Thad Sasser Loves Learning, Smart Risk-taking, Fun, and MERICA, Part 1

If you're not learning, if you're not growing, if you're not taking risks, if you're not innovating, you're not doing it right. I like taking smart, calculated risks.—Thad Sasser

Thad Sasser, a long-time designer of first-person shooter (FPS) video games and a seasoned game studio exec, was a Player Driven podcast guest last October. Sasser and Player Driven’s founder, Greg Posner, had a lively, wide-ranging discussion. Sasser’s enthusiasm and profound affection for the finer points of shooters was as self-evident as it was infectious.

One of Posner’s early questions involved a theme he extracted from Sasser’s remarkable resume.

“You’ve worked on EA’s Battlefield Hardline,” Posner noted. And on Krafton’s PUBG, and “we have NetEase’s Marvel Rivals, we have Activision’s COD, right? You seem to be locked into FPS’s.” What gives?

“I’ve been fascinated by shooters ever since I played the original Doom,” confessed Sasser. “The first time I saw the original Doom running on a PC, I had never seen anything like it.”

“It was at a friend’s house. It was at a party, and somebody was nerding out in the corner...I just spent the rest of the party playing that game with him.”

“That’s the first time I was ever exposed to shooters,” and it was love at first sight. “From there, you know, I went and I got a Voodoo card, and I got, you know, Duke Nukem. And I became a master of Quake on the 1200 baud modem. Oh my God, those were the days.”

“I just got absolutely hooked by the competitive aspect, and then how friendly the players were. There was a real sense of community back in the day when you played a shooter. People were like, ‘Oh, that was a really good game. You did really well.’ And you’d be like, ‘I can’t believe you sat in that corner and got me. Good job!’”

Not that it was all hat-tipping and golf clapping.

“There’s some toxicity here and there,” recalled Sasser. “Maybe sometimes that was part of it, too.”

Shortly thereafter, Sasser discovered “Virtus Deathmatch Maker. It was an old, old piece of software. I learned how to make levels. And that started my technical journey on the side of game development.”

Virtus’ Deathmatch Maker was an early WAD creation tool and map editor for id Software’s Doom, Doom II, Quake and Quake II, all of which debuted in the 1990s. You can still download Deathmatch Maker today.

Left: Yes, kiddos, before the internet took off, you had to buy level editors, mods, and games on CD-ROMs. Right: A screenshot of the Virtus Deathmatch Maker editor, courtesy of a Valve community-related archive site, VDU.

Posner asked Sasser how he “got into the gaming industry and what was it like when you started?”

“It was very different back when I started,” he answered. “As you can imagine, there weren’t many degree programs for game design and there weren’t that many known avenues to get into game design. In fact, I didn’t even know I could be a game designer.”

“I was in Los Angeles at the time and I’d started my own IT company. And I hated my boss, myself. I was terrible.”

LOL.

“Jobs used to be found in the newspaper. It’s an archaic thing.”

Yes, kiddos, job-seekers (including me!) used to get ink-stained fingers as they scoured the Help Wanted sections of their local newspapers for potential future gigs.

“I saw an ad in there that said, ‘Get paid to play games.’ ‘Oh, that sounds like my kind of gig.’ And of course, it’s a QA position, which means you get paid to play the same broken game over and over and over.”

QA is short for quality assurance. Basically, the job involves playing video games and finding and documenting any bugs, system failures, and stability problems that may exist so that they may be reviewed and/or fixed prior to release.

“I was actually really good at this. Not only was I good at analyzing the bugs and understanding the bugs and writing them up,” recalled Sasser, but “having been a lifelong gamer and avid consumer of games, I was really good at games.”

“It was really fortuitous. It was at Gray Matter Interactive in Los Angeles. I got to work with an amazing team of just absolutely stellar game developers on a game called Return to Castle Wolfenstein.”

This was in the early 2000s. That particular game was indeed well-received: Its Metacritic on PC was an impressive 88%, according to Wikipedia, and some 350,000 copies eventually sold in the U.S. alone.

“This was kind of my first foray into being an embedded tester of looking at the scripting and the code and the level design and offering my input directly to the developers on a daily basis,” Sasser continued.

“I loved games already. I was already taking apart files and editing them, just because that’s the kind of guy I am. I was able to show off some of my mods and so on.”

“I became a game designer then, and it turned out to be a really good career move.”

That’s an understatement.

Sasser has gone on to work for a veritable who’s who list of AAA shooter studios.

Yeah, “I’ve worked for Activision, Amazon, Ubisoft. Yeah, a bunch of the top players. And this was intentional. I want to know how they work,” Sasser told Posner at one point.

“My goal is always to try to figure out how to help gaming get better,” he added. “Not every risk is gonna pan out, but being able to identify that earlier—this is unlikely to work versus this one’s likely to work—allows you to focus your vision.”

We’ll circle back to what Sasser means by vision in next week’s concluding installment of this peak podcast exchange. We’ll also get into Sasser’s assessment of the balancing act that must be struck, if a shooter is going to have a chance at success in today’s tough and crowded market, between innovating and playing it safe (by nailing the basics) next week.

Here, our focus is providing more color and texture to Sasser’s earliest industry gigs, and how the line between this hardcore PC gamer and a full-time job in game design/development disappeared.

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Skiing Straight from Tribes into a B-17 Bomber in Call of Duty

I'm just kind of a tinkerer and a taker-a-parter.—Thad Sasser

Early in last October’s discussion, Player Driven founder Greg Posner asked Thad Sasser, the current Creative Director of Warzone at Raven Software, to take a separate stroll down memory lane.

“Back in the day when you had this thing you called a newspaper,” Posner asked, “and you were looking for your jobs and you found that QA job, what were the games you were playing at the time?”

“I was hooked on Tribes,” Sasser responded. “I don’t know if you know what Tribes is.”

Tribes is a series of multiplayer PC FPS’s (naturally!) set in a sci-fi universe. The first entry, Starsiege: Tribes, debuted in 1998. Dynamix developed it and Sierra On-Line published it.

“It was a game where you had two bases,” Sasser recalled.

“You had soldiers with different classes. You had vehicles. It was like an early Battlefield, but sci-fi, right? It had jetpacks. And it had the most amazing bug that turned into emergent gameplay.”

Sasser elaborated giddily.

“In this game, you could press the space bar and you would jump a little bit, right? Pretty common. Now, this game also had big mountains and big valleys. And what happens is if you press the space bar? You remove your friction.”

“As you went down a hill, you would jump the whole way, pressing your space bar. And you would ski. And you would gain velocity. And then you hit the other side and you go up and—tap tap tap tap!—and you’d sail up into the sky. And it felt so good and so powerful and the game became this almost, like, physics ballet.”

“The main weapon was called a Spinfusor. It’s a slow-moving rocket. And so, people started to get good at being…like, ‘You ran out of jet juice, I know your arc.’ Bam! ‘I’m going to shoot where you’re going to be.’ And so, these things called mid-airs became like the pinnacle of skill in this game. And this game was just so much fun to discover as a new gamer.”

The Spinfusor is Tribes’ answer to Doom’s BFG. The magnetic cannon fired heavy, explosive energy discs that could be used to propel a “skier” forward, if fired backward, or take out another player in mid-air, if fired forward at the right moment at just the right trajectory.

“I’d been playing the Super Heroes mod on Quake before, so I’d experienced flying rockets,” Sasser continued. “It wasn’t as expansive and cool as this. This had really thought about the physics. And so that was the game I was playing. And it’s one of the things I showed off, my mod for this, to the Grey Matter folks. It’s one of the things that helped me get my first job.”

To be clear, skiing in Starsiege: Tribes was a physics engine bug. It was discovered by beta testers…and they fell head over heels in love with it (while being blown out of the sky). By spamming the jump button at the right time, players slid down the game’s slopes rather than walking/running. The way the physics systems worked, they’d just keep gaining more and more momentum if they timed it all right, which led to avatars being launched off mountains like long-distance ski jumpers at the Winter Olympics.

Throw in the possibility of single-shot kill rockets and 10v10 (up to 32v32) multiplayer mayhem, and you’ve got the foundations of a unique, and potentially epic, FPS. Initially skeptical, Dynamix ultimately embraced this bug: By the time Tribes: Ascend came out in 2012, it had a dedicated ski key.

If you want to get a sense of skiing in the game, this six minute YouTube video has you covered, and the Spinfusor’s in it to boot.

As for the Super Heroes mod that Sasser referenced, it was related to the original Quake. This mod transformed standard deathmatches by introducing new hero classes as well new abilities like incredible speed, invisibility, and, yes, devastating projectiles.

“I just got super invested in this,” Sasser told Posner. “Now, I tend to get invested in anything I obsess over. I got invested in [Sid Meier’s] Civilization before this, and made mods and so on. So, it’s kind of in my DNA to tinker and take things apart.”

“Even electronics. I’ve done that my whole life.”

An interest in tinkering with things to see how they work is something that Sasser shared in common with another guest of Player Driven, Christina Camilleri. She heads up trust and safety at Netflix Games (and my profile of this “chaos gremlin” was published in March).

“You can think of some other emergent gameplay” examples, Sasser continued. “We talked about skiing [in Tribes]. You remember back in the day when you used to be able to see [through and fly] the jeeps, with friendly fire off, in Battlefield 1942?”

“If you got it just right, you could actually land them [jeeps and other vehicles] on the capture point with your friends in them. Things like that are just so much fun for me to play around with and have fun. I used to be able to stand on the wings of the B-17 as it flew, and it would roll and dump you all off for the capture point.”

Developed by DICE, Battlefield 1942 was published by EA in 2002. The way its physics and rendering engine worked, players could indeed reposition their cameras in a way that let them see through the jeeps/vehicles they were in to get a better view of their surroundings. On top of that, it was possible to drive vehicles at insane speeds in the game, and fly through the air as a result, and while they’d explode on impact—possibly taking out enemy players—if a player jumped out of these vehicle-missiles at the right moment prior to impact, they could walk away without a scratch. Again, this was an unintended side effect of the game’s physics and rendering engine, and it led to some of the game’s most fun, celebrated, and iconic emergent gameplay moments.

In a sense, Sasser’s career has been a quest to put the design and development teams with which he’s been associated in a position to create and recognize (and not QA out of existence) these kinds of happy accidents.

If you’d like a medley of the shenanigans Battlefield 1942’s glitchy collision and rendering systems made possible, this 18-minute YouTube video has you covered, and then some.

That game also included the B-17E Flying Fortress. It was possible for player to “wing walk” as these massive planes flew around Battlefield 1942’s large maps. There’s no reason to think Sasser was exaggerating when he said he’d jumped off its wing and landed on an Axis capture point.

“Then I got really lucky,” he confided to Posner. “I got to work on the first expansion pack to the very first Call of Duty.”

A Big Break

The eponymous Call of Duty game came out in late 2003 for PC. Developed by Infinity Ward and published by Activision, the acclaimed squad-based FPS put players into the boots of an Allied soldier battling through cinematic World War II environments.

In late 2004, a $30 add-on pack, Call of Duty: United Offensive, was released. This is the project to which Sasser contributed a level…and it involved B-17 bombers...but whether his deep Battlefield 1942 expertise helped him land the pivotal gig remains and open question.

“The first level that I made was a B-17 bomber mission where you flew over Europe in a…lend-lease B-17,” Sasser told Posner. “I scripted the gameplay with the airplanes flying and the physics and the turrets and all this stuff. And it was well-received. Well enough by the team and by the testers and so on that I actually got to showcase it in the E3 that year.”

“That’s kind of how I got my start.”

“When I find somebody who’s really promising who works inside of QA,” Sasser continued, “I love to help them climb the ranks and become designers as well.”

A lot of times the QA people are there because they have that passion, and they have that perseverance and that grit to push through all the hardships that are going to be required when you're an actual designer. You understand how bugs are made, how bugs are fixed, how to communicate with your team and so on. For me, it's a really great path for developers.

“You may be like, ‘I’ll never need math,’ and then you’re doing some vector calculations within your 3D game,” added Sasser. “You’re like, ‘I do need math, actually. I never thought about it, but it would be very useful if I’d studied harder...’”

“As a game designer, it’s important that you you’re kind of a sponge.”

“And not just about game design, but about the world. You could draw inspiration from history, as I did, or the arts or, you know, the world, the environment...and especially other people.”

“As a game designer it’s important that you have,” he continued, “not a mind that’s so open that everything falls out, but be willing to take everything in, and filter it through your experience, through your perception, which creates value for you.”

“Then you can start to find your core audience, your core players, and deliver these same experiences to them.”

Ah-ha! That’s just a taste of the vision-related insights we’ll dig into in the closing installment of our profile of Thad Sasser—grizzled, sagacious FPS studio exec. Until next week, adieu!