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FiringSquad: How close has Rise of Nations come to the game you envisioned making while you were still at Firaxis?

Brian Reynolds: I think it’s a lot more than I was hoping it would be. (laughs) You can never sit down and just write down an idea on paper and then tell a programmer “go implement this,” you have to get your hands dirty and play with it. I was surprised at how many of our wild ideas worked. I mean you can pick up Rise of Nations as a RTS player and see a lot of familiar stuff, but there’s another level where there’s a lot of other things going on. Like the national borders, and the multiple cities, and the attrition, supply wagons, flanking attacks and all these things are different from other RTS games. But they work together really well. They form something that’s more than the sum of the additional ideas. I guess that was something I never expected. I though, “well, national borders will be cool…” “Multiple cities? Well we might manage to make that work without wrecking RTS.”

FiringSquad: You could have just said “Oh I knew it would work all along.”

Brian Reynolds: Nooo! (laughs) I think the truth is always more interesting.

FiringSquad: I know, your answer isn’t uncommon with creators. They find it all works out in the end so long as the process works. Which leads to my next question. You’ve got a game that I would call the most complicated RTS we’ve ever seen. It’s on par with Alpha Centuari as one of the most complicated well-designed games I’ve ever seen. You’ve made something really, really, complex, yet you’ve kept it streamlined, easy to learn, and under control. How do you do that?

Brian Reynolds: You’ve got to keep it under control, that’s for sure.

FiringSquad: I mean, if you’re not doing everything all by yourself, how do you do that?

Brian Reynolds: When it comes down to the rules of the game, that code is mostly implemented by me. To a certain extent I can keep my eye on everything. Somebody else can be doing the artificial intelligence, someone else can do the historical research for what kind of unit it is, somebody can be playing the game and giving me reports on balance or what have you. But, in the end, it’s me doing the code and me and Doug (Brian’s longtime colleague Doug Kaufman) keeping an eye on the rules. Ultimately all rules changes go through me, so there is a single hand keeping track of what’s going on everywhere.