by Peter Clausen

Interview: Bob Bates is not only a legend, he is also the founder of Legend. Legend Entertainment, that is. At the Leipzig Games Convention 2005 we had a chance to probe his mind. These are the results.

Sherlock. Eric the Unready. Unreal II. Bob Bates has a very diverse portfolio. He is also a great interviewee. Want proof? Read on!

Peter Clausen: Is there a lot of storytelling in Panzer Elite Action?

Bob Bates: Well, in an action-game the most important part is the action. It’s hard for a writer to admit that, but we knew that the most important thing to do was to have a good action game with lots of variety, lots of different enemies to shoot, different environments and settings.

Along with that we had a theme for the game. One often wonders if he fights for a country or a cause or for the sake of the men around him. So very much a “Band of brothers”-feel to the game. And in order to do that you have to create characters that the player cars about, and characters within the game who care about each other. So, very likely, we have layed this into the game. We don’t have big cutscenes where people are talking to each other about their hometown or something like that, but in the course of the game it develops.

You play a tank commander, and as the game goes along they talk to you, and you talk to them. And their personalities come through. And through these exchanges, you come to realize that they are your men.

Peter Clausen: So, a bit like Wing Commander?

Bob Bates: Yeah, a bit. And in the course of the game you actually play three different campaigns. You play a German commander for the first part of the war, and the Russian commander, and than an American commander. And each of them has a slightly different reaction, a slightly different version of the theme. So, the German commander starts the war as a very proper millitary officer and he sees his men sort of coming together but he stays aloof from them, because he is an officer. And he works back on that and thinks “That was probably a mistake. I wish I had the closeness that they have”. The American officer on the other hand starts out the game as kind of a loner, kind of a drifter sort of guy. No human attachments at all. But in the course of the game he becomes very close to his tankmates. And after the war they become very good friends, and stay lifelong friends. So that’s pretty much the story. And we wanted to make sure that it did not get in the way of the action.



Panzer Elite Action is available on PC, PS2 and Xbox

Peter Clausen: That’s actually pretty interesting, because the way you tell it, the story is very character-centric. However, many game developers tend to make the mistake of writing plot-centered storylines, where characters are just devices to further the plot.

Bob Bates: Well, the two have to go together. Character drives plot in a lot of ways. In a World War II game, the overall story is none. Unless you are taking an alternative history, which this is not. What we did was to find actual interesting battles, interesting locations and design interesting missions within those locales. So it’s not plot-driven in the way many games are. It is attachment-driven and the characters sort of feed into that.

Peter Clausen: Recently there has been a lot of discussion about emotion in games. Many people claim that games will never be able to tell actual emotional stories, to touch the audience. Do you think that is true?

I think it’s very difficult to do. We know it can be done, because it has been done. But it is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do, to marry those two things together. And the challenge is simply one of interactivity versus linearity. When you put the player in control of a game, it’s hard to tell a story and engage people’s emotions. It’s hard to do, but it can be done.

Bob Bates: Was it easier to tell good stories in the days of Infocom and Legend Interactive?

I think it’s more difficult now, because adventure games were pretty much a storytelling genre. People came to those games looking for story. If you come to a first-person shooter you are looking for action. As a designer you have to make sure you are giving people what they are looking for. In an adventure game you have more opportunities to fill story into the game. In an adventure game you spend a lot of time in an environment. The more you interact with it, the more the game designer has the opportunity to add litlle bits of story and background and backstory to the environment. So if you come into a room, and your main goal is to get ouf it, some players will just work on getting out. But there is a vase on the shelf or a picture on the wall. And the picture shows someones great grandfather. And then you look into the vase and it contains the ashes.

So everytime you do something, there is the opportunity to put in a little bit more. You can create a rich tapestry of character, background and story.


Well, some games DO make you violent...

Peter Clausen: Of course there have been many recent adventures, but they are not very interactive. You just work on solving puzzles, but there is just not the same degree of interactivity as there used to be. For example, in “Eric the Unready” I would always try the most insane stuff, like killing someone, or other unmentionable things. But it was so funny, because there were different responses for everything.

Bob Bates: Yes. The joy, and it is a joy, in creating something like that, is that you imagine as you are sitting there while making this, you imagine the person on the other side. It’s actually a very intimate thing. Because I sit there at three o’ clock in the morning, I have been up all night. It’s four a clock, five a clock, and you have a room, and you always think about the player: “This is what the player knows. This is what he’s trying to do. These are things around him. What is he gonna try? And what is he gonna try that’s goofy. What is he gonna try that’s of the wall. Something, he thinks, I am not gonna think about.” So you might type in some very strange things. But if I thought of that very strange thing, and in comes back in a non-default response, than as player you go “Oh my god, he thinks the same thing, I think”. And that is a connection, that’s kind of been missing. When the parser went out of business, that opportunity has been lost.

Peter Clausen: Do you think this connection could resurface somewhere else?

Bob Bates: I’ve got plans to bring back this concept into games.

Peter Clausen: Have you heard about Facàde?

Bob Bates: I have read about it, but I haven’t had the chance to play it yet. But I will! I believe that the parser is so powerful a tool, that it will return. And I have lots of plans.

Peter Clausen: So, would you actually like to develop something in the vein of your old games again?

Bob Bates: I would!


Great moments in gaming history!



Peter Clausen: There are other people from this era of gaming like Steve Meretzky, or Al Lowe and they don’t seem to be able to return into the gaming industry. You have adjusted much better. Why do you think that is?

Bob Bates: Well first of all, Steve is still very much in the gaming-industry…

Peter Clausen: He’s doing some online-stuff, isn’t he?


Two good reasons to play Spellcasting 301.

Bob Bates: … Steve is a good friend of mine. For about five years he was the creative director at world winner, a company that’s doing competitive online games. Two weeks ago he went to work at Floodgate for Paul Neurath, who is another person from that era, doing mobile games. So Steve is still active as a game-designer.

Al got out of the industry for a while. He is looking at opportunities. We may see him again in some capacity. Hopefully. What a great designer Al is. And a great guy too.

Some people have sort of stepped out of the business-end. As the industry has changed, the kinds of things that you can do in a game have changed. So some people have stayed to fight, and try to figure out ways to keep doing stories in games, which is what I do a lot. Some of those guys are in fact still around in some capacity.

Peter Clausen: Anyway, you have worked on lots of different projects. From “Eric the Unready” to “Unreal” to “Panzer Elite Action”. What was your favourite kind of project, and what project contains the most of Bob Bates?

Bob Bates: Well, I mentioned the game earlier. It was “Eric the Unready”. This was the game where I had the most fun. I did the writing and the programming, and I felt very alive while doing it. Because it’s a really interesting task and set of ideas.

In terms of classic adventures “Time Quest” was probably my most intricately designed game. It was like a clock, where everything comes together. There is a big difference between “Time Quest” and “Eric the Unready”.


Time Quest was among the more serious Legend games.

In “Time Quest” everything had to actually make sense, and be logical and completely fit. But in “Eric the Unready”, if there was a joke to be had I went for the joke. Those are different activities and the games have to reflect that.

Peter Clausen: Yeah, I remember the whistle at the end of “Eric the Unready”. And you pretty much brushed over it, and made a joke of it.

Bob Bates: Because it’s a different kind of entertainment, the player has different kinds of expectations. I very much enjoyed working on that. But I also enjoyed working on different kinds of projects. There is a common thread to all of those things. What I try to do, is to find a theme and find ways for that theme to emerge, rather than beating someone over the head with it. Just reassure its presence in the game, so when the player is running along, or when he is done, he reflects on this theme. And it’s not a message like “You should live your life this way”. It’s more of an interesting issue. Even in Unreal II I was looking at the idea of authority. You start with two characters, one who absolutely believes into authority and comes to distrust. And the other character is paranoid, trusts no one, but in the course of the game she comes to trust some people. As a writer I am not saying “Authority is good” or “Authority is bad”, I am saying it’s kind of ambiguous, and that’s interesting to think about.

As I do different games, I think of those kinds of things and try to put them in. And that goes back to my very first games like Arthur and Sherlock. Except for Eric. Eric was no theme, just fun.

Peter Clausen: By the way, your producer on Panzer Elite Action is Michael Hengst who is a kind of cult-icon in German gaming journalism. How did you get together?

Bob Bates: Well, we go back a long way. Michael was an adventure game fan. And back in the Legend-days he would do interviews and we got to know each other and liked eacht other. I don’t think that goes all the way back to Infocom. I think I met Boris there [Boris Schneider-Johne, founding member of the German gaming press – nowadays he is doing PR for Microsofts gaming division]. But Michael goes back to Legend.

And that’s actually the connection that brought us together for “Panzer Elite Action”. Because he knew of my interest in story. And he had this action-game, but wanted another dimension to it. And I said “Michael, I don’t know a lot about World War II tanks”. And he said “That’s okay, our team in Slovenya knows a lot about tanks, and they are passionate about that”. And Michael himself is passionate about tanks. So those three elements came together very naturally. Michael as a producer, me as the designer, and the Zootfly team, who are really wonderful people. Really smart, and the real stars of the game. There is a tendency in our business to give a lot of credit to somebody whose name you might recognize. But the people who made this game are the Zootfly team.

Thomas Nickel: One last question - How do you see yourself and your games? Do you see yourself as some kind of auteur, in some sense?

Bob Bates: Unfortunately the answer is yes. I say unfortunately because, certainly in America, the idea of an auteur implies a certain sort of arrogance. I try not to have that part. But I think a lot of storytelling in games, and how these things come together. There are two different camps of games designers. There are some game-designers, very smart ones, who think their goal is to create an environment where a player comes an to create their own series of events. Their own story. What they call story. Which I don’t call a story. It’s to create sandbox. To create a world of legos. To say “Look what I made, look how interact with it”. I understand that, and I understand the fun in that. But it’s not what I am interested in. Because when you listen to someones story, for example when someone tells you about a MMORPG he is like “So, I was going and I met this other guy, we joined together and there was a monster on the hill, and we killed that monster, and that was a hard fight. So we went down to the village and got some gold”. And as you listen to him talk about it, you think “Okay, that’s…”

Peter Clausen: It’s not really interesting.

Yeah, it’s interesting to him, but it’s not interesting to you. Because a story has what I call “authorial intent”. There is a theme, a message or something the story is about. And those things tend to be universal, which is why something like the Hero’s journey has all these common elements that resonate with us, as humans. There is a full talk about this I did at GDC. If you are interested in it, it’s on the GDC-website.

And I consider myself very much in this camp. I am much more interested in designing an experience, thinking of an emotion or thought that I want to live in your head. Figuring out a way for the game to create that in your head, rather than just saying “Here’s a world, go have fun it, and whatever you do I hope you enjoy it”.

Peter Clausen: Thank you for this interview!


Well, everybody tried this. Right? Right??

Text Copyright 2005 Peter Clausen
Screenshots Copyright JoWood, Legend Entertainment