allgeektout

[Editor's Note: My interview with Jeremiah Slaczka of 5th Cell originally appeared on TechFlash. It has been reprinted here.]

With some puzzle games, you’re constrained by the solution that the developers give you. With the upcoming Nintendo DS game Scribblenauts from Bellevue-based 5th Cell, you get to, as the tagline says, “Write Anything, Solve Everything.”

For example, if you want to get a collectible out of a tree, you could write “ladder” and climb up to get it. Or you could write “beaver” and get it to eat the tree. Or, as one early player discovered, you could write “time machine,” travel back in time, ride a dinosaur and travel back to the present. The possibilities are endless.

This past weekend, I spoke to Jeremiah Slaczka, the co-founder and lead designer of 5th Cell, about the upcoming game and his company. Slaczka, 28, dropped out of high school to go into the video-game business. Among other things, he explained why he doesn’t ever want to sell the company. Read on for edited excerpts from the interview.

Q: How does the underlying technology of Scribblenauts work? What’s the algorithm, how can you just let people write things and make them appear?

Slaczka: Our technical director, Marius Fahlbusch, he’s a really, really smart guy, went to Munich University, has two master’s degrees. He basically came up with a thing called Objectnaut, which allows us to edit any kind of object and say, what’s it like, what’s it eat, what’s it afraid of? What’s it going to attack? Is it buoyant? Can it swim? Can it fly? Basically anything that exists, any property, mental of physical you can think of is in this tool, and then we can basically just plug it in with designers and say, OK, do this and do that. There’s a lot of inheritance. Fire is going to burn wood, so a boat’s made out of wood, it’s going to burn. We don’t have to say, the boat’s going to burn, because we know that’s going to happen already. That’s how we made sure that the system would be doable, because otherwise, it’s like tens of thousands of objects times tens of thousands of objects, we couldn’t do it. It’s infinite.

Q: So you have to create a system that describes different properties of elements that someone would write. But still, there are infinite things that someone would write.

Slaczka: There is.

Q: So how does that work?

Slaczka: It doesn’t, really. We don’t know. People always say, is it some kind of PR thing, but it’s not, you can’t, no human being will ever be able to play the game in its entirety, they’ll die. You’ll die before you can experience everything in Scribblenauts because it takes so long. In your lifetime it’s not going to happen. And for (quality assurance) purposes, that’s bad. We just try to do our best. People are going to find weird stuff, where we’re like, what the heck? I actually had a guy who said he’s going to play Scribblenauts and he’s going to hand it off to his children and force his children to hand it off to his grandchildren just so they can all experience it and chronicle it. (Laughs.)

Q: So, in your first DS game Drawn to Life, you drew objects, and now, in Scribblenauts, you write objects. Is that a coincidence, or is it something that you’ve always had in mind?

Slaczka: No, it’s not really a coincidence that Drawn to Life was about drawing and that Scribblenauts was about writing. It was kind of like a natural progression. It’s like, well, we did drawing and then we did building blocks and stuff like that, with Lock’s Quest, so it’s like, what else can you do that’s really cool on the touch screen? Obviously writing is one of those things, so yeah.

Q: I understand that you had five people searching encyclopedias for six months to pick out words for the game. Exactly how did you decide what words to include in the game?

There was nothing too obscure, nothing too weird. We were going to put it in. If it exists, or even if it exists in fantasy — I mean, we have things like invisibility cloak and stuff like that. Those don’t exist in real life but they’re too awesome not to put in the game

Slaczka: As far as the words, I mean, everything — every single word we could think — there was no decision except for the copyrights — no copyrights, no vulgarities, and no proper nouns, and we kind of break the rule on proper nouns here and there. We have Abraham Lincoln, and George Washington, just because they’re really, really famous. But as a general rule of thumb, we don’t do it. As far as everything else, like, there was nothing too obscure, nothing too weird. We were going to put it in. If it exists, or even if it exists in fantasy — I mean, we have things like invisibility cloak and stuff like that. Those don’t exist in real life but they’re too awesome not to put in the game. We have robot hamster, because that was a popular Internet meme a while ago. We’re like, we’ve got to put the robot hamster in there, you know?

Q: I find it interesting how many internet memes you’ve put into the game, in particular Post 217. [Editor's Note: Post 217 was a post in the Scribblenauts E3 thread on the NeoGAF forums, where forum member Feep posted about his extraordinary experience with Scribblenauts. You can read the post here.] How did you end up putting that in?

Did you know that you could travel back in time and get a dinosaur and then go back to the future and then kill robot zombies?! Did you know that was possible?! People were like, wait: That’s possible in this game?

Slaczka: Post 217, it exploded, it was a big reason why Scribblenauts has done so well, because, when people read Post 217, which was a real, legitimate, hands-on account at E3 from just a dude who got to play it and was just, like, did you know that you could travel back in time and get a dinosaur and then go back to the future and then kill robot zombies?! Did you know that was possible?! People were like, wait. That’s possible in this game? Of course, I’ve actually talked with the guy, I actually met him today for the very first time. Feep. He’s a really cool guy. I asked him, can I put your Post 217, commemorate it? He was like, yeah, absolutely. I was like, OK, dude. And I put Feep in the game, too.

Q: Oh, really?

Slaczka: He’s a robot zombie. (Laughs.) That’s how he shows up.

Q: You’ve mentioned that you may consider doing a follow-up to Scribblenauts. What directions do you think you can take it in any possible sequels?

Slaczka: For sequels, we’re not really — we’re really focused on the DS right now, so we don’t really have any plans at the moment for sequels. It’s just like any game. If a game does really, really well, then obviously there will be sequels, but until that time we don’t know what we’re going to do with it.

Q: Both Drawn to Life and Lock’s Quest have all achieved cult status without actually achieving mainstream success. Why do you think that happened? Are you trying something different to improve your marketing for Scribblenauts?

Slaczka: Oh, actually, if you look at Drawn to Life, it’s sold over a million units. That’s a hit, yeah. I wouldn’t call that cold. I would definitely call that a hit. Yeah, Drawn to Life has sold definitely over a million units, Drawn to Life Sponge Bob has sold almost a million units and it will hit a million units, then we’re having Drawn to Life the Next Chapter and Drawn to Life Wii, and those are both most likely going to do very, very well, as well. Lock’s Quest still did, like, 300,000 units, so.

Q: Oh, so they’re a lot more than cult hits, then.

Slaczka: Yeah, well, I think it’s because the gaming people didn’t pick up on Drawn to Life because it’s more of a kid’s game, but the gaming crowd is, they’re big into their console games and stuff like that, so for Drawn to Life, it still did very very well, it’s just that it wasn’t picked up necessarily because it was a kid’s game, and so the audience for big press sites necessarily isn’t that kind of crowd that Drawn to Life was. Whereas Scribblenauts, though, it is. I don’t know why. It’s a game for everyone, I guess, so everyone just loves it.

Q: Yeah, I was about to say, I guess Drawn to Life was more of a kid’s game, and Lock’s Quest is definitely more of a gamers game. Is Scribblenauts an attempt to be the middle ground between those two?

We wanted the appeal of Drawn to Life that can appeal to everyone, and then we wanted the polish and just the — because, you know, Lock’s Quest reviewed very, very well for us. I think Scribblenauts kind of merges all that.

Slaczka: Yes, Scribblenauts is definitely the middle ground between both Lock’s Quest and Drawn to Life. We wanted the appeal of Drawn to Life that can appeal to everyone, and then we wanted the polish and just the — because, you know, Lock’s Quest reviewed very, very well for us. I think Scribblenauts kind of merges all that. There’s a lot of experience, with Drawn to Life, we didn’t know a lot about the DS. It was our first DS game. It had a lot of people that were new, because we were a small company at the time and we couldn’t afford senior people, so we had a lot of interns and stuff like that. Not that they were bad, it’s just that they were inexperienced, so obviously we learned a lot, built a better engine, and now we’re very, very confident on the DS.

Q: You recently said in an interview with Gamespot that you’ll soon be focusing more on consoles and less on the DS. Do you think you’ve pushed the limits of what the DS can do?

Slaczka: I wouldn’t say we’ve pushed the limits of what the DS can do, but the reason why we want to move onto consoles, is that’s what always we started the company as. When we started six years ago, we wanted to make console games. So with the DS, right now, we’re at a point where we think we can handle, as a company with management and just the people that we have, and the code base that we’ve built up and experience, we can handle a much bigger thing. But I think I said in my GameStop interview — you’ve definitely read up on a lot of stuff, and that’s pretty cool — but as far as that interview, when I said that, it’s like, I’m still not opposed to it, but right now we’re not focused on it, but if we have a cool idea, we’re going to do it on that system. It just depends what the idea is, that’s what we’re all about. Like, a lot of companies are like, OK, we made a racing game, and we have a racing engine, and then we’re going to make a sequel to that game and we’re going to reskin it. If you look at our games, Drawn to Life, Lock’s Quest and Scribblenauts, they’re all completely different, because we’re a design-driven company, so we make things that are cool because we think they’re cool and we’ll figure out the tech when we figure out the tech. If it works on that platform, that’s the platform we’re going to make it for.

Q: So that’s part of why you keep on coming out with such original ideas, when a lot of companies are coming out with sequel after sequel?

If you want to play our types of games, you’ve gotta get them from us.

Slaczka: Yeah, I mean, that’s kinda how we set up our company. There’s nothing wrong with that. If a company wants to make sequels, if a company wants to do that, then do whatever they want to do. But that’s not what we’re about. That’s not why we set up our company and why we started our company. We started it to do original games that you can’t get from anyone else, from anywhere else. If you want to play our types of games, you’ve gotta get them from us.

Q: It’s interesting you say that, since you’re working on a sequel to Drawn to Life right now. Are you trying hard to prevent the kind of decay that tends to set in with game sequels?

Slaczka: Yeah, well, we’re not working on the Wii one. We’re just working on the DS one. And, yes. No, I am actually really, really proud of Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter. Every single part of it has been blown out. We didn’t do Sponge Bob Drawn to Life, we turned it down, because we could have easily done that, reskinned it, but we didn’t want to, because, you know, it’s just not what we do, we don’t do license, we do original stuff. So with Drawn to Life the Next Chapter, the sequel, we’re like, we’re only doing this if we get to do it the way we want to do it, so we blew it out, the art’s completely redone, it’s all hand-drawn, it looks Miyazaki-style, Spirited Away, those kinds of movies. And it looks awesome. When you see it, it looks really, really good. And the story, we really pumped out the story, and the gameplay, we added, like, on the original game we only had one level designer, we had five on this one, so it’s like the gameplay mechanics, the bosses, everything is better, and the draw mode, you can reshape your hero and add limbs, we just blew it out in every single way, because we’re not going to make a game unless we’re really behind it, you know?

Q: So, 5th Cell is your first game company, right?

Slaczka: Actually, this is my second game company.

Q: Oh, it is?

Slaczka: Yeah, yeah. I started a company when I was 18, and we were doing an Xbox MMO for the original Xbox, before Xbox came out. And we did it for about a year and a half, me and Joe, who is general manager of 5th Cell. And of course, it didn’t work out, and so then we got together a couple years later and started 5th Cell. But I haven’t worked at any other company. This is the only place I’ve ever worked, actually, is my own self.

Q: What made you guys decide that you wanted to found your own company? What did you do to get started?

Slaczka: I don’t know, we just wanted to do it because we wanted to make our own stuff, and nobody’s going to let you make your own stuff unless you own your own company. If you’re your own boss then you get to make the calls, right? How it happened, I don’t know, just sheer force of will? (Laughs.) There was a lot of roadblocks, just kept on doing it, you know, personality, both our personalities are very strong-willed to just get through it. No matter how many failures we just said, no, we can do this, we believe in ourselves and obviously we did. What’s crazy is that a lot of people are like, what kind of investment did you get, and we’re like, none, we didn’t have any investment. Well, what’s your background? None. What games companies have you worked at? None. What school did you go to? I didn’t. You know, it’s just like, if you can do it, you can do it, you know?

Q: I was wondering, is there a story behind the name 5th Cell?

Slaczka: Actually, 5th Cell is from my writing. I studied screenwriting for a couple years, just self-study. And one of my screenplays had a terrorist group called 5th Cell and I thought it would sound really cool, and we were like, we needed something that sounded kinda corporate but hip, so 5th Cell kinda made sense.

Q: You’re in your 20s.

Slaczka:: 28

Q: What advice would you give to someone in high school who has deep passion about an idea, and wants to drop out and do it. What would you say?

Slaczka: I would say, dropping out is not a good idea. It’s just not smart. I was very fortunate. No, if you have passion and you believe in yourself, then just go for whatever it is. So many people, I talk to all the time, they say, Oh, I really want to do this, but I’m stuck in this or that. It’s like, so do it! They’re like, Oh, but I’m scared, and I’m like, dude, there’s going to be failure in anything. Look at the sports stars and stuff. They fail or whatever, but they make it eventually because they know. If you believe in yourself and you know you’re good, just do it.

Q: Could you ever see yourself allowing 5th Cell to be acquired, and if so —

Slaczka: Never happen.

Q: Never?

Slaczka: Nope, never happen. No, it would happen for such a stupid amount of money, that it would be stupid, you know what I mean? It would be stupid for anybody to —

Q: That’s how high your price is?

Slaczka: Yeah, we know our price, and we’re not worth that, because I sweated blood and tears for six years and I don’t want somebody telling me what to do. It’s like, I’m doing just fine myself, so why do I need (to sell)? We’re making money, we’re doing better every year. Not gonna happen.