The following questions all come from a single interview, published in a computer magazine called PCPowerPlay , in November of ‘99.
So how much of The Wheel of Time game bears the mark of Robert Jordan?
Well, I only know a little bit about the game. I’m not a programmer. My real programming skills are decades out of date. I started when you had to learn how to operate a key-punch machine so you could do your stacks of cards to hand into the mainframe, ‘cause there was nothing else than the mainframe!
Oh dear! So what role did you play in the development of the game?
To a large extent it was that I said I wanted certain things to be done. And it was not that I was asking them to do these things, it was that I was telling them “Do these things, or there’s no deal”. They were okay with that. The things I asked them to do made the game much more complex; made it much more difficult to design—hence it wasn’t on the streets three years ago.
It could have been ready, theoretically, three years ago. How long has the game been in development then?
For at least four or five years. The thing is, I wanted it to be a game where it’d be, at least in mathematical terms, impossible to play the same game twice. Every time you start the Wheel of Time, it’s gotta be different. I mean, the landscape is the same, but you’re not going to be able to play the same game again—there are too many changes in conditions. There are ter’angreal (magic foci, used as offensive and defensive weapons in the game)—there is a large library of ter’angreal in the game. But they are not handed over to the players. A random selection is made when you start up the game, and distributed at random over the landscape. I also wanted the NPCs to be as close to player characters as possible. So you can bribe them to lie to or kill others. And they’ll respond to you depending on your character and the way you’ve dealt with others.
So why did you specifically ask for all this?
Because I think the world changes and things are different. Things change all the time. It seemed to me that making a game where you learn all the rules and zip through and go back and do it again to see if you can do it faster is boring. I find it boring.
Given the almost rabid demeanor of your fans, how well do you think they will receive the WoT game?
I hope well. It takes place somewhere between fifty and [a] hundred years before the time of the books. It doesn’t involve any characters from them either, and it’s not going to be exactly like the books—there’s no way it can be as it’s a different genre altogether.
It’s shaping up to be a really good game. Hopefully, if it’s well received, there will be modules that take people more into the world as it exists in the books, and possibly even modules where people play characters in the books, or interact with characters from the books—which I’m hoping is something the fans would love.
The game also uses the Unreal engine, and one of my favorite quotes is “It uses the Unreal engine better than Unreal does”. The design team have done so well with it that they’ve been hired to design the sequel to Unreal—Unreal 2. Another quote I liked was “Every year we’re promised something new, something different, something fresh. At last somebody has delivered”.
You come across as someone who knows games!
I play games! But the games I play are Chess, and Go, and very firmly reality-based military-strategy and tactic games like Civilisation, Sim City, Sim World and so on. I really enjoy those. I don’t play them very often though, and recently just cleared 12 GB of games from my hard drive.
That’s a lot of space for games!
Yeah, yeah. Well, there are shelves of games up at home. I buy the darn things, I just find very little time to play them.
To change the topic a bit, do you feel threatened, as a novelist, by games becoming more appealing as elaborate story-telling devices?
Year after year, they tell me about the death of books. Yet I see more books sold. You can’t take a computer into the bath and let it dry out if you happen to drop it by accident. You can’t take a computer to the beach without worrying about sand getting into it. With a book, you can treat it as rough as you want to, and if it ends up destroyed, you can buy another one at a relatively low cost. Books also don’t have maintenance costs nor need to have their batteries replaced on regular occasions. You can just put one in your coat pocket and walk. I think that says it all, really.
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