I came back to see if the main fatbabies site was still essentially dead (yes) and found out that the forums are still kicking a bit.
I always wondered if any of the former Blue Planeteers would post the story of BPS and Tetris Worlds. Admittedly this is a dead thread (last post in September I think), but I wanted to shed some light on what really happened and why video game development (even something as seemingly simple as Tetris) is incredibly difficult these days. I was a member of the Tetris Worlds development team. When the project started, it was extremely ambitious: four platforms (PC/PS2/X/GC) in 11 months. As you all know, Christmas is king in this business, and we were under tremendous pressure from THQ to get two of these (PC/PS2) on the shelf by Christmas 2001, with the xbox and GC versions to follow close behind.
First of all, I think Henk Rogers loves Tetris. It is his baby, it made him a mint, and he really cares about keeping the game alive and fun. That being said, I think Henk also has a massive ego and is blissfully ignorant of the realities of game development, and I think these were the main factors in the train wreck that was Tetris Worlds. When we first began development, Henk provided a set of hand-drawn story boards to work from. No design document, no functional specification, only a stack of drawings and a few scribbled notes in the margins. Then he disappeared, to "handle business" and work with an outside contractor who was developing a Tetris design tool. This tool allowed the designers to create Tetris-style games using a simple GUI-driven Mac application.
While designing the tool and working on the gameplay itself, Henk (the "Master Game Designer" if you read the TW credits) left the bulk of the rest of the work to the Lead Designer and Lead Developer. Detailed designs began to take shape, development began, compromises were made, and the project began to look like it could actually be done on time.
Four months later, Henk called for a team meeting to get an update on development progress. Upon hearing about the direction development was taking, he freaked out. His "vision" had been utterly destroyed. Henk saw this game as a platform for the "Mino" characters. If you've played TW, the Mino is the little cube that sits in the lower left corner of your screen and watches the board while you play. Henk's vision was for each world to be comprised of dozens or hundreds of Minos that interacted intelligently with the player and each other, constructed the world as your gameplay progressed, and generally gave a feeling of life to each world. He also wanted a "Mino city" which provided online gameplay, buddy lists, and a tournament/ranking system. Needless to say, this was overambitious at best for a title that was expected to be on the shelves in less than a year.
With six months left until Christmas, Henk insisted on totally revamping the design of the game. The compromises for playability were thrown out. He insisted on redesigning the clean and simple multiplayer UI in favor of a complex, confusing interface that took three times as long to develop and debug. One programmer spent almost 100% of his time for 4-5 months working on nothing but the Mino AI engine, and effectively all of his work was thrown out of the final product.
Henk, the Lead Designer and the Lead Developer had meeting after meeting, argument after argument, and THQ got more and more nervous as Christmas approached and the game was largely unplayable. The development team put in 70, 80, even 100 hour weeks, sometimes 30-35 hours at a time, trying to make the game playable and keep Henk happy. While all this was going on, Blue Planet was in the throes of severe financial problems. Late paychecks were the norm - sometimes only a day or two late, sometimes as much as two weeks. The threat of a mass walkout convinced management to provide early notification of late paychecks and offer small bonuses or extra vacation days when checks were late.
Ultimately, enough of the problems were fixed that THQ deemed the game acceptable for release. It was a shell of what it could have been if the focus had been on simple, addictive gameplay with a few bits of eye candy to show off the capabilities of the (then) brand-new consoles. The PC version squeaked in before Christmas, but not early enough to make a dent - it hit the shelves on December 22. The PS2 version still had a number of problems and took another couple of months to complete. By this time, THQ was furious. They decided to take the work that had already been done on xbox and GC and hand it to another developer for completion. About this time, Blue Planet laid off its entire development staff and "refocused" on doing nothing but managing the Tetris license. I think they now consist of 2-3 employees (including Henk).
For the record, the ownership of Tetris is pretty convoluted. If I remember correctly, a Russian organization (Elorg) owns the copyright on the actual game itself. Elorg is somehow associated with the Soviet university that Alexey Pajitnov worked for when he created Tetris. The Tetris Company (TTC) owns the rights to develop Tetris games for PCs and consoles, and has dubbed Blue Planet Software the sole agent in charge of administering Tetris licensing. I believe in turn, BPS owns 50% of TTC and BPS is owned by Henk Rogers. The other half of TTC is owned by Alexey and a couple of lawyers or something like that.
Anyway, the main reason for making this post so long after the fact is that I wanted to give those of you who have not been in the game development business a glimpse of what goes on in so many development houses. I also wanted to defend the development team. They are not "hacks;" they were for the most part a talented group of programmers, designers and artists. It was simply impossible for this team to put out a really good game given the time constraints, flawed design, and grossly unreasonable demands placed upon them by Henk Rogers.
