LucasArts Speaks Out--Part 1: A Discussion with Hal Barwood

By Randy Sluganski

Hal Barwood is an anomaly in the gaming industry. He is clearly much more seasoned and experienced than the usual twenty-somethings associated with the business, and unlike his contemporaries, most of whom have never held jobs outside of gaming, Hal had a wildly successful career before he was wisely hired by LucasArts.

Hal Barwood was the screenwriter for Steven Spielberg's first theatrical feature, The Sugarland Express (1974), and he also wrote The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings (1976) and the best danged fantasy movie ever made, Dragonslayer (1981), among many others.

At LucasArts, Hal has been credited with Writing/Dialogue/Story/Design and Project Leader on games that span the LucasArts spectrum from Yoda Stories to Rebel Assault 2 to Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine. He is clearly a jack of many trades and master of them all.

Hal is an outspoken advocate of the adventure genre and agreed to do this interview with Just Adventure after I contacted him regarding some positive statements he had made about adventure gaming during a recent Game Developer's Conference.

Some of your movies, such as Dragonslayer, have a deeper subtext (the dawn of a new religious awakening) that is not readily apparent to the average moviegoer. Do you see any games, adventure or otherwise, that have this level of writing?

Well, all of mine! Um, make that more like some of mine. There are many others as well, I believe. This doesn't mean that the surface literary quality lives up to the standards of films and novels and plays--games, after all, have an added dimension: interactivity. Players want to play, so the story has to relax a bit. I personally think our latest Monkey Island is as funny as any movie in the last several years, and comedy requires writing! For finely crafted games with the feeling of substance, I'd pick Ocarina of Time as my current favorite. Superficially, the story is childish fantasy, but there's a sense of purpose that gets conveyed to the player that made me want to live up to the game world's expectations.

Dragonslayer, the movie, arguably the best dragon movie ever made. Dragonslayer, the game, arguably the worst video game ever made. Why? What goes wrong between the transfer from movie to game?

Wow, I must have missed an era. To my knowledge, there was never a videogame based on our movie. If you're asking about Dragon's Lair, the old choose-the-path cartoon arcade thing with Dirk Daring, the only connection is that those guys ripped off our movie logotype. My ignorance is part of the answer to your question: Hollywood deal-makers rarely care about the licenses for what they regard as nothing more than "ancillary income." Certainly the studios were never conscious of protecting the Dragonslayer franchise, so I never got involved. It's a shame. As video games become more prominent, I hope the current attitude will change. But it all depends on money. It's hard to budget for good work on a game when huge sums must be delivered back to some movie company. Anyway, Spyro is my favorite dragon these days. [Ed. note: I purposely left this question intact to show how easy it is to get confused with so many games and movies available. I, of course, meant that awful Dragonheart game from Acclaim, which has no relation at all to Hal's excellent Dragonslayer. My apologies to Hal for even mentioning that piece of trash in his presence.]

You have worked with some of the biggest names in the movie industry--Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, for example. Do you foresee a day when certain individuals in the gaming industry will be as widely recognized?

I think that day is already here. People like Shigeru Miyamoto, Richard Garriott, Sid Meier, and Will Wright are already famous. The problem may be that we don't have stars--and hey, maybe we never will. For every person who might recognize Steve Spielberg or George Lucas on the street, there must be ten who would spot Harrison Ford.

Compare movie critics to game critics. Are there any gaming reviewers, either on the web or writing for gaming magazines, that you would put on the same level as a Pauline Kael?

That's a straight line, right? People are going to think I paid you to ask that question! I'm not that worshipful a fan of Pauline Kael. I'd put them all in the same boat ...

In an interview five years ago, you said that if 90% of everything is crap, then more than 90% of computer and video games are crap. Has that percentage lowered at all since then?

Theodore Sturgeon's famous remark, and I was expressing the hope that the game biz would eventually drop our percentage down from something more like 95% crap to meet the still-modest world standard. It may have happened. We're a young industry. Along with the enthusiasm of youth comes the inexperience, and the improvement in quality and imagination is obvious as designers, artists, and coders get a few titles under their belts. Also, the technical possibilities of modern computing machinery, whether PC or console, means we can do a lot more than we used to. The results are encouraging. We've got nothing to be ashamed of.

In another interview, you said that you don't like interactive movies as adventure games because "... there are no 400 page scripts in movies." For those of us who do like interactive movies, will there ever be a way to tighten the script, or are interactive movies a failed experiment?

Personally, I think they're a failed experiment. And not just because it's tough even for talented writers to whip out reams of dialogue. I think interactive movies made an unexpected discovery about the human psyche: people don't want to be in charge unless there's something to be in charge of--unless we can meet a challenge. The equation seems pretty simple to me: interactivity minus goals equals boredom.

You favor using cinematic shots in games, establishing shots, etc. What are games not doing that movies are doing that could make them better?

As far as movie-like things games sometimes do, well, we could spend a little more time with writing, and acting, and studying up those directing books some of us have heard about. But games go beyond movies, and our real problems are elsewhere, out there in game space. Designers seem to have trouble fastening on ways to create immersive game environments that are satisfying (meaning fun) even though they must also be, to a certain extent, artificial. Movie makers have had a century to figure out what parts of ordinary existence must be imitated, what parts must be exaggerated, and what parts can be safely left out--and by and large they do their jobs well. Game makers are still struggling with the basics. Some of our problems are different--we probably need boss monsters, and movies don't, for example. And some are the same--movies learned not to spend much time exploring toilets 70 years ago. The real difficulty for games will be learning how to attract customers when the competition passes from technology to art, as it must when machinery matures.

Conversely, is there anything that the movie industry could learn from the gaming industry?

Dedication, hard work, passion: these we have in abundance, and now and then they make us shine. Maybe it was just this past year, but movies seem kind of tired these days.

Citizen Kane went through seven drafts; how many does the average adventure game go through?

I might not be the best one to ask about this, but from my point of view, "drafts" isn't the way to think about the matter. Aside from prerendered cutscenes, games are dynamic. The production process is also dynamic--and kind of s-l-o-w. Games can be changed and altered right up until the golden master candidates in ways that aren't possible in any other art. So we kind of tweak as we go in a continuous feedback loop.

Most of your games have incorporated action elements, yet you are a big proponent of adventure games. Are you deferring to the action gamers who claim they would play adventure games if there were more action included, or are you attempting to pull adventure gamers into the action genre?

I confess--I'm not a pure adventure game devotee. On the other hand, I have no time for shooters--they seem so monotonous. I much prefer action-adventure, where I get to feel like I can roll up my sleeves and solve the world's problems, but also run and jump and shoot the bejabbers out of everything that moves. I like the "whee" part of the fun factor when a game isn't too thoughtful, when chaos can happen.

What is your take on the following types of adventure games:

Oh boy, I'm being put on the spot here ...

Text adventures?

I have never been a fan. Unless you count the @-sign and hobgoblin H's in Rogue as text! It's not the lack of pictures, but the lack of readable prose. What's up with that second-person declarative construction anyway? "You see a glade with a stream running through it." Ouch.

2D adventures?

Some of the enduring greats! Monkey Island! Zak! Tentacle! Throttle! I love a number of them, including just about every one we've ever published.

Full-motion video?

I've done my share. Rebel Assault II, remember? Anyway, there was a moment when Hollywood and videogames almost did converge. Money flowed. Multimedia was a buzzword. And then real-time 3D spoiled the parade ... thank God.

3D adventures?

A natural evolution. We've done a couple here at LucasArts and are planning more. Escape from Monkey Island isn't just funny--it's beautiful. But in my mind, the third dimension demands exploration and exploitation--and that means action!

Be here next time as Just Adventure presents part 2 of our exclusive LucasArts interviews. We will speak with a production team currently working on a new adventure project, and LucasArts will respond to recent Just Adventure criticisms directed towards corporate policies and the Monkey Island series.