Terminal Reality's Joe Kreiner
The Ghostbusters engine makers on future-proofing game development with the Infernal Engine
You'll know the Terminal Reality name as the studio behind the highly-anticipated and much-delayed Ghostbusters: The Video Game, but the team has also recently begun licensing out the technology behind that game to other development studios.
In this exclusive interview with GamesIndustry.biz, VP of sales and marketing Joe Kreiner discusses the unique differences of the new engine, why developers are interested in an alternative to the established game middleware, and how the Infernal Engine is future-proofed for the coming of a new wave of home consoles.
We're founded around our lead programmer Mark Randel, who's also our CEO, so like all old school game developers – we've been around for 15 years – he's very hands on. The big differentiation for us is that with the Infernal Engine we provide a complete solution across Wii, PS2, PSP, PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 – all in one integrated editor, and none of our competition can provide that. Developers can leverage their assets across more platforms with our technology.
We have our own physics technology that we wrote in-house and it's very saleable across all the platforms. When we started Ghostbusters the existing middleware solutions for physics just couldn't supply this level of realism so we went off and wrote our own. Mark wrote this as a hobby and it turns out that it's a very robust solution and it's applicable to every genre of gaming. The beauty of the physics solution is that because it's integrated into the engine our licensees can start working on it immediately, whereas with other middleware they would have to integrate it, which takes time.
The Infernal Engine is designed around scaling on multiple CPUs and SPUs and the PlayStation 3 has a ton of SPUs that game developers don't typically take full advantage of, whereas our engine is built from the ground up to scale to the platform. Our engine works great on the PS3 which is relatively unique because we designed the engine for consoles originally, not for the PC. It still works great on the PC but because we took a different path than our contemporaries we get a lot better performance out of the PlayStation 3.
Publicly, yes. The Infernal Engine has been used internally at Terminal Reality for the last five years, starting with games like BloodRayne. And we've been licensing it to third-parties for the past two years, but it was typically developers that were founded when people left our company because they had experience with it and they wanted to take it with them. So for instance a studio like Red Fly was founded by a bunch of guys who left Terminal Reality and became a licensee using out tech on a lot of different projects.
Dramatic. I joined Terminal Reality in November and they bought me in specifically to run the engine licensing portion of the business. I've been doing game developer relations with hardware companies for the last ten years. When they told me they were going to go after engine licensing I thought it was a very good thing. We publicly announced it at DICE with six licensees, and we've also just announced a deal with Streamline Studios to use the engine across a broad spectrum of projects. I would say the interest level is dramatic, there's a real desire for an alternative in the middleware business right now. And I think Infernal, because of our feature set, is really attracting a lot of attention.
I think it's more the limitations of certain technologies. For us, we get a lot of interest in our tech because we have a Wii solution that works really well, we have a PS3 solutions that works really well. The whole thing of people complaining that a game looks a lot like another – you can mitigate that by spending a lot of time to make sure it doesn't look like someone else's game. I wouldn't imagine if you look at the work our licensees are working on, none of it looks like Ghostbusters, it's radically different concepts. But if somebody was working on a third-person ghost hunting game it would probably look similar to Ghostbusters.
We intend to be very aggressive. My goal would be to see at least another half a dozen to a dozen within the next year, at minimum, and I think we're on track for that.
Absolutely. It shows off the engine tech really well. We've put a lot of polishing time into Ghostbusters and we think once it's out it should make my sales job a lot easier. We've also been doing a lot to show off our tech at DICE, GDC etc, to people who are starting projects now and the response has been universally positive. We've got a lot of features that aid quick development and that has a lot of people excited.
Our licensees are very wide. We have everything from a Wii puzzle games to hardcore, first-person shooters. We're also exploring the Xbox Live, PSN and WiiWare markets. While our engine is very powerful and works great for triple-A titles, it will scale down to smaller downloadable projects. The way we look at it is by seeding our engine into those marketplaces, as those developers mature and move into the retail space, they'll have experience with our technology and want to use it with bigger projects.
Certainly this year there has been a lot of guys springing up, and that's probably in recognition of the success of someone like Epic Games. The way we look at it at Terminal Reality is that we've got a lot of advantages over a lot of new entries. We've been in business for 15 years and we have a really wide swathe of expertise that we've built up on multiple genres and that's really helped the engine with the toolset. And our tech was built from the ground up to support consoles really well, whereas a lot of existing technology is not. The other main point is that we provide a complete solution that includes pretty much everything you would need to ship a title, it's fully integrated, it makes it easy.
Absolutely, and in fact that was a core part of why we designed the engine the way we did. The Infernal Engine scales across multiple CPUs and SPUs really well and it's built from the ground up to do that, and we feel that future-proofs us because it's likely the PS4 and the Xbox 720 is going to include more and more CPUs. On the PC side, because we're offloading physics and animations on to threads, we see the PC market having more and more cores, more and more available threads, and we'll be able to scale as the market does.
We want to show that the Infernal Engine is future-proof and is a very advanced solution with a lot of awesome features, and the visual fidelity is up there with everybody else out in the industry. I wish the next console transition would happen really quickly because I think it would give us a huge advantage, but we'll probably have to wait a while and see. Until then, the Infernal Engine is a great competitor to what's already out there and the visual fidelity of Ghostbusters will show off the technology.
With the developers we've spoken to there's still a lot of issues supporting the PlayStation 3. And the Wii is a big factor now, with such a massive installed base it's really driving the market in a lot of cases. It may not be the developers lead SKU but they still want to be able to say to a publisher that they have the technology to do that. Our licensees know they have that, and they can share assets between developments easily.
Oh absolutely, the studio has always been about making large scale games and through our 15 year history we've done everything from making flight sims to driving games, survival horror, and now Ghostbusters which is the kind of title we want to be associated with the team. The triple-A, high quality title. That's our goal. We have two internal development teams, one has just finished Ghostbusters and the other is on an unannounced title. That will continue. We see ourselves staying in the triple-A development business and then having a separate engine licensing business.
As we look at potential projects for the studio we're always going to pick ones that are going to show off the engine. Because Infernal is such a focus for Terminal Reality we always want to show the best side of our tools and technology.
Joe Kreiner is vice president of sales and marketing for the Infernal Engine at Terminal Reality. Interview by Matt Martin.