Stargate Worlds Lead Content Designers Steve Garvin and Sean Dugan join Dial the Gate to explore how they planned to adapt Stargate for an online game and disucss with how things fell apart behind the scenes.

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Timecodes
0:00 – Episode Preview
0:53 – Opening Credits
1:20 – Katie Introduces Steve & Sean
3:05 – Guest Introductions
3:46 – Why Personality Matters on a Team
5:15 – The Talent Behind Stargate Worlds
6:03 – “Putting the Fence in a Story” (Archive Clip)
7:07 – Stargate Worlds Was a Team of Veterans and Newcomers
8:32 – Chris Klug Recruited an Incredible Team
9:46 – How Steve Got Recruited
11:32 – Chris Klug’s Directorial Vision
13:00 – Stargate Worlds Was Extremely Ambitious
14:11 – Sean on Writing for Stargate
15:15 – Steve Was New to Stargate
16:34 – The Team Took Some Big Risks
17:43 – When Ambition Becomes a Liability
19:03 – Combat System Was a Major Departure from Other Games
19:36 – The Game Never Fully Materialized
20:32 – When Game Development Finally Clicks
22:15 – Wiping Out the Asgard
22:54 – Crafting the Big Picture
24:34 – Choosing the Game’s Era & Setting
25:52 – Conceiving the Story
28:26 – Creating Stories Within an Existing Framework
31:17 – Every Story Choice Was Deliberate
32:44 – Struggling to Work Within the Guardrails
35:33 – Staying True to Stargate
37:46 – The Infamous Stargate Worlds Trailer
38:30 – Pitching the Furlings
40:59 – The Furlings Tied the Whole Game Together
43:25 – Brad Wright & Co. Fully Supported Stargate Worlds
44:46 – Video Games Let You Tell Bigger Stories
45:38 – Pranking David
47:52 – David Was the Target of Many Pranks
49:20 – Steve & Sean Loved Pranking People
52:18 – Working Extremely Long Hours
53:20 – The Funding Controversies
56:03 – Stargate Worlds Was Funded by Families
57:18 – Why People Invested in the Game
58:42 – Things Always Change in Game Development
1:00:20 – Sean’s Reflection on His Stargate Worlds Experience
1:02:49 – The Pros & Cons of Diversifying the Portfolio
1:06:01 – Launching a Game is a Challenging Endeavor
1:06:40 – How WoW Shifted the Industry Towards MMO
1:07:58 – The Market Crash Hit Game Development Hard
1:10:38 – How the Market Crash Affected Jobs & Paychecks
1:12:58 – The Team’s Talent and Dedication Really Kept the Project Going
1:16:41 – The Concept Team Was Incredibly Talented
1:19:45 – Daily Walkarounds
1:20:58 – Sean’s Biggest Regrets About the Project
1:21:52 – Sean’s and Steve’s Dream Voice Casting
1:23:06 – Voice-over Can be a Lot of Work
1:23:56 – Catching Up with Katie Postma
1:26:10 – Working on Stargate Worlds Was Like The Office
1:26:53 – Sean’s Prank Asgard Concept Art
1:28:50 – Why Stargate Worlds Couldn’t Be Released Today
1:29:58 – Thank You, Steve & Sean
1:31:28 – Steve & Sean Loved Pranking David
1:32:50 – Thank You, Katie
1:33:04 – End Credits

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

#Stargate
#DialtheGate
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TRANSCRIPT
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Steve Garvin:
I met this person on an airplane and never saw him again. This story was told to me. Guy sits down next to me, asking me what I do. I said, “Video games.” He says, “You ever hear of Shining Mountain Entertainment?” I said, “I’ve worked there.” And he proceeds to tell me this elaborate story. One person from the team apparently took three or four million bucks and ran off to Brazil, and no one had seen him again. The strategy that they had used for collecting the money was that he leveraged his connections to the Mormon Church. This again is what I’m being told by this dude, who was hunting down each person. He said actually they had a team of people hunting down, trying to get the money back for these poor people that had invested. I don’t know about you, but if I invested 50K right now into anything, that would hurt if that was gone.

David Read:
Welcome back to Dial the Gate: The Stargate Oral History project. I’m David Read. Here’s Katie Postma. How are you?

Katie Postma:
I’m great, but I’m gonna be really busy tonight apparently, and I won’t be able to join you and Sean and Steve. I’m so sorry.

David Read:
Long of the short, we’re recording this at the end of the show. There was a scheduling mix-up. That was because I did not send out a reminder, so that’s the big portion of that. So, Sean Duggan and Steve Garvin, who were helping us build the story for the game, so much of the heart and soul of what the story was gonna be, they’re gonna be in this episode, and Katie will be joining us at the tail end. But I wanted you to …

Katie Postma:
I’m sorry.

David Read:
… to share any thoughts that you had of them before we got into the thick of it.

Katie Postma:
I’m just so glad that I got to see them, even only for a few minutes. I guess, like we talked about, the best way to describe who they were at the office, not just in making the game itself, but they were the Jim in The Office. The Jim that–

David Read:
They were Jim from The Office. Two of them.

Katie Postma:
They’re so great. But their sense of humor– But so smart. So smart and so fun, and I remember there were moments where they were so intent on making the game a certain way or a certain deadline or something really important, and so passionate about it. But the rest of the time they were… But even then, they were so fun to be around and always inspirational to me, so it was great to see them again. Thanks for having them, and sorry I wasn’t here more for it.

David Read:
No. We’ll meet back up with you at the end.

Katie Postma:
OK.

David Read:
Guys, this is a treat to have you in a space again. I don’t know if I’ll be able to take the next 90 minutes alone with both of you coming at me from both sides, but we’re gonna see. It’s actually wild. So, thanks so much for stepping in. Steve, how you doing?

Steve Garvin:
I am good. I have a prank story to tell your audience about you that I enjoyed to this very day. That we did to you.

Sean Dugan:
There are many stories. We’re really happy to be here, David. Mainly because we wanna tell lots of embarrassing stories about everything that happened. ‘Cause Stargate Worlds was really a delightful… It was a great project with a lot of great people, and we had a lot of fun behind the scenes as well as trying to put stuff in front of people.

David Read:
It’s a row of apologies for me, being a 24-year-old, 23-year-old kid and my first adult job and with a team of almost 100 people, it’s like, “Oh my God, I could have done so much better at XYZ.” ‘Cause at least half of it is personalities. And it is important as to what you can put out and what you can create. But at the end of the day, if you don’t have a thick skin, if people can’t get along with you, you’re not gonna last. So, it was quite the– You guys really went through the fire after I left. That was wild to behold from a little bit of a distance. Just “How are they doing? That bad, huh? Oh, man.” But what I’ve discovered in this program, and long before, is a unity of being in the trenches and a common spirit of family. I was gonna be fancier with that. But it’s just the case.

Sean Dugan:
Steve and I met on Stargate Worlds, and we’ve known each other now for many years, so we’ve talked. And we’re actually pretty good friends, or at least friends adjacent at the very least.

Steve Garvin:
We’re friends.

Sean Dugan:
But we’ve commented on a couple of occasions that the team that built Stargate Worlds, or was building Stargate Worlds, was a very talent-dense team. You hear that term a lot, but genuinely it is the case. And you can see it over the arc of the last 20 years, where people have gone in their careers. And we got a lot of people that– A lot of folks were very young. We were all young and naive in our own different ways when we joined the project. But there was talent, definitely, and it’s grown over time.

Sean Dugan [clip]:
The concept artists who are external to us have been working diligently away doing their sketches. They’re actually looking pretty good. For a first-generation pass starting to work, they’re remarkably good. And we expect to get better at it as we go.

Steve Garvin [clip]:
What Tim was saying a second ago about the fence, the issue with the fence isn’t that someone is choosing to put the fence there to help tell the story. They should consider that when they put the fence there. The question is, are they doing it to put the fence there so that it’s a cool thing that draws my attention to the fact that this fence has been placed in an incredibly cool spot that tells me a secret story about the fence, or is the fence serving the story of the farm, which is serving the story of the game?

Sean Dugan [clip]:
The fence tells a story. It tells a story that it’s holding animals in because this is a farm.

Steve Garvin [clip]:
Absolutely.

Uknown Voice 1 [clip]:
And as long as it does that, you’re spot on. But to your point, if the fence is a demonstration of a topology feature, it’s probably ill-advised to put the fence there.

Uknown Voice 2 [clip]:
The guidelines, I would guess, in this quote are the writer trying to be clever.

Steve Garvin:
Part of the reason I think that Stargate Worlds didn’t ever ship was because of the decision to put it in Arizona, because Arizona had some good things about it, but it wasn’t where people in the industry lived. So, you had to pull people out there. So, the team had a lot of green people, new people willing to do anything for their first job. We had really good veteran people. We didn’t have a lot of middle, “this person’s been in the business five years” kind of folks. And that weird gap in experience at times cost us, ’cause we’d make mistakes that happened sort of up and down, here and there, and it cost us time. Our team was really talented, and as I’ve gone on in my career, it’s still one of the best teams I was ever on. It might remain, for the scope and size, the best team of that size I’ve ever been on. But we had a lot of really good people who were really green, who were learning. And when you have that, you have experience, you have gaps, you have mistakes. And again, those mistakes cost us time, which shouldn’t have mattered, but because of the fancy finances of our– I don’t know. It’s a public podcast, but I’m gonna say it. The finance stuff that happened when the market crashed basically buried us, and we didn’t have the runway we needed to try to finish the game.

Sean Dugan:
I think there was a game there that could’ve been made with a little more time. And I think, to the team, this is speaking more from the design team, ’cause that’s what Steve and I are most familiar with. I gotta give so much props to Chris Klug. This is a guy that found people across a lot of different sources. And they came there because they wanted to work not only on this project, but work with him. And I worked with Chris previously on an MMO called Earth & Beyond. And when the opportunity came up, it’s like, “Of course I wanted to work with Chris again.” And then the folks that he assembled, he had a knack for finding diamonds in the rough and bringing them to Arizona.

Steve Garvin:
That’s ’cause it’s Chris’s thing. Chris is super people-persony. At least he loved on Stargate the human part of our team and getting to know people and the quirks and all that stuff, and mentoring people, and Chris was very much into that. I would not be on the team at all. David, I think I shared this story with you, but I can share it again. I applied to one of the jobs through a recruiter, and I did a test, and I took a lot of hours on that test, I don’t know, 30 hours, something like that. So, unlike the rest of you, I was old when I was trying to get into Stargate, ’cause it was sort of a second career for me. And when they rejected me, I was like, “OK, I’m cool with that. Can you get some feedback on what I was missing from the thing?” ‘Cause I wasn’t gonna be like, “I put this effort in,” and not hear anything. They could say no, but I figured I would ask.

David Read:
You were gonna ask.

Steve Garvin:
And you could tell that the recruiter did not love the idea, ’cause she was, “I guess I can go back there, but Chris really needs somebody who’s got a writing credit.” And I had won a screenwriting award that was a pretty prestigious screenwriting award, and I mentioned that, and I was like, “Tell him about the Nicholl. I have pedigree for that.”

David Read:
And to be fair, you are the last new face in Star Trek: The Next Generation. That’s all I’m saying.

Steve Garvin:
That’s true. That was my acting–

David Read:
It’s a big deal.

Steve Garvin:
Yes. That hurts.

Steve Garvin [clip]:
It’s four decks down, sir, Section 005.

Steve Garvin:
‘Cause I look much better and a lot younger there. And she took the thing back to Chris, and he won the Nicholl, so Chris knew what the Nicholl was, and then we had an interview, and we got along famously, and that was how I got there, but I was rejected initially. But it was through our conversations that we connected, and Chris is like that. He’s a theater guy, which I think he mentioned on the podcast he was on. One of the things about approaches to theater as a director. There’s different ways that people direct. There’s a spectrum here of these kinds of things. There’s a director who reads a script, imagines exactly what will be, and then casts and attempts to recreate exactly their image of what that thing might be. It’s very rigorous, and you’re trying to fit into this mold. There are other kinds of directors who sort of cast the actors and see what happens. And the see-what-happens thing can be amazing or it can be horrendous. But it’s looser, it takes a lot more courage. And Chris, I would argue, falls more on that side of things. He had plans, he had things he wanted to do, but he also gave people room to sort of bring their stuff to the table. And I think that was always his superpower in my mind, was that he was good at sort of, “Hey, you’re good at that. Let’s keep pushing that. Let’s make that your thing.” And he would give people a little bit of room. I think at times it also bit him in the ass, candidly. But I think that it’s a more courageous way to work. It’s much easier to sort of have a vision and make everybody else fit in it. It’s maybe not as fun for them, but you can be safer. And Chris took those risks, and I think part of that is because he likes people and he likes that different people bring different things. He’s that kind of leader.

Sean Dugan:
I think it’s fair to say that the story and the writing and what was being aimed for with Stargate Worlds is some of the most ambitious you’ll ever see in games. Seriously, to this day, 20 years later, I can’t think of a lot of games that were gonna go live with the kind of story and writing quality and this sort of thing that we were aiming for in Stargate Worlds. And it’s the kind of thing where– I came into the game industry from more like a journalistic background. Steve was more like screenwriting and that kind of stuff. So, I had this mechanical sort of training in terms of my writing. Whereas you work with a guy like Chris, and Chris is a very people-oriented person. He’s very emotional and thinking of craft in a different way. He forces you to sort of up your game. We were bringing a lot of creativity to the table from all the different individuals who were part of the team, trying to make this thing that would be worthy of Stargate. I personally came to Stargate as more of a casual fan. I had watched some of it, I’d seen the movie and everything. But I wasn’t a devotee in the way. But I always was struck and thought the core concept was super interesting. The core concept in terms of a story and layers in the story of human beings sort of discovering that the gods of old are false. They’re not gods. They’re these beings from other worlds, and we are stepping through this doorway into a universe which is dangerous. And growing up from being the children of Earth to fledgling adults, teenagers, if you will, going into the universe and trying to find our way. And it’s a really compelling and interesting concept. Plus, it’s fun to have soldiers running around and then Egyptian crazy things and that mix of fantasy and modern. It’s really interesting and layered.

David Read:
Steve, how familiar were you with the franchise?

Steve Garvin:
One of the things that was pretty interesting– Sorry, dude.

David Read:
Before you insert, how familiar were you with the franchise?

Steve Garvin:
You’re asking me? Not really at all. Saw the movie. I knew stuff. But I had experience, and over my career I’ve had experience diving into franchises and trying, learning what their stuff is very quickly, and you sort of pick it up and you have to get the mojo of it. At a different point on a different job, I was working on a Harry Potter game and was pitching to Jo Rowling, “Hey, this is what Harry Potter’s about,” to her face, which was very fascinating. But she agreed and liked it, so we were good. But that’s part of the job. You have to dive in. So, I became a fan. I really enjoyed it once I dove in, but I didn’t know that much about it before. You kind of knew that, because I would use you as a sort of gauge of Stargate-ness. Because you have to 100%, when you are on something like this, deliver as much of it as you can, as authentically as you can. It cannot be Stargate adjacent with the name on it. It would disappoint the fans, and also you need it to string everything together. And for everything to hold together, it has to sort of stay in this world with this fabric that the show had created. So, we were always trying to do that. One of the thing I was going to say is that we — just to give you a sense of what Sean was talking about in terms of ambition — we were doing stuff that was risky. When you returned to a planet, in a lot of games at the time, like in WoW, if I went out of a town and I came back, it was assumed that it was the same sort of people, same character, and you would sort of consume the content there and then would exit.

David Read:
Same iteration of it.

Steve Garvin:
Yeah. But we were using a ton of instance notions where I would come back to a planet that had had an evolution since you’d been there. We weren’t doing it as physically as some instance things, but essentially we were taking a risk there [with] this idea, “Will the story move forward? Would that feel weird? Like you were there talking about someone and something two acts behind me. How would that feel?” And then, I don’t know, 20 minutes after it all fell apart, WoW basically did the same thing. And we were like, “Ah, OK. It would’ve worked.” They did it a little different than we were, but we had a lot of really …

David Read:
[inaudible]

Steve Garvin:
… stuff going on on the project. A lot of risks. And that I give Chris a lot of credit for. He was open to those ideas.

Sean Dugan:
I think actually, again, going under the heading of it being an unusual project, it would be very rare for you to see this kind of combination in one project where this was, like you said, a young team, a small team — not the biggest team, not the massive army that you see on other projects in later days — coming together a little bit green with huge ambitions. We focus a little bit on story and content, but overall, the game was very ambitious in what it was going for. Inherently, an MMO is an ambitious endeavor. They’re not easy to build or maintain by any means. And then to do something that is, like Steve’s saying, this risky, like the world is evolving because of things that you’ve done in the storyline, and some of the game mechanics that were happening and the cover-based system, and getting something that feels a little bit more like modern warfare in this unusual setting. A lot of ambition, and that’s, again, probably what undermined the project eventually, is that with that kind of ambition and a team that occasionally is making mistakes and has to figure out how to get through the woods, you need a little time, and time ran out.

Steve Garvin:
Little stuff, I think that you’ve talked about this other ones, but the cover-based combat system. So, technically, that is a major departure from something like WoW. And understanding where I’m standing, throwing rays through that, “Is this blocked or not? Does this mitigate or not?” And then packet transmission that has to happen back in those days, and all that kind of stuff. There’s so much technical stuff to make that work. That doesn’t even include all the other stuff of the NPCs, like having an AI that they are running through and finding places to stand so they can shoot at you. There’s a lot of stuff going on there. And I think Sean said it at the beginning of this, but we never saw it materialize fully. I would argue the game never reached where we wanted it to go. What you could do, and you could play the parts you could play, is that if you squint it a little bit, you saw it. You saw what it wanted to be, and you could see it.

David Read:
The potential.

Steve Garvin:
I don’t know how much in this retro people talked about it, but we were never there and it was 10 minutes and some content away. We still had things that we had to develop, but the things that we were developing were really interesting, and they had really fantastic potential. It could’ve been very groundbreaking. It also could’ve fallen on its face because, let’s be honest, nobody knows what a game is gonna do. They can say they know, they don’t know. You hope it would’ve–

Sean Dugan:
Especially a game that goes live. Getting the game to the shipping point — Steve and I have worked on a lot of games subsequently — that’s step one. Shipping and launching is step one. It’s the steps afterwards that are really critical, and especially when you’re talking about something like an MMO. You wanna people to subscribe and continue to subscribe and love what you’re doing and everything. So, keeping it running and live is half the battle. And to comment on something Steve said, I think it’s important to know, when you say potential, it’s funny because in game development, usually there’s a long period where to see that there’s gonna be a game that even has an inkling of fun, you gotta really squint. You’re squinting hard, you’re wearing really thick glasses. It’s painful. And professional game developers often will be like, “Ah, this thing is terrible. It’s gonna suck. We gotta blow it up and start all over again.” And you’re like, “Hold on. Hold on. Let us stay the course for a little bit longer.” And then there’s usually this tipping point where it goes from, this thing is the biggest flaming wreckage pile you’ve ever seen, to, “Wait a minute, maybe it’s not on fire.” It’s not there yet, but there’s a turning point where people start to realize, “There’s something there. Maybe if we can keep on this path for a little while longer, it could actually click.” I think that Stargate Worlds had found that inflection point that really makes– Suddenly, it’s like, Dorothy is now in the Land of Oz and everything’s in color, and you’re like, “Huh. This is interesting.”

Steve Garvin:
“It’s alive.” And then the money ran out. God. No, I’ll save that. A little bit of backstory to jog everyone’s memory. I can’t remember when it was. It was some time, I think, in 2007. We found out that they were killing the Asgard, and that was a big deal because you were supposed to be able to play an Asgard. So, that really narrowed down the perspective of time that the game would be set. We ended up setting it at the end of Season Eight, before Season Nine, after “Moebius,” where a puddle jumper was discovered, and that was gonna be the inciting incident that really sped us into the story. What do you guys remember about crafting the broader strokes for the game?

Sean Dugan:
I can speak to that quite a bit, and Steve can help add. For better or worse, I will say that a lot of the big story elements that you’re familiar with came from me to start with, and then workshopping a lot of that stuff with Steve to get it to a good point. I can vividly remember at one point after Chris Klug had brought me out to Arizona and I was getting settled, I was brought out specifically to solve a preexisting story that wasn’t quite working. The original version of where the game was going, I characterize it sometimes as Back to the Future II, where you’re this character who’s behind the scenes, who’s always shifting stuff for the main characters to do their thing. And it went through this very methodical—from the start of the series and all these points from A to Z. And it wasn’t quite what you would expect in sort of the fantasy of being an up-in-front member of Stargate or whatever faction, being the hero of your own journey. And so, crafting a story where you could have some room to be a hero, or a villain, that is on par with an O’Neill– You know what I mean? That is a trick to pull off. That’s, at least from my perspective, one of the biggest reasons that we chose that gap between Seasons Eight and Nine. Because there’s this point where, “OK, they’re shutting down the SGC, they’re wrapping it up.” There’s this undefined period between that and then bringing in Mitchell, was it, as sort of the new SGC. And so, that was this gap that we felt, OK, we’re gonna insert ourselves and create a massive story that is within that. But because of the esoteric Ancient technologies and all this stuff, we can do a little bit of hand-waving and make some crazy things happen. But then it’s all like, “But it was a big secret, and you’re one of the special few that knows about what happened, but most people will never, ever know because they went about their lives.”

David Read:
You’re ultimately guarding a doorway with a very, very bad guy behind it, and keeping him locked away for all eternity is the idea that you’re left with. I don’t know if you guys watched it, but Torri Higginson narrated the bones of the outline, and she did a great job setting it to some images of the show. Steve?

Steve Garvin:
I hate to say this, but it is true for me. I’ve written a lot of stories over the years. Before I got into games even, I was doing screenplays. I think I had about 14 spec screenplays rolling around, and then I got into games. And I am terrible at years later remembering the details of the stuff I wrote. I don’t know how to explain it. I will read it later, and I have at times been like, “Oh my God, that was a pretty good twist. I fooled myself.”

Sean Dugan:
That’s the best part, when you realize that you’re way smarter than you ever thought you were because you read something and you’re like, “Who’s the genius who wrote this? It was me. That’s crazy.”

Steve Garvin:
It’s happened a few times. Also, you read it and you go, “Oh my God. I was… God, why did I do that?” But with the thing that I remember most about the core story, I told Sean I was gonna tell this story, so I’m gonna tell it now anyway. So, the thing that I was very impressed with, Sean joined the team after me. I was there first, but Sean was sort of brought in to be the lead. So, I got there when we were still assembling the Avengers, if that makes sense. At the time, this is how much I didn’t understand the way that creative stuff works on a video game. Sean called a meeting, and we were all going into this meeting, and he was gonna show us and deliver the story of Stargate Worlds. And he doesn’t remember this meeting at all, but for me it was very interesting. So, we go in and he presents the story of Ra and the five acts and everything. And I had come from a world where virtually every time I presented anything, it was shot down because I was trying to sell scripts. So, I got a lot of negative feedback a lot of times. And I’ll never forget how impressed I was, but also how much I learned. Sean presented the whole thing so extremely confidently. “Hey, here’s our story. Strap in, ’cause this is what we’re making.” And it did galvanize people behind it, and we did have a jump, and I never forgot it. It’s one of the things from the show or from working on that game that I’ve always sort of kept in my pocket and try to remember when I’m in that spot doing that now. Because you have to set that forward. And we had a really good sort of baseline, and then the writing team sort of added meat to those bones, if that makes sense. But we never really deviated too much from that original structure once we had it.

Sean Dugan:
And it’s funny ’cause, like Steve says, I don’t even remember the meeting because I was probably super nervous at the time, doing it and presenting the confident facade of, “Here’s our story.” The idea, when you’re making a game, it’s shocking how much work people do independently. And they have a lot of room to build stuff and do their own thing. One of the great challenges is trying to figure out how it all moves in one coherent direction. I maybe came across stronger at the time than I intended, but the idea was to set some guardrails that are like, “OK, this is the fundamental thing that we’re gonna try to do.” You bring your creativity into this. Steve and I have talked about this, that if you’re a showrunner on a television series, you know what show you’re trying to make. And you get writers in the room who are bringing their creativity. And they can do some stuff that’s wild and crazy, but they have to do it within the framework of that show. Stargate can have an episode where it’s a Groundhog Day episode, which is not your typical thing that they would do, but it can work because they’re doing it within the framework of the established stuff of Stargate. In the same way that Star Trek can do an episode that’s a legal drama, which that’s not normally what they do, but they framed it within this thing. Trying to build this story that we could all bring our own individual takes to, but it would be coherent, moving the same direction, was the intention. And I do remember vividly pitching it to Chris. ‘Cause Chris Klug gave the blessing. That’s why I could go with confidence and go to the team and be like, “OK, this is the story we’re doing,” ’cause Chris had signed off on it. We were in a Denny’s or something, and I go through this rant. And I’m probably the crazy guy that … if there could’ve been a whiteboard behind me with little strings connecting pictures — serial killer board — that probably would’ve been a good image. But I give him this whole big thing, and it’s leaning pretty heavily into some sci-fi concepts. Because of the stuff that was influencing me, we got a lot of fairly high sci-fi stuff in this, more than you would typically see in a Stargate episode, because our budget was bigger. We could go big. And Chris, he… I remember him, he looked at me, and he did this Chris thing where Chris leans back and crosses his arms, and he goes like this as he’s thinking deep on something. And he’s like, “If you think you can pull that off, OK.” And he knew it was ambitious, and he knew it was a little esoteric. ‘Cause the Straegis and time bending and Ra coming back and all that stuff. It was all deliberate. It was all very conscious choices for building a story. But it was ambitious. But he’s like, “If you guys can do it, go for it.” Then it was a matter of getting everybody and getting talent like Steve. Steve was a huge find, coming from outside the game industry and everything, to build this thing. But when we were building the storyline, it was all very deliberate. We knew we needed a hook for players, and we needed this to appeal to both dedicated television viewers as well as people who’d maybe seen the movie and were like, “That movie with the Egyptian stuff. Cool.” So, that’s why Ra. Ra being a figure that it’s like, “OK, let’s bring him back.” This resurgent threat. Ra is being resurrected. How is that possible? That shouldn’t be possible. That’s a big question mark. That’s the mystery you’re solving. So, the threat of Ra and Ra steamrollering the universe, with the open question of how is that possible, and who are these entities that seem to be working with him, the Straegis, and what is that about?

Steve Garvin:
And then six storylines all tied against how they’re all dealing with Ra in a different way. The Ra thing was really smart and structurally made a ton of sense. I know this is a Stargate-centric podcast, but if you think about that product, and I think this way much more now as a veteran who’s been around in games and been in creative lead spots, you have to make a game as broad as you can. Had we gone down a path where we took more specific stuff– It’s funny that you were talking about the previous story, Sean, that you sort of redid, because there was an MMO that came out during this time. This was the time when WoW had sort of ascended, and there were a lot of games taking shots at WoW. And one of them was Lord of the Rings Online. And Lord of the Rings Online’s entire move was, “Hey, look over there. It’s Frodo, but you’re doing this over here.” And you could see them for a brief moment. You were never them. You were never Frodo. And I think our choice of giving you the opportunity to be the hero, you’d still interact with the characters from the show and stuff, but they weren’t… You weren’t their sidekick. You were doing stuff that was really important. That approach was really smart. Again, against six different storylines. It’s ironic, because I still think that that object was really, really great for setting guardrails. And I think one of the places where we suffered from inexperience on the team was that we sometimes struggled to keep our writing team inside those guardrails and lost time, because they would go outside it. We’d have to redo stuff. And over the years I’ve learned the value of having those north stars for people to understand what you’re doing is really, really, really… It’s invaluable. There is almost nothing as a creative lead more important than everybody understanding the game you’re making. Because I use this in a talk that I do, but if we’re making Barbie Dreamhouse, there’s a version of Barbie Dreamhouse that’s Barbie Dreamhouse Zombocalypse, where it’s Barbie but zombies. But if that’s not the game you’re making, you have to make the Barbie game. You know what I mean? And it has to be the best Barbie game that you can make. And I think that Stargate Worlds at times, and part of our struggle, was that that thing would occasionally wobble. You know what I mean? It would, and we’d pull it back. Part of that was Chris giving people freedom to see where they went. He wasn’t sitting in their shorts making sure that it was in a single direction, and then keeping it sort of driving. And it was great. It was great for its experience. Super talented team. We got a lot of great stuff from them. It’s disappointing that it never got its shot, because I think it had a chance.

Sean Dugan:
I think part of what you’re talking about is what we were talking about earlier, being true to Stargate. Finding people that sort of can internalize what it’s about on sort of an emotional or an instinctive level even is really… It’s important and very challenging. ‘Cause especially a show like Stargate. When we started development on it– God, we were in what? Season Nine or something of the show. Around that.

David Read:
Season 10 was filming.

Sean Dugan:
So, there was a lot of material here. Look, if you were to grab Brad Wright and everything and pin him to a corner, I’m sure he would tell you, “There were some episodes that, if I could go back in the time machine and erase those, I probably would.” It usually takes a couple of seasons early on to really get your feet as a series and really establish your tone. And when you’re doing material that is based on this canon, you can always point to stuff to justify almost anything. You can be like, “Hey, we’re gonna do something because, in episode 47 at time index whatever, O’Neill said this. So, sure, we can do it.” But is that really the core experience of Stargate? Does that really represent what resonated with the fans? And we were always trying to stay true to things. I think Steve and I are both people that, as writers, we try to internalize the essence of the IP that we’re working on, make it a part of our heart and soul, so that you go from an instinct point of view. But that’s also why we would hit up you at times. Because not only were you a walking encyclopedia, before the days where I could ask AI, “Hey, what happened in this?” It’s, “Let’s ask David, he’s our AI,” about something that happened. But then also get a tonal read on things that, besides the factual stuff. Why does this resonate with you? What is it about this that works? Or does it feel appropriate? And some of our little internal controversies and everything would center on things that felt tonally off. I think you guys have talked previously about the infamous trailer that went out and some of the controversy that came with that.

David Read:
“We come in peace. Wait, no we don’t.”

David Read:
Why?

Sean Dugan:
The original version of that actually had the Stargate soldier come out and then busted out his lightsaber, and he charged in and started smacking people around with it. And he killed Ra.

David Read:
That’s the game I would’ve played.

Sean Dugan:
It was pretty epic at the time. But we had to tone that one down.

David Read:
Sean, you are the only person who’s taken a swing at the Furlings. No one else has done that.

Sean Dugan:
Yeah. Again, there were a few choices that I made that I’m gonna chalk up to youthful enthusiasm, because these were big things. Again, every choice we made was pretty deliberate. Like I said, bringing back Ra. That was a deliberate choice because it hooks new fans, it resonates with old fans, and it’s a good hook. Then there’s this idea of the Furlings. For the people who watch the show, this is an unsolved mystery of who were the Furlings. It’s easy to make a joke about it. And yes, the original pitch on the Furlings was gonna be that there would be heartwarming Furlings and then grumpy Furlings, and it’d be like Care Bears. No. That was never actually the pitch. But the Furlings seemed like, “Hey, there’s a mystery here. There’s an unanswered question. That’s a gap that we can fill. If we come up with something that’s good enough, that could become the answer to this question that is a part of the canon.” And so that was one of the reasons that we cracked open that box. To me, the name Furling, you could easily see it as silly, but it always had this resonance to me, this weird Irish Celtic mythology. The Furling. This would be the Tuatha Dé Danann, which in Irish mythology are these elvish people. Something in that space. So, what kind of entities could they be if they were these exotic, otherworldly things? And when we talk about Stargate looking at aliens through this lens of them being perceived as gods, it felt like one of the areas that we could explore would be some of the Judeo-Christian duality of dark and light, fallen angels, things that are intended to be good, but something went horribly wrong and they became bad. And so that’s where the notion of the duality of the Furling becoming this corrupted thing, which was the Straegis . Both the light and the dark are the same entity, spread out.

Steve Garvin:
But you can see in the discussion, David, one thing is you could attack the Furling in a lot of ways. And fundamentally, I’m not just saying in terms of what they are, but also how you attack them. But I think one thing that we did that I wish had come out, because I thought it was always smart, is that we didn’t attack the Furling with, “We’ve explained the Furling for you in chapter three in a three-paragraph thing,” and then they exit. We made the Furling seminal to the entire storyline. And you interact with them to solve things, and they become part of the explanation of what’s happening and why Ra’s back. And all of that stuff was part of our approach. I don’t know, Sean, if you remember this, and I am terrible at names because one of the writers, when we went to visit them up in Vancouver, we asked about the Furling. And he was like, “I wanted the humans to be the fifth race ’cause it sounded cool.”

David Read:
Then the fourth.

Steve Garvin:
“And so I needed a name for the fourth race. And I was like, ‘Furling.'” And that was the depth of the thought around the Furling that they had put in. They would do hints about it, but they never defined it or anything. And probably in the top three or four moments in my career of pure satisfaction was when they didn’t only like what we did, but they wanted to use the stuff we made in their show. They were like, “This stuff is pretty cool. We wanna use OP-CORE. We wanna have this kind of stuff happen.” We needed OP-CORE for a video game. You couldn’t have light humans and not dark humans. We needed that. And OP-CORE was a notion. But there’s a lot of ways you could do dark humans. You could do dark humans from the planet Zork over here that didn’t exist anywhere. But we thought there were things like we needed them to all use the same assets and things like that that video games require. That’s part of the reason that they had to be SGC-adjacent. But that stuff was really great. And they really embraced that. That’s what’s cool about the whole process. The guy could make that word up for fun ’cause he was like, “I don’t know. I can’t think of anything better.” And that turns into this fundamental thing that we try to use through, part of the web that tied the whole game together.

Sean Dugan:
What I remember when we were pitching Brad and the folks up in Vancouver is that when we said, “We’re gonna answer the Furling question,” he was like, “Really? You’re gonna try to answer that?” He was like, “You’re gonna go there?” He’s a really friendly guy and really cool and nice and everything. But you could tell there was some skepticism there of, “OK, I’m not so sure about these video game guys.” But then we went through the pitch and everything and explained to him where we were gonna go with it and everything. And he was like, “OK, that’s cool.” And one of the things that was really interesting is that I think they were very supportive of not only some of the specific choices we made in terms of story and some stuff that got them excited about things becoming canon; OP-CORE, the dark human, dark SGC faction becoming a real thing. What I remember is that Brad was saying, “We’re gonna use that faction and that character in the next DVD movie.”

David Read:
Revolutions. They were planning on Stargate Revolutions and throwing one of your antagonists in. There was consideration.

Sean Dugan:
They got excited about the ideas. But on another level, they were supportive of the idea of us drawing on a slightly bigger canvas because they would always acknowledge that, “Look, we don’t have the budget to do unlimited things on a TV show. We have human-being actors. We have to have human beings cast as Jaffa. So, we can’t make them super …”

David Read:
Three times this big.

Sean Dugan:
“… half-oversized, Hulk-like creatures or something like that. We can do more spaceships. We can go to more exotic planets that they would never have the budget to do the sets for.” And so a lot of the things that we proposed that were a little bit out there, they could get behind because, “OK, you guys have a different set of constraints that you can work with. You can expand Stargate universe a little bit in terms of how exotic it can be.”

Steve Garvin:
There’s a great segue there to get where we got you in one of our pranks, David.

David Read:
Uh-oh.

Steve Garvin:
The assets thing is always a thing in games. And the prank that we pulled– Because you did a thing at the beginning of this podcast where you’re like, “Ah, I had things to learn.” I found you incredibly valuable. I loved working with you. It was great. I don’t have any memories of any conflicts. I’m sure that there must have been something because it’s a creative situation and people have conflict, but I don’t remember any of that. I do remember this, though. You gave lots of shits. We came up to you one time and told you that we had to change some of the worlds, and that three of the worlds would have to have Nazis on them as the primary enemy. Because Dan had connections with Medal of Honor at the time, and we could get the assets for free. And so we had to change the storyline, and we had to integrate these Nazis into the game. And I remember telling you that story, and you were like, “What?” You said, “Really, Stargate?” And we’re like, “Yeah, we gotta make it work. You’re gonna have to suck it up.” And then we sent one of our writers over to you, and you were talking. And Hugh was sent over to talk to you to agree with what a terrible idea it was, to spin you more. And so he’s, “I don’t know. I don’t even know if we can make the game anymore because of this stuff.” And you were very affected. And it was lovely. You came into the main room where the writing and where all the design team was in that very cubically office. And across the room, I let you know that we were just kidding. We were pranking you and everything. But I will never forget how spun up you were around it. You were like, “You can’t. There’s no way that… That doesn’t even fit. They don’t do that.” Because I had gone deep. “No, they’ve gotta have MP34s and KAR rifles, and it’s very World War II. We might have to have cannons and tanks.”

Sean Dugan:
The Asgard wearing little helmets.

Steve Garvin:
Asgards.

Sean Dugan:
David, you invited this because the infamous trailer with the “We don’t come in peace” thing. I remember vividly you being in the office and going around and being really upset. And I understand why. To me, I don’t have quite the same level of emotion. It was more like, “Eh, that was clunky and missed the mark in terms of landing an O’Neillism.” And it seemed a little weird. But you were genuinely upset. I remember you walking, being really, “Guys, what is going on?”

Steve Garvin:
Because they do come in peace.

Sean Dugan:
They do. The thing is, you’re thinking about it on multiple levels. As a fan of the show, you understand what they are really doing, that the SGC is actually the good guys. They’re not imperialists trying to colonize something or whatever. And O’Neill makes quips, but he’s the only one that really– Most people are pretty serious in Stargate except for O’Neill. And O’Neill gets a pass ’cause he has a past of his own. But you put a target on your back there, my man.

Steve Garvin:
You make yourself vulnerable to people who you should never make yourself vulnerable to, and that’s the two of us, is what we’re saying.

Sean Dugan:
It was people who were working too many hours. We were working too many hours and were probably a little tired and a little punchy sometimes, and, “OK, we need to blow off some steam. Let’s see how we can do that.”

Steve Garvin:
I remember another thing, Sean. I don’t remember the total details of this, but at one point there was a woman who worked with us, and I don’t remember her name, which is bad, but I’ve told you earlier, I don’t remember things.

Sean Dugan:
Long, dark hair?

Steve Garvin:
Yes.

Steve Garvin:
Her job was to, or she was brought in … I think she was– Was she a project manager or something? Anyway, one of the things that we were told was that there was concern over violence and gore, and that the gore especially, we had to be careful with in language, and there were some concerns over that. And so Sean and I had these little miniature breakdowns of what the storylines were gonna be for little locales. And I made a completely false and fake one where you were going to this planet, and each area that you went to, you would do something more and more torturous and horrible. And we were like, “This is Darkseid’s story. You’re a ghoul here.” And it was literally at one point, you had to find the enemy and make contact with him, and then throw them into a wood chipper, and there would be a rooster tail of flesh that would come out the backside. And then she was like, “That seems gory.” And we’re like, “No, no, no, no, no, no. We’ll make the flesh black. It’ll be fine in Germany.” And we did the whole thing, and she sat there and took it straight-faced. It never struck her that we were having it on. I forget. Didn’t we hang people upside down at one point and set fire to them? The things were terrible.

Sean Dugan:
I don’t remember all the details other than it was a Saw movie meets Mortal Kombat. It was really over the top. Steve is not exaggerating. There is literally a bit where you’re shoving somebody into a grinding machine like out of Fargo, right?

Steve Garvin:
And then the best part of the whole thing was that during the course of the conversation, to make it authentic and also because it was funny, we would start to talk about the logistics of that. So, for example, a thing that is true in games is that having characters touch each other or connect or touch, that’s a thing, especially back then. It’s not easy to do. There’s a bunch of things technically required to it. So, there’s all these things where I’m like, “How do we manage that? We’ve gotta pick the body up.” And we’re like, “No, because they’re gonna drop a ring over here that allows you to levitate the body, so it’s more of a shooting motion that we’re–” And we had all these explanations of how we would make these horrible tortures occur, and she never flinched. I thought we were gonna be done the first time, and the wood chipper was the third one. But we had other—- You hung people, you set people on fire. And the descriptions were literally, “Yes, they’ll be screaming. We’re gonna have to have Nick do the sound of these people burning alive.” And the whole thing, and it was great. The team, we had a lot of fun with that stuff, partly because we were working a tremendous number of hours. The day before we got the notice — Sean wasn’t there anymore — but we got the notice that they weren’t gonna pay us in December of some year. You probably know the number. I don’t know what year it was. I just remember that …

Sean Dugan:
’08.

Steve Garvin:
… “They’re not gonna pay us.” I had worked with Tim Sweeney, who is awesome. I’d worked with Tim Sweeney through Thanksgiving weekend every day, 16 hours a day through the entire Thanksgiving weekend, only to come in Monday and find out we’d get a half check for December. And we were putting in hours to try to get this thing, because we were behind schedule. And in those days, burning the team was more of a thing you could do than you could get away with now. It’s less true now, thank goodness. But there was a lot of that kind of stuff going on when it fell apart. I have some stories about that, by the way, David, some insider stuff which I can share at some point if you want.

Sean Dugan:
Whatever you’re willing to share. We’re here.

Steve Garvin:
Now, I will have to preface this part with: I met this person on an airplane and never saw them again. So, I’m saying, this story was told to me. I’m sorry. So, after Stargate ended, and I’m still owed, I don’t know, $6,000 back pay that I don’t think I’m ever gonna see. I’ve given up. David, if you know a way, I’ll take it, but I didn’t get it.

Sean Dugan:
I’ve got some Bitcoin.

Steve Garvin:
The Stargate Bitcoin. But I had to get a different job. I was living in Denver. My family had stayed back in Phoenix, and I was going back and forth. And I’m on an airplane coming back, and a guy sits down next to me, asks me what I do. I said, “Video games.” He says, “You ever hear of Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment?” I said, “Yeah, I’ve worked there.” And he proceeds to tell me this elaborate story that was all about litigation around the funding, because at this point, it’s all washed away, and there’s all kinds of accusations against Gary and all this other stuff. But the juicy part of the story is apparently one of the guys involved in finance– I’m not gonna name names ’cause it’s a podcast and I don’t feel like getting sued if I say the wrong name. One person from the team apparently took three or four million bucks and ran off to Brazil, and no one had seen him again. The strategy that they had used for collecting the money was that he leveraged his connections to the Mormon Church, the LDS group. Mesa has the second-largest LDS, at least at that time, per capita in the country. And a lot of the members of our team were members of the church. A lot of people would be brought through, so there were a lot of families investing basically life-savings-type investments, $50,000 little pops here and there. And they had raised an enormous amount of money, in the many millions. But they had taken that money, and they had invested it into other stuff, not the game. So, when the market crashed, those other things collapsed in on themselves, and suddenly there was no money to finish the game, which is what they had collected the money based on. This again is what I’m being told by this dude, who was hunting down each person. He said, actually, they had a team of people hunting down, trying to get the money back for these poor people that had invested. I don’t know about you, but if I invested 50K right now into anything, that would hurt if that was gone because of some shenanigans. And they were hunting, and it was a fascinating discovery. He was not a fan of the game industry, this guy that I met.

Sean Dugan:
I think that Steve and I are not the finance or business people, and that’s a different realm from what we’re used to. But there definitely seemed from our perspective to be some unusual things that went on with the founding and funding of the studio, in the sense that normally speaking, if you’re going after a big MMO thing, you have sizable investments coming from large entities, either a VC or a publisher or somebody who’s really wealthy. ‘Cause building an MMO is an expensive proposition. With Cheyenne, it was very different in that there were a lot of small investments from regular folk who had some money that they wanted to put in. And we would have these unusual moments where we’re all working in the office, and a little crowd of people would come by. It was like tourists coming to the zoo and looking at the animals in the zoo doing their thing, and be like, “These are people making a game.” And you’d look up from your keyboard, and you’d be like, “Yes, I am making a game.” Wave, and they’d throw some peanuts at us, and then they’d move on. And that happened on a few occasions, and it was definitely a little unusual.

Steve Garvin:
I had members of the team — if you get them on, you can ask; they’ll probably tell this part of it — but they would have to be part of taking them around, and it was uncomfortable because there was a lot of projecting around how successful we were gonna be and that kind of stuff in those discussions as they were bringing people around. I also had a meeting one time with Gary where he was trying to think about ways to raise money, and depending on the tier of money you got, you could get your name or your character into the game. And there was this whole discussion, and I was like, “I don’t know, Gary, if a Jaffa named Frank Wagner is really gonna sell. So, it’s probably gonna be the humans. We’re not gonna make it work with a Goa’uld, like ‘Bob Fisk is the most evil Goa’uld in the world.'” We talked through that. And that isn’t an insane idea, people investing and having stuff in the game. I think on Chris’s podcast that you had, at the beginning of the day, a Frankie Muniz character–

David Read:
Wasn’t Frankie gonna be from Lucia? A racer? Frankie Muniz, for crying out loud. A member of the Lucian Alliance or something like that. He couldn’t be from Earth.

Steve Garvin:
I believe that was the idea. I don’t– That goes back into that space of– One of the fascinating things about games: the inputs are disparate and often coming from very different sides. There’s you, who’s a purist. Correctly, by the way, and it’s not a criticism. You’re a purist about Stargate. But then you have on the other side, “Hey, find a way to get Frankie Muniz in a racing suit.” And you’re like, “All right.”

David Read:
Now, to be fair, I would’ve been all aboard that because I was always, “You can’t do it this way, but here’s a way you might …”

Steve Garvin:
You’re right.

David Read:
“… present a solution.”

Steve Garvin:
That’s generally what we did.

David Read:
This is what you wanna do.

Steve Garvin:
We would come to you for that kind of stuff. We would talk about those kinds of… If those issues came up, we would usually probably pitch you more ideas than brainstorming right away, but we would come together and have you give us that feedback, and it was very useful. But it’s the nature of a giant thing like that. It always is changing depending on what you can or can’t do, what state the project is. We had at different moments realized, for example, that we had over-scoped the size of the worlds, and we did a massive story revision around shrinking some of the worlds to make the game more shippable. All kinds of things like that. You have that as you’re building a video game. Things change, and they adjust. But again, we’ve said this before, the team was pretty talented. The reactions to the adjustments were usually pretty great. And people generally stayed on board. There was obviously conflict. It’s a creative thing with lots of people. But for the most part, when we tried to solve a problem, usually the solution was pretty interesting.

David Read:
Sean, when did you know that you probably weren’t long for the project?

Sean Dugan:
For me it was more of an individual thing. I left before things got really bad. And some of the stuff that Steve alluded to, I had opted out by that point. It was a combination for me. Arizona was not necessarily the place that I wanted to be in any long-term way. I came from the San Francisco Bay Area, and that’s where I’m from originally. And I didn’t have any roots or connections there. And there’d been an opportunity to help build a company with some folks that I knew from way back when and be a founder, which was really attractive to me, combined with the idea that there were some things that were a little bit unusual about the situation at Cheyenne. And I can’t say that I had any crystal ball as to where it was gonna go, but it was an unsettled feeling in certain ways. Like I said, the weird funding situation, ’cause I think you have some instincts when you’re a little younger, and then as time goes on you realize what those were grounded in. ‘Cause subsequently I’ve gone to work for companies. I worked on a game that had really big funding. It was a really big online game. And because it had a founder that was like a rock star in the industry, they had more than 100 million, and they would get $20 million rounds and things like that. So, that’s the thing that you expect or need when you’re doing something so ambitious or really ambitious, and Cheyenne was not in that position. It’s not like, to get an extra runway to make the game ship, they would go back to do a Series C investment from venture folks and get $20 million dropped. It wasn’t that kind of situation. Every dollar is being earned each step of the way, and that makes it really hard when things start to get tight.

Steve Garvin:
When you exist that much that you get into illicit stuff that isn’t the game, that’s also part of it.

Sean Dugan:
Come on, now.

David Read:
I remember, I had never heard the term diversifying our portfolio before until I had come to Cheyenne. And I remember meeting Shane at Deadlands, and then also working on a racing game, and thinking to myself, “Wasn’t this money for Stargate? Shouldn’t you get your first product out the door before you start developing social networks that play Snap Games? Like ‘We’re gonna be the place.’ Why should you be the place? You haven’t proven anything. But no one’s asked me, so I’m not gonna say.”

Steve Garvin:
But here’s the thing. To be fair, even though I agree with you 100%, the overstepping was, I don’t know, John Cleese in his long, weird steps kind of overstepping. There were a lot of legs stepping over stuff. But this is not the only place I’ve ever been where the chunk of stuff that was for one thing that we would get started gets diversified out into other stuff that you’re making. It’s like, “How are we making three games here? We said we were making this, and now suddenly we’re making these.” And very often it’s like, “That’s because this is in its sort of incubator mode, and that’s what we have is incubator mode.”

David Read:
Even for companies that had never shipped a title before?

Steve Garvin:
At studios who’ve never shipped a title before, at larger companies.

Sean Dugan:
I think it’s fair to say that in the game business, if you are a studio of some kind, it’s a little scary to put all your eggs in one basket, and that’s why studios have portfolios of different kinds of games. And especially because there’s always this assumption: you start, you get one game going, and then at some point it has different requirements in terms of the amount of people that are on it. And you like to have other projects so that people can ramp off of something, go onto something else, and you have these kinds of things. So, there is a logic to some of these things, but there’s also this … You can call it a natural human tendency to overreach and go try to do these things a little too–

David Read:
Greed?

Sean Dugan:
It’s cool on the surface to go, “Hey, we’re gonna build a gaming hub in the city that has really great living. And we’re gonna make it so compelling that people are gonna wanna come here, and it’s gonna become a hub.” And then you think of the implications to the local economy and everything. Sure, that’s great ambition. But you’re not doing that in a year or two. And especially because it’d be one thing if the first game you were building was modest in scope. MMOs are not modest in scope. There’s no such thing. So, when you start diversifying and going into alternate areas when an MMO is the first thing you’re trying to ship, it’s a little scary.

David Read:
At the time, my understanding was it was one of the most, if not the most expensive pieces of software to create. The Burning Crusade had only been on the shelves for a few months. And, I think, Dan and I talked … we were in the neighborhood of around 20, 22 million, I think, if my memory serves. I don’t even know if that includes marketing. I can’t fathom the architecture that would have to be in place exactly right to hold those load-bearing structures down to get that thing out the door.

Sean Dugan:
It is. Launching an MMO is a super challenging endeavor. I think everybody had gotten excited about WoW, ’cause when I was working on Earth & Beyond, the world shifted in the MMO space when WoW came out. And it was suddenly this quantum leap in terms of what these games could do and who they could appeal to. And I think everybody got really excited, and, “MMOs are the license to print money.”

Steve Garvin:
And that showed.

Sean Dugan:
[inaudible]

Steve Garvin:
That showed over and over during the time when we kept playing the WoW killers, they kept coming out. Conan games. LotRO.

Sean Dugan:
I think that’s one of the things that probably happened somewhat behind the scenes, is that you’re saying, “WoW is the biggest thing ever, and we’re gonna be even bigger than the biggest thing ever.” And then there’s all these other–

David Read:
‘Cause anyone can just make that.

Sean Dugan:
And all these other games are coming out, and some of them are crashing and burning. Some of them are doing, “Eh, OK, they survive for a few years” and everything. But nobody is dethroning WoW, and that’s when I think you probably, if you’re the guy with the green visor in the business suite going, “This is a little bit scary. Maybe we need to have some other eggs,” or something like that. I don’t know. This is speculation on my part.

Steve Garvin:
I’m not defending that decision, David. I’m not saying it’s smart. I’m saying that isn’t indicative of them being singularly wrong, as opposed to, say, collecting all your money from families and that approach, and making a gigantic game, as opposed to making a smaller game. So, for example, even the fundraising approach didn’t necessarily match directly to the kind of product you made. You’re gonna make the biggest kind of game you can make at the time, or one of them, and you’re doing it through mom-and-pop financing. That is a bold strategy. And to their, I guess, credit, but also no credit, they raised an enormous amount of money, and they did it– It was impressive. They raised enough money so that when the market took a dump, we didn’t have money, but had the market not taken a dump, we probably would’ve gone farther and maybe gotten to the point… We were probably six or eight months out of beta, or at least some initial really serious playtest, depending on how we were doing that squint thing. If your eyes could open a little bit, then we could have been in beta, and we were a ways out. But it is a shame that when the market crashed, it really– A lot of people that lived there, people that lost their jobs on our game, were underwater on their houses. And there was a lot of very significant fiscal hurt for those of us who were left behind. I did not own a house, and I cannot claim that for myself, but I know multiple people who were, “I can’t… I’m going to lose money selling this house if I wanna move now,” and that kind of stuff. It was rough.

David Read:
I remember the president came out August– No, it was after that. It was fall of ’08, and Obama came to Mesa to talk about the economy because Mesa was one of the ground zero spots. It was one of the worst. And I had been fired a few months earlier, and I’m sitting in my apartment trying to figure out what I’m gonna do with my life, and the president is coming to town to talk about how bad it is here. “Great. And it’s hot as balls outside. What the hell am I doing here? I don’t even like the heat. What am I here for?” I remember hearing about an infamous all-hands meeting where someone had to get everyone together and basically saying that people weren’t gonna get paid or were gonna get paid a fraction of that, and it was… There was some shouting.

Steve Garvin:
People were upset. I was at that meeting. I’m sure I was. I think that the frustration… Some of this is communication. Some of this is the way things were sold to us when people were brought in. “Hey, we got money. Don’t sweat it. Come work out here. It’s totally fine. It’s a startup, but it was fiscally–” I also think that when you’re pulled into a room and you’re, “You’re gonna get a piece of a check for December,” and then we didn’t get paid in January, and then they came into some money. I’ve heard weird tales around that that I don’t wanna publicly share because it’s too weird, and I’m not convinced, and it’s so good I wanna believe it, but I’m not sure. But anyway, we ended up with some money to get our back pay and get paid in February, March of that year, and then it was over. We never got paid again. And I think by June it was dead. But in those initial meetings, what happened to the product at the time was that the veteran people who had had pretty solid careers or had a longer resume, they were like this, and they’d probably been through this kind of stuff before, but it’s not like games don’t have layoffs or don’t end, and they jumped. So, we lost a lot of really, really key people who were able to find jobs. So, a lot of us greenies kept … we filled the gaps while it was gone. For me, I ended up in Sean’s job because there wasn’t anybody, and it wasn’t a bad thing for me in the end. It was a little bit of a promotional, probably an overstep of a few … whatever long until I could have had it. But there was a lot of that. So, a lot of people ended up stepping into bigger roles, but we weren’t making any money, we weren’t being paid, and eventually people were falling off. It was rough. It was no fun.

David Read:
Were you there for Resistance?

Steve Garvin:
What is Resistance? I don’t remember.

David Read:
Stargate Resistance came after.

Steve Garvin:
No.

Sean Dugan:
That was the shooter game that used a lot of those [inaudible].

Steve Garvin:
I heard about that, but by that point I had jumped. Actually joined Dan Elggren in Denver. And that is one thing, we’re talking about the talent and the people with talent, and people being really good. The other thing was that there were a lot of relationships that people had there that helped them land, or pull people along, or started or kept careers going, because there were good people there. I tell this story all the time about one of the interns we got from Carnegie Mellon. This guy came in, Joe Grubb came in, he was an intern, and this is one of my favorite “You wanna make your boss love you, do what Joe Grubb did” stories. So, Joe was part of our content team. He was implementing material, and he discovered… I don’t know how he did this, because how could we have ever made a mistake, but he discovered a problem in one of our story points, and he was, “This is not gonna work the way you want it to work.” And he sent me, Sean, Dave Debord, and I wanna say Brian Hines, an email. And in the email he was, “Hey, I’ve discovered this problem,” and he outlined the problem. Now, a lot of new people would stop there. “This is broken, and it’s dumb,” or whatever. But he didn’t do that. He provided three different possible solutions, all of which could have worked, maybe, and he set up a meeting for all of us to meet a couple days later, which he’d already scheduled and put on our calendars. Now, what a way for you to be, “This dude is serious.” First off, all the things that he shared as his ideas fit what we were doing. Remember we talked about the guardrails and being in the game or not? Joe understood what we were making, and he showed that a week into his job with this thing that he did. It was so smart, and that managing upward is a thing that, when you’re the boss, because there are fires everywhere, you don’t want them coming from below. And he nailed it. I use that example every time I do a talk on when you get into the business and how to work with your leads, because it was great. You don’t remember that, do you, Sean?

Sean Dugan:
No, I don’t. But it goes back a little bit to the… It was a talent-dense team, and especially some people who did not have a long track record of experience or anything, and for some folks, their first job and whatever. But really good people that you could see then and subsequently have gone on to do other things. We had a lot of Carnegie Mellon, their computer program graduates, that came and proved themselves. I remember there was a young producer who was very wet behind the ears that had literally come from the airplane landing in Phoenix, and he’s full of enthusiasm. And I was, “This person is going to tear it up,” and subsequently become a very senior producer and does really well. There were a lot of folks that– I think that if it wasn’t for the people who were really dedicated and talented, things would’ve gone off the rail probably much sooner or more spectacularly. In a lot of ways, I say this affectionately, but the project was that old Cary Grant movie, North by Northwest, where he’s drunk in a car trying to escape these bad guys, and he’s totally soused, and he’s swerving all over the road, but somehow not going off the cliff. And it’s a miracle. He should go off the cliff at any moment, but somehow manages to survive and get to the police and whatever. And that was Cheyenne. It was that last cliff that “Oh, we didn’t make that turn,” and “Wah.” But given the ambitions on so many levels and the constraints, it’s spectacular that it got as far as it did.

Steve Garvin:
Chris said a thing in his podcast that I do wanna set the record straight on.

Sean Dugan:
This is what we do. Go right ahead.

Steve Garvin:
No, I’m not accusing him of being wrong.

David Read:
I know.

Steve Garvin:
He just told a different version of my story. So, the one thing, this is an example, I think, of the talent-dense opportunity that we had. So, we as the content team would do concepts for different planets. We’d do these, and they were thick. There was a lot of writing here, man. I can’t really tell you how much material we generated, but the number of documents is… I think I sent Sean some stuff in, what was it, three gigs, and that was what I took at the end, and that was the only stuff I had room to grab on a flash drive. But there was a lot of material, and we would make these really detailed documents about these worlds, and we would be giving them to Howard and the concept artists on that side. And we’d be, “Hey, we want this,” and they were super detailed. And one day Howard grabs me and he goes, “Hey, listen, you’ve given us a lot of stuff, and it’s really good, but maybe try giving us less stuff. Give us more of the general … give us what you need to make the game work, but don’t give us so much of ‘It looks like this and has that.’ Let’s see what happens.” And I was, “Sure, Howard. You’re so powerful, I have to do what you say.” I was not thrilled about that, but I agree. Howard is one of the most wonderful people on Earth, by the way. So, I agreed. I went, “I’ll try it.” So, we do that, and we give Eric Belisle, the concept artist, some stuff for one of the planets that we had in mind, and what Eric came back with was so weird and genius and smart and visually fascinating that we took that and modified our own stories to match more of what Eric had made based on what we had required. And we went from design on high, forcing art into a space, into the art and the game design integrating insanely perfectly. Because they were inspiring us, so that the stuff you saw was actually mapped in the stories rather than the stuff you saw reflecting the stories. And I never forgot that. I’ve taken that everywhere I’ve ever gone. But that wouldn’t have happened if there wasn’t… That concept team was really talented. Eric specifically, because I worked with him pretty closely, that dude was so good, and we ended up, we changed the way we worked, we changed the way that we related, and the way that we even constructed stuff was based on that kind of thing. And there was a lot of that going on there. The animation team was really good. We had a lot of talent across the board. The systems team, there was a lot of really great stuff that would go on. The world-building team was …

Sean Dugan:
I will say …

Steve Garvin:
… really good.

Sean Dugan:
… in terms of my own experience, the collaboration that I had with the art team or that I saw between design and art was one of the best. And it’s a cherished memory for me because I still remember how Howard Lyon, who was the art director at the time, really great guy and had a really good team, and we would do these daily walk-arounds where there’s a little group of us, I remember myself, Chris Klug, Howard, and I forget however other people. But we’d go to the different artists and be, “Hey, let’s talk about what you’re working on.” And the thing is, I’ve been in organizations where that was a really uncomfortable experience, and people are very closed and defensive. This was not that. This was… I still remember that and use it as my exemplar of, this is best practices of how you do a work: a walk-around with an art team that’s doing concept stuff and rapidly iterating, and you’re giving them thoughts and notes, and you’re having interesting discussions, and they’re collaborating, and we’re all coming up with some cool stuff. And that was really fun. And on the list of my regrets about the project, I’m always sad that the story that we built, which was pretty grand and epic, never got to be told or played. I wanted to play an OP-CORE guy busting out of prison in the castle, and that frozen prison and making his way. That seemed like the coolest idea as a way to start your character and really set the tone. But the planets and the places that you were gonna go, they were gonna be pretty interesting. There were things like Agnos and, was it Anima Vitrus?

David Read:
Anima Vitrus.

David Read:
A cat and– Weren’t we looking at Mel Harris potentially being the Agnos AI? I forget what its name was, but there were a couple of things that we were poking around for that were, “Ooh, that’s gonna be really interesting.”

Sean Dugan:
I can’t remember. The one that I remember that was my dream was the OP-CORE faction that is the rogue black ops SGC that does whatever it takes to get the job done.

David Read:
It’s the Rogue ID.

Sean Dugan:
“We’re protecting humanity at whatever cost, like anybody else.” Had this Colonel Marsh running the operation, and I wanted us to cast Kurt Russell in that role so badly. That was one of those– And it was something that was half discussed because Steve has lots of connections with Kurt. Steven and Kurt are like this. And that would’ve been a dream voice casting to pull that one off, in my mind.

Steve Garvin:
That would’ve been good. Instead, the VO was gonna be me, Sean, doing Al Pacino as an Asgard.

Sean Dugan:
If you’ve ever heard Steve’s Al Pacino, it is good, and Al Pacino Asgard, that would’ve been the–

Steve Garvin:
‘Cause we have him for Thor, for a joke. For a while, I was reading all his text as Al Pacino. “It looks like a Straegis ore problem.” And it was gonna be great.

Sean Dugan:
People are always asking me–

Steve Garvin:
The VO stuff was always one of those things that, again, we’re talking about scope. Some of the sort of experience stuff in retrospect, having been in the business now for a long time, some of those things, you look at and you think, “VO, of course we do VO.” VO on that project was massive. It takes in the studio getting the actors to get it right, and we wrote all that stuff. That MMO, I pretty much wrote the majority of any spoken or said thing in the entire MMO. And it was in before we had finished it. And I remember thinking, “The number of sides…” The way we’d have to predict … get the sides ready, it was very, very, very grand and ambitious and exhausting.

David Read:
One of these days I hope to be able to read some of it. I have someone who wants to pop on and say hello really quick before we wrap.

Sean Dugan:
Hey, Katie.

Steve Garvin:
Katie.

Katie Postma:
Hi.

Steve Garvin:
How you doing?

Katie Postma:
I’m so sorry.

Steve Garvin:
That’s OK. You can see it on the internet.

Katie Postma:
I know. That’s the good news.

Katie Postma:
My goodness.

Steve Garvin:
We will have cut out all the parts where we talked about you behind your back.

Katie Postma:
That’s good.

David Read:
Hey, if you’re lucky.

Katie Postma:
No, I got this message. I just picked up my phone. It’s like, “Gang’s all here,” and I’m like, “Huh? Uh-oh.” Sorry. I don’t even know what day it is. I’m so sorry.

Steve Garvin:
None of us have ever–

David Read:
It’s better than you know.

Katie Postma:
None of us what?

Steve Garvin:
I think I did that one time in a meeting for funding for a company. I was like–

Katie Postma:
Great.

Steve Garvin:
I admit it.

David Read:
We’ve had a thoughtful conversation. You were missed, but we …

Katie Postma:
No.

David Read:
… “It’s gonna be a good one.”

Katie Postma:
I told you you didn’t pay me enough to see Steve again.

David Read:
I learned how to make a Zoom meeting invite for you, and you still didn’t show up.

Katie Postma:
You didn’t. You did for Howard’s, but not this one.

David Read:
My bad.

Katie Postma:
It wasn’t on my calendar.

David Read:
I’m sorry.

Katie Postma:
No, it’s OK. I should have remembered anyway. I literally thought it was Wednesday …

David Read:
God, you’re absolutely right.

Katie Postma:
… until about 10 minutes ago.

David Read:
That is me. Thank you. But see? I still don’t know how to do it.

Katie Postma:
Hi, Sean. Hi, Steve.

Steve Garvin:
Good to see you.

Katie Postma:
Tell me everything. Start from the beginning. Tell me all the things.

Sean Dugan:
We’ll get the AI transcript to tell you exactly what you missed. Steve was mentioning that he had this big drop of Stargate materials, and I’d been going through it ’cause he shared it with me. And I found a concept piece for the Asgard that I’d completely forgotten about that it was actually cool. I don’t know if you can let me share it or not on the screen, David, or if you’re willing to.

Katie Postma:
Uh-oh. Is this gonna be a joke? Nothing Sean ever says is serious. What is this gonna be?

Steve Garvin:
[inaudible]

David Read:
I remember people asking me back around ’08, “You really need to be watching The Office.” And I’m like, “Why do I wanna go home and watch something that I live because of these guys?”

Katie Postma:
I know.

Sean Dugan:
In fairness, we really did …

David Read:
I’ve never seen it.

Sean Dugan:
… enjoy messing–

Katie Postma:
Have you never seen it?

David Read:
I love these guys to this day. It was a wonderful time.

Katie Postma:
Have you seen The Office, though?

David Read:
Nope, because of Sean and Steve.

Katie Postma:
Don’t you miss–

David Read:
And among others.

Katie Postma:
You should watch it ’cause you miss them.

David Read:
I know. I loved working with them, obviously, but I wasn’t gonna go home and watch more of that kind of thing.

Katie Postma:
You should see it. It’s pretty good.

Sean Dugan:
So, David, let me set this up. That collaboration, artistic design, everything, we were really trying to get to the essence of what was gonna work. We did some exploration on the Asgard. We wanted players to be able to express themselves, some customization and everything, and have characters really speak. In MMOs, dancing is a whole thing, so the Asgard …

Katie Postma:
The hammer pants.

Sean Dugan:
… the Asgard gotta dance. This was the concept piece that was put together.

Katie Postma:
Are you triggered, David? Are you OK?

David Read:
I am gonna keep my mouth shut. But in one vein, it’s extraordinary.

Katie Postma:
That’s funny.

David Read:
Absolutely wild.

Steve Garvin:
I don’t even know if that’s real. Did you make that?

Katie Postma:
I think they did that for you, David, probably.

Sean Dugan:
David, if Stargate had continued to this day, like WoW has, there would’ve been so many pranks. And the technology now, it elevates the craft of pranking so much.

David Read:
For God’s sakes.

Steve Garvin:
Honestly, I’m gonna say this is dumb, but I know we had to do the dancing stuff. That isn’t an actual thing, is it? You did that shot, or is that one of the things, ’cause I have not looked through the stuff that I sent you …

Katie Postma:
Was that because …

Steve Garvin:
… in a year.

Katie Postma:
… the whole Asgard don’t dance, then the Asgards will dance?

David Read:
That was probably–

Sean Dugan:
This is my giving David his props: the Asgard don’t dance.

David Read:
That was probably–

Steve Garvin:
No.

David Read:
That grew out of that. No, it was awesome.

Katie Postma:
That’s funny.

David Read:
It was way too serious. Let’s get the hell over yourself, James, whatever.

Katie Postma:
Everybody was. You were the keeper of the lore. But I was a–

Sean Dugan:
You have to be serious.

David Read:
… a keeper.

Katie Postma:
Now that would get clicks. Even people that are purists would be, “What is this?” And then they’d be, “Oh, there’s an MMO. Cool.”

David Read:
“Let’s check that out.” Exactly. That’s been some of the confusion is, “I wanna go play it.” And it’s, “Watch the video and get the context.” And so many people are, “Go ahead and release it.” It’s not that. It’s built on an architecture that no longer exists.

Katie Postma:
Can’t just do that.

David Read:
You can’t just press play. Katie and I fielded a couple of those, but it’s great walking down memory lane with you guys.

Steve Garvin:
You couldn’t, even if you wanted to. You’d wanna update that technology anyway, even if you could reboot it. That game is …

Katie Postma:
Even if you could.

Steve Garvin:
… really old.

Katie Postma:
I love the at home devs who are, “Just do this.” It’s, “Yeah, I’ll just get right on that, bucko.”

David Read:
That’s it.

Steve Garvin:
It takes 10 minutes and a couple of people on Torque.

David Read:
Maybe some AI thrown in there to fill in some missing pieces. It’s like using frog DNA …

Katie Postma:
They’d love that.

David Read:
… to build a Tyrannosaurus rex. It’s not happening. God. Guys, thank you.

Katie Postma:
Aw, I’m so sorry I missed this. But we’ll do another one and we’ll …

David Read:
We will.

Katie Postma:
… keep circling back over and over until we get sick of each other, I think.

David Read:
We’re gonna do something bigger later on in the year. We’ll start bringing teams together to break things up a little bit and make it more interesting.

Katie Postma:
I think we’ll do two or three at a time, and then we’ll do a big one for each team. It’ll be fun so everybody can see each other again.

Sean Dugan:
I’m convinced that if you got, I don’t know, a dozen key people all in the same room to reminisce, the stories that would get triggered, ’cause everybody’s forgotten, ’cause this was so many years ago. But if you started the conversation, one person would have one little piece of it, and another person would have another.

David Read:
That’s right.

Sean Dugan:
And then it would unlock this, and there’s probably a treasure trove of not-suitable-for-prime-time stories.

Steve Garvin:
You can see how professional I am. The only thing I remember from working there are the stories. I don’t remember what we called the Asgard.

David Read:
But the relationships are the heaviest things that we carry, so that makes a lot of sense. So, I need to get my hands on your documents at some point …

Katie Postma:
But David, you remember–

David Read:
… so I can at least know.

Katie Postma:
You remember more about the game than I’ll ever know about it.

David Read:
The idea is why I was there.

Katie Postma:
I know.

David Read:
It’s historical documents to this day of something that could’ve been. It’s all relevant. Guys, I’ve got another meeting …

Katie Postma:
Thank you.

David Read:
… in 10 minutes. Thank you so much. That was Sean Dugan and Steve Garvin from …

Katie Postma:
It sure was.

David Read:
… Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment. And now you can appreciate why I’ve never watched The Office. But truly …

Katie Postma:
No.

David Read:
… those guys were so much of the heart and soul of that project. I found, I don’t know how much longer after I had done a bit about the vending machine at Stargate Worlds when Alana Sabin went and made Stargate labels for all of the …

Katie Postma:
I remember. All the soda.

David Read:
… the drinks. All the soft drinks. I filmed a little documentary on it, and I put a camera near the vending machine for a couple of hours to get people using it. So, I was gonna do a montage of people using the machine. A while later, I pulled out the DV tape and I was looking through some of the stuff. And Steve … and it may have been Shawn … did this whole five-minute bit talking shit about me that I completely missed at the time.

Katie Postma:
I love it.

David Read:
I was talking with Steve a month or two ago to wet his whistle for this, and he was like, “I don’t remember any of that.”

Katie Postma:
It’s a day in the life of Steve Garvin for …

David Read:
That’s it

Katie Postma:
… something like that to happen. Of course he didn’t remember because it was a day in the life.

David Read:
This is what he does.

Katie Postma:
Always.

David Read:
That’s it. I am thrilled that we’re continuing to do these, and we got a …

Katie Postma:
Me too

David Read:
… we got a few more to crank away at. So, I’ll see you on the next one.

Katie Postma:
Quite a few. We’ve got a few more yeses. So, I’ll put them on the list, and we’ll keep cracking.