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Steampunk
Jacob Minkoff
Lead Game Designer
Blue Omega Entertainment
Steampunk: A subgenre of speculative science fiction set in an anachronistic 19th century society wherein modern or futuristic inventions are represented as having been created utilizing obsolete technologies.
In entertainment, Steampunk is a dirty word.
When we set out to make a unique, new IP, we decided that we didn’t want to do Space Marines or WWII or High Fantasy; instead, we wanted to make a new world, a new setting for players to explore. We really liked the American adventurer and frontier aesthetics and we felt that they had been under-utilized in videogames. The visual of the dusty, world-weary explorer wearing a wide-brimmed hat in the American wilderness is a fantastic icon that is immediately recognizable around the world thanks to Hollywood cinema. The one problem is that the weaponry associated with the American frontier is boring. Who wants to reload their revolver after every 6 shots? Enter Steampunk. By injecting our world with Steampunk technology, we are suddenly able to justify any weapon or power-up we might ever want to design. It gives us the ability to create a unique new setting that still has all the creative flexibility of a Space Marines game and is pretty darn interesting to boot.
Unfortunately, there hadn’t really been successful Steampunk games in the past; at least not worldwide. You can hardly point to a game like Sakura Taisen as being a break-out, multi-territory hit and, at the time we were first pitching Damnation, Bioshock (which is, at very least, retro-futuristic if not traditionally Steampunk) hadn’t even been announced. In fact, the only high-budget, worldwide Steampunk entertainment reference available was the box-office flop, Wild Wild West. As you might imagine, the profitability projections that publishers’ analysts were able to pull up did not make it easy for us to get someone to sign on to Damnation. A lot of what we got was, “We love what you’re doing, but can we remove the American and Steampunk elements?”
Today, as I make my way through the interwebs and its associated gaming forums, I can’t help but marvel at the number of posts that all boil down to, “I’m sick of WWII and Space Marines! Why don’t developers set shooters in some other sort of world?” And yet, publishers and developers continue to tread that same, well-worn ground. “If people are buying it, then we should make more of it,” goes the traditional business thinking. “Halo has Space Marines. Therefore, gamers must like, or at least understand the concept of, Space Marines. If we make a game with Space Marines, then gamers who like Halo will see that our game is similar and they will buy it while they wait for Halo 4.” Honestly, that thinking makes complete sense.
Videogames cost untold millions of dollars to produce and market. Taking a risk on a new setting or a new gameplay mechanic can easily kill a development studio, or even a publisher, with a single poorly-received game. For that reason, publishers employ people whose job it is to review products in development and determine their market viability. The only stats they have available to be able to track profitability potential are games or other entertainment media that have done well in the past. If no games that have Unique Setting X exist, analysts will have no hard numbers on which to base their sales projections. That makes developing Unique Setting X high-risk. Businesspeople don’t like high-risk; and why should they? Their job is to make money. Higher risk may result in higher payoff, but lots of low-risk, low-payoff products will eventually reach the same amount of profit. Why risk millions of dollars on trying to invent a unique, new genre or IP (Intellectual Property) that may or may not sell, when you could invest the same money in a number of cheaper Halo-knockoffs that pretty much guarantee at least a small profit. Any gambler will tell you that a low-payoff sure-thing is better than a high-payoff long-shot.
So, this left us at Blue Omega with a dilemma: How could we make something new and unique while somehow lowering risk to an acceptable level? Back in the golden age of game development, wacky ideas were the norm; yet who, today, would greenlight a game about a plumber in a mushroom world fighting dinosaurs by hitting them with his butt? In the big-budget entertainment world, people look at you like you just flipped them off when you say the word, “Steampunk.” Thanks a lot Will Smith.
Ultimately, however, we found some great partners at Codemasters who really believed in the concept, but changes were still made; for the better as far as I’m concerned. As we continued to develop the look of Damnation, it became clear that we needed to give the game a visual style that didn’t look too whimsical or wacky. Steampunk is often both of those. Instead, we wanted to create a look that had all the benefits of a Steampunk world and the technological/societal anachronism that comes along with it, but didn’t turn off the mass-market by being too “weird” or “odd.” Ultimately, we needed to make Steampunk look like something that a theoretical “average dude” would play. We started to kid around that Damnation “ain’t yo’ daddy’s Steampunk.”
If we were setting out to make a traditional Steampunk game, it would probably be set in Victorian England and titled, “Professor Winslow and his Automatic Contraptions: Wherein a Fantastical Journey is Undertaken by Heroic Persons Against Nefarious Mechanized Foes.” While a game like that might make a lot of core gamers (myself included) squeal with glee at merely the thought of its existence, it would most likely fall flat when introduced to the mass-market. The reality is that the current generation of games cost so much to make that developing triple-A titles that may not appeal to the masses isn’t a realistic goal anymore. The utter failure of PWahAC: WaFJiUbHPANMF (as its journalistic acronym would surely be) could cause Blue Omega to close its doors and might seriously hurt our publisher as well. So instead of the fiddly, filigreed technology of traditional Steampunk, we turned to a more rugged look. With the help of our marketing team, we keyed in on two words: “war-torn” and “industrial.” Using these two concepts, we modified the visual style of the world, taking cues from the post-apocalyptic design of movies like Mad Max and from WWI’s rough, ramshackle machinery. We also wrote a story that would justify a world that had been a technological marvel but was now being torn apart by war.
Ultimately, our goal was that someone who had played a recent, gritty shooter like Gears of War or Resistance: Fall of Man would look at Damnation and feel that it was familiar territory. We needed to somehow be different enough to be interesting, yet similar enough to be recognizable. Face it – $60 is a lot of money, and many gamers are loath to risk wasting their average one-game-per-month purchase on a wacky premise and weird-looking art, regardless of how amazing the gameplay may be; otherwise Psychonauts would have been one of the best-selling games of all time.
Yet, even with all those changes, we still stuck to a few basic Steampunk tenets: The world is powered by steam, not electricity; everything is over-engineered to the point of the designer’s sanity being questionable; and with enough clockwork and gauges you can build anything. The final result is a world that is clearly Steampunk, but a grittier, darker Steampunk – a Steampunk that really fits with the violent, rugged American frontier. It’s not filigree and hoop-skirts; it’s 32-shot multi-cylinder steam-driven pistols and 11-foot-tall, merciless clockwork automatons that will cave in your skull with a single punch.
Damnation’s vision of Steampunk is a great example of developers and marketing working hand-in-hand to innovate on a genre. I firmly believe that business drives innovation. As a designer, how will I ever get my crazy ideas made if I can’t convince someone that they will make money? Who would ever entrust me with millions of dollars to make a game with no guarantee of a profit at the end? It strikes me that a lot of developers don’t adequately respect marketing. This is a huge mistake. Marketing is an extremely valuable resource. If they tell you that your gameplay or your setting worries them, then you should take their comments to heart. You should treat the marketing team as your first focus-test group, and you should actively work to find solutions to their concerns. More often than not, the reaction of the marketing team is representative of the future mass-market reaction.
Thanks in large part to the feedback from our marketing partners; I think that with Damnation, we have reinvented Steampunk. The new form we have given it is one that I hope will make the entertainment world sit up and take notice. I think we have created a more mainstream Steampunk; something that could easily translate into a Hollywood blockbuster. If we’ve done our job right, my hope is that in 5 years’ time we’ll see games and movies inspired by Damnation’s new take on Steampunk, filled with brass, gauges, steam, and 19th-century robots.
My biggest hope, however, is that someday I’ll be able to walk into a marketing meeting and not be treated like I just cursed when the word “Steampunk” comes out of my mouth.
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