If it’s not World of Warcraft, if it’s not Guitar Hero, or James Bond or something in that strata, it’s hard for them to get excited as an organization. Which means they’ve sort of taken the roots out of the garden in a lot of spots which means that a lot of smaller plants can start growing. So in one sense it creates a lot of opportunity for smaller players to address some of these smaller opportunities.
So it’s not a doomsday situation for independent game makers.
Alex Seropian: Oh no, from that perspective it’s a great thing for us. We’re not necessarily in the business of making a Harry Potter game or making version 12 of whatever was hot last year. We’re in the business of taking creative risk. So in a lot of ways it gets them out of our way.
What’s the riskiest game concept you have tried to pull off?
Alex Seropian: Well, I’ve been kicking around the idea of trying to make the most expensive game ever created. Like what it would take to justify a $120 million dollar video game. I haven’t worked out the details just yet but it’s going to be huge.
Can you give me some broad brush strokes?
Alex Seropian: It’s going to be an epic story, and it’s an MMO, right?
Are you yanking my chain right now? Because you’re using what I’m guessing is your “dramatic voice.”
Alex Seropian: No it’s real, totally multiplatform. It uses both the Unreal engine and the Source engine, it’s first person most of the time but sometimes it’s a strategy game and it’s got this rhythm game component to it…and a peripheral.
Of course, possibly a Guitar Hero kind of component?
Alex Seropian: No, the peripheral would be a big bazooka that you have to play with. And it would actually shoot things across the room.
Ah, so there would be a real-world aspect to this. Moving parts…
Yes…it’s also an alternate reality game. [Laughs] Would you buy that?
Ehhh…I don’t know. Does it have a good storyline?
It has three good story lines…it’s a trilogy. [Laughs]
For more of Alex Seropian’s singular sense of humor, pick up a copy of Hail to the Chimp
