Boy of Tomorrow: OK, would you mind introducing yourself and explaining what you do?

Morten Iversen: My name is Morten Iversen. I am the writer behind the Hitman games and Freedom Fighters and a couple more that haven’t been released yet at IO Interactive. Currently I’m working as a boss at my own outfit, a rogue team of game developers in Copenhagen, Denmark; we’re called Zeitguys Game Developers and we have a project called Recoil Retrograde, for which the tagline is “It’s never too late to change history.”

BOT: Yes! I sat through the demo movie and I also got to play the demo a bit as well… and I’ve gotta say this is the purest steampunk game I’ve ever seen. What’re some of the problems with marketing a steampunk game, especially since there’ve only been two others (that I know of) in the industry: Arcanum and Bioshock. Now, don’t get me wrong: Arcanum had a very loyal following, but it didn’t sell all that well, and then Bioshock was the runaway hit, so there isn’t really a set marketing campaign for this genre yet.

MI: Exactly. Well, we encountered difficulties in the beginning, communicating this vision. But we stuck to it, we stuck to our guns, because it’s not just a pretty setting for us. The feature of the game is time travel: travel down through the history of the city and when you do return to the future, things change dynamically before your eyes. So the story ties in with the look of the universe. The overarching story is that there’s this regime, a bunch of guys that call themselves Gloria Mundi, which have changed the history of the city. Originally they did it to prevent catastrophes, like World War II and prevent the development of the Nuclear bomb or stuff like that. But when you have powers like that, you become corrupt, and that’s what happened to these guys. So you have a very dark, dystopic metropolis. It’s a utopia that went bad.

That’s why we stuck to it: we didn’t want to copy what everyone else was doing. There are guys doing good sci-fi shooters and WWII games, but this is something new and unique and this freshness will shine through. And we stuck to it even though publishers shied away from it. But [chuckles] yeah, Bioshock has opened the sluices for this. We’re getting approached by publishers on a daily basis saying “we need a steampunk game” because this is something that’s going mainstream… this is new and fresh and exciting, and this is what gamers want. They don’t care about genres: they want a unique experience that keeps them on their toes.

BOT: At the event of the demo, you change an event in the past by saving one or two brothers. And your decision alters your present and how the city develops. Now, I was really impressed with how everything liquefies and changes, but are the changes in the past cumulative as you progress through the game? Are there going to be a combination of these varying changes throughout the game?

MI: There are cumulative changes to the city, depending on your choices in the past. There’s a sort of recipe to it. The way this organization, Gloria Mundi, has done it is they’ve gone into the past and killed several birds with one stone. As you saw in the demo, there’s a doctor and a scientist trapped in a burning house. They tried to kill them both so they could control the doctor’s medicines and the scientist’s inventions. So that’s what you find out as a player: you can’t save them both. So we want to encourage the player to go back again and try saving the other one. And, of course, during the game, the challenges will be more subtle. Maybe you will be forced to kill someone to save a couple of others. Maybe you will have to burn down a building to undo the nefarious work of Gloria Mundi. Of course, we want to challenge the players and increase the replay value of the game. What we suggest, as the science behind it if you like, is that not all the things you do in the past have an effect. Killing a few cows won’t really have an effect. Killing a peasant? Well, it might not do anything, but we want to encourage players to explore the limits and find out what effect they’ll have.

What we want to do as well, is to do something that just happens because you went back into the past, is the butterfly effect…. We want to encourage players to talk about it and figure out what happened. It would be good if we had some randomly-generated stuff that could happen as well.

BOT: Well, yeah, I would imagine when the game comes out, people will start posting different combinations of choices and the results they’ll get from that.

MI: Exactly. Yes.

BOT: I remember the similar thing was, in Arcanum, how people would post guides to creating custom inventions and all that.

MI: Right, exactly!

BOT: So, what’re some of the inspirations you used? I saw some elements from Jules Verne in there…

MI: That’s always a hard thing to pin down. I’ve written several game manuscripts and several stories, and I’ve always been fascinated by the conspiracy aspect of things. The idea that we aren’t told the truth. What we experience in the real world is that we have common truths that we agree upon. And common lies that we agree upon, if you like.

BOT: Right… so, history being dictated by the winners?

MI: Exactly. So, there’s always an alternative version of what happened. And another fascinating thing is that every historical event has a minute turning point; some little thing that determines the outcome. It could go one way, or it could go radically in another way. Take the battle of Gettysburg: the North states captured the South states’ dispatch… even though they were the underdog because they were outgunned, outmanned, and tired, they caught a dispatch with the troop deployments for the next day. So, they knew were their enemies were going to be and were able to surprise the South with their own troops. So, that little thing, that they captured this rider, that turned the world around. Imagine if the South states had won? We might still have slavery here.

So these little things were fascinating, and I wanted to incorporate them into the recipe that could sink down well with the players. But we knew we couldn’t suggest that we were changing world history. Well, maybe we could suggest it, but aside from going back in time and killing Hitler’s mom, what could we make everybody relate to? So, of course, it’s our story and our history in this city. You can’t leave the city, but you go down through the history of it. Of course, we’ve used actual historical events for the game…

BOT: Like what historical events?

MI: Well, one of the missions you encounter, in the demo, is inspired by the English bombardment of Copenhagen. The English bombarded us because we were silly enough to root for Bonaparte during the Napoleonic wars. So, that’s the reason England came and beat the crap out of us. We thought, “hey, that’s good inspiration! A foreign army invades the city and bombards it with firebombs and so forth.” We have another one, that we’re setting up, where you have to go back and find yourself in a foggy area. A harbor area. And a shadowy figure is going around and attacking women, slashing them up. Now, a couple of these women are very important for the future’s history. The rest of them, though, are just fillers to create a panic. That way, everyone just thinks it’s some crazy mass murderer, but there’s really a purpose to it. So we’re ringing a familiar bell with this.

We want to do things which make people go, “oh, I remember what this is about.” That way we don’t have to introduce scenarios that are difficult to relate to. Stuff like that, but we’ve got lots of ideas.

BOT: What’re you most excited about with Recoil?

MI: Well, we’re pretty excited with the attention we’re getting from publishers, at long last. I mean, holy cow, this is the third year we’ve been working on this. I started this with the royalties I had from Hitman and Freedom Fighters and we closed two rounds of external investments and we’re looking at closing the third round of external investments. But it’s expensive keeping an outfit like this running. We’re very excited that we’re finally -finally- getting the attention that we, in all modesty, that we deserve. Because we’ve worked hard on this, and we have an original product. And we think we’re going to set a very big fingerprint on the steampunk game genre. That’s we’re excited about.

BOT: Thanks very much.