Join Stargate Worlds Creative Director Chris Klug as we explore marrying TV canon with new directions for Stargate with the video game format, and find out more about the story we almost got to play.

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Timecodes
0:00 – Frankie Muniz
0:24 – Opening Credits
1:08 – Welcome
1:58 – Guest Introduction
2:28 – Chris Talks About What He Does
3:36 – How often does Stargate come up?
7:59 – Roadmap From Earth and Beyond
13:14 – Stargate Inside a Game Space
18:10 – Early Days
22:55 – The Show is About Friendship
27:44 – Game Delopment
32:03 – Stargate Worlds Story
36:29 – Ra’s Rebirth
40:14 – Six Playable Races
49:32 – MMO’s Should Be Fun
55:10 – Storytelling in MMO’s
1:00:02 – Whimsy in the Game
1:03:32 – Convention Circuit
1:06:57 – Teasers
1:11:06 – A Series of Missions
1:13:55 – Timetravelling Puddle Jumper
1:16:55 – The New Goa’uld
1:20:55 – It’s a Collaberation
1:22:26 – When It Went Wrong
1:26:29 – Running Out of Money
1:29:46 – Everyone Handles It Differently
1:33:51 – The Document That Convinced Brad
1:35:26 – A Shared Background
1:39:12 – Budget Limitations
1:41:30 – David & Chris Weekly Sessions
1:42:43 – Getting Gamers on Board
1:47:29 – Chris Communicated Well
1:52:00 – Onboarding of Players
1:54:05 – The Comic Con Panel
1:58:30 – Finding Talented People
2:01:57 – Why the Project Failed
2:03:55 – Katie About Chris
2:05:31 – Thank You, Katie
2:05:37 – Post-Interview Housekeeping
2:07:15 – End Credits

***
“Stargate,” “Stargate SG-1,” “Stargate Atlantis,” “Stargate Universe,” and all related materials are owned by Amazon MGM Studios.

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TRANSCRIPT
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David Read:
Welcome back to the Stargate Oral History Project. I’m David Read. I really appreciate you being with me for this episode. I have such fond memories from Stargate Worlds. Katie and I have been blessed over the last month or so here with bringing people back together whom we have admired for years, who created something that folks in the Stargate community only got a glimpse of. And today I am thrilled to be able to explore that with one of the key designers here. In fact, the creative director. Christopher Klug, creative director of Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment, and the spearhead of the story that was Stargate Worlds. And Katie. We’re back with you as well. Thank you so much for being here. Chris, thank you for coming on.

Christopher Klug:
You’re welcome.

David Read:
How are you?

Christopher Klug:
I’m good. Very happy to be with you.

David Read:
It’s been a while since all of us have been together in one space. Where are you now? What are you up to? What is your secret, Chris?

Christopher Klug:
So, I’m still teaching game production and game design at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. That’s what I was doing when Cheyenne hired me, and I was lucky enough to go back to it after it ended, and I’ve been doing it pretty much ever since. I teach about 75 grad students every year who want to go into video games or animated film or location-based entertainment. So, I get to tell stories about what I did and how I did it when I was working in the industry.

David Read:
How often does Stargate Worlds come up in terms of, “Here’s something that I was lucky enough to do,” or, “Here’s something that, if you’re lucky, you won’t have to do?”

Christopher Klug:
So, that’s an interesting question. I have three sort of go-to projects that I talk about with the students when I say, “Here’s a problem,” and I’ll talk about how we tried to solve it. One is a role-playing game that I did for the N64. And then another was the project that probably got me the job at Cheyenne, which was Earth & Beyond, which was an MMO for EA. And then Cheyenne. And the interesting thing about Cheyenne is I tend to use the projects as examples of ways to behave in times of stress, as sort of weather vanes for the students about mainly what not to do. The big story about the video game industry is surprisingly it’s not as… Success in the industry is not as much about your skill as it is what kind of human you are. Meaning how fun you are to work with, how well do you get along with people. And the earlier two projects before Cheyenne were good examples of incidents that maybe the students might want to avoid when they get into the industry for various reasons. But the team at Cheyenne was so astonishingly easy to work with for the most part that I tend not to talk about it too much. The reality is, gosh, it’s hard to say, but none of my students know what Stargate was. They’re too young. They’re all 22, 23 years old. And I can say things like how many years the show was on the air, and the records it set, and the audience share. And I’ll relate stories about Brad complaining to me about treatment that he felt was unfair because Battlestar was the critical darling, and why weren’t people appreciating the work he had done. Like anybody would. Just schmoozing. But it’s hard to remember how influential the show was and what a big deal it was. But it’s not a good example for my students ’cause they don’t know it. They don’t even get the MacGyver jokes because they don’t know what that show was. So, I don’t talk about it as much, actually, as I talk about the other two games. And the other part of it, frankly, is it never shipped. So, it’s hard to get footage. It’s hard to show the game. It’s hard to really talk about what players did because a lot of it was never proven, so it doesn’t come up as often as you might think. Sadly.

David Read:
That’s a fair point.

Christopher Klug:
Because the people were the best.

David Read:
That’s right. Katie?

Katie Postma:
Hi.

Christopher Klug:
Hi.

David Read:
I’m gonna let you feather in here. Chris, what I would really like to set up is the roadmap that led you from Earth & Beyond into Stargate Worlds at this stage, if you could discuss that.

Christopher Klug:
So, let’s see. Earth & Beyond. EA science fiction universe set in an intellectual property that hadn’t seen the light of day in any other form, which was the biggest challenge. You couldn’t say, “Hey, you’ve seen the TV show. Come play the game.” Which we could say all the time for Stargate. We were explaining how the universe worked at the same time we were explaining how the game worked. That was a challenge. But there had been a deal that had been discussed with TiVo of all people.

David Read:
Really?

Christopher Klug:
Yeah. So, I was in meetings where the following idea was pitched. The idea went like this, “Hey, EA. You’re a big video game company.” TiVo had used Vegas, which is where the studio was for Earth & Beyond, as a test market. So, everybody in Vegas had a TiVo. This is 2001. And the TiVo seeding had happened in the late ’90s, I think. 1990s. Anyway, there was some interest in pitching a television version of Earth & Beyond if the game did the same sort of numbers that EverQuest was doing. If we were sort of approaching EverQuest numbers, they were gonna pitch a TV show. To sit concurrently with the game. So, I had been in planning stages for exactly that sort of thing. It never happened because we didn’t get close to the EverQuest numbers. But it was in discussion. So, when I was approached by… It wasn’t Cheyenne then. Cheyenne’s name came later. Whatever it was, the entity. To be the creative director. I sort of had been approached twice, early on, really early on. Jill Zinner, the recruiter, had contacted me. She really pushed me hard, but certain people at the studio weren’t interested in giving creative control to somebody else.

David Read:
Which studio are we talking about at this point?

Christopher Klug:
It’s the thing that became Cheyenne, but it wasn’t called Cheyenne.

David Read:
The thing that became – understood.

Katie Postma:
Are you talking about Jim, Darrell, Todd?

Christopher Klug:
I wasn’t gonna say their names.

Christopher Klug:
Yeah, it was Jim. Jim really put the kibosh on hiring me. And then Joe…

Katie Postma:
I did not know that.

Christopher Klug:
… eventually convinced Jim that maybe he needed to rethink that, and they came back to me — I’m trying to think — six months later. And that’s when it got serious. And in those interviews with Joe, I talked a lot about the plans we had had for Earth & Beyond, and Joe was like, “Really?” Because he thought that would be a good thing to talk about with Brad. That I had a background in shared IP usage across media. And it turned out to be true. That was the thing Brad and I talked about the most. And as we know, I don’t know how many seconds it is of footage of the game sits in the pilot episode of…

Katie Postma:
Universe.

Christopher Klug:
… what was the show?

David Read:
Universe.

Katie Postma:
Universe.

David Read:
Part one.

David Read:
A good 15.

Christopher Klug:
And that bit came from the discussions that Brad and I had when I first sat down with Brad.

David Read:
So, you can’t leave it there, Chris.

Christopher Klug:
That’s background. Go ahead. What’s next?

David Read:
You can’t leave it there because I remember you telling me this story about the potential nugget of the idea that Stargate was inside of a game space all along, being played by a gamer at a computer.

Katie Postma:
I remember that.

Christopher Klug:
I can’t remember… I mean, yes. That certainly surfaced in the next show. Where that came from… So, this is really going back. So, my memory of early conversations with Brad was him talking about his daughter. He’s got a daughter, right?

David Read:
He has two.

Christopher Klug:
One of them was really sort of leaning on him a little bit to get with it with this whole gaming thing. Come on. Your TV shows are for old folks. We all play games. That’s a very simplistic statement, and I’m not attributing those words to coming out of his daughter’s mouth. But that was the vibe. In other words, in a world where Stargate’s demo was not skewing as young as Battlestar’s was, David? Am I crazy?

David Read:
Unfortunately, no.

Katie Postma:
No.

Christopher Klug:
In that world, one of the things that Brad was trying to do with the next iteration of Stargate was try to get it to skew younger. I remember that conversation. And he saw the game as one of the ways to do that. And he joked at one point about it would make his daughter happy. I think that might have been as far as it went.

Katie Postma:
This was at the dawn of the era of… There were a lot of game companies as well as TV streaming services that started thinking along the lines of merging the… That’s how you got GameTap, and that’s how you got GameTree TV, all these things that we don’t hear about anymore. But there are games on Netflix, and there are games on Prime.

Christopher Klug:
So, I later had dinner with a TV writer who was trying to make this exact idea work. Somewhere in the mid-teens, there was a cable TV show where there was a game and a TV series at the same time.

David Read:
Defiance. On Syfy Channel.

Christopher Klug:
There you go.

Katie Postma:
Defiance.

Christopher Klug:
I had dinner with one of the writers of Defiance.

Katie Postma:
I remember that.

Christopher Klug:
And we were sort of kicking around how to do that, because the design challenge is always who goes first. In other words, if you’re gonna set up an event that happens sort of simultaneously in some fashion, you tee it up either in the TV show and then the game picks up and does something with it, or you tee it up in the game and then the TV show picks up. Because there’s no way that you can really do simultaneous stuff. The lead time. You’re writing back in the era of 22 episodes of TV, you begin a season in the writer’s room. I remember vividly sitting in the writer’s room in Vancouver, in Burnaby. And they had Atlantis on this whiteboard over here, and they had SG-1 on this whiteboard over here. And the plates are being spun, and everyone is working. And it’s hard when that pressure on that production budget and timing is bearing down on everybody to worry about what the stupid game company’s doing and trying to sync up with them. The one guy I remember being really interested in seeing what we were gonna do with it was Martin. The evening on the aircraft carrier, I had a relatively long discussion with him about what we were thinking about doing. Really, at that point I didn’t know enough about the next show to really understand where he was going. Brad, this is. And we hadn’t even launched yet, so a lot of it was theory, not pragmatic. If we have a game and if it’s successful, what we’ll think about doing is this. We never got there.

David Read:
And there was discussion…

Katie Postma:
But the midway is when…

David Read:
Go for it.

Katie Postma:
Sorry, the Midway is when… We had overlapped with them at Comic-Con at the panel.

Christopher Klug:
I have a story about that panel. No, we’ll save it.

Katie Postma:
But what I was gonna say is… Chris had been to the office, and we had met some… Whenever you went to Burnaby, you might meet someone in the field, or I had met a couple of them at Chicago, where I met David. And when they asked about it, I remember Mike Shanks asking, “Tell me more about this.” He was curious about it. And then the next time he saw me, he said, “We’re doing voices, right?” And somebody, I can’t even remember who the other person was standing beside him, said, “Well, I am,” or something. And he was like, “And I haven’t been.” And I’m like, “Guys, it’s so early. It’s so early for this.” Literally. But then on the Midway, when they saw and heard the trailer, and we’ve talked about with Nick, that music blasting out. Then I think they were like, “Oh shit. Look, this is a thing.”

David Read:
It’s real.

Katie Postma:
This is an actual thing. At the reception after, when you were talking to Martin and various of us were walking around talking to whomever, that’s when they were like, “Oh you’re…” Instead of going, “What do you do?” and then walking away, it was like, “You’re working on the game?” They had questions now, and they were sitting up in that moment a little bit more than they had been.

Christopher Klug:
The relationship with the TV show was so much a driving force from the point of view of the kind of game we wanted to do. But because it was a theoretical possibility and probably, in retrospect, needed Stargate Universe to work and needed the game to work, it was hard to argue that in design meetings inside the dev studio as being anything that anybody really needed to worry about, ’cause it required all these things to work. But in the discussions that I would have with Brad — and it’s certainly not like we talked even every week or every month, we probably talked once every three months as we sort of needed to keep him informed about what we were doing — it was definitely the long-term goal for both him and I to try to do this. And it could’ve been really, really interesting. But I know that politically inside the dev studio, that was viewed as probably not gonna happen. I think that there were some designers who were skeptical of the chances of that being pulled off. But what they didn’t know is the tantalizing possibility of that happening — the vibe I got — was the only reason Brad signed off.

David Read:
Wow. To do something in tandem.

Katie Postma:
Initially?

Christopher Klug:
No, let me be clear about this, ’cause I don’t wanna get a phone call from Brad Wright saying I misquoted him. He said to me in my first meeting with him, “People think the show is about shooting. It’s not about shooting. It’s not about shooting.” And every game that has ever been done — there was one in Australia, maybe, I think — was a shooter, and it annoyed him. It really annoyed him. And he said, “So, here’s what I want you to do. I’m gonna give you a month or two months. I really want you to think about what the show is, and then come up to Burnaby.” I think I told you this story, David, didn’t I?

David Read:
Yeah. I’m remembering it now.

Christopher Klug:
“Come up to Burnaby and show me that you understand the show.” And I’m like, “Sure, I can do that.” I was trained as a theater person, and script analysis is… Everybody has to do script analysis. So, I got some scripts, and I spent the Christmas vacation that year. And what I did was… You can’t watch all those episodes in one sitting. You can’t. And I’m like, “OK. Let me think about this. I know that every season would end, and he wouldn’t know whether it was gonna get renewed or not.” I think he had told me that, or somebody had told me that.

David Read:
At that point in time, that was correct.

Christopher Klug:
OK. Good. I’m glad I can remember that accurately. And I’m like, “OK, so if I’m the showrunner and I know that I wanna leave them at the end of the year with something that’s gonna entice them to renew, I’m gonna go out with my guns blazing, and I’m gonna write the essence of what the show is.” What I did was I cherry-picked the last two or three episodes of every season, and I watched them. And I realized the show wasn’t about laser pistols; it was about friendship. That was the show. The show is about the relationship between the team and their relationship to each other. And I wrote him a document analyzing the show from that perspective. And when we went up to Burnaby for the meeting, he’s like, “OK, let’s talk, because you understand the show.” And it wasn’t an amazing discovery. I think that the evidence for what the show is about was on the screen. But what worked for him was that I wasn’t like other game designers and worried about the combat first and the character second. I think my sense was, from his perspective, it was the other way around. That the characters are more important than the combat.

David Read:
I remember hearing the stories from Earth & Beyond, and you approach a ship full of children, and this has to happen or this has to happen. I think Katie said it very astutely in a previous episode. It’s various takes on fundamentally the trolley problem. There are no right answers. It’s often the case in life. You have to pick one, hold your nose, and go, and pray that you’ve done the best that you can, because that’s life. The problems that the SG-1 team often faced were very much like that. And that’s what we connect to as human beings, not, “The last week I was on P3X421 and this happened.” No.

Katie Postma:
No, that’s not what it’s about.

David Read:
My dad’s dying of cancer, and I have to go to work because it’s what I have to do, and there are people counting on me to do this. And that’s what we vibe with. That’s what we relate to as human beings.

Katie Postma:
It’s the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few, or the one, and it’s the no man left behind. Those two sentiments.

David Read:
And juxtaposing those two ideas together.

Christopher Klug:
So, part of the tension as the schedule reared its ugly head, game development always takes too long, and nobody really knows how long it’s gonna take till you finish. And as we faced the realities of the budget and the schedule, we were late. I forget what our original ship date was, but I know we were late.

Katie Postma:
Everything was in those days, and MMOs especially.

Christopher Klug:
No, it was. Things like downloadable content or updates or pushing some of the game off till later on, all that was in its infancy at that point. And now it’s what you do. You don’t ship the whole thing when you launch. You ship a piece of it. But that idea hadn’t really succeeded, or the track record of that succeeding wasn’t as prevalent then. So, when Dan and I and the leaders were trying to figure out how to get enough out the door to make people happy and get them to sign up, I was always looking at it from the point of view of how do I set up this ongoing, sequentially segmented story in a way that makes the most sense. And you can sort of see that in the slide deck I found doing research, that we were pitching that kind of story.

Katie Postma:
A serial story, right?

Christopher Klug:
A serial story. But you needed to get it out the door for that to work, and you never got it out the door.

David Read:
Would you like me to open that and explore that document at this stage?

Christopher Klug:
Yeah, sure.

David Read:
It’s like Christmas morning, man. My God. I haven’t seen this in 20 years.

Christopher Klug:
Again, the challenging thing for me is I’ve got… When I glibly said to you in email, “I’ve got some slide decks.” And then this morning when I went and looked for them, there’s seven versions of this. And I remember vividly working with Steve Garvin and Sean to prep this, ’cause the three of us went up to pitch it. It has this feeling of what we were trying to do and how we were trying to deliver these updates. Because we were convinced that especially fans of the television show who are used to that kind of storytelling structure — a thing happens, and then next week the next thing happens, and the next thing happens, and this all happens in one season, and then the next season this other thing happens — they’re gonna lean into that ’cause they understand it.

David Read:
That’s correct.

Christopher Klug:
I remember thinking… the ZeniMax game, the Elder Scrolls game, they were sort of trying to do the same thing. They weren’t as far along as we were, but they ended up shipping ’cause they had more money eventually. Anyway, do you want me to go through this?

David Read:
I’m gonna share this.

Christopher Klug:
You’re gonna share it? OK. So, we’re all looking at the same thing.

David Read:
And we can view.

Christopher Klug:
That’s it

David Read:
And I will be your piano page-turner. So, let me know. What you are about to see, folks, is what I got to see… I’m pretty sure you threw this at me, Chris, for a gut check.

Christopher Klug:
I’m sure we did. To set the stage for a minute, I had this relationship with the writing team at a distance. We didn’t wanna show what we were gonna build story-wise until we were darn sure we could do it. And the last thing we wanted was for the showrunner to hate it. Ugh. That would not be good. So, I’m sure we showed it to a bunch of people before we took it up. I’m quite certain that you probably saw some version of this before we took the flight to Vancouver. So, go ahead.

David Read:
Let’s have a look here. At this point, I had been established with Chris. We had had a lot of long meetings together, and there was no point in my mind where it was: no one else can be doing this thing. Because we had already seen your document that really broke down the show into the elements of friendship and striving to ascend. That had all come before. And then we had what grew into the shape of what the game was gonna be, and that is this.

Christopher Klug:
What we needed to do in the meeting was explain where the game was going to sort of peel off a little bit. Because I’m trying to think. I can’t remember whether we knew that SG-1 was gonna end. I forget all of this. I knew that Universe was coming. But I can’t remember whether the timeline of all that had been worked out. I honestly can’t remember.

David Read:
We found out later. During production.

Christopher Klug:
I’m glad you can remember. The meeting was, “OK. So, let us explain to you our thought process about where we’re gonna sort of step off that bus, your bus, and sort of go do our own thing.” As the slide talks about, for us, we’re picking it up at the end of Season Eight. We’re summarizing where we are and what the System Lords are doing and what each of the races are up to. Because if you remember, we were gonna let players play not only Stargate Command but the other races. We made it harder for ourselves than maybe we should have. But the idea that every race was gonna have its own arc…

David Read:
It’s a big game

Christopher Klug:
… means we’re writing the Free Jaffa story, and the Goa’uld story, and the Asgard story. I think there were three races of good guys and three races of bad guys. I can’t remember now. But anyway, this slide’s about where we are when the game starts. And then we go to the next slide, which is the big reveal, which is that we were gonna reboot Ra. I remember vividly that this slide was the slide we were nervous about.

David Read:
Of course!

Christopher Klug:
Because we needed Brad’s OK to do this. We put this right at the beginning of the deck because if he was gonna get nervous, we wanted him not to sit there for 45 minutes and then get nervous. We wanted him to get nervous at the beginning and say, “Stop. Explain what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.” Because rather than back-ending the big reveal and having him feel like, “Oh, I liked all that, but now I have to approve this.” If he was gonna say, “Nope, this doesn’t work for me,” he would say it now. But he didn’t. I remember him being sort of like, “Well, of course you would do that.”

David Read:
Really?

Christopher Klug:
In the sense of he could see the story rationale for it. In other words, if we’re gonna make this show feel familiar to the core fan base, the discussion as I remember it went sort of like this: Do we invent a brand-new villain that they’ve never met, or do we bring somebody back that they know and would love to get another shot at?

Katie Postma:
And this captures people that aren’t fans of SG-1, but the original movie as well. Because this is a familiar villain to both camps.

David Read:
And there’s a pre-existing lore to that.

Katie Postma:
So, you don’t have to have seen the SG, you don’t have to have seen SG-1 to jump in and understand what’s going on. If you’re a fan of the….

Christopher Klug:
Setting it at the end of that season allows us to mine and not have to reinvent all of the known lore of the way the universe works and who the bad guys are and what their story is. We can step right in and leverage it. That idea keys up everywhere that we were gonna go from there on. We were inventing new stuff. We came up with this version of humans called OP-CORE, which was sort of a dissident political group. I’m laughing ’cause, yes, we invented many things, including power armor.

David Read:
You have to go somewhere.

Christopher Klug:
We can talk about that. ‘Cause that was one of the more humorous situations we got ourselves into. But there has to be things in the game that they couldn’t do on TV, and Brad was very gracious about saying, “Sure, of course. I would do power armor, but I can’t afford to.”

David Read:
That’s the thing.

Christopher Klug:
Sort of thing. There were things that the game could do and explore that you can’t really do on TV. And we were gonna do that. I’m glad you put this slide up. So, there were six playable races. Stargate Union comprised of the three good races. And then the bad guys were the Goa’uld, the Fundamentalist Jaffa, and the renegade humans were the OP-CORE. I’m pretty sure the name Praxis was a name that we invented. Each player race has their own journey from character creation to level cap told through a series of missions. That’s how it starts. I remember having a discussion about… was Brad gonna understand a fundamental distinction, which was in a TV show set to explain the relationship between the Stargate characters, the humans. They’re not all humans. Why were we gonna complicate the story by doing these other races and indeed having to write six stories, not one story. Some of that was the thing that was normal in an MMO at the time was this idea that you had elves, and dwarves, and humans, and lizard people, and whatever, and it was part of the…

Katie Postma:
How did they get here?

Christopher Klug:
… part of the fun was playing something that you weren’t. Fantasize that you are an elf. Fantasize that you are a dragonborn, to quote a D&D race. And we felt it was important to be able to deliver that in an MMO about Stargate. But man, that’s part of what makes MMOs really hard to deliver is… that breadth. It’s like this really expensive to put together buffet, and you’re feeding everybody. And you can’t really do something like Horizon Zero Dawn does, which focuses on one character and tells the story through their eyes, and everybody who plays it plays that character. What brings people to an MMO is playing a bunch of different characters. So, it makes it hard to do. Go ahead.

Katie Postma:
Can you speak to… I remember Star Wars Online was out, or soon to be out. They had a dilemma of everyone wants to be Luke. Or 80% of people want to be Luke. Can you speak about the decision to have — I believe I’m right — that any of the heroes that we see on TV would not be playable. You couldn’t be O’Neill and you couldn’t be Jackson.

Christopher Klug:
Boy, that’s…. No, I’m rolling my eyes a little bit because that’s not just an MMO design challenge, that’s a design challenge in almost any character-driven adventure game.

Katie Postma:
Pre-existing IP.

Christopher Klug:
The problem of pre-existing IP.

Katie Postma:
Where you wanna be Lara Croft.

Christopher Klug:
Or… It happens in Lord of the Rings games where — do you really wanna allow people to play Gimli, or Legolas, or Gandalf, or Aragorn, or whatever? And the games tend to treat that choice very carefully depending on who their core demo is. MMOs are essentially saying, this is a universe you know really well — if it’s based on an IP like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings. You know the stories that those characters did. Have done. Are doing, depending on the show. And you’re also gonna do adventures that are like that, but they’re gonna be your own. If we weren’t doing an MMO, if we were doing an adventure game where you were gonna replicate the stories, or replicate the original team and their dynamic, you’d probably wanna use those characters and lean into… If you’re gonna do a multiplayer game, sure, then they can all play one member. If you’re gonna do a solitaire game…

Katie Postma:
You can choose one of the four and have the other three as NPCs.

Christopher Klug:
You choose one of the four main ones and lean into it. But MMOs, by their definition, you’re existing… It’s all coming back to me now. I’m sort of glad you brought this up, because that was a really early conversation with Brad about how are we gonna stay separate if you’re telling stories about these characters and so am I? And I was like, “No, we’re not using those characters.” And he said, “Why wouldn’t you?” His first gut reaction was, “But it’s about those characters.”

Katie Postma:
But you can’t have 500 Jacksons and 800 O’Neills.

Christopher Klug:
The thing that happens in an MMO, especially when it first launches, is you sort of walk into this world and it’s crowded. And not so much anymore, depending on the server, depending on what’s happening.

Katie Postma:
I remember you telling me the first time you saw Ironforge, you’re like, “Wait…”

Christopher Klug:
It was unbelievable, because they’re all…

Katie Postma:
“Nothing prepares you.”

Christopher Klug:
… they’re all real people.

David Read:
That’s right.

Christopher Klug:
The little dude running down the hallway is somebody in Portugal. Or whatever. It’s an astonishing idea. And I was explaining to him, Brad, that that’s what the game is like. It’s lots of people running around in that universe doing their own thing. And it’s exhilarating when it feels that way, when it feels like it’s crowded. If you’re in Cheyenne Mountain, you’re there with a bunch of people who all wanna play good guys, and they’re all gonna go on missions. And these missions are all gonna be about pushing back Ra’s new incursion, and that’s all a shared fantasy world that you’re living in.

Katie Postma:
And this was so new. It was still very, very new. It wasn’t like now where you log in and you expect to see hundreds of people, and you expect this concurrency. It was very new. It was very, very new. There was UO a little bit, and there was EQ, of course. But WoW wasn’t out yet.

Christopher Klug:
No.

Katie Postma:
It was, but it was brand spanking new when we were starting development.

Christopher Klug:
I remember I had been hired and had gone out and met the team, and it was just before Christmas of that year.

David Read:
So, this is ’06.

Katie Postma:
Five? Five.

David Read:
Was it ’05?

Christopher Klug:
Let me think. ’05. It was Christmas of ’05.

David Read:
Wow, excuse me.

Christopher Klug:
No, it’s fine. I didn’t move to Mesa until January of ’06. Sitting in Joe’s office, and I’m like, “OK, Joe, what do you want me to do over Christmas?” And we knew about the assignment from Brad at that point, so I knew what you were doing.

Katie Postma:
I know what you’re gonna say.

Christopher Klug:
And Joe said, “Just play WoW.”

Christopher Klug:
“Just play WoW. We’re all playing WoW. I want everybody to play WoW, because…”

Katie Postma:
And he told you which guild, which server. I remember.

Christopher Klug:
And that was because it was so influential. It had been out a year. It launched in November of ’04.

Katie Postma:
’04. That’s right.

Christopher Klug:
WoW’s success… Let me think. When I left EA, they had really soured on MMOs because Earth & Beyond didn’t do the numbers that they really wanted, and The Sims Online…

Katie Postma:
Ubisoft was the same.

Christopher Klug:
… The Sims Online had really tanked.

David Read:
Wow. That’s right, Sims Online.

Christopher Klug:
And I was sitting in the vice president’s office, sort of figuring out what I was gonna do now, and he said — I’m not gonna say his name — but he said to me, “For as long as I work in this company, we’re never gonna do another MMO. It’s a failed business idea.” And that was two years before WoW launched. And then after WoW launched, they bought Dark Age of Camelot because they realized that WoW had shown that it could be successful if you made it fun and didn’t make it hard to play. There’s another YouTube series out hosted by the woman who was the vice president at Microsoft while the EverQuest team had gone on to do another game, and this debate, how easy do you make an MMO, was still a big debate. There was this whole group of developers who believed that MMOs had to be hard. We were gonna follow WoW. We weren’t gonna make Stargate hard. We were gonna make it fun. The demo for Stargate was different than WoW or Dark Age of Camelot because the fan base was different.

Katie Postma:
More mature.

Christopher Klug:
More mature. More women.

Katie Postma:
More tech savvy.

Christopher Klug:
More tech savvy.

Katie Postma:
That was a huge, huge part of it.

Christopher Klug:
And that’s why we had the class that was a puzzle-solving class.

Katie Postma:
David’s laughing too, because the whole mini-games thing. David’s bringing people who are fans of the show, and I was bringing people who were fans of the Myst universe and fans of WoW. We were going to our — whenever we needed a new influx of fresh blood, that’s where we were going. We were each going back to our own original wells. If puzzles have anything to do with that, I’m sorry.

Christopher Klug:
The design regret I’ve got is that that idea that you would advance through the game by being good at mini games, I wish we had gotten a chance to see whether that worked or not. Because it was designed so that you didn’t have to like combat, or you didn’t have to focus on combat to succeed in the game.

Katie Postma:
You had another path.

David Read:
That’s so cool.

Christopher Klug:
You had another path.

David Read:
You could take the path of Daniel.

Christopher Klug:
Exactly right. You gotta build the combat systems first. You gotta test them. Oh, my Lord in heaven, the whole debate about the cover system and how long that took to… Oi! But you have to do it first, because if that’s not balanced, your whole world-building falls apart. But because of that, the dev time that really you needed to see whether the puzzle-solving thing could work; it never happened. I remember thinking, after Stargate, the Telltale Games idea of doing IP that was mainly storytelling hadn’t happened yet. That came in the next four or five years. And they were more focused on that kind of storytelling.

Katie Postma:
It’s fascinating to me — as this series continues, David, you’re gonna learn, it’s incredibly fascinating, the proponents of each aspect of the game. Like Chris being like, “Can we finish the combat so we can get into more of the story?” But Dan can talk to you for three hours about how incredibly awesome and thrilling the combat was.

Christopher Klug:
This is so interesting.

Katie Postma:
I’m not saying it’s good or bad, I’m saying it’s fascinating that…

David Read:
Everyone has a different thing of meat and potatoes.

Katie Postma:
And there’s so many moving parts.

David Read:
Everyone’s meat and potatoes are a little different.

David Read:
And they’re all valid.

Katie Postma:
There’re so many moving parts that, of course, you have to wait for certain things. We had to wait for art, we had to wait for cliffs, we have to wait for… Everything’s so incredibly complex and layered in such a way that until you’re sitting there living it, waiting for these deliverables, you can’t even understand. I have to go work on this now because this part that I’m waiting for, there’s no way I can have that by Tuesday.

Christopher Klug:
I’m glad you circled back, because what I meant by that comment was, I knew — having worked on Earth & Beyond — I knew that you could tell a deep, interesting story in an MMO universe. I’d done it. The user data that we had showed that it was the most popular part of that game.

David Read:
It was working.

Katie Postma:
They’re still playing it today.

Christopher Klug:
It was working.

Katie Postma:
People are still playing it on private servers right now.

Christopher Klug:
… shh, shh, shh. No, I’m laughing only ’cause…

Katie Postma:
But it worked.

Christopher Klug:
… nobody cares. Nobody cares. But it is true. It is true.

Katie Postma:
I care.

Christopher Klug:
I was the ambassador for that segment of our user base.

David Read:
Yes, you were. I think it’s one of the reasons we got along so well.

Christopher Klug:
Because I knew the design staff, we had built could deliver an interesting combat system. The downside of the combat system wasn’t whether it worked. It took so long to build levels. That was the problem.

Katie Postma:
Complex.

Christopher Klug:
Complex. I knew that I had assembled a really good staff of writers. Sean had worked with me on Earth & Beyond. Brian Heins had worked with me on Earth & Beyond. They had seen it work and knew how to twist the dials to make it interesting. Garvin, his credentials speak for themselves.

David Read:
Speak for themselves.

Christopher Klug:
But the risky part was this mini game thing, because nobody had ever really done it. Finding the right lead designer to handle it was an ongoing challenge.

Katie Postma:
Who did it? Or what series of people?

Christopher Klug:
What series? I can’t remember who we interviewed, but we ended up using Steve because I couldn’t find the person who really wanted to do it. In retrospect, if I’m gonna point a finger here, what I should’ve done is let Sean and Garvin handle the story, and I should’ve done it. That’s probably what I should’ve done. But anyway.

David Read:
Let’s have a look at more of the deck.

Christopher Klug:
Sure. I’ll see what else is in here.

David Read:
And so, we begin. The SGC. Stargate Command. Who are the players?

Katie Postma:
It’s so pretty.

Christopher Klug:
Go to the next slide. Go back one. This slide is essentially telling Brad, “We understand what makes your show work.” Because Brad had talked about…

David Read:
The right stuff

Christopher Klug:
… the challenges of writing for the O’Neill character. Because what he brought to the show was part of the core demo. Women liked him, and he liked being funny. And that brought both of those qualities to the universe. Not that the other actors didn’t know how to handle comedy, but it was especially part of what made him charismatic.

David Read:
God, it was unique.

Katie Postma:
That cynicism.

Christopher Klug:
And the thing that I remember us struggling with a little bit was — doing humor is tough. It’s interesting where it worked. Your typical MMO delivery system is very few characters are voice overed. Elder Scrolls hadn’t happened yet — where they voice overed everybody. So, you’re dealing with cost and production issues. We wanted to VO the main actors, but not everybody. But often comedy comes through performance. The words in the box, writing them so that they land as being humorous, is very challenging…

David Read:
That’s correct.

Christopher Klug:
… in an environment like that. Elder Scrolls did it, ’cause… didn’t they hire some Monty Python people? I can’t remember who they cast. I remember some of their writers talking about the fact that they could almost cast anybody when they did that, and they hired a lot of really talented actors to deliver the funny. That slide, I remember sitting it in there so that Brad was reassured that tonally we weren’t gonna go way off over here and do something else.

David Read:
It has to be whimsical.

Christopher Klug:
The whimsy had to be in there someplace.

Katie Postma:
And yes, John Cleese was a voice actor.

Christopher Klug:
Yes, yes. That’s who I’m thinking of.

David Read:
Makes total sense.

Christopher Klug:
And navigating the negotiations with the actors was gonna be challenging in the following way. It was sort of like what Katie was saying before of Shanks realizing, “This is real.” Because actors being actors are worried about more work, because it’s such a hard industry to be successful in. Going to do interviews in YouTube channels wasn’t quite the industry it was gonna become. But that whole circuit of conventions and stars, and… the actress who played Starbuck on Battlestar has her own…

David Read:
Katee Sackhoff has her own show, where she’s re-watching the series now, and everyone is eating it up, as well am I.

Christopher Klug:
But also, a lot of what she’s talked about is, thank God for the convention circuit. But it’s now an important part of an actor’s…

David Read:
Bread and butter.

Christopher Klug:
… career. Bread and butter, that’s exactly right. So, until we had credibility — meaning the game was out, and the actors were gonna see the opportunities for them — Critical Role hadn’t happened yet. That whole universe of this alternate revenue stream was not really obvious to the…

Katie Postma:
And I don’t think you even had those talent tie-ins to WoW. Remember you had Mr. T, and you had all these people that were playing. None of that had quite happened yet.

Christopher Klug:
None of that had happened yet.

David Read:
I’m William Shatner, and I’m a Night Elf Shaman, or whatever it was. What’s your game?

Katie Postma:
That’s right. Those weren’t out until I think Seven or Eight.

Christopher Klug:
We couldn’t even think about, “Maybe we’ll be able to use these performers on a regular basis.” We were really only thinking about it for launch. That it would be an advantage if we had a handful of these performers in the game so that the casual fan, and in my mind, the casual fan was the player who was playing a character who advances through the game through mini-games. That casual fan would come into the game to go up to O’Neill and say hello, and that moment had to land somehow. Convincing Brad, in this presentation, that we understood all that was part of why we did it. As every slide comes up, I’m reliving the meetings we had about… This is all written from the point of view of the casual fan, because we knew… Do you remember the OP-CORE teaser?

David Read:
The one that Nick made that was an early…

Christopher Klug:
It was an animatic. Eric and Steve Garvin created it. Steve Garvin did the voiceover. I have it someplace.

David Read:
And Nick has it on his reel, and I will get it.

Christopher Klug:
So, if you…

Katie Postma:
He voices in it too, I think, right?

Christopher Klug:
What? I’m sorry?

David Read:
It’s one guy.

Katie Postma:
Go ahead. No.

David Read:
It’s one guy writing a letter.

Katie Postma:
One guy yelling or something. OK.

Christopher Klug:
Writing a letter. Yes.

Steve Garvin [voiceover]:
Dearest Jess, I don’t know where to start. How have you been? I miss you. I miss my boy. I bet he’s big now. I’m alive. I’m sure you didn’t know that. I’m alive. In my cage. Time stands still here. My days are a mixture of boredom and dread and thoughts of the past. Never believe what they tell you, Jess. They have no honor. They had us do their dirty work, and then they got caught playing a game by the wrong set of rules, and instead of acting with honor, they turned us into the criminals. We’re not criminals. We’re soldiers, just like our fathers. They’re moving me today. Into storage, like an old box you don’t want to throw away quite yet. But there’s hope, Jess. There are a few of us left out there. And Marines never leave their guys behind. And I’ll tell you this, if we ever get out, we’ll make the rules.

Christopher Klug:
That teaser, while it’s effective, isn’t written for the established casual fan of Stargate. It has no real internal reference to stuff that a fan of the show would have seen already. They don’t tell you what OP-CORE is. It’s written for a gamer to understand what the game is about. We were really aware of the fact that the game’s marketing — the bits we were gonna be dropping, that you or Katie were gonna be dropping to the fan base — had to be created in such a way about who especially they were gonna target, because every segment of that population was gonna look for different things in the game to attract them as to why they were gonna play. That slide that you had up was really written for the casual fan. Essentially, it’s saying you’re gonna spend your first 15 minutes talking to O’Neill.

David Read:
We’re getting your feet wet.

Christopher Klug:
Yeah, we’re getting your feet wet.

Katie Postma:
And there’s no other person in the world that you should meet first than O’Neill.

David Read:
Especially at that point in the series.

Christopher Klug:
Especially if you’re that fan.

David Read:
And the end of Season Eight. Or they’ve gotten back from fishing.

Christopher Klug:
David, did you and I ever talk about that I went to undergrad school with Erick Avari?

David Read:
Yes. I sent you a message a few years ago. I finally managed to get Erick Narry to respond. He says hello, by the way.

Christopher Klug:
I’m using Erick, but I knew him as Narry. Anyway.

David Read:
Absolutely. OK.

Christopher Klug:
This is interesting. The way we wrote this slide, we were essentially… This whole deck was, can we deliver what a playthrough of the game will feel like to Brad, even though that playthrough might take six months or some long period of…

Katie Postma:
This is the quest arc.

Christopher Klug:
This is the quest arc.

Katie Postma:
And there’s gonna be side quests, and there’s gonna be all kinds of other things to do. But this is the story advancing.

Christopher Klug:
So, if you look at that slide, it’s all written in verbs. You do this, you do this, you do this, you do this. To make it clear to Brad that you’re not watching stuff happen, you’re doing stuff. My memory is it was crafted that way especially because we were worried that he wouldn’t understand what you were doing. There’s no exposition. There’s no sort of context to it. The context is provided by the game. All of these slides, one after the other, present you with, you’re going from event to event, and that you’re unlocking the next event by completing the one before it. And as Katie said, it’s a series of missions linked together.

Katie Postma:
Can I say how absolutely tickled I was, that’s the best verb I can think of, for when I realized that one of the first things you did in the game was go to the beta site, and that was where all our primary beta testing was happening. That made me so happy. That warmed the cockles of my heart because it was one of those things, ’cause I sat and helped run that, first the alpha and then the beta, for so long. But the fact that people landed at the beta site was… Anyway, that made me super happy.

Christopher Klug:
What part of it tickled your fancy? I’m curious.

Katie Postma:
Because I’m inviting people to sign up on our beta-testing site so that when they go in the game, they can join us at the beta site. It just made me…

David Read:
There’s something that flows

Christopher Klug:
That’s what I thought you were…

Katie Postma:
It was so great

Christopher Klug:
… alluding to.

Katie Postma:
Because we are, in the game, like in life, we need your help here. We need you to test this. Things are murky. We need you to find the problems and help us fix them. So, it was art imitating life in the best way for a…

Christopher Klug:
That’s nice.

Katie Postma:
[inaudible]

Christopher Klug:
That’s really nice.

David Read:
I love that I’m remembering, but I’m delighted to see that we did something with the time-traveling puddle jumper because there’s two or three of them at this point floating around, and the series addresses none of them. So, I’m glad that we took advantage of this here in the story.

Christopher Klug:
So, couple things. Did we tell you the sort of in-joke about the Furlings that we discovered?

David Read:
No.

Katie Postma:
No.

David Read:
Probably, but I don’t remember.

Christopher Klug:
So, fans were wondering what Furlings were.

David Read:
That’s right.

Christopher Klug:
Nobody knew. So, we asked Brad in this meeting, “What’s with the Furlings?” And he said, “I don’t know.” There was no mystery. They invented the word. And he said, “Do whatever you want with them.” So that was great.

Katie Postma:
That’s right. They’re never seen on the show, are they?

David Read:
Not in canon, no. They’re seen as giant koalas in the 200th episode to give fans some fun.

Christopher Klug:
Oh, really?

Katie Postma:
I remember that. That’s great.

Christopher Klug:
So, these costumes for the new Goa’uld are astonishing.

David Read:
Eric Belisle, Howard, they were geniuses.

Christopher Klug:
I know. Unbelievable. Look at that. It’s amazing. It’s such a shame that these were never built. Oh, Firesky. That was the name of the company.

Katie Postma:
Yeah, it was. When you were being interviewed, it was CME initially. That’s what it started out as.

Christopher Klug:
Right, it was Firesky.

Katie Postma:
Firesky was going to be the publishing branch. CME was making Stargate, and then there were other teams making other things. And Firesky was the overarching… became Firesky.

Christopher Klug:
Man, this would’ve been… The fans would’ve eaten this up, I think.

David Read:
I agree.

Christopher Klug:
Howard has been gracious to me particularly in that he’s made three or four visits to the school and worked with young artists, grad students. And going back to the very first question you asked me, which was how much do you talk about Stargate, I talk about it mainly through the art direction, and I do that because Howard gave me the library. I can pull up these sketches as examples of… here’s the story that I tell. So, young game designers are under the misapprehension that their job in the future will be to spout brilliant ideas and have everybody build them. Doesn’t happen. Doesn’t happen.

Katie Postma:
Never happens.

Christopher Klug:
Everything is a collaboration. Everything. The story I tell, and Steve often tells the same story about MO and Eric. And it goes like this. So, we would have a weekly meeting in the art department, Steve and I, or Sean when Sean was in that job, and they would show us stuff that they were working on for feedback. And we were struggling with what the Goa’uld were gonna look like. Everybody was struggling because they weren’t the old Goa’uld because the Goa’uld had been eradicated. I have that right. Right, David?

David Read:
That’s correct.

Christopher Klug:
They had to be the new Goa’uld in whatever way that meant. Whatever new meant. I forget the justification, but we needed the Goa’uld because they were so cool that we were all like, “Why did you kill them off?” Anyway.

Katie Postma:
Goa’uld: The Next Generation.

Christopher Klug:
We were brainstorming how to justify narratively these other Goa’uld. And one of the two artists, I don’t remember which one, Howard might remember, came up with this idea of having them be descendants of French haute couture designers. That Gaultier was essentially a Gould, if you lean into that idea.

Katie Postma:
That’s very fitting.

Christopher Klug:
Isn’t it?

Katie Postma:
Immediately you can see it, and everything it conjures is right there.

Christopher Klug:
Correct.

David Read:
And they’re gonna be very snazzy.

Christopher Klug:
That idea didn’t come from any of the design staff. It came from the art team. And we said, “Hmmm, that’s interesting.” And then those sketches started to appear. And the whole idea of who the Goa’uld were, the new Goa’uld, and how they fit into the universe was not driven by the design team, it was driven by the art team. And the game would have been so much better if we had built it and watched the fan reaction to those Goa’uld influenced so much by the clothing that they wore. It’s a shame it never happened, but I use that as an example of you gotta let the best idea win.

David Read:
That’s right. You can’t sit on your–

Katie Postma:
Collaborate.

Christopher Klug:
It doesn’t matter where it comes from. I almost hauled the whole library out again this semester. I was working on a team with an artist, really talented, very skillful craftsperson artist, who had never worked with a game designer who had an opinion about the way stuff looked. And the first time this student delivered artwork, I said, “No, it’s not there yet.” “What do you mean it’s not there yet?” I’m like, “It’s not there yet. It’s not in line with the overall direction of the game.” And it floored him, not because he agreed or didn’t agree or whatever. He didn’t expect that opinion coming from somebody not on the art team. And I’m like, “Let me go over this. It’s our game, not your game. And we all get to give you, our thoughts.” And that idea, just because you call yourself a game designer or an artist, doesn’t mean you own all the rights to those ideas.

Katie Postma:
Or even your part.

Christopher Klug:
Brad was so gracious to all of us. Once he understood that we weren’t going to deliver a universe that was only one small sliver of the one he had crafted with his team, that we were gonna embrace all of it, once that happened early on, he was really welcoming to all of us, and treated us as collaborators.

Katie Postma:
He was lovely.

Christopher Klug:
When it went south and he had already committed, I forget, maybe they had shot the first…

David Read:
Stargate Revolution

Christopher Klug:
… pilot of Universe. He’d already committed to sticking that snippet in the pilot. That’s my memory, anyway. I could almost hear in his voice the frustration with those silly game companies. “Just ship.”

Katie Postma:
Who broke the news to him? Was it you?

Christopher Klug:
I don’t know. It might’ve been me. I don’t know. I don’t remember. Once things started to go south, I speculate there was a debate about how much we should tell him.

Katie Postma:
And when.

Christopher Klug:
And when

Katie Postma:
Because it was day to day. We all were all holding out for a miracle.

Christopher Klug:
No, it was. This is sort of a little inside baseball, but you know when I knew we were in trouble? I think I might’ve told you this, Katie. When finance came to me and said, “So, do we really have to pay the actors up front when they show up for the voiceover?” And I was like, “What? Yeah! Holy shit, yeah!”

Katie Postma:
Why are you asking that?

Christopher Klug:
‘A’, why are you asking? ‘B’, because they don’t wanna get ripped off. Right? ‘Cause once they do the voiceover, it’s done. Once the little tape machine’s wheels are turning and their voice is on the tape…

Katie Postma:
Now we have it.

Christopher Klug:
… now we have it. They wanna get paid. And then what you do with it is up to you, within the boundaries…

David Read:
Of course.

Christopher Klug:
… of your agreement.

Katie Postma:
They’ve done their job.

Christopher Klug:
They delivered the fire when ready. You then get to do with it what you want. And I was like, “Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Why are you asking?” is exactly right.

Katie Postma:
What a horrible thing.

Christopher Klug:
I don’t know.

Katie Postma:
So, that’s when you had your moment of, “Uh-oh.”

Christopher Klug:
Because Brad had been so gracious to us, I felt doubly bad. I felt bad for me. I felt bad for everybody. ‘Cause he had other things to worry about. He had three shows. I can’t even imagine the workload.

Katie Postma:
And two movies.

Christopher Klug:
Oh, the movies. Oh my God, I forgot about the movies.

David Read:
For sure. No, there was a lot going on there. I went up to Bridge, this would’ve been spring of 2009. I was told that it was basically over at this point. And Brad hadn’t really known for sure at that point. The whole thing was a mess. I knew that it was done. I may have conveyed one thing or another at that point. I got into a bit of trouble. The game became Stargate Resistance not long after that. So, what was gonna be was not anymore. I don’t even know if Chris, you were still there in spring 2009.

Christopher Klug:
I’m trying to think of the sequence of events.

Katie Postma:
You had moved back at least, I think, by then.

Christopher Klug:
I think that, like everybody else, I was running out of money to do things like pay rent.

David Read:
Of course. The bills.

Christopher Klug:
The bills, exactly right. There was definitely a time when — I can’t remember his name — the Australian–

Katie Postma:
Jeremy.

Christopher Klug:
Jeremy.

Katie Postma:
Taylor.

Christopher Klug:
He and I–

David Read:
New Zealander. Yes.

Christopher Klug:
Yes. Sorry. Yes, correct. He was tasked with doing some sort of PR work, maybe for Resistance. And he and I had a decent relationship, and he would run things by me to get somebody else to read it.

Katie Postma:
He was smart.

Christopher Klug:
No, I’m saying. I helped out after I had moved back to Pittsburgh.

David Read:
Wow. Good for you, Chris.

Christopher Klug:
It was fine. It was complicated. I’m gonna back up for a second.

David Read:
You’re OK.

Christopher Klug:
Game industry, the last two years, it’s been rough. It’s sad to say that other companies have been put in positions like we were put in at the time. Katie knows what I’m talking about here. So, the running out of money thing is horrible on everybody. It’s horrible on everybody concerned. So, I’m not gonna sit here and say, “What they should have done was A or B or C,” because everybody’s situation is different. It’s one thing when I have a former student who was working on an MMO that Microsoft stopped middle of the summer last year. Can’t remember when they did it. They pulled the plug on a bunch of games. And that was, on Friday they were employed, on Monday they weren’t. It was very cut and dry. Microsoft said, “Nope, sorry. We’re gonna pay you some kind of severance, but we’re done.”

Katie Postma:
What year was that?

Christopher Klug:
It was last year.

Katie Postma:
Yes, OK. That’s right.

Christopher Klug:
The unannounced Zeni Project is the one I’m talking about. And Microsoft was funding that, and they stopped. But it’s horrible, but there wasn’t three months of dragging it out like we had. Which is a different dynamic because we were in that space, Katie, of, “We’re gonna keep working on it.” And you can stay if you want to, but you don’t have to. It was horrible.

Katie Postma:
But it makes you feel… It’s the shittiest thing, ’cause it makes you feel like you’re disloyal if you don’t. Like feeding the kids and your…

David Read:
Let’s put the ball in your court here. Would you like to eat or not eat? And loyalty. That’s not the first time we’ve heard the word loyalty thrown around in this series.

Katie Postma:
Some people say — they say it really graciously — like, “We know you need to pay rent. We know you need to move on. We’re gonna still be here, but please do what you need to do.” And then there’s other people that say, “Well, they’re staying and I’m staying.”

Christopher Klug:
I know.

Katie Postma:
And it’s a shitty way to do it, ’cause you feel like if you don’t….

Christopher Klug:
It was awful.

Katie Postma:
It’s awful.

Christopher Klug:
Having lived through that, I made mistakes, others made mistakes. So, in the last two years, when on LinkedIn you’ll see people criticizing how A or B or C handled it, I’m like, until you’ve been through it, you don’t know what you’re gonna do.

Katie Postma:
You don’t know.

Christopher Klug:
I made the decision to help Jeremy because I liked him and he was in a rough spot.

Katie Postma:
But you’re also thinking about the fans, the public, what’s being seen. Not just the people doing it, but who’s seeing it. I know you’re thinking…

Christopher Klug:
All of that.

Katie Postma:
… all the aspects.

Christopher Klug:
All that. The question you guys asked, which was, when did Brad find out? How did Brad find out? I have a memory of maybe not being the one that broke the news. I don’t remember that. I might have blocked that out. But I remember talking to him. And the frustration in his voice when they had committed. They had committed, we had committed, everybody had committed, and now it wasn’t gonna happen, was palpable to me in the call.

David Read:
The one other document that I must have, Chris, if you will indulge me, is the document that was used to convince Brad that, yes, this guy gets the nature of the show. I love that document.

Christopher Klug:
I’ve got that someplace. I sent the document out. The meeting was on Tuesday. I sent it out probably Friday. I show up in the writer’s room. Everybody’s there. Martin is there, and the others whose names escape me now. Brad is the last one in the door. And he comes in, and the thing is he stapled it and folded it and dog-eared it, and there’s color coding in it. I’m like, “He read it. Holy shit. He read it.”

David Read:
No, he did his homework.

Christopher Klug:
But that was what impressed me, is he didn’t walk in and say, “Re-pitch it to me.” That’s what I was expecting. He had read it and knew it, and knew what we were doing. That told me a lot. Yes. I’ll find that document and send it to you.

Katie Postma:
That was probably the nascence of him trusting you, and you understanding that he was gonna do what he could in his power and limited time and scope to support you. Say what you will about it being every two or three months, when you guys spoke, it was on a foundation of trust and mutual respect and understanding that is hard to get these days. In those days.

Christopher Klug:
I’m really convinced the difference in terms of his history with game developers came from the fact that when we talked briefly about my background and his background, is that we are both theater people originally.

David Read:
That’s right. He’s a playwright at his core. I swear to God.

Christopher Klug:
He’s like, “Oh, well then we speak the same lingo.” And on the day that the three of us flew up there, Garvin and Sean and I, Sean stayed for the pitch, but then Sean had to leave and fly out, so it was Garvin and I for the rest of the afternoon. Eventually, we tag-teamed our way through the pitch. I gave some of it, Sean gave some of it, and Steve gave some of it. Lunch, and we’re chatting, and I remember that day Brad was struggling to get an actor who I won’t mention the actor’s name, to get on a plane to fly to a shoot that had to happen at a certain moment. And he was frustrated. Wrangling actors.

Katie Postma:
Cat herding. Yep.

Christopher Klug:
Cat herding. That’s exactly right. Garvin made some comment because he was trained as an actor, was an actor for a while. And immediately, as soon as that happened, the door was open to stories. And who have you worked with and blah, blah, blah. And a good friend of Garvin’s, who I also knew a teeny, tiny bit, was Holly Hunter. Holly had been at Carnegie when I was there. I knew her a little bit. Steve met her in LA, knew her better than I knew her. When you’re in that world, you start swapping, “Well, there was this time when blah, blah, blah.” And once Brad realized that we had a shared background, Steve, Brad, and I, he started hauling out these stories about cast members. “Wait a minute. There was this time when blah, blah, blah.” I was like, “Oh my God.”

Katie Postma:
These are the stories you don’t wanna hear about your favorite show. So, as long as it’s not… sometimes you don’t wanna hear this.

Christopher Klug:
And what it spoke of to me and to Steve was that he trusted us.

Katie Postma:
Yeah, for sure. He knows it’s not leaving the room.

Christopher Klug:
He wouldn’t have told those stories about actor X. “I’m not even gonna tell them to you.” Because, really? Holy shit.

Katie Postma:
No, the vault is shut.

Christopher Klug:
The vault is shut. And I remember flying back, Steve and I were like, “What a nice guy.” Getting back to Stargate the game for a minute, Katie and I had that moment with the power armor. So, the TV ad comes out. Where they showed an SG member in power armor. And the fans go nuts. “That’s not the show. How dare they?” And Brad was just like…

Katie Postma:
Because our earliest audience wasn’t based on gamers. It was based on Stargate.

David Read:
It’s a budget thing, guys. Every Goa’uld would have had their own helmet if they had the money to do it.

Katie Postma:
No, but we can’t… how much do you say? We can’t make it about that.

Christopher Klug:
I think I probably said to him, “You need to be aware that they’re going crazy over the power armor,” blah, blah, blah, blah. And he laughed it off because he said, “I’ve lost count of the number of things that the audience doesn’t understand about the realities of making a television show.” Budget being number one.

Katie Postma:
People would joke on forums week after week about other things that were being filmed at Bridge, saying, “Oh, that looks like that planet that we…” Because they were the same locations over and over again that we saw. And I remember there were times… You have to do what you have to do. There were times where there’d be a planet, and it would look identical to the planet they visited the week before, so they’d do a filter.

Christopher Klug:
Like you said, every planet looks like green woods because all they had to do…

David Read:
Brad was asked this at one point, and he put it in one of the illustrated companions for SG-1, and I quote him, “For budgetary reasons, we have to shoot on Earth.” So, that’s all there is to it.

Katie Postma:
I love that. That’s exactly it.

David Read:
Do what you can.

Katie Postma:
Not everybody can fly two robots to Tunisia. We’ve gotta do with what we have.

David Read:
Let me say this. You only had so much bandwidth every single week, and the fact that you made an hour available to me every single week for a meeting where I essentially got to sit down, me and you one on one, and have a 400-level course gifted to me, downloaded to me every week, I will never forget that because I so appreciated that you took the time to explain your process to me so that I really got it. Every week we would have this meeting, and sometimes we would go to Ted’s Hot Dogs. Regardless, it was one of my favorite times every week that I looked forward to.

Katie Postma:
Chris is first and foremost the teacher, ’cause he did the same with me. Always teaching.

Christopher Klug:
I do appreciate that. But the thing I’ll add in that environment was you really need to get the gaming public on your side. In an environment where the game is gonna be live, the more that the audience has your back, the easier your job was. The inspiration, aside from the teaching thing, which I certainly agree with after all these years doing it, but when Babylon 5 came out, I’m sure you remember the way Straczynski spent time on CompuServe introducing the universe before the show launched, and how eloquent he was speaking about how much runway that granted him with the audience, that they were already pre-sold on the idea of the universe…

David Read:
And a single story.

Christopher Klug:
… because he had spent time with them online.

Katie Postma:
And seeding the ground of those early adopters is so important because then when people come in, if they wanna naysay, if they wanna be there to troll, you already have this battalion, for lack of a better word, of people who are like, “No, you know what? We don’t need that here. Here’s where we’re at. Meet us where we already are.”

Christopher Klug:
And when I was hired for Earth and Beyond, the number of offices in the building at Westwood were limited. You didn’t have any of those big bullpens like we had. And I got placed in with the community manager.

Katie Postma:
You loved her.

Christopher Klug:
And she’s now the creative director of the mission group at Blizzard, by the way. So, if you’re playing WoW these days, you’re playing her content. I learned from her the tricky nature of managing an audience in a live game, ’cause Earth and Beyond wasn’t live when I started, but we were pretty quickly in beta. You’re then running a live game. By the time I began at Cheyenne…

Katie Postma:
You knew.

Christopher Klug:
… I was very aware that this relationship was something that I needed to pay attention to. And going back to the earlier discussion we were having about the established audience for the television show, because I wasn’t a Stargate fan before the project began, David, you were my conduit to that audience. And when you verbalized a thought, whatever that thought might be, about power armor, not that you did, but I’ll use that as an example, I paid attention because for the game to compete in a world where Blizzard’s audience was gonna play WoW no matter what, ’cause they were such loyal Blizzard fans, the leverage that we had was to leverage the television show’s audience. And having struggled with Earth and Beyond to try to educate people about the way that universe functioned, when there were no novels, no television series, no compendium online anywhere, the only thing the players were learning was what was happening in the game while they were playing it, I knew how hard that was. It’s really difficult to do.

Katie Postma:
You came to me early and said… We started to get together and you said, “Let me tell you about Maria.” And I owe her so much because, ha ha, working with teams both before and since, I will tell you, not every creative director, not every studio head understands how important that was. And I have to say, the fact that Joe, and to an extent Jim and those guys, understood the importance and hired me on, ’cause I was there before you even. Not before they first considered you. But then talking to you was never me going hat in hand saying, “Please give me something.” It was you coming to me saying, “Tell me what you need from me in the gap.” And you and I came up with what was an early form of the ask me anything, for example, where you would do a weekly, literally choose a topic and I’ll tell you all about it, all those kinds of things.

Christopher Klug:
I have, in my archive for that N64 game, THQ, I mean, it’s Nintendo. They have all these highways of information to get to their audience, even in the ’98, ’97 timeframe. I have question-and-answer sessions about that game.

Katie Postma:
It’s so important. People don’t realize. It’s not like the community manager gets to go shopping and, “I can choose this art and this story.”

David Read:
You’re not walking down a grocery aisle.

Katie Postma:
And I can’t look at this programming breakthrough and cherry-pick. No, not at all. For example, I can’t remember now what it was, but you and I agreed that there was gonna be one thing that we would never, ever, ever reveal, that it had to be revealed in-game. Maybe it was Ra. But…

David Read:
It was probably the Furlings because…

Katie Postma:
Furlings; sure.

David Read:
… Ra is seen briefly in the teaser that was on Midway.

Katie Postma:
There was something… Maybe it was As… No, it couldn’t be Asgard. It…

David Read:
It was the Furlings. It had to have been.

Katie Postma:
… something that you said, this is the one thing that you can never say. Everything else, we’ll discuss. When we saw Howard’s concept art for a character, for example, you’d be like, “I don’t wanna take this whole thing and plunk it down. Let’s figure out a cool, revelatory way in which we can tease this out.” We worked together on every aspect, and we were so precious with it all, knowing that less was more in that moment. ‘Cause we didn’t know what was gonna end up on the cutting-room floor. We didn’t know what was gonna end up in beta, in live. But the fact that you understood and valued that, the fact that Joe, Dan understood and valued that, Howard—all of them really—was… It’s one of the best teams I’ve ever worked with as far as that goes, as far as community being integral and integrated and not a fly on the wall, and not, “They’re here again. We have to find something for them.” It wasn’t a chore for you guys. It was important. It was an important preceding time for the story and for the elements that you wanted fans to get excited about early, but also… ‘Cause we all know when you say Stargate Worlds MMO, and you’ve seen nothing, not even the logo for the game. Remember the wording for the game? That was a whole trailer revealing the logo. We had nothing to show. It was so important that those early first glimpses set the tone and got rid of preconceived notions or confirmed others. It was really important that we didn’t have people playing their own game in their minds so that they had this huge letdown or disappointing moment later on.

Christopher Klug:
That’s the tricky thing about moving from one medium to another. The TV show did this great job of making the universe interesting, leveraging on the original movie, building it into its own thing, creating characters that you loved and were interested in. It goes to the question that you were asking earlier, which is the decision whether or not you were gonna play Daniel or not. And what part were you going to play in the creation of this online world when so much of the world already exists in the imagination of the audience? You really have to think that through. And when we were looking earlier in the discussion about the slides, the onboarding of someone who comes to the game with their own preconceived notions about what the world is and how it works and what their place in the world is, you need to get them ready to be more proactive as soon as you can in a world that they’re comfortable in. It has to be designed. It’s gotta be curated in a way that a normal game sort of assumes that they know nothing and sort of puts them in and needs to get them going quickly. But they have less baggage to bring with them. It’s tricky.

Katie Postma:
It is.

David Read:
There’s a lot that goes into play. Before we let you go, Chris, can you please share being a part of the Comic-Con panel, sitting next to Brad in front of 4,000 people in ballroom 20. What an experience.

Katie Postma:
David, were you there? You were in the front row?

David Read:
I was. I was with 20th Century Fox promoting Stargate Continuum.

Katie Postma:
But you were right there in the front row?

David Read:
I got let go the month before. No, I was row three or four.

Katie Postma:
OK, but you were right there.

Christopher Klug:
Normally I’m remarkably unfazed by public speaking. Not that day.

Katie Postma:
That’s a big room.

Christopher Klug:
It’s a big room. It’s people who know the IP better than I do. On the panel… my memory is it was Dan and Brad…

David Read:
Howard.

Christopher Klug:
… Howard.

Katie Postma:
Demetrius.

Christopher Klug:
And Demetrius. And I’m at the podium. The cast had been on stage before us. All I could think of is, “Don’t fuck up. Just don’t.” And I was nervous. I’m very unaccustomed to speaking in public and being nervous. So, I was off-balance. So, there’s this microphone stand right here. Microphone. And I have a very well-established habit when I speak in public, which is I use my hands like this. And I kept whapping the microphone.

Katie Postma:
Man, I forgot all about that.

Christopher Klug:
I couldn’t stop myself.

Katie Postma:
Of course you remember it.

Christopher Klug:
After it was over, Demetrius came over to me and said, “If you hit that microphone one more time, I was gonna come over there and rip the microphone out of the podium.” Because I couldn’t… I was aware I was doing it. What I needed to do was take this and stick it in my pocket. I was so nervous.

Katie Postma:
And everybody was. He was too.

Christopher Klug:
Who was?

Katie Postma:
Demetrius was very nervous before.

David Read:
And Brad’s sitting there. Brad is among you guys to provide a sounding board on top of that.

Katie Postma:
Yes, that’s a big deal, but the bigger deal is being in the large room. You know Comic-Con. There are dozens of smaller rooms. This was the big stage.

Christopher Klug:
My memory is that the power armor thing had already happened. My perception was, if I’m a fan and I’m in the room, I’m thinking, “Show me. Show me you’re not a jerk. Show me.” Normally I’m unfazed. I relax and I trust my ability to improv. I usually am not at a loss for words. So, what’s the big deal? Except the stakes at that particular place and time and day. It was, wow.

Katie Postma:
You wanted to win them over.

Christopher Klug:
Yeah, I did.

Katie Postma:
I think if we leave with nothing else, it’s the level at which you care. This wasn’t a job.

David Read:
Amen.

Katie Postma:
It wasn’t just the next thing you were doing like a career. This was hugely important. If it wasn’t, then the whole presentation to Brad would not have landed nearly as well as it did. That relationship wouldn’t have been nearly as strong. I even wanted to talk about the fact that, yes, you brought people from Earth and Beyond. Yes, you brought people from television and from all kinds of walks of life. But also, I remember we were having a hard time getting really good talent for the entry-level positions. Do you remember you and I went to Carnegie Mellon to interview the graduating class?

Christopher Klug:
And there were three ETC students that we hired.

Katie Postma:
After interviewing almost all of them. It was a lot.

Christopher Klug:
After doing almost all of them. And two of them have done really, really, really well in the industry. It was an advantage to have an understanding of what those students could potentially do. And it helped me when we interviewed Rebecca and Erin, who were at Collins. Sort of having a sense of what kind of gems you could find in programs like that.

David Read:
Producers.

Katie Postma:
But I remember the level of… I was 12 or more years their senior at the time, and I remember thinking, “Oh, my gosh, they’re so poised, self-assured, but also the talent. ” And you and I conferred before we even set foot in the building about what specifically we were looking for. And it had nothing to do with the art or the design or whatever they were working on. It was everything to do about them, the person. Using words like we instead of I. The typical standard questions. But we weren’t looking for them to tell us how they solved a problem, for example. Tell us a problem you once were proud of solving. And it was all about how they would share that with whomever was around them at the time. This is what we were going for because this is what we already had at CME, and we didn’t want anyone coming in that was gonna be, “Hey, I’m the star of the show.”

David Read:
They were self-confident enough to be like, “Look, this is who I am. What I wanna be is with all of you and helping to build this thing together.” And that’s one of my real core memories of this whole group of people. And if there is any compliment that I can give Chris, it is that not once did I remember until this day that Chris wasn’t a Stargate fan before the project. I was convinced…

Katie Postma:
You’d never know.

David Read:
… that you were. And I knew at the time when I was working with you that you weren’t until the project. But it bled away because the project was so strong with what your core belief in the property was in terms of who the characters were with each other and with themselves. And that has stuck with me to the point where it’s, “Oh yeah, that’s right. He didn’t know the show before coming on.” That’s how well you did with this.

Christopher Klug:
Thank you, but I will circle back and reiterate how welcoming Brad and the writer’s room was to what we were trying to do. I remember Martin. I don’t mean to bring up Martin again, but he was a gamer. I think that’s right. He played games enough to understand what he didn’t know about the way they were created, but also that the audience down the road in television was gonna have to share space with the game world, and that we needed to know more about it. Is he the showrunner of the new show?

David Read:
He’s the showrunner. It’s his idea.

Christopher Klug:
Good for him.

David Read:
That relationship that you guys made happen with Bridge Studios, it was either gonna be frictionless, or it was gonna be miles and miles of really bad road. One way or another, this thing was gonna move forward, and you guys proved that this thing works. And it wasn’t that it failed. We talked about this with Dan. It wasn’t that it failed because the ideas weren’t working. It failed because it run out of fuel in its tank, and that was nothing to say a negative thing about the project itself. And that’s the real shame of it.

Christopher Klug:
It failed because of speculation on Wall Street. That’s really why it failed.

Katie Postma:
Wow, 2003.

Christopher Klug:
The very people that were getting into bed with us and investing their money ended up having the market that they trusted fall out from underneath them.

David Read:
I went into this wanting to really explore the story of the game but also really wanting to get his backstory, and what we got was both. What we got was his thoughts around the process but also his blessing to go ahead and run with the story separately, which is what he gave us here. He hasn’t changed a bit.

Katie Postma:
He hasn’t.

David Read:
And there is something that’s very right with the universe knowing that.

Katie Postma:
Absolutely.

David Read:
“Yes, this is as it should be.” Which is wonderful

Katie Postma:
He’s had some incredible experiences not just before, but since.

David Read:
That’s right

Katie Postma:
We’ve talked several times about things that have happened. He’s very generous with giving credit to other people and other circumstances and other studios for…

David Read:
He’s self-assured

Katie Postma:
… his own edification. But man, he gives as much as he ever gets, if not a thousandfold more.

David Read:
That’s a good teacher. That’s what a good teacher does.

Katie Postma:
It is. It’s good teaching, but he teaches through fun and play.

David Read:
He should have his own YouTube channel because his podcast is something that I would tune in for if he wasn’t already so busy.

Katie Postma:
If he wasn’t so busy already.

David Read:
That’s it. Exactly. That’s it

Katie Postma:
He’s a good one to have in your corner. I’m so thankful I got to work with him, especially in the early days of my career in the game industry. He set the bar. It was great.

David Read:
100%. For sure. Thank you again for doing this series with me. It means the world to have you here.

Katie Postma:
Of course.

David Read:
Folks, if you enjoy what you’ve been seeing with this series, please click the like button. It does make a difference with the show, and it will continue to help us grow our audience. Please also consider sharing the video with a Stargate friend. And if you wanna get notified about future episodes, click subscribe. And giving the bell icon a click will notify you the moment a new video drops, and you’ll get our notifications of any last-minute guest changes. And clips from this episode will be released over the course of the next few weeks on the Dial the Gate YouTube channel. Katie, I think Howard is next, if I’m not mistaken.

Katie Postma:
I think so. I’m excited for that one. That’s gonna be a pretty one.

David Read:
Thank God for all these people. It’s gonna be… It most certainly will. It’s gonna be a lot of attribution, making sure that everyone has the right names. We’re gonna do the best we can with that because there was so much talent that came out of that office, that it’s coming out of our ears, the blessings that we’ve been privileged to show off on this show. I’m thrilled that we had Chris. I’m thrilled that you’re doing these with me.

Katie Postma:
Thank you for doing it

David Read:
I’m over the moon that I get to… You would never have been able to convince me 20 years ago that, “These assets that you’re seeing in this dark room right now, a lot of these are not gonna be seen until you show them 20 years from now.” I would’ve laughed in your face.

Katie Postma:
It’s amazing.

David Read:
So privileged that some of this, a morsel of this, gets to come out, and that these artists get their attribution as they deserve.

Katie Postma:
Finally.

David Read:
All righty.

Katie Postma:
Thank you.

David Read:
We’ll see you on the other side, folks.