Giant Bomb Presents: The BioForge Interview

Fantastic interview, a lot of fun to listen to! :)

This was an awesome, awesome interview. Fascinating to hear how the designer looks back on it and to get the reasons why it is the way it is. Really dug it. Thanks for putting this together, Patrick.

It's not that you can't criticize, it's just that you give no one any reason to care about or respect what you're saying. You're doing something that takes no skill and complaining about something that takes a lot of it.

This was really genuinely interesting.

Thank you for getting this interview up, Patrick. Always enjoy watching your hard work!

@patrickklepek Did you happen to convince him to make a sequel by any slight chance???????????

oh god , just noticed his is almost an hour, definately one to download and listen to on my commute, looks super interesting.

Thanks Patrick. This kind of features really make this a site great.

For non-subscribers that missed out on the BioForge stuff, the one and only @turboman has you covered:

Can the site devs put an up/down vote system on the comments so we can hide this guy's bullshit?

Awesome interview, it's always fascinating to hear how develops feel about their past games from well over a decade ago.

@coribald: Voting systems are bad. Ignore functionality would be better.

Interesting interview

Great job, Patrick. Don't mind the interview police. I'd rather listen to a two way conversation than a checklist of questions.

Agree. Voting doesn't push thoughtful comments at the top, it pushes short, snappy, sarcastic/"funny" remarks at the top.

Man, Ken Demarest is doing a way cooler thing now than trying to make Facebook MMOs. Good for him and great interview.

That flute music.

Fucking EPIC interview.

Super fascinating front to back. We don't normally get an honest and upfront interview with the lead developer of a game like this; it's very interesting to hear the perspective about how things went down behind the scene.

Who's Vincent..? I know no Vincent.

Patrick, keep bringing unique content that sets Giant Bomb apart from any other website. Its amazing.

This interview was amazing, that cut at the start about the flute lore was exactly what I wanted from this piece! I'll probably rewatch the whole series after hearing this, so many great moments. Keep the content rollin'

Thanks Patrick, the content you bring to this site is some of my favorite at the moment!

Best dumptruck yet!

Thank you, Patrick. This interview was more than I could have ever hoped for.

Awesome interview :D

This is also a conversation. A good one that flowed really well. You already dislike Patrick and you took that into this interview and it completely colored your perception. You're also being a dick. So there's that.

The worth videos have been great so far. I like that there is room on this site for different sets of people with their own feature content. After the very odd year its been, I appreciate how the site is evolving.

^

Well done!! So cool you could get this interview to happen.

Thanks Patrick

This, plus the BioForge playthrough, is the reason I'm finally a Premium member. I remember playing the demo on a PC Gamer disc (along with Magic Carpet and Syndicate Wars) and being totally blown away. This brought back lots of memories. Thanks for the great interview, Patrick.

This is my favorite interview in the Dumptruck series so far. Demarest comes across as humble, honest, and passionate about his work both past and current.

@patrickklepek: I feel like these interviews need an outtro, e.g. a simple "that was Ken Demarest, director of BioForge". The end feels so abrupt otherwise.

Wow, this guy did NetStorm? I used to play that all the time and even checked back every few years. What a highly underrated game. For... The Storm!

@patrickklepek: I enjoyed the personal nature of the interview. They don't have to be a 20 questions format, this isn't a publication that focuses on that type of content. A personal spin is why I joined and continue to subscribe.

My favorite part is that the guy has NO ILLUSIONS about how it all turned out. I LOVE that he's as ready to acknowledge, and even laugh about, the stuff that didn't work as much as the stuff that did.

I remember playing the game at the time and thinking it was something special, but never hearing much discussion about it. Actually, I think I played it two years later when it was a pack-in with a Matrox video card.

Anyway, very interesting to hear the (one of) creator's thoughts on it. Also really appreciated his thoughts on reward models in games, and the contrast between "I will never let that happen again!" and "I'll just stop playing this game."

Finally, I'm going to see if App Soma is hiring. :)

"...compared to the ammount of space games writing has gone in the interrum"

Laterally to a new mix of crappy/good, sadly

HOLY SHIT, props from Carmack! Nice work, Mr. Demarest!

It's sad that PC action games didn't exactly take off quality-wise outside of FPS during that era like console developers. Is it from a lack of input devices, I wonder.

First off: this was awesome and its nice to hear that Demarest is an interesting, well spoken guy. Also, Patrick kept saying 'over ten years' but when you think about it its way closer to 20, thats super impressive when you consider just how good it looked.

Secondly: this isn't some short, snappy news interview, when your working with an entire hour there has to be some give and take, (i'll surely get flack for this!!!!!!) imagine if a Larry King interview was King just mumbling "how? ok. why? ok. when? ok." He gets such interesting answers from his interviewees because he is willing to put a bit of himself into the conversation.

BioForge 2: The Kickstarter!

Great interview Patrick. I really found it pretty interesting and insightful. Now if you'll excuse me...I need to rematch some Bioforge.

Awesome post, Patrick. Ken seems like a great dude.

@spiritof said:

Go ahead and take it!

Great interview and great guy. To be honest, I didn't expect the conversation to be that interesting!

It's all true. That Vinchenzo guy's my best friend. I always tend to enjoy the Patrick content though so this vitriolic discussion is half funny to me. I'm going to give him crap about this now that I've discovered it.

what's the name of his company? Absoma?

Very great companion content to the playthrough of Bioforge. I love that Patrick brings some ambition to his work :>.

Man I remember playing NetStorm: Islands at War and it was really incomprehensible at the time.