Caverns of Hope

Interview with Maurice Molyneaux

Introduction

Maurice Molyneaux is credited for game design in Defender of the Future. I've had a couple of talks to him at one time, where he would reveal some interesting things to me. He told me what happened during the developement of DotF, what his job was, he told me about problems and thoughts about Ecco and about prototypes. I will spill out the best and most interesting parts of our talks!

The Interview

Hauke: Was it cool to work on the game?
Maurice: Yeah... But frustrating too.
H: Oh, how come?
M: A lot of the levels were built before I came on the project and were not designed well. It was difficult to get enough interaction into them. And many were redundant... Which is why some were cut.
H: Did you actually ever play the Gensis games?
M: Yeah, I played the first one all the way through.
H: Before or after DotF? ;)
M: Years before. I was sick of dolphins by the end of DotF.
H: Hahah, really!

M: My favorite part of the game is the first level of Man's Nightmare stage. I liked the writing I did there...the dolphin cultures and all. Brin had written "there are different dolphin tribes" but he gave no details. I built their whole history based on their jobs.
H: Hm. And they praise him (Davin Brin) so much on the cover...
M: Well, personally, I think if you watch Star Trek: First Contact you'll see where he got the story. Let's go into the past to save the future. There was a lot more time travel in his outline. You went back to the present between each world and saw the result of bringing back the various traits. I worked on that a lot but ultimately it was scrapped.
M: I hated the Foe. Thought it was too derivitive. I don't recall much of the plot to Tides of Time... But by the time I came onto DotF they were locked into this Brin thing. I ended up fleshing out all the characters. But in the end some of the Hungarians rerwrote some of the text and thus bits got clumsy sounding English. I cringed when I saw the level called Dearth of whatever it was.
H: Anguish of Dearth
M: That's it! No one uses dearth that way.

M: I remember originally the little Dolphin was going to follow you around for a few levels.
H: Pilot.
M: That's him! He was gonna be your tag-along help system. If you didn't solve problems in a vertain amount of time he'd give you hints via dialogue. "Did you see this?"
H: Oh, does that really happen?
M: No, that got dropped. I really wanted to push character realtionships, but the pressure was on just to get the game done.

M: Well, it's funny, but there was a lot of in-fighting at Appaloosa itself over the game design and content. At the Brin stage the idea was just to mimick a lot of the play mechanics from the previous games, but reality reared its ugly head later beause puzzles and play mechanids that work in 2D don't work in 3D.
H: Were there at least some people who wanted to do a sequel of Tides of Time?
M: Nah, I never heard much discussion about the story... More just making the story advance the gameplay. I was trying to write nice dialogue. My favorite idea never got in the game. There's the mirror where you need the invisibilty to get by, right?
H: Yeah, in Up and Down!
M: Well, my idea was that if you sonar it, it bounces back and you actually see what Ecco says :) Since you only otherwise see what the other characters say. My idea was he'd start off saying, "Hi! I'm Ecco. Who are you?" And then he'd say, "hahah! So that's what I sound like!" etc. I wanted a little more humor and occasional absurdity in the game. It's in my dialogue sheets somewhere.
M: I was the one who suggested we call the sidescrolled levels "Genesis" something.
H: Passage from Genesis?
M: Yeah, they inverted it. I wish we'd done a whole game like that - 3D 2D.

M: The Other thing that changed in DotF was the finale... As I recall there was supposed to be this big finish after you destoyed the Foe... But I forgot what happened in the game as was released.
H: I've read in an interview somewhere that they (Appaloosa) were working on a sequel to DotF.
M: Maybe. But I've heard nothing. I recall some small discussions about a DotF sequel towards the end of the project and a meeting to discuss same... ...but I don't recall any details.
H: I see. Well. I don't expect anything anymore.
M: Well, I think they kinda blew it a little witht he games as they were. If you want my feeling, it's that the character and the actions had a tremendous possible cross-gender appeal, but the extreme difficulty cut off a large segemtn who got frustrated. I also think the reliance on alien enemies was unnecessary. We all know it's the damned Orcas that screw up the oceans hahahaha.

M: One thing that was toyed with on DotF was a mini game for the VMU. There was a simple prototype of jumping through rings (as in Tides of Time) done for it. But it was scrapped for time/resource pressures.
H: Damn. They scrapped so much cool stuff.
M: That's true of most games. It's like editing a film...you cut the stuff that doesn't work or isn't important.
H: I would've liked to play that funny Foe Queen level. She looks so ugly!
M: It's in the proto I have, I think. The whole thing was flawed. I hated the design. I felt they went too "Alien" looking all the way around. I was there when they were trying to revise it. I had a lot of objections hahah.

M: I had a lot of issues with the intro animations and stuff. I argued for simplifying them, but the animation director couldn't see how my suggestions were better/easier than what was in the works. I think she just didn't understand cinematics... She couldn't see how the storyboards I drew moved the story along in fewer angles and with less action. As I recall it was the whole sequence of the Foe ship coming to Atlantis and "draining" the dolphins.

M: Oh, I was digging in my files and I found some Ecco related notes I scribbled while working on the project. Well, I found only two so far...one is a diagram of a section of Man's Nightmare with my notes for where we should place things... The other was my pitch for a new Queen, that would be a giant cralike creature that would hang above the water...but no one was interested in that.
H: Hmm, I see. So you would've liked to see the Foe Queen above water?
M: Well, my though was you'd have to do big leaps out of the water to hit it. But it's been years...I don't remember the details. I wanted something scary, and I figured this huge creature walking around above you would be frightening in a way that the "crow" wasn't.

H: Many thanks again, Maurice Molyneaux, for the various chats where you gave us so much input about your time at Sega/Appaloosa. It's quite exciting to hear about the developement of the game! We hope to talk to you again someday!

Attachments

    
Two scans of Maurice's game design notes. The first one is from the stage "Blades in Motion", the maze part of the stage. The second one is a design suggestion for the Foe Queen.

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