The Cool Cam

When I first started out in the games industry, I was working for a company called Microprose. They were famous for their sims, Civilization, XCOM, Masters of Orion, stuff like that.

I was working on European Air War, a game that was four years into development, and was nowhere near ready to ship. In the first month of my working there, the entire programming team quit. They saw the writing on the wall, and knew that their project was in deep doodoo, so they bailed. I don't hold it against them, they were under incredible strain. Every week, there was a meeting with studio execs, trying to determine whether to cancel the project or not. In those meetings, the execs would ask hard questions, and they never seemed pleased with the answers.

Anyway, the company needed to hire several new programmers, and it especially needed a lead (at the time, I was a junior programmer, and nowhere near ready to put a game together by myself). They hired a guy who I'll call "Tom" for this story. Now, Tom knew what he was getting into when he saw the project. Way over budget, ready to be axed if it didn't show immediate results, with huge gaping holes in the game.

So, what do you think he worked on first? Let me give you a brief list of some of the big issues he was facing. This was a WWII fighter sim where, if you fired your wing guns, the wings would fall off. It was not possible to take off or land, and if you touched the ground, you would be bounced miles up into space. Planes occasionally flew backward, and the AI would periodically (and unexplainably) shoot down its own teammates. So, with all of these issues, what do you think he would work on first?

He built a new camera object. One that would jump immediately to wherever "cool" things were happening. Sometimes, the cool camera would focus on a plane executing an impressive evasive action to shake the enemy. Sometimes, the camera would follow a bomb from the bay of a B17, down to the ground in a cool tracking shot where you watched the Earth come rushing up at the camera. Sometimes, the cool cam would focus on a firefight, or on a plane that just got shot down, and was now a fireball, barrelling toward the ground at terrific speed.

The cool cam was cool, yes, but I had to bite my lip to keep from saying, "That doesn't help us! We've got real issues, and you're screwing around with the camera!"

Then I went to one of the meetings with the execs. It was another one of those, "Give us one good reason why we shouldn't can your project" meetings. Tom started up the game, and started flying around, trying to avoid the obvious issues (like shooting your own wings off, or the planes flying backward).

One of the execs threw out a tough question, designed to show how far over budget we were. Tom put down the joystick, and hit the "cool cam" button. Then he turned around to answer the question. While he was answering the question, every eye in the room was on the screen as one amazing scene showed after another. I looked at the execs, and I swear, some of them were gaping. No one was listening to Tom as he answered the question, and when he finished, he picked up the joystick, and jumped back into the game. Every time they asked a question, he would switch to cool cam, and they would completely forget why they had asked.

I swear, that camera saved the project. European Air War suddenly became a going concern for the company, a major player in our lineup. The meetings with the execs dwindled to nothing, we got more programmers, and we shipped a hell of a game. To this day, nearly a decade after it shipped, people are still playing the game. Groups still get together to play it multiplayer. And I know it wouldn't have happened without a programmer who knew what the project needed most, and gave it the Cool Cam.