Today I'am offer you a continuation of the previously started series of interviews with various figures who once made one or another contribution to the gaming industry. The general approach remained the same as originally planned, but since the previous iteration some conclusions were made and two aspects were changed:
1. After some reflection, it was decided to increase the average volume of questions to 30 for all subsequent interviews, and limit the minimum number to 20.
2. From now on - this was partially reflected in this interview - in compiling the list of questions, in addition to me, and sometimes individual members of the Old-Games.Ru forum team, if the general situation allows it, representatives of other platforms, also known as fan communities, began to take part.
Brief information about the main characters:
Mitch Gitelman - since 2011 to 2023 CEO of Harebrained Schemes, a studio known primarily for Battletech (2018) and the Shadowrun trilogy (2013 / 2015). Since 2018, the company was part of Paradox Interactive, but since early 2024 it has regained independence. From the mid-nineties to the early 2000s, he led the team responsible for the creation of the MechCommander duology (1998 / 2001), as part of FASA Interactive Technologies Inc., which existed from 1994 to 2007, in the case of the second part also with the participation of Microsoft. Fasa Interactive, among other things, once distinguished itself with the creation of MechWarrior 4 (2000 / 2002) and the MechAssault duology (2002 / 2004) released on the original Xbox.
David Abzug - an attempt was also made to communicate with a guy who held the position of the main level (mission) designer during the development of MechCommander, but the process did not go beyond the initial contact.
Q. Do you remember the first games that you have played in your life? Which of them were your favorite?
A. My first game system was a black & white set top box that played a generic version of Pong. In high school, my friends and I had a blast playing Zork on an old amber screen CRT but it was Wing Commander and TIE Fighter that acted like freshly baked pies on a cartoon windowsill for me. I was fundamentally attracted to the adventure they offered.
Q. Can you tell, in short, what was your entryway to the gaming industry?
A. I had a full time job as a management trainer that took me all around the country. While I was traveling, I wrote tabletop RPG books on a Mac Classic that I lugged around with me just to fight the boredom. A friend at the company I was writing for suggested that video game companies were looking for people like us so we went to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and convinced someone at Sony Interactive Europe to give us a chance. They wrote us a contract to design a first wave title for the first PlayStation. Thirty years later, here I am.
Q. Let's talk a bit about some old titles you have been working on and which one is not so well known today, in contrast to others - Eraser: Turnabout (1997) and Virtual K'nex (1998). What were the preconditions in your case to get into Imagination Pilots? Can you tell a few interesting facts about those two? FMV quests, same as puzzles, were a big deal in the early 90's, but, it seems, not so much after the middle.
A. Yeah, that was a fun period for games. CD-ROMs’ seek times were quick enough that you could quickly cut between pre-recorded videos with real actors on real sets. I was hired as a Creative Director at Imagination Pilots to take over the Where’s Waldo? series of educational games and then went on to design and produce FMV titles like Eraser: Turnabout. This was just as 3D Studio Max was coming onto the scene and 3D characters and environments were gaining momentum. Once 3D cards became ubiquitous, the days of watching B-movie actors give you mission briefings were over.
Jordan Weissman. 2006. Photo from Wikipedia.
Q. Battletech started its history as a turn-based thing in the 80's. Later went to the simulator niche, some serious offline activities, like separate, very specific sort of arcade machines. For most of the folks till today it's stuck to one of huge bets - MCO (2013) and MechWarrior 5 (2019), which are typical examples of simulation. How did you come up with the idea to create an RTS type title? Probably some other games acted as ideological inspirers?
A. The idea of an RTS style of BattleTech game came from Jordan Weisman, the creator of the BattleTech board game and universe. Command & Conquer was a huge inspiration for that and the original Warcraft RTS had a part to play as well.
Q. MechCommander (1998) probably has one of the best mission designs in the RTS niche. Can you tell me some words about that part? Perhaps some principles that you have used to get to the right point, i.e. what is good, what is bad? Specific mission was to stick to a specific guy, or the developer team in total proceed all things together?
A. I’m happy to hear that you think well of the mission designs in MechCommander. We worked quite hard on them and iterated on them, quite a bit. That’s the key to success, in my opinion. The more passes you get on a mission, the “tighter” and more thoughtful you can make the experience. The process was relatively straightforward. There was a high level outline of which enemies would appear in which mission to insure the right progression. The outline also contained guidance for the mission objectives: protect this, destroy that, etc. From there, the mission designers worked independently on a “pitch” including the mission map, the placement of key terrain features, enemy locations, and interesting triggers for enemy behavior. I would meet with the designer to hear their pitch and give (often pointed) feedback. We’d often go through multiple versions of the paper map before starting work in the digital game editor. I’d then be called in for a “first playable” review where I played the mission with the designer watching and taking notes. When we got the mission to what I thought was a shippable level, I’d ask the CEO to play it and give his notes. This nearly always resulted in the missions getting more challenging and complex.
The secret of MechCommander was that most of our missions contained mini-puzzles to solve while working within logistical limitations - in this case, the ablative nature of ‘Mech combat. But the special sauce in our missions was created when the team learned to work within the limitations of our engine.
We leaned into our rudimentary fog-of-war system and used it as a tool for mission design. Our fog-of-war was simple: the map started out black and your units revealed it as they moved. The higher the elevation, the more of the map was revealed. We decided that gaining a vantage point to gain intel on the enemy would be an important focus for our mission design. We would place high-ground lookout points in strategic locations so you could see enemy and strategic building placement and make informed decisions about your angle of attack. We would reveal points of interest when enemy buildings were captured to clue you into your next move. We strived to give you clear, interesting choices so you could make a plan and see it come to fruition.
We also leaned into our lack of in-mission saves by creating large mission maps containing several separate encounter zones. Getting past each encounter allowed you a moment to breathe, celebrate, and collect your thoughts before moving on to the next. It also gave you a chance to consider whether you had enough firepower remaining to complete the rest of the mission or if you needed to restart from the beginning and complete the encounters while taking less damage.
I think this is why folks like our missions. They felt like they “beat” a MechCommander mission rather than just completing it. And they often replayed a mission they’d won to get a better logistical result (less damage to repair and fewer weapons to replace).
Q. Two of the key features of MCG are the facts of its replayability and variability of strategies, which, even in the RTS genre, doesn't happen very often at this level. You can try to play as long as you can only by light mechs only, under 35T including, complete a bunch of missions of only one heavy, jumping mech, make a bet on only "melee" weapons, i.e. short distance kind, or, in opposite, only long range rockets.
The opportunity to receive trophies stands out, mechs in particular. Basic and first example of it is OP1M3, where newbies players could be surprised at the end of a successful mission. A non-obvious opportunity to take a 15T car, cross an exploding bridge in a couple of seconds and use one large artillery to grab first Mad Cat A with all his weapons changes the entire balance for the next few missions. Also if you manage to escape from him, then you can capture a base nearby and attract the attention of up to six mechs from neighboring bases, subsequently getting rid of them all at once, without engaging in direct combat at all.
To summarize the long introduction. Do you, same as some members of the original team, have any strategies / tricks that you or them preferred when playing through or testing the game? I, for example, always mentioned Mad Cat A, later one W in a city mission, near the extraction point and, which may not seem the easiest, Vulture in a rather difficult, at first glance, mission with a medical convoy.
A. Oh my goodness! Unfortunately, no. I really couldn’t relate the strategies I used making a game in the late 90s. I’m so sorry; too old and gray for that. The best I can recall is being very aware of the enemy’s minimum and maximum weapon ranges and using them to your benefit.
Q. Videos. Another major component of both MC games, not least forming the overall atmosphere, starting right from the iconic intro of the first MC. Could you tell us a little about the production of these?
A. I was lucky enough to be at the shoot for the live action portion of the MC opening video and it definitely had the air of magic about it. The set and the costumes really felt like BattleTech and everyone was smiling and having a good time. It felt like kids playing dress up. I didn’t write that video (which I absolutely love) but I did write the videos in Desperate Measures and MechCommander 2 and did my best to transfer that positive energy and respect for the source material to the set.
One of the things folks should know is that the art team who created the 3D ‘Mech sequences were some of the same people who worked on BattleTech: The Animated Series, which was ahead of its time in integrating 3D and 2D cel cartoons.
Q. Both of the original MechCommander campaigns are run around clan invasion and mostly do not cover any other things. Any specific point was to choose this plot direction? Or, perhaps, this has been changing during the developing stage?
A. MechCommander didn’t have a plot or even much of a story. It was a straightforward military operation executed by the book. I added a named enemy with a vague motivation in Desperate Measures but that was the extent of the plotting. The reason was simple: we didn’t see ourselves as storytellers and we didn’t have features or budget to support more story. We were fully focused on creating interesting real-time tactical combat situations in a relatable sci fi setting. So nothing really change or evolved during development of those campaigns.
Q. Some rumors say that the "Desperate Measures" (1999) add-on was in a rush developing stage. Same as, actually, the core game was done in like a year and half. As a result several interesting features, which are not the last thing in the Battletech universe, like heat sinks, new vehicle types and sort of other things were not included in the end product and were cut off. Is something like that true? If there was an opportunity to add something else besides mentioned or existed, but removed, what would you choose first?
A. Nope, none of that is true. Desperate Measures wasn’t rushed but development was briefly affected by our move from Chicago to Seattle when we joined Microsoft. Every feature I came up with got into the game without exception. And remember, there was a major feature in MechCommander Gold that you haven’t mentioned: a fully featured, easy to use mission editor. That wasn’t a trivial addition.
Q. In 1999 FASA was acquired by Microsoft. If we talk in short. How has your cooperation with Microsoft started? Did it affect your vision of how MechCommander 2 should look alike?
A. FASA Interactive was one of the first game studios acquired by Microsoft and as such, we bore the brunt of their learning curve. First, we were assimilated into their fledgling games group and while we sort of kept our identity through force of will, our culture was definitely affected. Microsofties regularly made jokes about us “joining the Borg” and “getting chipped.” Second, FASA’s CEO didn’t come with us and our spiritual and creative leader, Jordan Weisman, became the creative director of the secret Xbox project, so we barely saw him after we arrived. The MechWarrior and MechCommander teams were left adrift within a megacorp after moving 1,800 miles to the alien culture and environment of the West Coast.
Third, and this played hard on my personal morale, the MechWarrior 4 team got all the attention, resources, and budget while I was told at the MechCommander 2 greenlight meeting to, “just get it done fast.” That wasn’t a highly motivating experience and when combined with the culture shock and with reporting to people whose development experience was in MS Excel, I have to say I didn’t display the greatest respect for the organization I’d joined.
However, I have to say that at that MC2 greenlight meeting, the head of the games group did make a good point about the punishingly ablative nature of our missions. He asked why players couldn’t repair mid-mission - something we’d previously avoided for lore reasons. His question gave me the idea for flying in off-board support vehicles and pilots who could salvage enemy ‘Mechs mid-mission and immediately add them to your forces.
Q. Microsoft shared MechCommander 2 (2001) source code in 2005. But the same never happened with the original game. I've heard that it was lost forever, same as the more "detailed" map editor for MCG. How you think, is there any chance that will we see them one day as it, for example, it happened with Prince of Persia source code for Apple II? Also, or readers interested in if somebody still has something related to the editor specifically. They are looking to expand things to, well, a bit more then default editor, even with some tricks, allow.
A. I wouldn’t count on the Mechcommander code or editor ever being released. If it was available and legal to share, one of us would have by now.
Q. Transition from sprites to "early type 3D" was a big thing back to the second part of the 90's and early 00's, sort of a huge "hype", if I use today's words. But not all players like that direction for different reasons. MC2 took that way, which ended up as a mixed experience for some players. What was your personal experience from such a pick?
A. The switch to full 3D in MechCommander 2 was a simple production decision. After moving to Seattle, we didn’t have the pipeline in place to create more sprites like the ones used in the original and the remaining team wasn’t interested in taking the time, money, and effort to recreate it and do that level of sprite work. Most of the art team had been assigned to MW4.
Q. You favorite mech. Few details.
A. The Raven. It’s a thinking person’s ‘Mech and I love its architecture.
Q. During MechCommander dilogy development was it a requirement or, well, condition, then originally Battletech lore must be more / less count in?
A. I’m not exactly sure what you mean with this question but I guarantee that Microsoft had no guidance or direction when it came to lore. They didn’t know BT and wouldn’t dream of telling FASA what to do in that regard. We had complete creative autonomy. Jordan wanted live actors and story in MechWarrior 4, because it had worked in MechCommander and he likely had dreams of a BattleTech movie one day.
Q. Both in MechCommander dilogy and Battletech there are basically up to no major cooperative missions with AI taking a place, same goes for an option for two players. Not saying there aren't any of them at all, but you get the idea, I guess. Things changed in MW5. Is this aspect ever discussed in both cases? Was it limited because of technical aspects, or perhaps something else?
A. Co-op wasn’t really on the table. Our AI wasn’t up for it and it would’ve taken a lot of work for that and for networking and UI. The return on investment didn’t seem worth it at the time. Still doesn’t.
Q. Both games don't have missions with snow landscapes. This could probably lead to some interesting mechanics. Were there any reasons for this?
A. Just the standard stuff: time and budget. You have to stop somewhere.
Q. Have you ever heard about creations made by fans during the years? Probably played them a little? Like for example RizZen's "Darkest Hours", which is MCG based project, Nemo's "LosTech", that bring to original game a lot of new lore friendly weapons and tough enemies, or long going Wolfman-X MC2 custom campaigns with a lot of new features?
A. I’ve heard about them but never tried. Them. You need to understand that I was under a ton of pressure to always be moving forward on the next product. When MC2 was done, I walked away and didn’t look back.
Q. How do you feel about fan-made localizations of the games, in particular old ones, including which development did you take part in? MCG, for example, never had official Russian language support, but today it has one that can be counted as a fine one.
A. I had no part in it but I love the idea of fans taking it into their own hands to support their local languages.
Q. Do you have any interesting unfinished / abandoned projects about one you want to tell about? And, if so, perhaps you can share some images on top, or, well, something else?
A. We came up with a cool vertical slice of a game called “G” that featured a rider doing tricks on an anti-grav “sled” in an interesting and funny setting in a near future after an alien invasion. We spent nearly a year on it before deciding it wasn’t the right thing to move forward with.
Q. Xbox era. MechAssault (2002), Shadowrun (2007). Can you tell us something about this time and any remarkable stories associated with these projects? How involved were you overall in their creation?
A. MechAssault was developed by Day 1 Studios, a talented group led by FASA Interative’s former CEO. The launch of Xbox LIVE was looming and Microsoft didn’t have a title that would be ready in time. FASA Studio at MS was given carte blanche to get it finished in time. We sent a team of our best producer and four best designers to live on-site in Chicago for about five months to pull out all the stops and get it done. I stayed in Seattle as the publishing producer, working closely with the teams in Chicago and Baltimore, directing MS publishing efforts, and liaising with the Xbox LIVE team. It was a thorny task to create a multiplayer action game for a live service that didn’t exist yet but we all pulled together and pushed very hard to make a game that we could be proud of.
Beyond being a launch title for Xbox LIVE, we also shipped the first paid DLC on Xbox, a ‘Mech called the Raven. After all that effort and an 87% metacritic rating, it's disappointing that MechAssault’s place in Xbox history has been forgotten - especially by Microsoft.
The Shadowrun first-person shooter has been discussed a lot over the years because it moved the genre forward in several ways (that would be adopted by other wildly successful games) while simultaneously alienating Shadowrun fans because of its lack of RPG elements or adherence to lore. I was the Studio Head of FASA Studio and Executive Producer on the title and was intimate with its creation from beginning to end. I’m very proud of that game and the team who made it and I’m gratified that there is still an active player-base for it 17 years later.
Q. Consoles and strategies. There is an opinion that those two things can be normally combined at all and, even in case "light" RTS niche and, well, most companies, for most of the time, follow this unwritten rule. Still, there were some exceptions. What do you think about this?
A. Obviously, RTS can work on consoles as proven by Halo Wars from Ensemble Studios, the creators of Age of Empires. However, it doesn’t appear that the type of player engagement they require fits with the experience of sitting on a couch 10 feet away from your screen holding a controller. I don’t see this as a loss, however. I don’t play Candy Crush on my TV either. Some experiences are simply more attuned for different devices.
Q. Developing atmosphere. Back in the day and now. Do you feel any specific difference, or, maybe something like that is called nowadays "good old times"?
A. I grew up in the school of hard knocks. It’s a trope, but that’s how it felt. There were no gamedev schools or GDC Vault videos you could watch to learn about game development. No websites devoted to the profession. And mentorship was hard to come by because A) everyone was making it up as they went B) managers were little more than jumped-up devs with little-to-no management training C) insecure devs were leery of their juniors overtaking them.
But it was also a simpler time. You made your game and sent the “gold master” to the publisher for duplication and went on vacation. The publisher put it in boxes and got it in stores. Then you’d cross your fingers and wait for reviews to appear in next month’s issue of all the game mags. You’d wait to find out if you needed to ship a dreaded “patch” (which was seen as a failure at the time). Then you’d get to work on an expansion or a sequel if you were successful.
They were the good old days because we didn’t care about anyone but straight white males under the age of 36. When I started in game development, gaming was not in vogue and the nerds who made them were looked down upon or brushed aside by society. This was long before the Lord of the Rings and MCU movies allowed the geeks to rise up and take over the entertainment industry. The idea of making games that appealed to women or “minorities” was laughed at. They didn’t play games, my bosses would say, so why would we make them with those groups in mind? Flash forward to now, when games generate higher revenues than movies due in large part from a wider audience.
Q. Has the approach to game production changed much since the late 90's? Did you have to do anything else, during development, besides meeting the budget for the project and overall scope around, would be it working with graphics, texts, and so on? Also, as a project manager according to the main work profile, I would like to ask this question - are there any basic points that you adhere to in the PM field?
A. Everything has changed since the 90s. Everything.
There were no “game engines” like Unreal and Unity to start from. Digital distributors like Steam didn’t exist. It was all about getting your game boxes good placement in stores and wishing with all your might to make the cover of a major gaming magazine. There were far fewer developers out there in the 90s and far fewer games released each year. There wasn't a cacophony of games vying for your attention which made each release feel more special.
All that said, making games has gotten progressively more challenging year after year for decades. The bar has continued to rise and rise, making game development more and more complex and competitive. The gravity has gone towards “tentpole titles” that require a large scope and thus, large teams and long development times. And whether folks want to believe it or not, indie and AA games are often unfavorably (and perhaps even unconsciously) compared to AAA projects with huge budgets and elite development teams.
As a result, they’ve become far more expensive to make and yet retail prices haven’t kept pace. That’s required developers and publishers to find new and creative ways of making money. It’s made projects far more risky. It led to “games as a service” where publishers do their utmost to capture and maintain players’ attention to the exclusion of others for as long as possible.
Q. Today you are mostly known for the Shadowrun trilogy (2013 / 2015) and fresh Battletech (2018), which are TBS kind of things. With all their ups and downs in overall they are a good example of how long going franchises can be refreshed during the years, personally playing them all. Is there any chance that you will go back to RTS titles in future once again? BTW, Some modders once were working on MW5 based modification.
A. I have no plans to return to the RTS genre but I’ve learned to never say never.
Q. According to many opinions, the RTS genre is completely dead by now. In particular, most of the iconic and long-running series have not made their presence felt for a long time. At the same time, demand among a wide audience remains, and attention is now paid to, by old standards, fairly niche projects, like Iron Harvest (2020), Tempest Rising (WIP), which which largely copies the C&C style. Do you think there were some obvious prerequisites for this and this genre is no longer in demand, or does fashion now tend to be set artificially?
A. One likely scenario is that it’s a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. The folks who make funding decisions believe it to be dead, so they don’t fund them, thus ensuring they stay dead. I remember RPGs being dead before Diablo. All it takes is one breakout hit in a starving, under-served market to change the perception.
Q. Cyberpunk. Did some books or films of the past act as sort of inspiration during development of the new trilogy?
A. There was no guiding inspiration for the Shadowrun series other than the Shadowrun source material and film noir.
Q. It seems that Kickstarter played a significant role in the emergence of your new projects. Every year, crowdfunding, despite various obstacles, is becoming an increasingly significant phenomenon, especially for board games, which regularly collect record amounts. The indie games genre has also come a long way over the past 10-15 years, while in the major AAA industry there are more and more different problems taking their places. How do you evaluate these two phenomena? Is it possible that in the near future there will be a turning point and, with it, a renaissance of "by fans, for fans" attitude, which can remind many veterans of the times of the small teams of the early nineties? Put all together, create a hit from scratch.
A. I’m not convinced they’re related. Indie games have come a long way due in large part to the ubiquity of inexpensive and free tools that allow anyone to try their hand. And games are no longer gate-kept by publishers that used to decide who gets to make games and who doesn’t.
However, the crowdfunding of video games seems to have slowed down considerably and as I understand it, campaigns rarely raise more than $200k - $300k these days, which sounds like a lot but doesn’t really get you far in today’s economy.
I’m very happy to see the popularity of board games these days. In a post-Covid, increasingly digital world, I think people crave human interaction and games have great return on investment.
Q. Have you often played or do you play games? Did this help you at work?
A. When I’m deep into a project, I really can’t play games for fun. However, I need to understand what’s going on in the industry, so I rely on Let’s Play videos for my education. Now that I’m on sabbatical and deciding which direction to go for my “Act 3”, I’ve been playing a lot. Just finished Baldur's Gate 3 and I’m about to beat Diablo 4. After that, I’ll likely go scifi.
Q. Starting from this year Harebrained Schemes is an independent company. Can you tell us something about your immediate plans?
A. Well the first thing to clarify is that they’re not my plans. I began my transition into an advisory position mid-last year and no longer play a day-to-day role in its management. That said, the team has a great head of creative steam and I’m excited by the direction they’re heading. I can’t say more than that right now, but watch their social media!
Q. Lastly, Want to convey something to the fans of the BT universe and our readers in total?
A. I think the main thing I want to convey is a deep appreciation for all the fans who have supported MechCommander, MechCommander: Desperate Measures, MechCommander 2, MechAssault, MechAssault 2, BATTLETECH, and its expansions: Flashpoint, Urban Warfare, and Heavy Metal. It’s been an honor to play a part in BattleTech’s history and meeting fans is one of the best parts of the job.
