Interview: Howard Cushnir, Matthew Fassberg, Adam Wolff (1997-06-19) by Online Gaming Review

This is an unaltered copy of an interview of Howard Cushnir, Matthew Fassberg, Adam Wolff, for use as a primary source on Sega Retro. Please do not edit the contents below. Language: English Original source: SegaSoft (archived)

Online Gaming Review had the chance to speak with Howard Cushnir, designer of Obsidian; Matthew Fassberg, producer of Obsidian; and Adam Wolff, director and designer of Obsidian. I would like to thank them for participating in this interview. If you have never played the game, be warned there are a few spoilers (mainly game area descriptions) below. You also might enjoy checking out OGR's Obsidian Review.
Online Gaming Review - Was there any inspiration for elements of Obsidian's storyline -- such as the environmentalist Lilah, CERES, and nanotechnology?

Howard Cushnir - We knew the core of our concept was travelling through dreams, and we wanted those dreams to be real physical places. No existing technology could build them, so we looked to the speculative tech of the future.

Adam Wolff - Eric Drexler's work provided a lot of background for our ideas on nanotechnology. Douglas Hostadter's essays on AI and hive-mind also provided much fodder for our discussion of the particular abilities and inabilities of a thinking machine. In fact, the Church of the Machine puzzle was based on a kind of Turing machine, which was one of the first theoretical computers, and which Hofstadter treats at length in his book, Godel, Escher, Bach.

OGR- The graphics in Obsidian are excellent. What can you tell us about the creation of the visuals?

Matthew Fassberg - There's a lot to tell. The visuals always begin on a sketch pad and go through so many phases and different hands before they end up in the final game. 
In this case, we had two very talented artists who came up with the fantasy characters (Bismuth, Conductor, Spider, Nanobot) and the Obsidian structure concept. That was Rich Cohen & Mark Sullivan. 
Rich & Mark left Rocket Science early on in Obsidian's production, but the brilliant imagination, strangeness and attention to detail that they brought to those first few ideas were a standard that was set for the entire project.
Throughout the project I hired people who were used to working at a very high level of quality -- not all of them were gaming people. Industrial designers, feature film art directors, Animators with feature film experience, all sorts of people contributed. 
I can say that as producer, my hardest job was keeping one eye on the quality level we wanted to maintain, while keeping in mind that this was a computer game, not a feature film (yet!). It was a very difficult place to be, wanting to get the best out of people, but always needing to pull the plug and move on in order to complete the project. 
Of course for players to see all the work we put into making the game, we needed to make sure the final stills and movies looked great as well. That's why we went with 16 bit images.

OGR- The Bureau, Obsidian's first realm, is an incredible place, where just navigating the walls and ceiling is a puzzle in itself. What was the inspiration for the Bureau and its unique "look"?

Matthew Fassberg - Like so much of Obsidian, creating the Bureau was a strange collaboration. Scott Kim had the idea to make a room where the player had to traverse all the walls to find a way out. Our artists referenced large old bank and government building interiors. The story called for a bureaucratic place where learning to break rules was important. We wanted Obsidian to feel populated, but technically people would have been impossible to do in our time frame, hence the "Vidbots". Added all that up and you get the Bureau.

Howard Cushnir - Scott Kim, puzzlesmith extraordinaire, created a six sided room as a plastic model. It was inspired. We set out to build it in CG, not knowing if we could clearly simulate the specific gravity effect. It turned out we could, which created an opportunity for the player to have an experience that could ONLY be found on a computer. But the space itself was not enough, so we had to graft an appealing story on it that would pull you through. The "Brazil"-like Bureau came naturally, and then the rebellion followed. We took great pains to make the bureacracy fun, not tedious, and in the end the fact that you have to subvert it adds a lot to your satisfaction.

OGR- The player will meet the "VidBots" in the Bureau -- who not only help you (well, I use the word "help" loosely") but also provide some humor to the game. Did you feel it was important to add humor to the game -- why?

Howard Cushnir - Even "Hamlet" has humor. We always need humor. Adventure games take themselves much too seriously sometimes. It was important to us while layering in the jokes, though, to make sure they fit the style of the games. No ha-ha fall-down stuff, or "groserias" as they say in espanol.

Matthew Fassberg - We thought touches of humor that didn't interfere with the over story would be a welcome break for the player. It has to be just the right amount. We had to maintain humor in order to survive the project, so some of it was bound to find its way into the game. 
There are lots of funny things I pushed for including, but they didn't make the final cut. Editing is a wonderful and important thing when it comes to attempting humor in a "serious" setting.

OGR- Are any of you VidBots in Obsidian?

Howard Cushnir - I, believe it or not, am the Bureau Chief.

Matthew Fassberg - Yes. I'm the ID bot. In fact, many of the designers and production people got to do VidBots. We used actors as well, simply choosing the right people for the right bots.

Adam Wolff - And I'm the document disposal vidbot in the cubicle maze.

OGR- Some readers have asked me -- Just who is that mariachi guy?

Howard Cushnir - He's tiny, he's magic, he's...a real mariachi! We hired him from a Mexican restaurant and brought him to a blue screen stage. I directed him in Spanish. It was a blast. He likes doing parties better, though. Very proud of his work. His place in the game, however, is just trippy dreamstuff. Blake Leyh composed a cool groove for him to strum with. It lasts five minutes. His riffs are all different, always in keeping with the other, invisible, cats.

Matthew Fassberg - I was booking an actor and costume person. Suddenly I realized we could do the whole thing cheaper and better by using the real thing. He had fun doing it!

OGR- Obsidian uses elegant moving transitions when navigating from place to place. Why did you use this type of navigation instead of the usual "slide-show" type movement?

Howard Cushnir - Gotta push the envelope, or you're yesterday's news. When's the last time you sat through a slide show and enjoyed it? Uncle Louie's vacation to Barbados?

Matthew Fassberg - Because the real world isn't seen in a slide show. We wanted the experience to be as immersive as possible given the limitations of watching at computer monitor. Adding the realism of real transitions seems worth the effort, and it WAS a major effort and expense to include them.

Adam Wolff - I think that the ultimate promise of the adventure game is: be the star of your own movie. I think the rendered transitions, and the fluidity of the game in general, make Obsidian a very cinematic experience.

OGR- The music and sound effects in Obsidian were created by Thomas Dolby and Headspace. Did they work seperately creating the music and sound effects or did they work closely with the Obsidian team?

Matthew Fassberg - Thomas Dolby was involved in the project very early on. His interest in creating interactive music was of great interest to us. Headspace was contracted and attending meetings from the very start. We worked closely with Thomas, Blake and Kim all the way through, though they did the work out of their own offices.

Howard Cushnir - The meetings were relentless and went on forever. We're talking days and days of painful meetings, going over each note and theme and feel and button sound.

Adam Wolff - But that was good. Headspace was working in mTropolis and so were we, so they were actually designing the sounds right into the game, making sure they were appropriate in every instance. On most games, the sound designers just deliver a DAT tape with a few musical cues and 50 different sounding button clicks and say, "good luck."

OGR- Obsidian's music is quite varied. What feelings did you want the music to convey?

Matthew Fassberg - That varied from place to place. In areas where the player might spend a long time we had to make sure the music wouldn't drive them crazy. So we'd talk about the mood we were after and then try and put in an ambient sort of soundtrack (like in the plane) In places where we wanted to build towards a climax and didn't think anyone for would stop for long (climbing the statue) we could be a bit more dramatic. Lots of times they went away and come up with their own great ideas and surprised us.

Howard Cushnir - Everything needed to be just right and also a little bit off-center. Like the muzak in the cubicle maze or the jazz in the gallery. It needed to draw you in and comment on itself a little and also be something you can listen to for hours.

OGR- What do you consider the biggest factors in making a great adventure game?

Matthew Fassberg - I think the biggest factor is elegantly weaving together the basic elements that make up the game: story, environment and gameplay. In some ways great adventure game are like great movies. They can should be enjoyable from a number of perspectives. Whether a player loves solving the puzzles, unraveling the story or simply exploring strange places, they should be satisfies in a well thought out game.

Howard Cushnir - Inspiration! You should walk around the block and talk about your design and beat your head against the wall not five times, but a hundred times. You shouldn't be satisfied until YOU love it, until you can't point to another project and see it all done previously. You need to break new ground, not just in tech, but in concept. Some simple games are wonderful, like "Bad Mojo," for instance. 
Integration! Just like in a great movie, you should go "That was great! The whole thing rocked!" You shouldn't be picking it apart or focussing on pyrotechnics because the whole should be much greater than the sum of its parts.

OGR- I've read that it was a goal of the Obsidian team to make the puzzles well-integrated into the storyline, not just obstacles to impede prOGRess. What can you tell our readers about that and why do you think it is significant in an adventure game?

Howard Cushnir - I hate puzzles. There, I said it, my dirty secret is out. So when Adam and Scott were designing them, I tried to make sure they would emotion, and resonance, and relevance, and would feel like something that comes naturally...so you might forget for a moment that is was a (yikes!) puzzle.

Adam Wolff - Early on, we honed in on a philosophy for puzzle design.

It shouldn't take you too long to figure out what your ultimate goal is. We wanted to avoid the problem some people had with Myst, which was, "what-the-hell-do-I-do-now?" You should always know what the next step should be, you just don't necessarily know how you're going to take it. 
When you're actually working on the puzzle, you shouldn't have the sense that there's something simple that you're missing. There shouldn't be any pieces in the other room that you needed to pick up, nor should there be a hidden switch that you don't find until you give up in frustration and start clicking everywhere on the screen. A good puzzle should have very clear parameters that don't get violated. (ie, don't have a switch in one room that opens a door in different room, unless you set that up very clearly.) 
Once you figure out what the deal is, it shouldn't take you too long to solve it. This seems like the major downfall of a lot of puzzles. It's just not that satisfying to realize, "I need to put all the black knights on the white squares" and then spend two hours making random moves trying to accomplish that. The best puzzles should have a series of "A-ha!"s that lead directly to a solution. Another way of saying this is that the player should know that they are nearing the solution as they do. Puzzles where you just get it and you're not quite sure why, are distinctly unsatisfying.

OGR- What went into the puzzle creation process? Are there any ideas that almost went into the game, but didn't?

Adam Wolff - The puzzles largely grew out of our conceptualizations of the realms. We'd decide "there'll be a puzzle here" but we often didn't quite know what shape it would take -- more that it would be on an appropriate theme and that it would have a specific result. Then, once we came up with a puzzle, we'd often go back and make small changes in the story and environment to weave it in more tightly to the game. Working back and forth like that, we found that we could enrich both the gameplay and the story. 
In a few cases, we tried to adapt puzzles we designed for other purposes to spots in the game where we felt we needed more interactivity, but that almost never worked. In every case in Obsidian, we were making sure that the puzzles were germaine -- that instead of just slowing the player's prOGRess through the game, they were contributing to his or her appreciation of the environments and story of Obsidian. 
At the top of the junk heap in the third dream, you can see the vestige of a puzzle that we didn't have time to make. That radio you listen to before flying to the hand used to be a rather difficult puzzle. When it became clear that we wouldn't have time to finish everything, that was our first candidate to cut, since it lifted out without disturbing any of the story or gameplay surrounding it. 
There was a whole realm we created for Obsidian called the Incubator, which was a very ambitious, very conceptual environment. In then end, we didn't feel we had enough time to make it up to our high production standards, and we felt that it actually strengthened the story to take it out. It was a strong design, though, and there's talk of building out from that realm into a sequel.

OGR- Do you have a favorite area in Obsidian?

Howard Cushnir - I think the Bismuth realm, with it's bizarre environment and interlocking storyscapes is our best work. I enjoy how you learn the story as you come to understand the puzzles. I love how you have to use what you learn in one place later on in another place. I love that the games central themes -- rebellion, machine power, inspiration -- all become central to your gameplay.

Matthew Fassberg - The Bismuth realm. It's the third one in the game and brings together the entire story with some wonderful puzzles. I love showing it to people. We designed it and built it in-house, and a company call Pixel Liberation Front from New York did the final animation, and lighting.

OGR- What is next for Obsidian? May adventurers find themselves in the strange realm once again?

Matthew Fassberg - We have ideas, but because it costs so much to create a game like Obsidian, we need to watch sales of the first game before committing to a second one.

OGR- Thanks very much for participating in this interview and good luck on future projects!