The brilliance of DC Heroes, and the most telling sign of Greg Gorden's breadth of vision, is that each additional AP is worth about twice as much as the AP before it. So, for instance, a character with Strength 6 is twice as strong as Strength 5. If 1 AP of surface area gives you a tabletop; just 51 APs (fifty doublings) gives you Earth. (A mere 5 APs of information separate Gorden's cell phone dungeon-crawls from Morrowind.) This lets the DC Heroes' design gracefully accommodate both petite and planetary, normal and superheroic, Jimmy Olsen and Superman, all on the same scale.
Gorden pushed this idea to the limit with the cinematic action RPG Torg. A sprawling free-for-all in both design and setting, Torg depicts a war among realities, competing universes ("Realms") in a surreal land-grab for Earth. The genre-spanning premise conjures competing Realms of fantasy, science fiction, cyberpunk, pulp adventure, and Victorian-era horror - supervillains, ninjas, dragons, dinosaurs - magic, cybernetic implants, shamanism, and theocratic sorcery. Gorden's design boils down his earlier universal tables to a single line, and then layers on rules for Realm-specific genre conventions, Possibility Points, a Drama Deck of cards, a system for collecting story outcomes from individual player groups nationwide and quantifying their combined effects to shape the published war storylines. By now you see why reading Torg is like eating an entire pineapple upside-down cake - rich, delicious, much too much of a muchness.
Did his experience in creating these giant games, among many others, help Gorden in condensing the Elder Scrolls to 64K? "Yes, it actually did," he says, "it's more just being old. You have an established bag of tricks, a game toolkit. A lot of the techniques are the same," regardless of the game type. "You can hearken back to some of the old solitaire dungeons and build-your-own-dungeon tile-laying games, and turn that into something easy to execute in code. In Shadowkey it's just the ability to put a narrative together that's spread across 50 bite-size pieces" - a technique Gorden mastered in his trading card game Killer Instinct, with Shane Hensley. Gorden relates, "I believe it was Greg Costikyan who said, 'Mobile games are designed by haiku.' If you've done that in the past, you know what to do better than someone who's come to the platform from a console game."
First-person perspective
Gorden's presence in the mobile space echoes an earlier influx of paper-game designers into computer and console games - a horde that includes Warren Spector (Deus Ex), Chris Avellone (Planescape Torment), Zeb Cook (Metroid Prime, City of Villains), and not least, Ken Rolston, who did standout work for paper RPGs RuneQuest and Paranoia before designing - what was it? - oh yeah: Morrowind.
The gameplay ideas these designers brought to computers are now filtering virally into phones, and Gorden is one vector. "I love RPGs, and the mobile space is growing like crazy. I thought, 'If I'm gonna jump in, it's certainly better to jump in now.'"
Apart from his future projects with Vir2L (nothing has been announced), Gorden is shopping around a mobile game he designed with longtime collaborator, Anthony Gill: Marble Mazeness, a J2ME version of those infernal wooden tilting-table dexterity toys in which you guide a steel ball along a path while avoiding holes, or more often, not. The phone game adds divots, bumpers, lasers, lava, trapdoors, power-ups, and magnetic walls. Mazeness went gold in May and may appear by late 2005.
From cosmos-spanning epics to ... marbles. With the Travels games, Gorden has brought vigor to mobile RPGs - sort of created them, really - but platform strictures forbid surpassing the scope of his paper masterpieces.
Gorden is philosophical about his future role in the space. "I think the coolest mobile game genre is yet to be developed. My experience on Travels got me closer to seeing how you could build an entirely new experience on the mobile phone. But I'm not there yet. I consider myself a laggard in the race, but I definitely want to see who wins.
