A Conversation with Carbine Studios: The Biggest MMO Company You’ve Never Heard Of

Still in stealth mode, NCSoft’s Carbine Studios seems to be working on something big, with a budget of between $50 to $70 million. What they will do with those resources is still unclear, but Steve’s interview with them will get you inside their heads.

Sitting down with a pre-announcement studio like Carbine is always an interesting experience. It’s only natural as a reporter to want to talk about their game. They want to talk about it, too, but they signed a piece of paper saying that they would be tortured and killed, and their family homes bulldozed to the ground if they spilled the beans too soon.

The trick, then, is to talk about their game, without actually talking about it.

That wasn’t going to be too hard, considering the fact that I knew next to nothing to begin with.

But I got educated, fast. Read on for the transcript.

The MMO Gamer: To get us started, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, could you please introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about what you do at Carbine.

Chad Moore: I’m Chad Moore, lead creative designer.

Jeremy Gaffney: The fellow with the sultry voice is Jeremy Gaffney, executive producer.

Matt Mocarski: Matt Mocarski, art director.

The MMO Gamer: Have any of you guys ever read the book Atlas Shrugged?

All: Yes.

The MMO Gamer: Talking with you before the recorder started running, that’s the first thing that came to mind… John Galt came along and showed you the way, and then all of a sudden you dropped what you were doing and all ran off to Carbine-Galt’s Gulch.

I know you can’t talk specifics, but just generalities, what was this grand appeal? You guys have all worked on games before, what was the irresistible magnetism that drew you to Carbine?

Matt Mocarski: I’ll answer that.

Our lead concept artist, Cory Loftis, never worked in games before, but he is a visionary artist. His artwork completely sold me. I didn’t know who this guy was, I’d never seen his stuff. He’s not online, in forums anywhere.

His ideas are absolutely incredible, and this is early-on in the production process where we didn’t really have a solid IP, we just had ideas, right?

I think it’s safe to say we’re doing a science-fantasy hybrid, and there’s a lot of appeal to that.

I don’t necessarily like the purer science fiction… I think Star Wars is more of a fantasy world, but it has a sci-fi coating on it, its archetypes are based in fantasy. I saw a lot of that in what Carbine was doing.

There’s a lot of talent in the industry as far as concepting goes, but his ideas were like everything I ever wanted to do in a game but didn’t know how to express perfectly.

I know it sounds like I’m just doing the regular like, “Hey, everything’s amazing!” stuff like that, but really I’m being perfectly honest with you. I love the art on the game.

Jeremy Gaffney: Also, I think we have a very solid core team, and a lot of people want to work with them. We’ve gone out of our way to grab people who have done stuff that’s really impressed us.

Our lead designer is Tim Cain of Fallout fame, and he’s done enough cool stuff before that there’s a bunch of people who want to work with him.

Our art team is super strong, super strong lead. That attracts a bunch of people, just ask Cory.

Our programming team is really strong. We’ve got guys who have worked not just on Blizzard games, but also from EverQuest and EverQuest II, Vanguard… You name an MMO and we’ve probably got someone who has done a piece of it.

We’ve always just gone out of our way to get guys who have done the key bits of it, too. I guess I talk too much about that in detail, but it’s kind of a dream-team, which is nice, and having critical mass just attractive.

It attracted us, and part of it, I think, is just being with that critical mass, it’s the team we want to work with.

Chad Moore: When I came down to check it out, when I saw what they were doing, there were two parts that came into it.

One was the game itself looks amazing, and that was a big, big part of my decision.

The other part, as everyone was saying, is the team. There’s a lot of guys I used to work with at Troika Games, and Troika was all about story.

We really wanted to tell interesting stories, and figure out a way to tell those stories in the MMO space. I think there’s a lot of room for that.

For me, that was a big draw.

The MMO Gamer: Storytelling is one of those big fetishes I have, particularly in the MMO genre, and I’d like to get back to that in just a moment.

But, first… you mentioned ideas and ideals that attracted you to Carbine in the pre-production phase. I hear that from a lot of MMO developers.

The problem is, once the money starts flowing, ideals tend to fall by the wayside in favor of, “The guy with the cash says he wants us to make an EverQuest clone because that’s what he thinks sells. So, let’s forget our ideals and make an EverQuest clone.”

Have those ideals held steady, even after what was it-50 or 70 million dollars-has gotten involved?

Jeremy Gaffney: Having been an NCSoft exec, the one thing I can say would get NCSoft in our office kicking our asses would be for us to make a clone game.

You can love or hate NCSoft’s games, but one thing we’re not is a “clone” company. We’re a risk-taking company.

Whether or not we succeed or fail, any genre we tackle, we’re a company who is willing to take risks and put some big money down for those risks, which makes them a great company to work for.

That’s going to create some stellar successes, and I’m sure it’s going to create some stellar failures, going forward.

But it’s much more interesting to work for a company like that than one like, “Hey, let’s clone the last game, it was really popular, and clone games are so successful in our business!” They’re just not. A great way to fail would be for us to make a copy of WoW.

Continued on next page…

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