Sandy Petersen 🪔
@SandyofCthulhu
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Game Designer, Horror fan, Grandpa. Founder of Lovecraftian gaming. CEO of Petersen Games. Also known for Doom, the Age of Empires series, etc.
Joined October 2012
Pet peeve: when archers are ordered to "fire" in a period film. Before gunpowder, that term made no sense.
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Okay looky here whippersnapper. I WROTE the original Doom backstory. First off, it’s not genocide to blow demons back to Hell. Second, well … I got nothing else. You hit the nail on the head.
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Americans call it “soccer” because when it came to the USA, the common UK slang for the sport was “soccer” and we kept it. We called it “soccer” before the UK called it football. So screw you guys.
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In 1999, I was assigned to design the expansion pack to Age of Empires 2. I chose The Conquerors as the theme, and wishing to have 4 civs (as we had on Rise of Rome), I chose the Spanish, the Aztecs, the Huns, and the Mayans. The project went ahead extremely well. We were
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So I went ahead and we crammed in the Korean civ in the last 5 weeks we had. No Microsoft didn't give us any extra time. We made what apparently were three mistakes. We used the wrong art for the turtle ships (we used a legitimate source, but apparently Koreans didn't like that
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Granddaughters playing a game their grandpa helped design 27 years ago.
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@GShaneMorris The Christian aversion to the Harry Potter books, whose author has avowed that the books are inspired by her Christian faith, is one of the most embarrassing examples of Christian prudery and philistinism to occur in my lifetime.
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Microsoft said, "We want you to add Koreans to The Conquerors pack.". I said, "Koreans, greatly to their credit, were not conquerors. They stayed in their lane. While they're cool, they don't fit the Conquerors theme.". Here was Microsoft's argument: "Starcraft sold 3 million
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In 1997, Age of Empires was just coming out. My job was to design a new RTS game - Sorceress. But in the first few months, they kept pulling people off my team to work on Age of Empires 2. By the end of the year, I had exactly three guys - me, one programmer, and one artist. I
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@ThePhoenixPress He did. And then I did not have access to it when I wrote the manual for the original Doom so the two-sentence backstory you got is what I wrote.
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How to get your dream project - corporate politicking. After my successes with Rise of Rome and The Conquerors, I was a shoe-in to do the expansion for Age of Empires 3. But I had a problem. The natural assumption everyone had was that this expansion would be Asian civs. I did
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it's kind of depressing that the most popular Real Time Strategy game today (according to the ever-reliable Reddit) is Age of Empire 2, which we designed back in 1999. Yeah I know it's somewhat updated but still . there hasn't been ANY huge improvements in RTS in 26 years?
Are there any forgotten game genres or design trends you wish devs would bring back?.
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We had an actual Nahuatl speaker do the voice over for the Aztec civ in Age II: The Conquerors. We wanted an actual Mayan speaker, only to find that there are about 20 different extant Mayan languages. We picked one and so we DO have a real Mayan speaker but no idea if it's one
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For Age II and Age III we sourced the real language for pretty much every civ for the sounds for the villagers & warriors. Some we could not, and had to use substitutes - no one seems to know what the Huns spoke for instance. (I am not sure, but we might have had them speak
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@MBartworkz This is scientifically completely wrong. Predators, in general, and with some exceptions, are generally smarter. Case in point, canids & felids are both smarter than rabbits.
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For me, the deathknell for the new Star Wars was their misuse of Finn. Here was a SUPER EXCITING character - a guy who used to be a Storm Trooper?! Now joined the good guys? What a concept! I expected to see him angsty about killing former comrades, giving the heroes insights
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Here’s another awesome t-shirt I own, from early 1994. Only 8 people got these. The front is just a shirt, but when people saw the back, their eyes popped.
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I just can't see a game as "Satanic" in which you spend literally all your time trying to destroy demons.
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I will die on the hill of literally no one before the 1980s being “transphobic”.
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My dad is two months away from his 97th birthday. He is the NUMBER ONE player of Starcraft in his age category.
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My dad is in the top 1% of Starcraft players in his age category. He is 93.
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Often modern "experts" talk about how horses won't really charge a line of infantry. This is because they don't know how cavalry horses were trained pre-gunpowder. In the middle ages (and doubtless back to ancient times) you took a horse and ride it towards cooperating footmen,
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The best part, for me, was at the end of 1999, when MicroSoft came to Ensemble Studios, all pompous and snide, and said, "We have learned that doing expansions for RTS games is really smart. Do one please." I looked at the MS goons and just said, "Yeah? Who taught you that?" And
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In 1994, my LDS family had the missionaries over for supper at our house. When they heard I made computer games, one of them started telling about this really evil Satanic game he'd heard of. Yup, it was Doom. Some radio stations back in Utah had picked up on it. I was red as a
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It's 1993, and Doom E1M1. John Carmack says, "We need an enemy launching fireballs DOWN at us, to prove it's actually 3-D." Hence the imps up high in the acid room. Their sole purpose is to convince you it's 3-d.
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You don’t have to uproot many olive trees to build a thorium nuclear plant. In fact, atomic power doesn’t even need to be in a sunny area.
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Sadly I do not know the name of the person who vocalized the famous wololooo sound. It was done before I joined the team. If Chris Rippy sees this (or someone shows it to him) perhaps he remembers.
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I think I have enough chops in gaming to be authoritative enough to say: “Games must be fun. In fact the single criteria for rating games is how fun it is.”. Not only that, the game should be fun right from the start. We spent a lot of time making Age of Empires fun.
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You know why we had those huge boxes? Those thick manuals? Cloth maps? It was 100% to discourage piracy. Source: I was there.
When PC games stopped being sold in big boxes full of maps and trinkets and with a manual you could kill a crocodile with, we knew civilisation had collapsed. 💔
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This was my grandson's gelatinous cube costume for Halloween one year. Note the burger, skull, etc. inside the cube.
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As near as I tell from talking with native Asians and Europeans, the American "disgusting food" is Root Beer.
They say every culture has a food that everyone else thinks is disgusting, what‘s that food for your culture?.
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In the late 90s LucasArts licensed the Age of Empires game engine to create Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds. I think it came out ~2001. We at ES got to see it and make suggestions before its release but all credit for its gameplay & art goes to LucasArts.
Would you play a TTRPG/wargame of planetary conquest, and what would be the driving ethos of your faction?
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@InsaneCope As one of Doom’s designers I had zero idea that it was political. How is it right-wing to kill zombies & demons?.
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A friend told me this story. He was running a D&D game (circa 1980) and a mini-maxing guy asked if he could play a gold dragon. My friend: "Sure.". Mini-Max: "I suppose it will have to start as a hatching and work its way up?". My friend: "Naw, it can start as a young adult.
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Because drawing the human figure is taught early in art school, and drawing clothing that drapes realistically is hard, especially in action poses.
Why do superheroes have to wear skin tight clothing to fight crime and villains what if you wanna pull up in sweats.
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The way I pay for my property & money is by trading part of my life to gain them. This is how it works in every society, from hunter-gatherer to hardline communism to capitalism. You exchange part of your life to get stuff. Someone who steals from me is literally destroying part
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They sent in a team which was whining because in Age of Empires III though we had native americans, they couldn't be wiped out. But in The Warchiefs, if you were playing a native civ, obviously you could be annihilated. Sort of the whole purpose to playing an RTS, right?. But no,
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When Excalibur came out (1981), Greg Stafford (founder of Chaosium) went to see it. He came back all super-excited. Why? Because it had the Fisher King motif. He gushed about it. I was only 26 years old, and had no idea what he was talking about, but didn't dare admit it. So I
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A guy told me he aced his history test because thanks to Age of Empires he knew who the Hittites were.
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When I designed Call of Cthulhu, HPL was vanishingly obscure. Today millions know of him, and thousands have told me they read HPL after playing CoC. It is my proudest achievement to have been even the tinest part of leading so many to cosmic horror. Despite all the kitsch.
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I did have some pushback. First, some people at Ensemble wanted to claim that Carthage was the same as Phoenician. I agreed they had a lot in common, but felt that Carthage had developed enough to be something new. Also oddly enough I got a lot of flak from Greece - they were
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In 1993 I joined id Software. There was a Doom Bible written by Tom Hall, but I only ever got a brief skim of it. I think it was used by the artists and John Romero to some extent, but I didn't really access it. One of my jobs was actually to write the Doom manual. As part of
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In early 2006 I was in charge of creating The Warchiefs, an expansion to Age of Empires 3. In Age 3, native sites were on the map, and you could ally with one by building a trade post. But the native town itself couldn’t be harmed. The native towns produced unique units that
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I worked on Age of Empires II. And all i have to say is “Now do huskarls”.
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And here's a balance tale about the Huns, which I created for Age of Empires 2: the Conquerors. I wanted to give them a really cool early game boost. But I also wanted it to "feel" like the Huns, rampaging nomads. I came up with "they don't need houses". Normally in AoE, you
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My wife asked me if something was bothering me. I’ve been married 46 years so I knew exactly what to say. Nothing. Never again. Fool me once shame on you. Fool me 10,000 times shame on me.
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It’s demonstrated in multiple studies that religious conservatives donate more to charity, even leaving out “giving to a church.” Plus wedded unreligious conservatives donate more than comparable liberals. So the lie that conservatives don’t care is just that. A lie. Single.
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Boycotting is part of capitalism, and doesnt make it fall apart any more than it makes communism fall apart. The difference is communism shoots you if you don’t participate.
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Here is the argument, articulated by Jack Vance, which convinced me. I pay for my property by sacrificing part of my life to earn it. Hence someone who steals or destroys my property is literally destroying part of my life. (This is as true under communism as capitalism.)
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Tell me you’re a city kid who’s never been outside the ‘burbs without saying so directly.
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Seriously? We loved Princess Leia. We loved Black Widow. We loved Katniss. We loved Sarah Connor. We loved Hermione. We loved Ripley. We loved The Bride (Uma Thurman). We loved Clarice Starling. Being female has nothing to do with liking or not liking a character for fandom.
would've been this generations boba fett, but since she's a woman people hated her.
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Huh. PC Gamer found my tweet. Well, it’s the truth. I’ve told the tale in plenty of interviews ere now. And in the end, we got the Korean civ out of it, which is cool.
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Probably almost anyone who played Age of Empires III can guess this fact, but the most powerful dude in the game - the cheat Tommynator, created by typing "tuck tuck tuck" is of course a homage to one of the artist's toddler sons. Said son really liked his monster truck toy but
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My son was telling my grandson a bedtime story: the heroes went deep into a cave. Suddenly, my grandson interjected, "And they saw the MOUTH of the world. And it was EATING." In 12 words he created imagery scarier than 99% of my stuff.
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Whenever the US Army creates a new rank, George Washington gets promoted to it. He was the first 3 star General in the Civil War, first 4 star general in WW1, etc. So George is always highest rank, and, obviously, always senior. This means in the zombie apocalypse, he will be in
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Okay, so here's the thing. Goblins or goblin-like beings are found worldwide from Algonquin puckwudgies to Shetland trows to Japanese akaname. These cultures didn't have Jewish people around to be antisemitic. So "Toga's Revenge" is 100% wrong at least about goblins.
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One perk of working in the game industry for 45 years is I accumulate a LOT of rare T-Shirts. Here I am wearing the rather subtle Age of Empires 3: the Warchiefs release t-shirt. If you are envious I sympathize.
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There was never a group I associated with that was less political than the crew at id Software. We never talked politics. Ever. I have no idea how John Romero, John Carmack or Adrian Carmack voted, or even if they did vote. The closest I got to a political discussion was one.
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Microprose was destroyed by going public. I was there.
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First, I had to convince MYSELF that the Natives would be cool. I wanted to give them a new and interesting ability and make them undeniably cool. I worked on this for a while, coming up with the Firepit idea (which lets the Indian villagers dance for special powers) and the
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Fun fact: in the first Age of Empires our artists used the nearby Benihana's as a partial basis for the oriental buildings. That's why the roofs are blue. It was a ghetto Benihana's. It actually had graffiti on parts of the INSIDE walls, and the cooks didn't do a show.
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In general, in Age of Empire playtests, cavalry were underrated. This is because cavalry are large hand-to-hand units, and their pathing is hindered when they try to get at dense units of infantry. When you consider that infantry usually were ranged, and didn't NEED to path to
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Pro Tips after 40 years in the game industry. 1) if they say "we don't need a contract", you need a contract. 2) if they ask, "don't you trust us?", don't trust them. 3) never EVER let a guy in a suit see a game with unfinished art.
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Is peak performance when your army masses at the enemy's gate, and then a random trade cart opens it up for you?
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@DocStrangelove2 To be fair, the craptastic Sten was specifically designed so some dude in a metal shop could make a copy in occupied Europe. So it was intentionally sucky.
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Game journalists have always been mostly scum. Around 1990, gaming mags would literally call us at MicroProse and ask for bribes for reviews. Bigger bribes = more favorable reviews. For “real” reviews, go to folks who play the whole game & grew from fandom, like sophia narwitz.
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Let's talk about Deep Ones. Deep Ones are weird amongst Lovecraft's races. First off, they are exceedingly humanoid - if you think about his other beings - Elder Things, Yithians, Fungi from Yuggoth, Starspawn - the Deep Ones are outliers. Yes Ghouls are also humanoid, but we
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Next step - the team. Now that all the leads agreed with me, we met with the team - programmers, designers, and artists first as individual groups then all together and made our case for Indian civs. The artists were the easiest ones to convince, once I started talking about
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Age of Empires cheat unit VMDL. The "DL" stands for the initials of one of Ensemble Studio's (ES) employees, and one of my very best friends while I worked there. We actually had two "DLs" at ES, and distinguished between them by calling one "Evil DL" and the other "Good DL".
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One of the two most lethal traps I ever used was this. The problem was when the player fell into the pit, he couldn't see anything because whipped cream. And the other players couldn't see him. And when they tried to lower ropes to him, the ropes floated on the whipped cream and
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This is the back of my car right now. Super happy to have kids. Even happier to have grandkids.
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Have people forgotten what POV stands for?.
That's not something you organise. That's the sort of thing that just happens sporadically in isle 3 at walmart
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