Stay Awhile And Listen: a tale of game development

After 23 years, Richard Dansky is leaving Red Storm.?For many people, this is hardly news – what is Red Storm??Who is Rich Dansky??For me, personally, this is the end of an era.

Rich was at Red Storm when I joined in 2001.?I was coming off a disastrous stint at an independent developer that had ended with a studio shutdown, including all the usual shenanigans – contracts getting cancelled, pitches not getting signed, not getting paid for weeks, looting the office on the way out the door.?I will never forget interviewing with Rich.?We shared a love of language; both of us had done graduate work in English; we had the same experience of discovering fantasy and science fiction as kids and devouring whatever we could find.?

And we could not find a single thread of commonality.?He had studied eldritch horror and Lovecraft; I had studied French theory and 20th century novels.?We spent an entire hour going “Have you read this??It’s about X” – “No, I haven’t read that one, but it sounds similar to Y – have you read that?”?“Not familiar with that, but it sounds like Z”.?At the end of the interview, I apologized for wasting his time because we had found so little common ground and spent so much of the hour trying to find it.

They hired me anyway, God knows why.?Kevin Perry was running the design department at that point, and he was willing to take a flyer, I guess.?Brian Upton had laid the foundations for the studio’s success with Rainbow Six and Rogue Spear; Ghost Recon was underway, but he had stepped away from managing people to focus on project design.?Kevin built an eclectic group of young designers to carry the studio forward – boy, I wish I could show you that studio.

In 2001, Red Storm was in a little one-story office park off of Airport Boulevard, literally across the highway from the airport.?It was a squat, red building surrounded by a parking lot, carved out of the ubiquitous pine forests of North Carolina.?Nothing about it would tell you that there was high tech development going on, much less cutting edge entertainment.?The floor plan of that office lives on, sort of, as a multiplayer map in the Sum of All Fears.?Late in development, we would run around in a virtual version of that office, shooting each other in the virtual breakroom, then grabbing a drink after work and talking about it in the real one.

But that was years later.?In the Spring of 2001, the PS2 was still fresh – you could play the best and the worst games on it and get a real sense of the range.?The Xbox was still in development.?Ghost Recon was aimed at the launch of Live for the multiplayer experience.?I was brought in to work on a new IP project, and there was still some publishing and handheld work going on.?At that point, the design department was Rich, Brian, Kevin, myself, Gary Stelmack, John Slaydon, and Matthias Dohmen.?We ended up bringing on a lot more talented people – Chris Roby, Stieg Hedlund, and Clint Richards, Christian Allen, Chase Jones, and Jeff McGann, and over the years, Rich worked with generations more, but I will always remember that core group fondly.

That core group for me was the foundation of my real knowledge of game development and design.?In spite of our demographic similarities, Kevin built a diverse group of designers, each of whom brought their own flavor to the stew.?Slaydon was incredibly precise and meticulous, thinking through every detail in advance.?Dohmen was a creative engine, overflowing with ideas and possibilities, as well as an encyclopedia of games.?Gary was the “secret sauce” in Red Storm games for years – he understood the combat model, both how it worked and how to tune it so it felt right; he was where the theory met the practice.

And that conversation, with that group of people, is really how I became a game designer.?We worked in nearby offices sometimes; in cubicles sometimes; in the same room sometimes.?We got together every week and broke down what was on the market, how it worked, what we could learn from it.?More than a group of designers, Kevin built a community.?We tested our ideas against each other first; we developed a vocabulary of gameplay and player experience.?We knew what to do when the player wasn’t having the right kind of fun.?I learned more in that four years with that group of people than any college could ever teach.

Brian was the first to leave, if I remember correctly.?After defining the tactical shooter genre and taking it mainstream, he wanted to move on to other things, and his wife got a job out in LA.?Kevin followed a little later, not quite literally, but also ending up in LA.?Rich took over for a while, in spirit if not always in title, looking after the designers as best he could, as much as people would let him.?It was a sign, of course, that all of the design leadership was leaving, there was some turmoil for a while as people figured things out; we don’t talk about Bruno, except maybe the wonton down incident.?Eventually, I left to pursue other things, and Rich got tracked into writing rather than general design.

I have always been comforted by the idea that while so many of us have moved on, something remained.?That core knowledge, the expertise we built up as a community, the traditions, the patterns of work, there was a thread that continued in the weave of the studio and its projects.?And that will still be true, on some level.?The studio will continue; it’s in good hands.?No one is better positioned than Liz Loverso to continue the tradition of excellence that has always been at the heart of Red Storm.

But, on December 22nd, when Rich Dansky turns in his keycard and his laptop, when he leaves the building, metaphorically, for there have been many buildings over the years, when Rich is no longer a part of the conversation, it will truly be the end of an era.?The last of that group will have moved on.

All of us have found success with other teams, other projects.?It is an astonishing thing to consider that some two decades later, everyone in that core group is still a game developer, still learning how to make better games, still working to create entertainment that people care about.?The body of work is truly incredible.

It is the spirit, now, that must live on.?While I am happy for Rich and wish him the best on his new adventures, I cannot help but feel that the studio will be poorer for his absence.