Sandy Petersen 🪔
@SandyofCthulhu • 86,010 subscribers
Game Designer and Father of Lovecraftian gaming. CEO of Petersen Games. Also Doom, Age of Empires, etc. Subscribe for exclusive game insights & history!
Shorts
Videos
How Quake ruined id Software. There has been a lot of praise of Quake of late, with its 30th anniversary, and it's deserved. Quake is an amazing feat of art, programming, and design. I worked on it, and everything came together almost perfectly from all of us. We ended up with a free-wheeling, frenetic action game with enough of a visible world to grip the imagination. All the team did a brilliant job, fulfilling tasks just right. But at a grim cost. We worked long and hard, and I think it broke us spiritually. 1/3
Sandy Petersen 🪔1,213,652 views • 28 days ago
Poltava - the Swedish king Charles XII, filled with hubris, took on Peter the Great of Russia. At Poltava Charles was crushed. If the Swedes had better managed the campaign leading up to Poltava, they might have ended up controlling the Baltic, and what are now known as the Baltic states. While no one's ever going to claim Charles XII was a good guy, Sweden has been a generally benign force in world history, while Russia has been a force of repression and darkness of the time. A feebler Russia may have have been a good thing. 2/5
Sandy Petersen 🪔183,018 views • 16 days ago
For those doubting, Thai commercials are the best in the world. Possibly the entire solar system.
Sandy Petersen 🪔1,982,002 views • 10 months ago
Under the Labor Theory of value, the game Concord should have been a great success, because of all the effort that went into making it. Looking at their characters, it's mind-boggling that they thought you'd play to be these awful cringe "heroes". I know Concord is old news now, but it is incredible. I was invariably on much smaller teams, but we apparently put a lot more effort into making our games look good to players. 1/2
Sandy Petersen 🪔206,577 views • 1 month ago
I took my 12yo grandson to see Godzilla Minus One in the theater. He was of course excited, but I was a little concerned because would it be too scary. The WHOLE MOVIE he was sitting forward in his seat, his hands gripping the armrests, staring unblinking, jaw agape. He was picking up on stuff I didn't get. But you need to know my grandson has an eidetic (photographic) memory. So I'm watching it, and there's a report that Godzilla is seen near Giza. Big deal I think, but my grandson gasps and says "Oh no!" Because HE had remembered that the girl got a job in Giza. But I had not. When it ended, I asked my grandson if it was too scary. He said, breathlessly, "No!" Then I asked him what was the best part, and he said, "Every part was the best part." I reluctantly had to say that despite my great love for the original 1954 movie, Godzilla Minus One beats it. Two other facts: 1) The IJN Takao was a real ship which survived the war. It even survived Leyte Gulf! 2) Godzilla Minus One cost less than $15 million. We could have made 25 of them for the cost of Avatar: The Way of Water. Or 15 for the cost of Wakanda Forever. Godzilla Minus One punked the American movie system so hard.
Sandy Petersen 🪔408,429 views • 3 months ago
How MicroSoft murdered Ensemble. In a side note, Elon Musk himself dropped in on my Quake thread from a night ago. Sir - with respect, what are you doing commenting on my puny thread? Go take humanity to Mars! Anyway, Microsoft's purchase of Ensemble (as described yesterday) was great for us. Our worthless Ensemble stock became valuable MicroSoft stock. I paid off my house. And MicroSoft's ownership didn't change much because they were already our publisher and we already had spent time working with their idiot marketers. MicroSoft had learned lessons. When they bought FASA, they moved the company to Redmond, broken it up in different teams (different buildings even) and then FASA basically never did much again. When they bought Bungie, they moved them to Redmond, but kept them all in the same building working together. It took Bungie 6 months before they were able to produce. So when they bought us, they just left us in situe, in Dallas, figuring we'd become an awesome cash cow. Which we did. 1/6
Sandy Petersen 🪔110,382 views • 27 days ago
I balanced all of the Age of Empires series except the first (which I then re-balanced after Rise of Rome). What I learned is that the Goths or Ottomans aren't your real enemies - that's the spreadsheet. Game balance is one of the black arts. If you make a unit too strong, everyone whines that it's broken, and it gets banned. If you make it too weak, nobody touches it and all your time was wasted. You’re forever chasing that sweet "goldilocks" spot. 1/7
Sandy Petersen 🪔57,555 views • 14 days ago
So if my theorem is correct, and Quake gutted id Software, was it worth it? Well I'd say yes absolutely. Games are more important than game companies, and Quake is an iconic titan of the gaming world. Plus it's not like the people who left vanished off the face of the Earth. John Romero's still making games. I'm still making games, Mike Abrash as well, and so forth. We're all contributing to the hobby. Heck, I'm GLAD I was gone, because I got to work on the Age of Empire series which was amazeballs. But man alive it seems like the company could have had its act together better and kept that dream team. 3/3
Sandy Petersen 🪔103,203 views • 28 days ago
How Ensemble Studios got bought by MicroSoft. Ensemble Studios was amazingly successful. We produced only one game that sold less than 2 million copies, and THAT one sold a million so was no failure. Even the expansions (which I led) sold a million copies or more. In 2000, MicroSoft needed to sign a new contract with us for our upcoming games. The contract sucked. It was literally equal to or worse than the contracts offered to their other partners. We balked. The problem was that MicroSoft is so huge, that it is divided into different satrapies that don't answer to each other. The contract-signing division get rewarded, basically, for handing out sucky contracts that benefit only MicroSoft. But the game publishing division was rewarded for selling great games, and Ensemble Studios was a rock star. 1/5
Sandy Petersen 🪔45,034 views • 28 days ago
All traditional Chinese medicine is trolling rich people. "I bet if I put a snake in this bottle of wine I can sell it to a wealthy idiot for big bucks." "My client's wiener doesn't work. I'll tell him that if he eats a tiger's wiener it'll heal up." "Gonna feed this guy aristolochic acid, because it will destroy his kidneys and then I can marry his widow." Traditional Chinese medicine is the most-disproved folk medicine in the world. I would rather go to a Hindu Vaidya or a Navajo medicine man than a Chinese doctor. They'll be far cheaper, won't use endangered species, and while their elixirs might not fix me, won't kill me.
Sandy Petersen 🪔38,411 views • 23 days ago
Spears are the best melee weapon ever invented, and we inherited them from earlier hominids (probably Homo erectus). With a spear, a human can take on a lion with a pretty good chance of success. The Masai tribe used to require its youth to kill a lion with a spear as a rite of manhood. Every kid. Spears in some version dominated every battlefield. Yes the Romans used gladius & shield, but they also carried spears (pila). Yes knights carried swords, but at Agincourt, the dismounted English knights used their lances as spears against the French chivalry. Even when firearms came out, spears were used. Up till near the end of the 17th century, pikes were used to protect musketeers from cavalry. The pikes were only discarded when bayonets were invented - allowing every musket to be its own spear. We still use bayonets today of course, but the vastly superior weapons of our age make it mostly superfluous. But the spear is the weapon that put us on top of the food chain, and that won almost every battle fought up till the 19th century. Lindybeige (the guy in the video) did the actual experiment. He had a bunch of guys who had never used spears before battle a bunch of guys who were somewhat familiar with swords. The spears win and win and win.
Sandy Petersen 🪔122,395 views • 4 months ago
This is my favorite anti-tank rifle. It's from World War I. I know it's not the best, but it's cool because it looks like a real rifle, instead of a technological nightmare (like the Finnish and Japanese weapons). It only has a pistol grip because it's impossible to wrap your hand around the giant stock.
Sandy Petersen 🪔131,636 views • 5 months ago
Why game companies focus on graphics instead of gameplay? 1) the devs must show the game to upper management. They don't play it. They just look at the cut scenes. So to get greenlit you need cool cut scenes that the players will probably skip. 2) the game journalists who review your game only care about screen shots. They will play it for maybe 10 minutes. Superficial looks, not depth, is what they will review. I'm not decrying graphics. Great graphics make a game better. But game play entices players. If devs ignore management and journalists you can get incredible games. Remember Dwarf Fortress? And look at Fallout: New Vegas - really, kind of chunky graphics even for its time, but terrific gameplay. Also neaer-perfect soundtrack.
Sandy Petersen 🪔36,873 views • 1 month ago
Way back in 1975, the early days of D&D, my friend Steve created a huge single-floor dungeon. Instead of traveling up and down to get to harder sections, the monsters (and treasures) got higher level as you wandered further from the entry. The rooms were sorted into clear neighborhoods. It was innovative for 1975. In the exact middle of the place was a chamber with an enormous pile of loose bricks. The bricks detected as magical, so naturally we piled as many as we could into our packs to carry out of the dungeon. Our plan being to figure out what they did later on. We could only carry a hundred pounds or so at a time each, so had to keep going to the central chamber and returning. Eventually we noticed that the pile of bricks we'd stacked in our wagon outside the dungeon wasn't getting bigger, and we figured out that the bricks' "magic" was that they randomly over time teleported back to the central chamber. So what? Well, our party members were always encumbered with bricks, moving at the slowest rate of 6" per turn. And the dungeon's monsters were packed with slow, but tough, things like mummies, giant slugs, shambling mounds, golems, etc. Which now could catch us. We were also going along a predictable route - to and from the chamber, so the smarter monsters set up ambushes for us. Really it was one of the most subtle and clever holistic "traps" I've ever seen, because everything worked in concert. There was no lock to pick, no pit to avoid. It just depended on greed and the dungeon's natural layout. Calling you out though Steve because that was a dirty trick, but what a fun dungeon. Later Steve got a job with TSR and designed one of their minigames (Saga, if you're curious). Even later, he got me in touch with Greg Stafford of Chaosium which eventually allowed me to publish Call of Cthulhu with them and launch my gaming career. So I guess I owe all to Steve, despite those damn bricks.
Sandy Petersen 🪔55,362 views • 2 months ago
1960s Czech movies are crazy, as well as crazy good. Here's a few I've seen that YOU ought to watch as well: Fantastic Planet (1967 Franco-Czech co-production; better science fiction film than any anime I've seen) Prague Nights (1969) horror/fantasy anthology Invention For Destruction (1958) the most amazing "animation" I've ever seen, based on a strange combination of cardboard cut-outs, stop-motion, and live-action. Everyone ought to see this. The trailer is shown below. Also, Karel Zeman, the director of Invention For Destruction, did a bunch of other crazy fantasy movies all worth watching. One's about some boy scouts who sail down a river into the past and meet prehistoric monsters.
Sandy Petersen 🪔61,058 views • 3 months ago
Fourteen years ago I had decided to give up creating new games. Times were tough. I had actually accepted a job in an Indian iPhone app company - my task was to make their games fun. The job seemed interesting. The salary was fantastic. But before I left for India, I decided to create One Last Game ... Let me know what you think.
Sandy Petersen 🪔24,826 views • 1 month ago
The game industry has a history of making terrible decisions, but I guess we're still better than Hollywood in this regard. Remember E. T. the video game? The company was so certain it would be a hit that they actually produced MORE E. T. games than there were Atari 2600s. That REALLY punks the Labor Theory of Value in my opinion. Add your Worst Ever video games to the list. 2/2
Sandy Petersen 🪔25,693 views • 1 month ago
