*engage music*

Monday 12/01/04 07:00

I’m out the front door, bag strap over my shoulder and a bone in my pocket. Vurt was out front and leaning coolly on the bonnet of his car across the other side of the road, Reservoir Dogs style. Trains rumble past in the background as planes course through the airspace above. This is inner city Sydney, and it’s all good if you come down to my hood.   Today we’re on a mission from GOD.   The both of us are heading to Irrational Games in Canberra for interviews and some T:V goodness.

Looking first right, then left, then right again I crossed the road towards the waiting escort. “You’re one cool frood”, I said in an inner city drawl. Leaning forward and engaging in the Gentlemen’s club handshake *of which Vurt is an honorary member, living in the western suburbs as he does* I noticed Vurt smelt really nice.

Vurt snapped his fingers Fonzie style and the boot of the car flipped open with a smooth hydraulic hiss. “Put your shit in there bro and let’s get out of this town” I did as he said and then slummed it into the passenger seat.   I flipped my shades down, covering my eyes in black light as Vurt gunned the engine and engaged the warp drives. The G-forces inside the cabin were incredible as the little Delorean was pushed quickly towards light speed.   I pursed my lips together, almost dribbling under the stress of it all. It just wouldn’t be cool to let on that you’re feeling the effects of the warp acceleration. I scanned Vurt out of the corner of my specs and he was grinning like a freaking mad man, huddled forward against the G like some sort of supersonic Limpet on a speeding steering wheel. He looked like he was enjoying himself a little too much.   The counter clicked down… 3…2…1.. And we were through and crashing in a blinding funk back to reality.

The road from Sydney to Canberra isn’t really too bad, when you know where you’re going. We however, and this is my point if you'll stick with me a second, didn’t. With the fresh morning sunshine turning quickly into Western suburb’s death rays, Vurt decided to take me on a guided tour of Bankstown.   This was really great I must say and I wish we could have stayed longer to fully enjoy the stabbings.   Before we got on the right highway and sped off towards the Nations capital.

We talked about a lot of things on the long trip down, like Tribes and Tribes 2. When we got bored of that we spiced things up with Tribes Vengeance talk and girlish giggles, then finally, just girlish giggles.   Highlights of the trip were the kangaroo road kill, some nice rivers and Lake George, which by golly is one hell of a lake for something with NO WATER IN IT. With the image of sheep grazing in the middle of a lake still stuck somewhere like crazy in my mind we reached our destination.   Total travel time 3 hours 25 minutes.

My first impression of Canberra when we got there was, “no wait, so when does the city start? No seriously?”   But the second impression was more like, “Its what?... but where do all the politicians sleep?” Fortunately, I had Vurt to whisper soothing sweet nothings to me while we found the Irrational offices and a park for the car.

Welcome to Irrational!

Office Billboard...

Thankfully we found a park right near the offices. The thought of having to traverse the CBD and dodge all those cows and farm animals was really playing on my mind. Though with Vurt leading the way we made it to the front doors unmolested and with barely a pause we were through, and into the inner sanctum of Tribes Goodness™.

The door beeped as it closed behind us, no doubt alerting the Sierra suits in the US to our presence. Communication must be tight between Irrational and Sierra because nary a few seconds had passed before a smiling Ed Orman greeted us. We basically sat down straight away and given our freshly pressed and laundered NDA’s to sign. Once this was out of the way, Ed faded into the shadows and Tony Oakden gathered us under his wing for a tour of the offices.   He ushered us down long dark corridors, through several of those nifty doorway-behind-the-bookcase things and even a hidden staircase behind the old suit of armor classic before we finally came upon the sacred inner sanctum.  And what a sanctum it is at that!   The layout is classic 17^th Century France, as with all the great abbeys and small castles of that time you enter through the kitchen/bathrooms. The walls are adorned with mostly clippings of games past and present. There are a lot of great Freedom Force posters hanging on the walls here, and even some framed awards for Freedom Force taking pride of place in the Grand Hallway.

It’s actually a pretty large office all up, much larger than it looks from the outside. Walls and corridors separate all the different groups within the company.   Not the usual big floor with no walls and a field of office partitions that most people immediately think of when they think “office space”. Actually I jotted the entire layout down in moon writing for all to see.   If you turn the lights off right now and hold the monitor out your window and up to the full moon, you should be able to see something or other that may or may not be interpreted as the layout of the Irrational offices but none the less! Enough with the distractions please.

We pretty much had 5 minutes to ourselves to work out the final game plan before we were up and running into the first of the interviews.   As Tony had been our guide we decided that he should be the first victim. The next few hours pretty much whizzed by, neither Vurt nor I had any experience previously with interviewing anyone, but we were happy with our results after the first few sessions, and indeed verily gay about the answers that were being provided by the kind Irrational workers.   It was after lunchtime when a group of the guys decided to come and grab us for some food Canberra stylez.

So out we went, walking on our hind legs from the offices into the CBD. The guys had found a dish that they seemed desperate for us to try.   Well, to be honest there was some dissent amongst the ranks. There was an argument the whole way to the restaurant between Dean (level design) and Marc (AI) about whether the fabled Fried Chili Beef that they wanted us to taste was actually worth all the attention.   Only one way to find out! 10 at the table, 8 orders of the chili beef and 2 orders of little consequence, I think they may have been the Szechuan chicken.  What can I say, a better use of the deep fryer I have never witnessed so crunchy on the outside and so tender on the inside. The others just nodded and grinned knowingly.   There you go Canberra, things are looking up, and you don’t suck so much after all :P

The rest of the afternoon we managed to fill up with more interviews, frequent trips out to the car to pop money into the parking meter and quite a lot of standing behind the guys while they ran around testing level scripting, or just plain old multiplayer dynamics.

It was about 6:30pm when Vurt and I decided we had better head to the designated place of sleep. Luckily, Vurt having worked down here for 6 months not so long ago, knew his way around the seedy hotels and we managed to secure ourselves a cozy room for the night. It was still pretty warm in Canberra but the temperature was dropping pretty fast.  Not like Sydney where if its 38 degrees during the day you can pretty much guarantee that without a change coming through it will still be around the 30’s by the time you want to go to sleep. Despite this I flicked the aircon onto “icy cold” and we climbed into separate beds   :P

The TV was pretty uninteresting and we were both about to call it a night before SBS pulled through as it does late at night keeping us entertained with lesbian sex scenes at the end of Queer as Folk. Gawd bless and goodnight after that.

DAY TWO

Well we both woke up pretty early, about 7am and it was pretty freaking cold in the room. The aircon was still pumping out cold air like a soldier. We got up, stretched, I combed Vurts hair for him (normally his mum does it *cute*) and we took our respective showers.   We bummed around a bit, Vurt had the laptop and his Ipod to play with. I just channel surfed and read the morning paper until we thought it was time to go grab some food and check out of the hotel.

Another blazing Canberra day greeted us. We grabbed a quick breakfast of sizzling bacon and eggs before heading back towards the Irrational offices for our second dose of interviews and Vengeance shenanigans. We arrived there at about 10am and it didn’t look like anyone had actually left since we last saw them, everyone was already at battle stations and into the thick of things.

Vurt and I had carved through the majority of our interviews the day before, leaving us with just a few more to do to complete the whole collector set of developers. We didn’t know exactly what we would be doing after that but we had been promised a game or two before we left, so we were pretty amped about the upcoming afternoon.  With professional enthusiasm we knocked the last remaining interviews on the head before lunch even looked to be threatening.

Vurt and I had a sit down together to see what else we could do to fill in the rest of our day. All of the guys had been incredibly accommodating to us up to this point. We were really hesitant to ask them to do anything more for us. I’m sure that when you check the interviews that are the meat and 3 veg of this whole thing you’ll be pretty happy with the effort the guys put in for us. It was pretty much at this point that Tony came in and said in his Pommy accent. “Right you two, we’re ‘eading down to town for a spot of food and drink to celebrate our latest milestone. Fancy comin’ yeah alright?”

The entire office emptied itself out onto the footpath and everybody piled into cars, or in Ben Lee’s (art director) case, a shiny big motorbike that purred like a pussycat. I seriously think the guys drove us in circles just to make me think that Canberra actually had somewhere else with big buildings and people in it and stuff. I was on to it though, none of that smoke and mirrors crap was going to slip past me today. So I’m pretty sure we eventually, after about 10 minutes, ended up just around the corner from their offices.   It was about 34 degrees out, I could hear white skin crackling under the blazing force of the Australian sun.   I think I over heard Phil Sullivan (Ass. prod.) saying that the heat allowed him to smell colours or something.

We all ended up sitting down at one long table, beers or non-alcoholic beverages at the ready, for a Korean BBQ feast.I hadn’t actually been to a place like this before but it was kinda cool.  Cool in a way that sitting next to a burning hot open BBQ and occasionally realizing that sizzling sound you can hear…. Yeah that one. It’s your knee getting grilled because you’re resting it up against the side of the Heat Pit of Hell that you’re cooking your food on.   “Wtf mate.” I’ll live.

Conversation was pretty lively the whole length of the table, but it was pretty much Tribes-centric around Vurt and I. It really impressed me that the guys, and there were no exceptions all seemed to have an unquenchable thirst for our opinions of every little nuance of game play from both T1 and T2. Luckily for them they had probably the best 2 Tribes players ever born to glean information from. If T:V succeeds you know who to thank kids. Let’s hope they listened to all my really cool stories, the ones that normally, you’re telling a chick and she doesn’t even look impressed unless you make the sound effects really loud and talk like [DMc] Rocket, “arghhh shzzzz”.

Issues ranged from things like the Half-life code being stolen to how difficult it was to keep such a large group of people in work constantly as projects start and others end. By the time lunch had finished both Vurt and I had been given a priceless little glimpse into what it took to run a successful games company.   All this witty banter was interspersed with the common; “but how do I know if it’s cooked yet? *prod prod*”, as people struggled with the idea of cooking their own food on a BBQ plate in the middle of the table. Dessert time! I think everyone bar one single dissenter ordered fried ice cream for their sweets, I hadn’t had the opportunity to have this before either.   This whole Canberra thing was like a treasure trove of new experiences for me, I now call Canberra the city of excitement and trees.  The Ice cream was awesome and we pretty much all jumped ship at once leaving Jay to pay the bill on his Level Designers platinum AMEX card.

As we walked back to our cars the guys told us it was time to set us up with some PC’s and for a bit of office game playing to be had.   Vurt had a hard time to not do the whole speeding limpet thing again as we drove around the corners for 10 minutes before arriving back with everybody else at the HQ.   It took the guys about 10 minutes to set us up with PC’s.   I got KP’s (sorry sir) as he was away on holidays and Vurt got one of those floating PC’s that doesn’t seem to belong to anyone.

Ahh what can I say after booting it up for the first time?  Nothing actually seeing as I signed an NDA. :P I will say I enjoyed the experience thoroughly and was delighted with how (even though it’s still early times yet) just the simple act of movement within the engine felt so right.   It was a real honour to be given that opportunity and Vurt and I would like to thank the all the guys for showing us such a warm welcome while we were there. The next couple of hours literally flew by.   Before we knew it, it was 4pm and our opponents had to get back to work, and us back to Sydney before I turned into a pumpkin and Vurt a medium sized eggplant. It wasn’t easy tearing us away I can tell you but it had to be done. I tried to give them some coherent feedback when we had finished but nothing really came out like I wanted. Cool things were still whizzing around my head and the best I could do was walk around and say goodbye to everyone we had interviewed and make it down to the footpath without falling down the stairs. Holy shit that was fun!!!

The first thing Vurt and I did when we got back into the car, APART from turning the aircon onto gazillion Ice age cold was to giggle like schoolgirls.The 2 days had been so much fun for us, more than I had personally expected. I just didn’t expect everyone to be so god damned irritably nice. It’s not even worth me writing what happened on the trip back, it was just all TV talk.  For every question that had been answered over the 2 days, another 10 had grown out of it.  We passed the hours with the usual geeky arguments that you get when you’ve just played a cool game that you’ve been looking forward to for months a year before its going to be released. Same old same old.

Vurt and I would like to thank on behalf of bittah.com and the Australian/New Zealand Tribes community everyone at Irrational and Sierra for helping us organize this event.   We appreciate you showing our relatively small community support in this most generous of ways. If you’ve managed to read this far Ill take this opportunity to say what the hell are you doing? Go read the interviews. They rule!

We decided to aim more at giving everyone an idea of who it is that is making this game for us. There’s a large upcoming media event on the 29^th that will give everyone ample game centric information. We here at Bittah wanted to give you a small window into the working lives of the brave people at Irrational. I hope you find the interviews interesting. They serve as not only cool reading, but a real insight into what it takes to get work in the industry for anyone that’s interested.