Exclusive interview with Splash Damage's creative director Richard 'Rahdo' Ham

How did Splash Damage’s experience making Enemy Territory: Quake Wars colour its approach to Brink?
You know, Quake Wars was [Splash Damage’s] first really big project. They kind of caught fire in a bottle with Wolf…and Quake Wars took a lot longer than it should. I wasn’t there, but I’ve heard stories that Quake Wars, when it started, was a radically different thing, something closer to the PC version of Battlezone. It took them some time to realise that the Enemy Territory gameplay they pioneered on Wolf was actually pretty damn cool, and that nobody else was doing it.

[With Brink] they’re making the big jump and going to console now. They can’t necessarily take four or five years again to make a game, so they started bringing in people with some more experience. They brought me in: I’ve been designing games for about 15 years now, my first big game was Syphon Filter on PlayStation, and my most recent one was Fable II. We’ve got Olivier Leonardi as our art director, who was the top art guy on Rainbow Six Vegas and Prince Of Persia: Two Thrones.

Making the jump from PC to console is obviously a huge problem and we wanted to make sure we got it right…so one of the first big hires was Dean Calver, who was the lead programmer on Heavenly Sword, and one of the most knowledgeable guys around about the architecture of PlayStation 3… Our audio director did the audio for Black, if you remember that, and Burnout Paradise. We were lucky to get him. Our character designer, Tim Appleby, we got him from Bioware and he did Shepard for Mass Effect. Our lead level designer, Neil Alfonso, was the lead level designer on Killzone 2.

Paul [Wedgewood, CEO] always says, “my secret to success is hiring people better than me,” so that’s been a big, big push. Splash has almost tripled in size over the last year since I’ve been here, but we’re working really hard to only expand as much as we need to, and make the right hires rather than just grabbing the first guy. We want to keep that small, independent feel.
 
It must be good to get stuck into your own IP, and develop those gameplay ideas.
There’s no two ways about it. For us, it’s more fun to work on our own stuff. I’ve actually done a lot of licensed stuff over the years, and probably the most fun I’ve had was working on Fable II, which was obviously not my IP, but I was a Fable fan. The same was true for Splash: they were huge Quake fans, and as cheesy as it sounds it’s kind of an honour, really, to get to work on that kind of stuff. If anything like that came along in future, I don’t think Splash would turn its nose up at it.

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