An Interview with Developer Charles Griffith

 

The victory that led to this entry.

           

Earlier this year, I had an opportunity to exchange some emails with Charles Griffith, who contacted me after seeing my entries on The Red Crystal (1993), an intriguing but buggy game that Griffith wrote himself after he left Paragon Software. At Paragon, he had worked on MegaTraveller 1: The Zhodani Conspiracy (1990) and MegaTraveller 2: Quest for the Ancients (1991) as well as three non-RPGs created under Paragon's Marvel license: The Amazing Spider-Man and Captain America in Doctor Doom's Revenge! (1990), The Punisher (1990), and X-Men II: The Fall of the Mutants (1990).

     

Readers who were around for my coverage of the Paragon titles may remember my constant frustration. The company managed to score licenses from both Marvel and The Game Designers' Workshop; under the latter, they developed not only the two MegaTraveller games but also Space 1889 (1990) and Twilight: 2000 (1991). If that seems like a lot of games for a couple of years . . . well, yeah. Paragon's games are characterized by rushed production, incomplete mechanics, and a complete lack of understanding of what an "RPG" really is. Most of them have nebulous character development at best. In offering traditional experience and leveling, Griffith's The Red Crystal is the most RPG of the bunch.

      

Wandering a dungeon in The Red Crystal. The  level attached to the character was more than Paragon ever did in the way of character development.

         

Paragon's CEO and co-founder during this period, F. J. Lennon, would be the first to admit that the company fumbled the ball. He wrote Every Mistake in the Book: A Business How-NOT-To in 2001, in which he frankly confesses to a host of business blunders. I interviewed him in 2020, and he admitted that the company never really took time to study the mechanics of other CRPGs. There were times that the developers made up for this deficiency in its stories and quests, as we saw in MegaTraveller 2 as well as Challenge of the Five Realms: Spellbound in the World of Nghardia (1992) and BloodNet (1993), two titles released after the company was acquired by MicroProse.

   

In his interview with me, Lennon confessed to a certain bravado that led him to over-reach and over-promise. It was this swagger that led him to approach Marvel about licensing their characters even though, at the time (about 1987), the company had only developed one game and published another. Charles Griffith's story with the company begins soon after. He graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a degree in computer science in 1987. The economy was shaky and jobs were thin. Griffith interviewed at Paragon and didn't get an offer. However, in a follow-up call several weeks later, he mentioned to Paragon president Mark Seremet that he had purchased an Amiga 500. Paragon needed an Amiga developer for its marvel license, and pretty soon Griffith was porting Spider-Man to the platform.

   

I'll start by saying [that] despite my best efforts, the game sucked. The PC version was horrible and I ignored most of it. It wasn't a code port, but some of the art was used. Fortunately, a newly-hired artist cleaned it up. [Griffith later interpolated that this new artist was Steve Suhy, perhaps the last of the original Paragon staff still working on games.] Sadly, while the Amiga was a revolutionary machine, it was not an easy machine to code on. Literally every program in Commodore's 300-page developer handbook resulted in a fatal error (called a "Guru meditation" with a numeric code). I muddled through getting 50% complete on developing the game before the company's sole Amiga hard drive irrevocably crashed - and no backups.  Again, as noted, deadlines never moved. You delivered by August (in time to master and produce the product for Christmas) or you went bankrupt. Long story short, we got a version out but it wasn't great.  However, I did feel some pride having been able to deliver despite the various challenges. 

      

Griffith probably regrets his name on the title screen.

         

Paragon decided at some point that the Amiga was never going to be a big player in the United States, "so Paragon graciously moved me to the PC." Griffith's next project was supporting programmer Thomas Holmes on MegaTraveller 1. Griffith remembers Holmes fondly: "He was an exceptional engineer. He literally was Paragon's early heart." Despite the many challenges he faced, including the fact that, in Griffith's opinion, "PCs were not meant for games," Holmes managed to deliver while keeping everyone's spirits up. "[He] was a great and calming agent for other engineers." On the CRPG Addict, we're about to see some more of Holmes's work on the two Ravenloft titles.

           

After his experience on MegaTraveller, Griffith lobbied to lead the development of a game, and he got X-Men 2: Fall of the Mutants. As perhaps the only true Marvel fan on staff, he saw the project as an opportunity to make up for X-Men (1989), which had demonstrated no affection for the comics. ("I mean, they introduced a gorilla as a villain!")

      

My goal was to take a major segment of X-Men history and turn it into a game that was true to the comic. I won't say we necessarily achieved that. However, I will say that it was an interesting attempt. We basically took all the potential X-Men we had in the license, created an underlying roleplaying system, and then put together a series of dynamic levels a player could explore with their team.  
     

I spent five straight days in the Paragon offices without sleep finishing this game. I had a pyramid of 200 Pepsi cans from the company machine with a continual parade of ants visiting it. Despite pleas for me to leave (or at least shower), I stayed until I finally figured it was done. I lived three hours from Paragon, and have no memory of driving home. One of the other set of team members that commuted told me they found me in my car that morning in a bowling alley passed out . . . but didn't wake me. In any event, when I did get home, Paragon called three hours into my sleep telling me I needed to come back in as they had "found a bug." I declined but we managed to make the deadline.

             

You know the situation is dire when there's snow in Dallas.

      

Griffith's next big project was as a co-programmer on MegaTraveller 2. The lead programmer, who Griffith did not want to name (and could be one of three people according to the game credits) "was an UBER-MegaTraveller fan." Griffith said that the developer had the "rare opportunity" to spend four months designing and prototyping the game, but that he didn't accomplish much during that time. "He was the classic game engineer: completely introverted, an exceptional coder, and difficult to engage. My role on the project was to help 'get something delivered.' I credit this as one of my early learnings on how to manage highly technical people." Once again, the company "put in incredible hours" to finish before the holiday deadline.

   

Griffith acknowledges the many comments I made about the lack of authentic role-playing and character development in the Paragon titles. He explains that Paragon operated in an awkward space between an independent developer, who can take as much time as he wants, and a large company, which has enough resources to fully develop their ideas. Paragon titles, in contrast, had "one or two engineers, one or two artists, a sound engineer, maybe a designer . . . [and the games were] likely tested by the same team!"

     

There was seldom downtime between games. Your lifespan was a direct result of earnings. Since it's been decades, I feel comfortable sharing some real numbers: For my roughly three years at Paragon, I started at $24,000 a year and left at around $30,000 if memory serves. The revenue I generated (and it was a small company, so numbers came in on faxes and everyone saw them), was well over $1 million. So you can imagine a small game company like Paragon  putting out about three titles a year in that era, was probably pulling in about $3 million a year. They had to cover salaries, licensing, rent, equipment, travel, [and so forth] out of that income so, it wasn't the industry it is today.  

       

The company was also having what in retrospect was its heyday during an awkward time. Changes in the computer industry were never more rapid, making it difficult to re-use last year's assets. All kinds of new technology was available, but it wasn't yet standardized even on a single platform. PCs weren't dominating the market yet, so every game had to be ported to multiple machines. You couldn't trust that most players would have hard drives, but you couldn't ship on too many disks. The industry as a whole had not developed a solid playtesting model. If the game turned out to have a catastrophic bug, there was no Internet yet to distribute patches. 

      

I liked MegaTraveller 2's story; I never warmed to its mechanics or combat.

          

Exhausted after his experience on MegaTraveller 2, Griffith quit the company, moved to Ohio, and briefly consulted on enterprise solutions for rubber companies before landing a position with another game company, the Leland Corporation (formerly Cinematronics). During the day, he worked on an SNES racing game called Super Off Road: The Baja (1993), but he couldn't shake the idea that he could develop an RPG closer to the ones he had enjoyed in the early 1980s, including the Wizardry series and Gauntlet. He began programming what became Red Crystal during his off-hours. He envisioned it more like Gauntlet than Wizardry: an arcade-like dungeon crawler with the ability to support two players simultaneously. However, he also wanted it to contain plenty of side-quests, something he felt was missing from both the Paragon titles and the industry as a whole. (He is correct in this; by the early 1990s, the only major series that clearly understood the concept of "side quests" was Might and Magic.)

    

By the summer of 1992, he had enough programmed to take it to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Chicago and start looking for a publisher. He caught the interest of Bruce Zaccagnino from New Jersey-based Quantum Quality Productions (QQP). QQP wanted to add more role-playing mechanics, and Zaccagnino and QQP employee Steve Cohen worked with Griffith to make the necessary changes. (Griffith particularly credits Cohen with most of the game's side quests. It was Zaccagnino who came up with the Seven Secrets of Life.) QQP had fewer resources than even Paragon, however, and the game was released in 1993 with minimal playtesting. Although acknowledging the game's many bugs, Griffith was particularly proud of a last-minute compression solution that he developed to fit the game onto two floppy disks, which was considered necessary at the time.

      

For all its flaws, the game had solid art and production values.

          

"Of course, the game was not the success QQP nor I hoped for," Griffith said. "Worse, [it] was available on WAREZ boards within hours  of release." On the other hand: "It was a PhD in learning."

   

Griffith had some final thoughts on the era:

      

It was still a moment in time when individuals could publish unique products with limited guidance or direction. However, these games had to be completed within ridiculous time frames with almost no support (engineering libraries, tools, high-end art packages, or multi-disciplined teams). Occasionally, this [reality] delivered compelling games that launched franchises; more often, players got inconsistent, flawed games which tried their best but never hit the mark. Sadly, most of mine fell into the latter category but, like babies, they were still mine and I love them for what they aspired to be. 

       

I think that Griffith's sentiments help explain why it's sometimes more fun for me to write, and for you to read, about flawed games than it is to write and read about the genre's masterpieces. 

    

Griffith continued for a while in the game industry, jumping to Acclaim Entertainment from 1992 to 1994. Between 1995 and 1997, he worked for Stargate Films, a special effects shop involved in major films like Star Trek, Highlander, and (more recently) The Walking Dead.

      

Griffith at home with his dogs.

        

Since then, his multiple jobs in the technology industry have included special effects engineering for television and films, computer-aided design and product rendering, e-commerce platforms, transportation logistics and supply chain management (he launched Amazon's worldwide delivery system), and business analytics. He has lived in the Seattle area for the last two decades and is eyeing retirement. He wrote his own closing line: "Like Bilbo Baggins, he looks back on these early adventures with fondness and a small bit of regret. However, he knows it pushed him to become more than he thought he was capable of."