 Show: The Interactive
Interview
Guest: Adam Ryland (Creator of Total Extreme Warfare)
Date: 4/20/04
Your Hosts: Daniel Edler & James Walsh
Transcript By: Daniel Edler
Creator of one of the most downloaded wrestling games
ever, and possibly one of the most popular and cult starting freeware series,
"Extreme Warfare", Adam Ryland has behind him an army of followers and fans,
after the production of this Extreme Warfare simulator series.
As Championship Manager is to UK Soccer, his newest edition, Total Extreme
Warfare is to Wrestling. With the option to take control and run almost any
federation in the WHOLE of the world, the game is quite frankly a mass of
data, options and quirks that will keep you occupied for hours. For more
information, check out the interview itself!
ADAM RYLAND
-- Before we have Adam on the show, TII debuts the new segment requested
by the fans and provided by the hosts, "Stump The Host". It is a trivia segment
with a crossover between every trivia show out there, with a main influence
(in my mind at least) of The Weakest Link.
-- Adam thought of the idea to do simulators through card versions of the
game. He then took it on as a college project, other projects and it led
through until 2 Wednesdays ago when the newest game in the series was released.
-- Speaking of that new game, Total Extreme Warfare, Adam pleasingly announces
that sales have been very good - much better than he expected/hoped infact.
-- Some quick information about the game:
# It costs $34.95.
# Can be purchased online at the website.
# Reccomended 512MB RAM to run every game area. Run less areas on a lesser
machine.
# Can be purchased internationally.
-- The first version of any game he made was about 5 lines of code, in black
and white and took just a weekend to write. He then stepped into other
programming languages while he was in college, and as he learnt new things
he added them - creating a huge mess.
-- That was for Extreme Warfare 3000, 6000 and 9000 and took about 2 years.
He was using the Pascal coding language, and eventually hit the maximum number
of lines of code allowed and moved into Visual Basic
-- Adam then gives his views on some of the other sims that are out there,
from one that he says is around 20 years old, to newer ones like TNM and
Promotion Wars.
-- .400SoftwareStudios contacted Adam after a mention about his works on
their message boards. Adam accepted, and because of the deal that was worked
out he has now of course since been able to release TEW. He started coding
at the start of September, and finished mid March.
-- The scheduled release date was always the 31st of March. Adam and co had
announced that it would be released in the first quarter of 2004, and they
didn't disappoint.
-- Adam's main goal was to make the booking of the game itself much easier
on this game, as some of the main criticisms from EWR (the game before this
new release) were that you had to un-do everything on the booking screen
if you made a mistake.
-- Rob Gothic then asks "why is it a pay game, when in the past they have
all been freeware". The response is simply that the game was coded afresh,
and therefore it was being worked on 7 days a week in a full time capacity.
Due to those factors, it made it only a viable project if it was a pay game
- much like every other game that .400SoftwareStudios make.
-- The topic of 'cracking' the game has come up. While he's not happy about
people talking about cracking it, he's knows it inevitable since its now
a pay game - but is happy to report he hasn't seen anybody who's actually
been able to do it thus far.
-- The feedback has been, on the whole, majorly positive. He wants to stress
though that it's a game you play month after month after month, not "for
half an hour on your lunch".
-- The most asked question since the game has been released? "Can I have
a free copy"! Adam tells a story about how many people have actually given
him the 'no money' sob story.
-- The made up names are generated randomly. Thousands of first names and
surnames are put into the game and randomly thrown together. There are some
names Adam specifically inputted though, such as the "Lobster Warrior" and
the "Calamari Kid". Those such names were just thought up on a whim over
the past year and written down whenever they popped into his head, to be
added to the final version.
-- In-between the release of the game and the recording of this interview
(just over 1 week), there had already been 4 updates with the game. More
angles, small bug fixes etc have all been added - AND, if you check out the
official forum of the game, there are some very UNOFFICIAL 'real world' updates,
that change the fake names in the game to a real life scene with all of your
current favorite superstars.
-- If he could change one thing about the game, it would be the naturalism
of the play-by-play reports. Originally he wanted it to have more character
to it like in previous versions, but due to the huge amount of possibilities
and variations of match, it became completely impossible to make that happen,
and thus it is now just done on a move-by-move basis.
-- The idea of making TEW more like Smackdown has been brought up many a
time by fans, but Adam says that he doesn't think the people that request
actually seeing your matches take place realise quite how difficult that
is to do - especially since Adam coded TEW all on his own. A discussion then
starts about the best wrestling game of all time - from the Smackdown series
right through to Def Jam Vendetta.
-- He wishes that somebody else would come out with a similar standard of
sim so that he can play it, as since he's had to test TEW and all past games
in so many different ways, and knows what does what for everything/has been
working on it 7 days a week for the past year, playing TEW just seems like
work.
-- A good point about now working with created wrestlers on TEW, for Adam
at least is that the pressure of the stats is off him. Not many people used
to complain about the WWE wrestlers, since we'd all seen them, but with Adam
located in the UK and the Wrestling Channel only starting up over here recently,
seeing a lot of the American/Japanese etc. stars in action is practically
impossible, and as such, everybody has a different opinion of their stats.
-- The most famous wrestling personality to have played the game would be
Trish Stratus. Adam also says he has unconfirmed reports that Rey Mysterio
plays it, as well as many other Indy wrestlers, some who wanted to be added
to the game. If you want to let Adam know you've played the game, and are
a wrestling personality, you can do so by the contact page on the TEW website.
-- There could be a TEW 2005, but he's made a promise that he wont release
a new game until at least this time next year (April 2005), so that people
get a full year of play out of TEW 04.
-- Adam wraps up the interview by letting people know that patches and other
vital updates are released regularly, and to check out the official TEW forums
for those.
-- For any other information, or to check out the free 24 hour trial of (and
links to purchase) Total Extreme Warfare, head across to the official site
www.totalextremewarfare.com.
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