Nickname: My old gaming alias was Tesla, because of my sad fascination with Nikola Tesla. I don't really use that anymore. Ed is really short and easy to type.

Irrational Title: Lead Designer

Qualifications: My really brief career history is that I worked on Fallout Tactics as lead designer for Micro Forte. Before that I worked on a game that no one would have heard of called Enemy Infestation, it was the first game I had worked on for Micro Forte, I did some design work on it. After leaving Micro Forte I came here [Irrational Games] for the last 5 months of Freedom force, just helping out really I didn't do major design, then managed to score lead designer on Tribes.

Previous games worked on: Fallout Tactics, Enemy Infestation and Freedom Force.

Meet the heavy armour

Hardest moment in development of any game you have worked on: Everything is challenging, every day. It is not like an amazingly easy job really, even though it is a good job and I enjoy it. Probably the one that I will always go back to is when we were doing Fallout Tactics and we did our first pass of the demo and it sucked. Interplay said, "you know what this isn't any fun", Tony our producer at the time said, "you know what they're right" and we said, "you know what, you're right". We did a lot of soul searching, retuning and figuring out exactly what we were doing.

It turned out to be a good game
I enjoyed it, I still like the game, there was just a point where we had got everything in and we hadn't done everything that we needed to do with it. So we had all these systems, weapons and characters and we hadn't tuned it in a way that made it interesting and the AI didn't do anything interesting. So I don't think it took us that long after we realised how to fix it and get stuff in there.

That must have been a fairly defining moment
It was a bad day; it was pretty much 24 hours of going hey what the hell are we going to do. But then like a day later we realised that we had all the tools to do it, so it was just a matter of pulling our thumbs out of our arses and doing it.

First Gaming system: I argue with my brother about this, it was definitely an Atari 2600 we had when I lived in the US. I am sure that we had a Pong machine by one of the various manufactures. I can't remember which one it was, my brother reckons we didn't and I think we did

Earliest gaming memories: I lived in the US for 2 years from 1980 - 82 and the first arcade game I can remember seeing was donkey Kong.

Favourite game of all time and why: I play a lot of games, I have been playing for a long time so it is very hard to say. I like everything action games, RPGs, platformers, racing games, adventure games.

Do you always finish your games: No. I do my best to finish as many as I can, but it just doesn't seem like a lot of want to be finished. Some of them are time syncs, I am trying to play through as many things as I can in per week just in general that's what I try to do. The last 25% of a lot of games seems to be the place where you use up 75% of your time so I'll abandon them.

Playing games for you, is it a work thing or a pleasure thing: It's both, part of my job description is to stay a breast of technology and gameplay. So that's a good justification for claiming things on tax but also it means I should play as many things as I can, but sure I play heaps of games for fun.

Games currently playing: Beyond Good & Evil, before that I just finished prince of Persia which is a terrific game, it was so focused, a really beautiful polished product. It reminded me a lot of ICO and I am pretty sure that comparison has been made. I really like ICO as well. On Xbox I have been playing Panzer Dragoon, on game cube probably Tony Hawk 4. I am playing all sorts of crap on Gameboy advance, on PC I am playing URU right now, I love the Myst adventure genre.

Home PC rig: It is crap. I rely on my work PC because I spend so much time here. I have a Pentium 2 450 with a 32 mb Geforce 2 at home, it is for word processing.

Console or PC: I have now got every current console. My wife is into games to so she got the Xbox so we have one of each in the house. We play some PC games but no I don't have a preference.

Single player or multi-player or co-op: I would play more multiplayer games if there were more to play, PC is currently set up the best for multiplayer from my point of view. We play a lot of DOD, friends get together and play that a lot. My wife and I play Warcraft 3 lanned but I would love more co-op games if there were more good co-op games but there aren't many.

Day to day what does lead designer do?
Well there is a component of management like looking at what the level designers are building and trying to schedule that, although, I let Jay [Kyburz] do as much of that as I can because Jay is lead level designer. Being Lead Designer means making sure that the original ideas that we had are being implemented the way you expected them to be implemented. Communicating to people and making sure they understand, what it is we're doing, like with having an 80 or 100 page design document, I have to make sure people understand what is in that. On top of that there is receiving a system from the programmers and tuning the numbers that are in it. They will parameterise for example a projectile and Michael [Johnston] or I will go through and write in the numbers for damage, projectile speed and all those things.

Have you ever been a developer in a game that has had an open beta?
Nah-uh

What do expect from the Tribes: Vengeance open beta?
Feedback.

What do we expect to get out of it, how much is the game going to change because of feedback?
I am not sure.

Is it the great unknown for you?
I have never done it before. I think that there is a lot of value to be had getting peoples opinions and feedback on things. You have got to temper everything you hear with what you want to do, what the publisher wants to do and what we think makes sense for the game. You obviously can't make a game that suits everybody. I am expecting it to be interesting and I'm expecting a majority of good feedback and a big chunk of negative feedback because there are always people that aren't happy. You just have to take it onboard and deal with it.

How much do you actually listen to the community i.e. Tribalwar or bittah. I know that Chris "Thrax" Mahnken is reading the forums all the time on TW. Are you taking anything from those forums or is it to late in the piece?
It is hard to answer that anyway. Various members of the team are on those forums everyday. I try and read ever morning, Michael [Johnston] reads every morning. We don't post all that much because it's generally about things we can't talk about, we gauge opinion and see what people's reactions are to issues especially to things that Chris [Mahnken] brings up, Chris is very good at putting an issue out there. We take things away from that like you would from an open beta, you have got to take peoples opinions onboard but you have to temper it all. Certainly at this stage it is harder to shift the project in any direction and I think that we are going in the right direction anyway. It would have to be something fairly spectacular on the forum to makes us change. That said earlier in the piece when Michael was still in Canada the first thing that I did and some of the other designers did was to plough through all the forums. We looked at every single piece of suggestion, vitriol and everything that anyone had out there, just to see what people thought.

Do you expect the beta to actually increase initial sales? Is it also a sales tool?
Yes, this is a question that Chris would answer better than me. Overall I think it will definitely increase awareness of the product, like I said there will be some people that are negative about it. Generally I think most people will be positive about it, I think that it will increase the hype around it but I never thought of it as a discrete marketing tool, I hadn't though about it like that at all.

Do you think it might be a double-edged sword? People might play it and not like it straight away where they may have bought the game up until then?
Yeah that is alway a possibility. Unless we make a beta that just sucks, if we did that then I wouldn't be at all that surprised [that it turned people off the game]. I think that people that would drop it because there is something in it they didn't like were probably never going to buy it anyway.

There was a post by Chris Mahnken on the TW forums about advertising within games. We have seen screenshot of the billboards already. Do you think this is something that will happen to games in general?
It already exists we have seen games right now. Super Monkey ball surprised me by being sponsored by a banana company of all things, and their logo is all the way through out it and I kept wondering who they were. There is certainly precedent, I get the impression in that case that they used the advertising to get their initial budget not for increased revenues after the sale of the game because obviously it can't be updated. I am sure that other publishes will try and explore that market I am not sure if I am particularly interested in it.

Do you not like the idea of it?
There is a bit of me that think it is a bit of a sell out, at the same time the companies are in business and they need to make money, I guess they have every right to maximise their revenues as long as they don't destroy their market. If people really hate advertising there is going to be a backlash and people won't buy it but I really wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing more and more of it.

Is your design document constantly evolving or is it the bible for the game?
It's both, the very first design document is the best ideas that we could come up with. Then implementation comes around and suddenly you realise that one of your ideas just isn't practical, isn't do-able or whatever the case. So you have to update the design doc because that is the place that everyone is meant to go for information. If I get run over by a truck then that document should be able to stand up on its own. There is certainly a core to it that has remained the same for the last year but there are the implementation details, which have changed. We try and update it as much as possible.

Thanks for your time Ed.