Every game you play borrows RPG elements as far as gaining experience and using it to develop a character, because that feeling of growth, the feeling of accumulation of power, just works. You start weak, and you become strong - hopefully. There’s something about that that feels true, because in a sense that’s how you go through your life. People make a visceral connection to that. You start a child, and you become an adult. The basic paradigm in an RPG is that you start out as this weak little guy with a wooden dagger or whatever, and you gain power and gain knowledge and you grow to the point where you’re powerful and influential. We know! And yet they work really well for telling stories. They are a ludicrous paradigm in every way. Most indie RPGs are just parodies of RPGs. But I love video games as a storytelling medium more than just about anything. Not everyone is as into the storytelling aspect of it. I’ve always said that gamers will forgive you for having a good story, as long as you allow them to ignore it. It’s the combination of the addictive, the illusion of achievement, combined with the storytelling. GamesBeat: What led you into RPGs, as opposed to any other genre? It’s a long way from Pong. (Trailer for Avernum: Escape from the Pit, the rewrite of Exile.) It made money, and then I quit grad school almost immediately and said, “OK, I’ll make a go of this.” It’s run from there. Then you come out with the perfect game at the perfect time. People are hungry for a shooter or a or a tactical game or what have you, and there’s nothing on the market. So many indie success stories just come from having the right game at the right time. It was at a real lull for RPGs in the industry. Much to my great surprise, people bought it. Then I released it as shareware, which was a thing that existed at the time. I decided to take a few months off from that and do what I’d always secretly wanted to do, which was write a real video game. I really kind of hated it.Īfter passing my qualifier exams, which is the thing you have to do to show you’re actually serious about it and ready to start research, I was really burned out. I was in grad school studying applied math. Vogel: The first game I wrote professionally was called Exile: Escape from the Pit. I started programming games, I think, when I was 8, 9, 10. As soon as I got the chance, I learned to program. I remember my dad coming home from a bar and saying, “Hey, Jeff, I saw this cool thing that you might like, it’s called Pong.” As soon as I started playing video games, I was immediately just compelled by them. I was born in 1970, so this is just about the time that computer games were being invented. I started out probably by drawing mazes for my parents to solve when I was 5 years old. Vogel: I’ve always been compelled by games and puzzles. GamesBeat: What got you started in the business? All my comic books and old video games and Magic cards are on shelves all around me, just to make me feel comfortable and enfolded. For the first 18 years, all of our games were written in my basement, but two years ago, we moved into a nicer new home. GamesBeat: Is this the infamous basement I’m seeing behind you? On the 20th anniversary of the publishing of his first game, Exile: Escape from the Pit, I spoke with him in a video call, asking him to riff on that process, indie developing, his basement, and the game industry in general. On Exile, his first hit game: “It was a mess.”Īdvice for game designers: “I think people need to embrace more - just making games dumb and unfair.” “RPGs are ludicrous.” (Vogel develops nothing but.)
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