The Storied History of Gaming Veteran Louis Castle, Co-Founder of Westwood

I'm sitting in my office I get this phone I pick up pick a phone call and it goes hello I have Richard Branson on the phone for you and I'm like no no no but you understand I'm like okay I have no idea who that is right right this is like 1991. yeah and he goes hello Brett I'm Richard and I go oh this is Lewis he goes oh he goes well I'm Richard I'd like to buy your company and I'm like I'm sorry I didn't know we were for sale and he goes oh my boy in my experience everything is for sale and uh that's my favorite Richard quote and then you basically hung up I mean it was basically like our folks were getting a tune and he left and I was like I went to like this is the weirdest call I've ever had you know welcome to the gaming Founders podcast a show where we interview the founders that have shaped the gaming industry I'm Eden Chen the CEO of pragma a back-end game engine founded by engineering leaders that built the platforms for some of the largest live service games like League Legends fortnite Destiny 2 and plants for zombies 2. pragma power services like accounts matchmaking and

player data for the world's most ambitious live service games and I'm Kevin Zane partner at upfront Ventures we're a venture capital firm based in LA and San Francisco I lead game Investments both in studios as well as the pick and shovel tools that power game developers and content creators to do their best work including pragma we interview Founders on their origin Stories the tactics that help them survive and thrive and key lessons for anyone interested in building the next generation of leading gaming companies learn more And subscribe today at pragma.gg gaming founders [Music] Lewis is one of my heroes in the games industry he's worked on more than 150 games won multiple lifetime achievement awards and most importantly for me was one of the founders behind Westwood the studio that built games like Dune 2 and command and conqueror effectively inventing the RTS genre a place where I've spent hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours we did a broad overview of his career and how he got started how he built his early team

including what to look for going through four Acquisitions during his time at Westwood and the numerous things he's been working on since then there was way too much to cover in this episode so we'll have to do a follow-up but I really hope you enjoyed this episode with Lewis [Music] hey Lewis thanks for joining us on the gaming Founders podcast just to get going what's your uh early Story how did you get into games well I actually started in games by going to a conference about architectural tools computer tools and I I always thought that if I couldn't make it as an architect I could always be a draftsman because I was pretty fast and pretty accurate and after I saw those tools I said oh wow I really have to get into computers I also love games and arcades and things like that so I decided to buy a personal computer funny story my my dad said I'm not going to buy one of those it's too expensive it'll just sit in your closet so I worked as a busboy to get the money to eventually buy it so I it was a it was a long process of

getting the money to buy my first computer and that sort of kicked me off into making artwork for games and then eventually learning programming and becoming a game maker were you all pretty much self-taught then is that yeah I just kind of picked us up back then I mean we're talking this was in the early 80s computers are really a hobbyist thing you I when I got the job at the computer store I started selling mini computers so I learned a little bit about Unix and you know some of the other cbms coming other things that are out there but generally speaking if you had a computer you were a hobbyist and oftentimes you built your own got it and then I guess what was the story behind how you first met your kind of co-founders how did that all come about well the job at the computer store um and where I went to high school got me into the computer games business in a lot of ways I went to high school with a guy uh with a bunch of folks from Century 23 where we worked at a computer store and one of them was David Gardner who was one of the co-founders of EA Europe and he was a junior in the high

school when I was a senior uh the computer store in Vegas there was really just one computer store that was really for hobbyists and so we were kind of a hot bed for that so how I met my co-founder was he was a regular customer along with Rich Hillman and a bunch of other folks that became very had a lot of notoriety in the business ultimately that Brett Brett's Berry was my co-founder he basically needed a printout so wanted to come over I said hey I got a printer at home come on over to my house and so we sat down and we were printing out he was programming at that time for a computer game an educational game and we started talking and just decided that we had a lot of things in common by the way is this David Gardner who is now has done the adventure Partners small world yeah very small world yeah he worked in the same computer store went to the same high school as me wow okay that is funny dad David's a friend you got to move him back to LA I know he's been stuck with us for too long he's used to it he's been running a long time yeah his firm is named after London so definitely not getting him out of there [Music] so what were the first steps when you

guys you and Brett first got started I guess back then there was no VC or anything you guys look for work like I said we raised our own money to buy our own computers um we worked for pittance now next to nothing and we were just working on um porting games initially so somebody would have a game on one platform they'd want it on the Apple I got quite good at programming as well as art on the Apple because I wanted to see animation on an apple and the only way to do that was to really learn the simple language programming and so um the two of us worked on a couple projects together uh Dragonfire and possible Mission these reports from um from other platforms usually Commodore 64. and then um we just got to know each other and we're working on projects together and eventually just said you know what we should probably we should probably just do our own thing at this point we have our own computers we're doing all the work the design everything the only thing that's being provided is the sort of um business contacts and and uh the negotiation for the contract so let's just do that ourselves we thought why not so that's that's how Westwood was born and and I had actually joined with another group earlier some of the

early employees of Westwood Studios were in a group called out of the blue and that that product that company ever really got going it just uh just kind of floundered a bit because we didn't have the same uh the founders just didn't have the principles didn't have as much ambition I think as Brett and I did how did you even do like the early Business Development like where did you find it's like no there's no internet we didn't do it very well to be honest I know Brett hates when I tell that story but but it's true you know we we decided to call ourselves a Westwood Associates um I'm doing Contracting work at the time um getting paid quite well like uh about 60 bucks an hour or so which was quite a bit of money back but yeah pretty good um quite a bit of money back then for doctors lawyers and point of sale systems so we wanted a name that would allow us to do business to fund games because we would do the work for other businesses and then use that money to have fun making games was the was the plan if we had to so we called ourselves Westwood Associates we got our very first contract with Epix EP YX for a

port of the Temple of outside Trilogy to the Macintosh and um that's a funny story actually but but we got the port and we got our first check for four thousand dollars I think it was or four or six thousand dollars and anyways it was made out to Westwood Associates and the two of us looked at each other and had no idea how we were gonna cash it so um that's how we started our business education really really Grassroots I mean we didn't we didn't have any really formal training of any kind and what was kind of the first Big Break what was the thing you know when you decided to start to build your own games well that was it I mean you know at the end of the day for a couple kids that were working I was 20 he was 21 you know still going to college um and for for that it was like and already had jobs side jobs so that was a great to get paid to make games it was just like the dream come true and so I think the entire project might have been a sixteen thousand dollar budget it was not a lot of money oh wow and the funny story was we went we went into uh epics uh we had a meeting with a guy named Bob Lindsay and uh he said hey do you guys know how to program the Macintosh we went in there cold and we've been doing out Apple games and uh and you know I

said yeah yeah we get into the mac and he goes great he goes well we have this this port and we'd like to Port it from the Commerce 64 to the Apple it's called the typical voucher Trilogy great game series by John Freeman and we said sure okay and then we walked out of the meeting and we're in the elevator I think or maybe the parking lot and Brett says I didn't know you had to know how to program Macintosh I go I got a Mac how hard can it be right so it was like kind of the fit spy yeah yeah yeah yeah we'll figure it out yeah and then I got the 1700 pages of inside Macintosh like oh this is going to be a lot more work than I thought so I had to drop out of classes that semester so I could actually focus on learning how to program the Macintosh while making our first port to the Macintosh so it was pretty crazy all in Assembly Language that was all we wrote in back then so I guess those early days is it was it sort of like eat what you kill like you kind of hire some folks when you get a contract exactly right we we did go out uh you know we started our first got our first offices in the next year so this 85s when we started the company 86 we got our first offices we we hired our first employee to do the same game

Temple of abstract trilogy but to Port it to the Amiga into the St we got one of the very early Amiga kits it was still basically a metal box with a bunch of wire wrap in it and stuff and it was uh it was not a full like not even a full prototype kit yet and so I uh I was in charge of the Amiga and we hired a guy named very green um who it was ended up being an employee for a very very long time 20 20 years I think or so so we started that way we just hired somebody when we got the money to hire them and we in fact we almost went out of business because we bought all the hardware and hired all the people and spent all the money building our company and then find out come to find out that when you go to do your taxes you can't actually expense 100 of all that equipment expense so you have actually you can't recognize all that Revenue so you actually have more taxes than we had money in the bank and so we we had to sign a deal get an advance just to pay the taxes on the previous year or we would have gone out of business in 1987 so kind of crazy

so I always warned people that it's actually probably a good idea to get to know a little bit about business accounting and finance before you start a company um we were really not Westwood was started because Brett and I were tired of working for other people that we thought didn't bring a lot to the party and we just wanted to go to a place where we wanted to work every where we looked forward to going to work every day we loved what we did so that was the the ethos of of Westward from the beginning all the way to the end was we just wanted it to be a great place to work and I'm sure not everybody's some some you know your mileage may vary I'm not sure everybody had a great experience at Westwood but the vast majority of people did and um I think that made it a very special place yeah I guess we'll have stories on uh how almost every startup including ours couldn't get access to our you know bank accounts and oh yeah our business license was a microfilm license because they didn't have software licenses back then um I can go on and on there's all these weird things we went to a bank for a loan and they they were like basically kicked us out of the building and the guy later came to get our business I'm like yeah I remember you

and and the funny thing is later in life you realize you were so I was so indignant at the time but later in life I feel like well he was right I mean you know literally we were probably 21 and maybe both 21 21 22 no business experience whatsoever we're doing something he doesn't understand we're working on computer games sounds kind of sketchy so there's this game on one system and you're going to bring it to another you know is that piracy no that's actually you're being hired to do that you know so there was a lot of the sort of sketch uh sus they wouldn't have called it back then that back then but that's what it was so it makes sense that we couldn't get our access to money and by the time we could uh we didn't need it you know frankly I guess the questions on how you hired your early employees because I I tend to feel like you know your first you know 10 20 people are some of the most important hires in our early stage company the way we hired them is they were people we liked and that we wanted to work with we just knew that we were going to be crammed into this little 400 square foot office with like five or seven people so we were we were stacked next to each

other really tight for U.S standards I would say going over to Europe I mean we were kind of a status quo for most European development Studios but uh but the way we hired him was just like we like Barry he was a good guy he was a great friend he worked hard and very smart we hired an artist one of the first people we hired Maureen Starkey who was went on to become an art director and everything in the games industry as well I'm very very accomplished and she was a great comic book artist and we just really we liked her a lot and we knew she could do great work and she was considerably older than us too I think that added a lot to the value of the company because we had we had a variety of of well nowadays you'd call it Dei but it was basically uh it was just a sort of instinct of ours that we needed people with different backgrounds and such to to be successful yeah one interesting thing I noticed was that you talk a lot about how Westwood was a slightly more experienced group of people uh no no Westwood was a group of people that we really liked being hanging out with in the case of Maureen she was a very experienced artist she was she was published in comics and

stuff but the rest of us had done Brett and I done had done some games Barry had only done a little bit of stuff for the educational company we hired George Galli who's a guy who does some great work now too and another other company so but he was like 16 years old I mean God had permission from his parents I mean so we hired anybody and everybody that we saw we saw potential in so I would say that we didn't in the early days especially we really didn't hire experience we hired ambition we hired personality and values I mean we wanted people to have the same values as us not dissimilar to many years later when I worked for Amazon and everything's based around values it's very similar to Westwood we just we weren't very disciplined about espousing the values we just kind of knew what they were it was very organic what would you what were those kind of critical values that tied people together yeah like I said we didn't have like a value statement until many years later and then we kind of backed our way into it so I would say the early days of Westwood it was really first of all are you willing to work cheap because we were getting we weren't making a lot of money the second are you

willing to work hard because because it's going to be hard work and you have to learn a lot because we were always working on new hardware systems and such are you talented can you demonstrate some ability some some is there something you can do to prove to us that you're pretty good like one of our early animators Ali Arabian had flip books he was our UPS driver and he delivered stuff and he showed me his flip books I said dude's got some animation shops so it's like it didn't have to be in the games industry most of our artists we hired I hired them with illustration experience they were very experienced illustrators but they'd never used a computer before and so we needed people that were willing to learn willing to work hard and just good people that we like to hang around with and and Westwood is a company you know quite frankly just sort of an organism would eject people that didn't fit those values you didn't work hard enough pretty soon nobody wanted to work with you it was completely obvious you needed to go if you were just kind of not somebody people wanted to be around nobody wanted to work with you pretty obvious you needed to go uh that's that's how the compan beginning and how did you and Brad I mean the co-founder Dynamic is so critical to to Startup how

did you guys split up duties did the responsibilities change over time as well yeah they did um first we fought a lot in the beginning I mean sometimes very loudly which was very unprofessional nowadays I I would be aghast at some of the the shout out matches we would have but ultimately a few years in I might have been two or three years in um we just we just had a heart to heart and I said look I it's not your nature uh to Brett to be a second in command you're just it's not you're not cut out for it I will do that I'll be happy to you make the calls you make the final calls I'll give you my opinion but somebody has to step back so that we can go forward as company you know and it was it was that decision I think that that made for a strong relationship for the company and for our friendship and he was the president um and I was the co-founder vice president and he made the business decisions he originally kept the books but it was just a checkbook when we actually became a big company where we had to have Finance I took that over so Brett was business Acumen game design and I'd say product vision and I was uh really programming art direction also

game design and operations finance and Tech there's so many different things there I guess um Yeah Yeah by 1992 when we referred to our first sale to Virgin we were only still only 29 people so and we had by that time we had already hired an agent and basically what it was is we were doing everything and we basically found somebody talented and said oh great now we can hire somebody and we don't have to do that anymore and so it was just basically keep hiring people to do the thing that um the one more thing that we don't have to do anymore and weirdly I'm with deviation games now as a senior vice president I still find myself wearing lots of different hats and we're just looking for great talented people to take on those roles not not I think it's um The Mark of a good leader to to find great people to delegate responsibility to and hopefully eventually you become redundant so that you can move on to do something else something else for the company or somewhere else that's just how you how you grow companies in my experience so you started growing I know virgin

ultimately did some kind of deal with you to sort of I guess take take care of a lot of like the the capital side of things uh they acquired us a Lock Stock and Barrel uh so in 1992 we had oh I don't even know how many games at that time we were working like 40 skus a year with a team of 29 people I mean wow and because because sometimes we'd have like games that would have nine skews like uh we would do these Disney games three games on three platforms so that's nine right there just you know uh so that was Mickey's Mickey's uh let's see Goofy's Railway Express Donald's alphabet Chase and Mickey's runaways Mickey's runaway Zoo maybe so they had to we basically would do those three games and do them on three platforms and you know that's my excuse simultaneously and usually you'd have two or three programmers sometimes you could do both like um I was pretty good at doing Commodore 64 and Apple at the same time but when we got into the higher end platforms like the Amiga and the St they used the same chipset so I've spent most of my time writing the operating system that we used a graphics based operating system

we pretty much punted the the intuition we later integrated intuition when a lot of the bugs were fixed and when we could actually figure out how it was supposed to work in the beginning I just got really frustrated we were under a tight deadline so I just said you know what I'm just going to bootstrap this thing and just take over the operating system write our own operating system so that we could actually get get access to the chips we were very Westwood was very uh high-tech from a from a ship level kind of developer there were back then you really there were no tools there was no applications program you had to know how the computers worked that's interesting and I I guess was version doing a lot in games how did they find how did they find out about you it was mastertronic so um Martin Alper and some other folks over there had massania in Europe but they had mastertronic and they had run in this the Virgin company and they they got bought by virgin and they were given Capital to go buy acquire developers they acquired uh the guys who did seventh guest uh trilobite they acquired ourselves and they started their own Studios at the same time and so they

were building a publishing Empire virtual virgin interactive entertainment and very much to to credit The Visionaries which was Martin Alper and Tim Chaney they they knew what they were doing uh Tim Chaney hired a rock star team of marketing people in Europe I mean they were they were some of the best that I've ever worked with in my career and I attribute a lot of Westwood's success to the fact that you know virgin had this incredible marketing engine that uh I could say to every developer out there you can make a great game but if you if you can't get it in front of people and you can't get people excited about it you might just be an also ran that never really breaks out we do owe a lot of our success to those folks in virgin were you guys looking to sell at the time or no we were we we had been um we had gotten to a point of I guess making a few million dollars a year we were keep retaining about 20 retained earnings Brett and I were paying ourselves very very little mostly that's why we were able to keep growing the company so we had a we had a pretty good bank account at that point we had started working on kairandi as our own title you know we basically very successful company and we didn't that was when we didn't need them money from the banks and everything else and we

actually had enough our burn rate was low enough to where we had about six months run rate so we were always able to find more work so really didn't need to need a buyout Sierra our agent brought um Sierra online we went to Sierra online to pitch chirandia as a game and they went to our agent said well we're not interested in just doing the game but we would buy the company and that was kind of what started the whole conversation uh I believe I'm pretty sure it was a six million dollar initial offer for purchase price and for Brett and I that would have been three million a piece uh we would make about 35k life-changing money yeah that's a pretty big payday you know yeah but maybe let's both sit down and go oh crap I guess we actually have something that's worth a lot of money here not just kairandi about the whole company and then Barry uh to his credit you know brought Martin over and said hey you know you guys should talk about throwing your hat in the ring don't let these guys just go very smart Barry is very hesitute agent and he wanted to make sure there was a bidding war of some sort but the bidding war wasn't about money it was really about control it was really about like what what do you guys

believe in so you know we we had at that point pretty strong confidence in our business Acumen we said okay we we know what we're doing now and Sierra didn't want us to run the company they wanted us to just be creative they said look we we want to scale your company you just two creative executive producers make as many games you want we'll fund you well we'll take all that business stuff off your hands and I think at the end of the day Brett and I just looked at each other like ah I don't know kind of like doing the business we sort of like run away so I don't know that I want to work for somebody and as I said before Brett really doesn't work well for others I mean personality and that proved out to be true with EA many years later but uh but it's it's uh it was just a decision to go with Virgin because we got very little money up front but we got a chance to I think it was 1.5 million after taxes you know you're talking a million dollars and then we had a lawsuit that we had to indemnify the company against which took another half a million so we basically made almost nothing from selling the company to Virgin but we had Phantom equity and so many years later when we sold to EA we were paid out millions of dollars many

more times than we would have made from from uh the sale to to uh Sierra online but so it was it worked out well but it wasn't because we planned it that way it was more about we just believed in ourselves that we could continue to add value and grow the company was there any uh Richard Branson story like did you uh yeah actually a fun one um I I guess Martin had put he put him up to that or maybe Devereaux we worked for Martin who worked for Robert Devereux which Branson's brother-in-law who worked for ran the music group anyways I'm on I'm sitting in my office and I get this phone I pick up pick a phone call and it goes hello I have Richard Branson on the phone for you and I'm like no no but you understand I'm like okay I have no idea who that is right right this is like 1991. yeah and because hello oh Brett I'm Richard and I go oh this is Louis he goes oh he goes well I'm Richard I'd like to buy your company and I'm like I'm sorry I didn't know we were for sale and he goes ah my boy in my experience everything is for sale and uh that's my favorite Richard quote and then you basically hung up I mean it was basically like our folks were getting

and he left and I was like I went to Brent like this is the weirdest call I've ever had you know and of course we were talking to Sarah at the time so it was like I don't know what's going on here and we looked him up and Alexis Nexus we had an account that we could tell tell them to um and it's like oh this guy's like a billionaire it's like that was really him and then Martin called us and said yeah we thought you'd get a kick out of that of course he's British so he knew who origin was we just didn't know so I had the opportunity to meet him several times after that as he owned our company and uh socially related just not from a business point of view because yeah everyone around the business side yeah that makes sense so then how did then the eventual sale into EA happen well we went through multiple Acquisitions so I'm in 92 two we became part of Virgin we had to convert our QuickBook not not sorry our Quicken account not even QuickBooks Quicken yeah that was doing into actual accounting software I think JD Edwards at the time and so I had sold accounting software at the computer store I worked with so I knew a little bit about accounting I mean just you know about touch I

actually had written some software to make accounting and spreadsheets uh work like Lotus one two three at the time that was the big thing so I built the bridging software for that so I actually kind of understood how things worked so I can't remember the philosophy of times and remember maybe was our our CFO over at um virgin so I became the quote CFO of Westwood which 29 people CFO is a checkbook but it's not just a checkbook it's a you know it's a it's a payables receivables general ledger it's a you know you have to pretty much it's real accounting even though you know we were a small company and so I started over the I took over accounting I had already done Ops and Tech at that point we had a new person running our technology side of things so I didn't I wasn't the CTO anymore or it but as the company grew you know we we went through four Acquisitions so the first one the Virgin the second one was hasbrobot exactly 20 percent of Virgin which triggered our non-competes so we got a chance to renegotiate some of the terms of our deal which was very helpful so we could get a little bit more control and then we were bought entirely by

um spelling entertainment through Viacom so I think actually Viacom did the purchase and we were tucked under spelling they didn't really know what to do with us so they stuck us under a television Studio was the first real lesson in accounting because we had all been expense-based accounting and spelling was a capitalized based accounting so so we basically had to switch to capitalizing all of our development expenses and so uh I don't want this podcast is about accounting but it was a it was a challenge after that I had done some programming about how we did our accounts and systems so by the time EA then came and bought us in 1998 several years later we finally uh I finally at that point had a good enough system to wear within a couple of months of being acquired minded in the same month I went into Stan McKee's office and he said well you're the creative guy why are you here for finance like why I happen to be the finance guy too and he goes he goes well you know we are going to get you all these we're getting all this stuff to you we'll get you on our chart of accounts and all these things like oh I'm already on your China accounts we everything we recorded this month is all under the EA chart of accounts and he's like he was kind of

puzzled and he goes wow because that's fantastic that's really fast I go well I'm a programmer you know this is just basically numbers from one place to the other and I had already had to go from expense-based accounting to accrual not cruel but capitalized accounting back to expense-based accounting and how to justify the purchase prices multiple times as we went through all this stuff and I was the point person for all the negotiations with our attorneys long story short I said we've got our entire history as a company back to 1992 at least in EA's book in EA's chart of accounts you can actually go back historically and see what our company would have looked like as part of EA all the way back to 1995. so it was pretty uh pretty fun story there that's how I got my accounting jobs your MBA yeah yeah through that yeah and your CFA and everything else yeah yeah exactly yeah legal negotiations contract law international law different Accounting Standards different accounting principles like all the things that nobody really ever has to do unless you have to do them so and you all work on a bunch of I mean legendary games throughout that that

whole period yeah from gosh from 92 to 95 it was The Lion King Blade Runner um we started Blade Runner we didn't finish till 97. I guess so yeah so night from 92-98 actually so that was gosh was uh like I said blind Blade Runner Monopoly Lion King Command and Conquer Red Alert this is the list yeah that's insane yeah yeah we were very prolific lands of lore kyrandia I mean all these games were being made and I personally was the executive producer on the non-cnc games so uh almost everything that wasn't CNC was my was one of my babies in some way or another and then I was still the very low level programmer for low-level compression algorithms I did our early 3D Systems I did our voice recognition and voice synthesis code so it was a pretty low level programmer uh then eventually became more of an executive just leading the business side of things one question on the technology because you know we're a technology company

think about this all the time I mean generally speaking we try to exist we tried to limit scope by not Reinventing the wheel and sort of creating new technology a dream yeah I guess was it just that so much was just not available and so you just sort of had to people asked me that they said you know why do we why did we write a compression algorithm there was Bank out there and other things I'm like well it didn't work well enough at the end of the day they were very early too and we were First Command and Conquer had single speed CD ROMs that's 140 kilohertz if I'm not mistaken of data and we were trying to do full screen video and audio with 140 kilohertz right it's like this just like no data and so we tried but it looked terrible it was not designed to run on that kind of a bit stream it's just way too low and so we had done a bunch of compression I used to write fast loaders for the Commodore 64. so I had written a lot of lossless compression algorithms and um and real-time algorithms so it's like

okay well let's apply some of these things uh and honestly even on my own I couldn't get there by my own we hired a bunch of um phds from I think it was Washington University to do Vector quantization which was a up and coming field that sort of the core stuff that was leading to MPEG impeg was a very early standard then too again impeg very capable but required hardware acceleration and we had to run on you know 8088 based computers in 8080 six based computers these are just just no way so we had to write custom algorithms um I could get into the really low level technical details of that but basically it was a combination of multiple algorithms at the same time working as a as a suite just specifically to do computer game videos now I gave you an example like I when Brett Brett comes in my office and goes he goes well we need it to be full screen because we had a little window like everybody else did it has to be full screen has to be like a cinema you know and I'm like well you just can't do that he goes oh you're just being lazy figure it out you know so it would push on that's really hard and we figured it out we got it working we got audio in there it was first it

didn't have audio that would have been tragic but we got the audio in there at all we used a wavelet compression for that and then I told the artist to go to the art director at the time I said okay so just please like if really matters from frame to frame to frame don't change too much if you can you don't like pans or are kind of okay but try to keep the cameras steady ones and the first thing they did is they threw static on the screen I'm like great white noise right that's right I got that working then I was like okay well that's fine they said okay great I said I got that as a different it would detect white noise and create a random sequence so it would just replace it with something that was generated so it compressed that then it was like oh okay now we want to do uh the opening scene so we're gonna fade I'm like fade every single Pixel and change screen changes every frame so okay so we we're detect a fade and we'd create a custom algorithm to do Fade and that's okay but you got to fade at this rate of course they would then put an envelope oh my God you're driving me crazy but yeah little by little by little I would get it to work they would break it and we would

fix it again I'm personally super interested in Command and Conquer like were there other rts's at the time because that was my first well okay so there were other uh the term real-time strategy game was coined for Command and Conquer again that marketing Brilliance over at the yeah um sorry version yeah yeah so we could create a dune too that was uh Joe Bostic you guys over Petroglyph many of them as well as Brett of course as a leader on that one had created Doom 2 which was this we've done a bunch of strategy games Westwood had done strategy games with SSI we like them but they they're a bit ponderous you know turn-based strategy especially back then yeah so we want to do something fast-paced like um the inspiration was uh rescue Raiders on the Apple II and uh which was kind of a tower defense game and then a game called um military Madness on the NEC turbo graphics and so Joe loved that the kind of he wanted to do a tile based game that had strategy kind of Tower Defense like with this resource and all that and Brett was really into Dune is

his favorite book um so we got a chance to get their Dune license from Virgin and so we created that RT that what a game that was called eventually RTS was massively pirated we sold I think under 100 000 copies but we know millions of people played it was just it was ripped it off left and right because it was 1.4 megabytes even back then that wasn't that hard to copy um and so copy protection was easily Stripped Away and they they it was just everywhere so we started working on command and Conquer and then of course um blizzard was deeply inspired by Doom 2 and they created Warcraft and so um you know very very similar to Doom 2 in almost every way except the theme the The Story theme and so then we came out with command and Conquer which was making use of that CD-ROM and I think honestly if we were responsible pushing blizzard to go get a film based you know to build cinematics because they it was like we set the bar that you were now expected if you had a CD-ROM game that you were going to be in strategy to have these these cinematic stories in between so really we we Westwood as a team as a group of people really did create what

people now recognize as real-time strategy and Frank mobas as well we have a different game called social Survivor which was basically the first MOBA but it just didn't it wasn't successful as well too have too far out of its time I mean that was also a multiplayer game and you guys had to design for that in the early days your credit credit to Blizzard on that one we we were not the first to dive into the multiplayer side they were and they built an entire platform around multiplayer we we used IRC chat as our as our core uh it became an Achilles heel over time we just we never because we were so fast at the same time we were doing all this we were going through all these Acquisitions growing the company everything we just never had the time to dedicate a group of Engineers to building our own online platform we talked about it all the time we just never did it I wish we had actually but we did absolutely have to back our way into multiplayer um on command and Conquer Dune 2 did not have any multiplayer it had cabled multiplayer you had to actually connect the decouplers on both sides of Serial cables were you familiar with the blizzard folks were you guys friendly with each other was it competitive there's very bit of attention in the very beginning because some of the folks

from um virgin who had access the source code of Doom 2 ended up over a blizzard and blizzard very quickly made a game that looked awful lot like ours and had very similar bugs so I'll leave it at that there were some early intentions uh the folks that have worked on that project I've come to know later in life you know swear to God they they didn't do any of that but I I just I have to believe that some things leaked over the fence even if people didn't know it did but the second game they built on World of Warcraft 2 they re they stripped it all down and rebuilt everything from scratch so um that's not one workout Warcraft 2. so you know there was healthy competition after that but not animosity um we were I mean we played the blizzard games we loved ones they were great games the same with the uh Age of Empires too that said that we were as game makers and we're just deeply pretty sure the fact they made great games there was plenty of uh pie to go around as it were so it wasn't at that at our level it was not the dog eat dog as it was in the when she got past the first five or six titles on rts's there was just a slew of wannabes that were just really kind of

tearing each other apart we were not that normal so thankfully yeah yeah and I I guess so the EA acquisition in the timeline happened so it's after Command and Conquer and then after red alerts with 95 Red Alert was 96. we were working on Tiberian Sun had not shipped it yet because it took us four years to ship Tiberian Sun so we were we were marketing Tiberian somebody hadn't shipped it yet shipped that under EA pretty sure no actually we might have shipped under maybe it's just week 10 maybe I'm wrong about that maybe two things but but right around that time so we were well into Tiberian Sun we had finished Blade Runner and we published it right I think as we were acquired we had started the Irvine Studio which had Thrill Kill um Gold Nugget casino and a bunch of other games under Mark Skaggs and they had started working on radar 2. so uh so that's about the right time frame I have to go back and we'll be gaming I can see when we actually ship the titles because I get confused sometimes a lot of games yeah wow I mean you guys shipped so many titles it's actually astounding yeah it

was crazy the time was crazy we were doing the lands of lures too those were massive games and then we started Earth and Beyond which was an MMO we did games on the N64 we did games on the Sony um the original Sony PlayStation and the PlayStation 2 Pirates and we were creating our own first person shooter with Renegade which eventually shipped as well and Renegade was kind of like Halo it was first person shooter with vehicles with a multiplayer mode and base defensing um and the Renegade X as a group of fans have created so you can actually go play Renegade or if you go play Renegade X now and get a sense of what that game was about so we were we were just really prolific game makers um company was growing fast and we just kept adding more stuff it was really Earth and beyond that became kind of the great sucking noise that took all of our people because MMOs are just so so hard to build yeah so how big did the company get them at its peak uh when I required us I think we're about 200 people 140 million dollars in revenues 70 million dollars in expenses so we immediately added over a billion dollars

to EA's bottom line by either gross revenue or by um Evita in fact actually more than a billion under even though because we're more profitable than most of the other Studios that EA had from Strictly from the numbers profitability not from the scale point of view so yeah no we were we were we were about 200 we grew to about 250 and then in 2003 or so was it five years later we had our very first layoff at Westwood as a company had never had a layoff of any kind uh so no reduction Force EA had at the board level they had decided there must be a 10 layoff it all must be at the same time on the same day and so we had to break that sort of social it wasn't a promise but it was a something that I think a lot of folks at Westwood have really been proud of we just were forced to we had to lay off 10 of our people it was a terrible day and one year later it's 2002 actually because 2003 is when we closed the Vegas offices and became part of Electronic Arts Los Angeles I guess a question from a Founder perspective I mean many people they sell their company they might stay for four years or you know what not invest out

and then they go out and start their next thing I guess you stayed at EA for quite a while what was you did until 2009 so I stayed um you know nine years I guess you'd enjoy it did you have temptation to go start something new or what was the yeah kind of a kind of a mix of things you know it was very personal decision um when we created EA in Los Angeles I had been arguing for a couple of years at that point as the because Brett had left in 2000 so it's been a couple of years I've been arguing that we should we should as a as a company consolidate all the Southwest studios in one place and John Banner was running the DreamWorks studio and some of the other folks to all kind of agreed um the reason was EA was becoming these uh at that time the trend was toward these uh sort of destination Studios where people would go to work to be on a campus very much like what Google and Facebook and other people done and he did that in Canada quite successfully so we really needed to do that because we were getting to be less and less important as individual Studios to is overall bottom line so I'd argue from a

strategy point of view for companies we should all get together and and make a make a Consolidated Studio I wanted to do it in Las Vegas obviously because I'm born and raised here but um ultimately La just had a better deal all the way around and um you know they had some traction with Medal of Honor and some other games then they said look we're just going to do it down there so I couldn't very well then turn 180 degrees and say oh I'm completely opposed to that I was I was arguing I was a poacher boy for it for so long so ultimately we we all moved we moved Studios to collapse them all into EA we tried it we did it way too fast was in one month March of 2023. it was just way too fast to try to close it but they had to do it by the by by quarter inch for for business reasons so it was a very rushed closing of the Las Vegas Studios there was an attempt to move as many people as possible into EA jobs and many many did and flourish to Laura mealy was our head of marketing she now runs you EA so uh clearly a lot of folks did end up in in great jobs and other folks like Paul mooder ended up being the audio director with writer okahara in the auto department over at um Ted prices

Insomniac games and well throughout the industry basically people from Las Vegas just got kind of scattered uh I chose to stay with EA because I became the chief creative officer of the LA Studios and the thought was I'd be there for a year or two and I really just enjoyed it we worked on some great titles and I really like the stuff we were doing and I went to quit about three years later went to Neil who was the head of the studio at the time I didn't want to be the head of Studio because of the living in Vegas and traveling to EA and all that it's been really difficult so ultimately um Neil I went into quit and he said I got this guy Steven Spielberg who wants to make a game and I thought you'd be perfect for that so that got that bought another three years and created the boom blacks Boombox franchise uh the game that was under development and I got a chance to work with some great EPS there uh Mike with Mike Perdue was I was mentoring him and mentoring uh Chris Plummer and some other people that have just turned out to be phenomenal balance so it was great I was just I just kept going so that's how I stayed at EA for so long and ultimately probably would have stayed there even longer but in 2009 there was a great contraction of of

uh because of the 2008 uh financial crisis and um the only opportunity at EA for me was to be an executive producer on a command and Conquer game that would would have about a third of the budget of Starcraft and try to compete with it I'm like ah no that's not that's not what I want to do with my time and so I was I was offered a job to be the CEO of IEC and ic's games division so I took over that instant action yeah it looks just from your like experiences you kind of explored a bunch of different spaces yeah I just I just followed the opportunities you know I mean I I think um I think people misunder or underestimate how often opportunity knocks you just have to have the kind of intestinal fortitude and confidence to to answer and um you know I've done a lot of other crazy stuff that's that's people would not expect you know big became a registered investment advisor for a big data trading platform yeah yeah called telling Investments and

we had many tens of millions under management and so so I did that for a little while whilst I was making games uh I was the chief strategy officer for a company I was on the board of directors and then became the chief strategy officer of a company called Shuffle Master when I went on the board we took off to stepped off the board and became the strategy officer we were about 480 million market cap we sold for 1.3 billion to 18 months later so um you know and the reason we did that is because I saw the opportunity I had hired the CEO and I said you know what there's Gavin's a genius we're gonna we're gonna grow this company so I've done a lot of stuff that's um kind of unexpected all while continuing to make video games I've never stopped making something that would be called a video game in my life so yeah I I saw I mean just the the smattering I saw was like mobile at Zynga is like Green Park there's like the web three stuff they were doing and live yeah I do know my way around the nft space and all that too uh you know so I'm just not uh I guess there's a lot of folks that they found their knitting and

they just like doing something in my 88h ADHD nature just has me constantly looking for the next thing and I guess I'm I'm lucky to have been started in the industry when you could be competent in all these different roles without having to to dedicate your life to being a specialist so I mean I've never been an animator or a rigger but I've written 3D platforms and renderers where I had to do my own character animation and rigging by default because I started so early that there were there just weren't roles for that those roles didn't exist so you know it's sort of those weird if I had started today there's no way I could have the get the career I've had because um to be good at any one of the things that I got to be good at you have to be so specialized yeah I guess well fast forward all the way till today and you're working at uh deviation games um love to hear about that but also I guess I mean your roles shifted obviously from a Founder where you were probably doing you know everything including accounting what is your focus today so yeah so for for deviation games

I was hired to be um I was contracted originally the head of production and then hired to be the vice president senior vice president of Studios so I work directly for the CEO who is the game director so this the game is not my game that I'm directing but I'm I'm making sure that uh Dave gets to make his game the way he wants to make it is my job um and that means you know basically care and feeding of the uh hundreds of people that work on that project um so my job has varied a little bit even as as this uh it's only been six seven months now I guess maybe a little longer but it's varied a bit as the need arise so in the beginning it was focusing on getting a design the design team aligned then it was a pivot that we had done on our decision we made to Pivot the game to a different different kind of presentation mode uh then it was trying to get our head around the scoping capacity of the entire project and most recently it's been about financially projecting the game because we're getting to that point where we have to actually have a plan to complete and show what our projected profitability will be so I've been

heavily involved in the forecasting and budgeting for all of that and then I'm looking forward to you know hiring some folks to to help with the production side and maybe even design that at some point but I feel like we've got we've got such a good stable of incredibly good design directors that probably I'll stay in charge of the design aspect of executing the design uh of course again Dave Dave Anthony is the game director so he's the creative control yeah is there any announcement sort of on what you guys are building and sort of that aspect unlike everybody else we're not we're not letting people go we're hiring so so we're in a different different phase of life we're very uh fortuitous timing for us I suppose because there's lots of tell it out there right now but we can't I can't really give you much on on the game you know there's you can go to the deviation games website and learn what's been announced we Sony is our announced publisher of course that that's out there in the public and we haven't said exactly what kind of game but if you look at the the pedigree of people from from Call of Duty World of

Warcraft um God of War I can just go down the list yeah without without using any of my background I think I can name uh 15 titles that would be top top titles in the industry that are represented by our staff so I'm really incredible very very blessed to be working with some of the very best people in the industry it's a it's an incredible team we usually try to close with like sort of a Cornerstone question and that's if you could go back to the founding of maybe Westwood because that's the one that at least from a long-standing standpoint and just give some advice to yourself or obviously the other Founders that are listening to this this podcast what what would be like the the biggest piece of advice that you would give yourself it's a that's a really tough one because I think things went really well like um I guess the only advice I would be I would give is to just um live in the moment a little bit more appreciate how unique it is because it doesn't last forever and um it's really important to enjoy where you are awesome okay well on that note we'll we'll have to schedule another time I really appreciate your time Lewis

and uh uh thank you for joining us yeah my pleasure I look forward to doing another one take care foreign foreign [Music]