Danny Bilson is the former executive vice president of core games at THQ, and a veteran of the entertainment business. His credits stretch across comics, movies, TV and, of course, games.
Here, he recalls a few untold tales of game development, drawn from his eventful time in the business. He is currently working on several new transmedia projects.
On Deep Six, THQ’s lost underwater shooter
“We were only working on the creative, we hadn’t started yet. It was really fresh and it has a really great concept. I think 4A was gonna do it, the team that did Metro. It was really awesome – we had lost the war of the worlds to a water-based alien planet and they’d flooded the earth so everything was underwater.
“The player started in a work camp, because they’d imprisoned all of the humans on the ocean floor in these work camps. The players finds out that they’re exterminating humans and you have to escape – and the whole game was a journey to the surface, and what you found along the way was unbelievable. It was creative only. A team in LA were going to do a prototype, but then 4A were gonna do that after Metro.”
4A never started work on Deep Six, but it has since released Metro: Last Light.
On Evolve, Turtle Rock’s ‘awesome, innovative’ shooter
“It’s an awesome game and I can’t wait for that to come out. I can tell you that Evolve was one of my favourite things we were working on, it was playable even in my last year there – that goes back two years – people in the office were playing it and having a blast.
“In the hands of Take Two, with the support to finish and good marketing spend, I can’t wait for them to finish. It’s really innovative and really awesome. I can’t actually tell you anything about it, though.
Evolve is still in development at Turtle Rock after it was bought by Take Two for $10.8 million in THQ’s bankruptcy sale.
On why EA seemed to think The Sims was like a sitcom
“EA came to me and said ‘We need some TV guys to help because we think it’s like a sitcom.’ Now, I don’t think Will [Wright, The Sims' creator] thought that for two seconds, and I don’t think I thought that for two seconds. I was just so excited to be working on a game because I love games, so we went up to Maxis and we sat with the team and we were very involved with them in high level creative for the last year of the game.
“So we wound up writing the career tracks in the game, we really convinced them to get kids and families in the game – or at least we inspired them… I don’t think I could convince somebody like Will of anything, he knows more than I do about that stuff. Helping them finish that game was really interesting and I learned a lot. They really were strong people there at that studio at the time. I don’t know if Will thought they needed any help at all, but management did so I got lucky.”
Bilson was a writer on EA’s James Bond: Everything Or Nothing, and directed the voice talent. He also worked on the Harry Potter games with JK Rowling and many other movie-based titles at the publisher.
On directing Hollywood talent
“At EA, any tie they had a big movie actor coming in they had me do it because I has a lot of directing experience with film so I did, y’know, Viggo Mortensen, Judi Dench, Pierce Brosnan, Gary Oldman – we had him on Medal Of Honor at one point, he was really awesome, really nice.
“The most professional and easy of all of them? Dame Judi. She was fantastic. I remember she was calling me Daniel and she was saying [puts on English accent] ‘just tell me what you want Daniel’ – I mean really easy, because she’s really professional and really secure. And there’s no nonsense.
“With Viggo Mortensen, there were lines [in Lord Of The Rings] that came up in the script that he had to say in Elvish – now evidently they’d crafted a whole language on the film, it was done, and we was like ‘You know what? I’ve got to get back to my house and get my book because I forgot how to say that in Elvish’ – he wanted it to be exactly right.
“Do they take it seriously? Yeah.”
Bilson also described one performer he worked with, who shall remain anonymous, as a “total jackass.”
Working with Peter Molyneux on Black & White
“My job was hilarious on that game. What I was really doing was localising the dialogue for Americans. It was stuff like [puts on English accent] ‘I am totally knackered and it’s time for a pot of tea’ – something like that, and I would replace it with ‘boy, I am wiped out, let’s get a beer.’ Stuff like that. I did the ugly American translation of the very colloquial dialogue in that.
“You know what I love about Peter and why I always want to hear about what he has to say and what he’s thinking about? He always thinking beyond. And he’s always reaching beyond and whether he reaches it or not I don’t care, because his vision is astonishing. I loved working with him. Working with Will [Wright] was similar, Will was more scientific, but that guy knows all kinds of stuff that I can’t even begin to think about.”
The one good thing to come out of GoldenEye Rogue Agent
“When we were doing my ill-fated game which ultimately became GoldenEye Rogue Agent – which I’ve never even looked at – I hired, as the senior production designer on the game, Sir Ken Adam. At the time he was 83, and he is one of my heroes of motion picture design – he designed James Bond, he did Dr Strangelove, and one of the coolest things was that he’d never scanned all of the sketches of his work, so I had someone at EA take his books and hi-res scan them all and give him back to him on disc.
“I have a disc too which I keep in my desk – it’s fantastic. I have a copy, Ken has a copy, and anyone who Ken has given it to has a copy. I may have given a copy to Guillermo Del Toro. It’s sacred stuff.
“He was more fantastic than I could ever imagine from his work. He was in the RAF in WWII and wasn’t a naturalised British citizen – he was a German in the RAF. And if he were shot down he would have been killed as a traitor. This guy was just one of the greatest guys, with one of the greatest stories, one of the best people I ever met in my life. And that was because of working on that failed game – that was the best thing that came out of the game.”
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