Eternal Darkness is one of my favorite titles. The storyline was interesting, the replay value is high, and the sanity moments were more than just a gimmick--they made the gamer want to see what would happen next. Would the character's head fall off? Would the television's volume slide up and down? Would the infamous blue screen of death make an appearance? Or worst yet, would the controller mysteriously disconnect just as I entered a room full of enemies?

After owning the game for several years, and playing through it just as many times, I decided that I'd learned all I could from fan sites and numerous reviews I would read just for the sake of reading about one of my favorite games. It was time to go to the source--Denis Dyack himself, director of Eternal Darkness and founder of Silicon Knights, a game development studio responsible not only for one of my personal favorite titles, but several other gaming gems as well. I recently had a length chat with Denis about the founding of his studio, the longevity of digital distribution, video games as a viable art form, and a recent controversy surrounding video game journalists and the E3 2006 preview build of Silicon Knights' next title, Too Human.

Shack: Out of everything you've played, what game would you say is responsible not only for getting you into video games, but also inspiring you to enter the industry?

Denis Dyack: I've never been asked that question before, and the answer's going to be really funny, actually. When I saw this game, I was like, "That's the right way to go, these guys know what they're doing." Speedball, by the Bitmap Brothers.

Shack: I've heard of it, but haven't ever played it.

Denis Dyack: They're doing a remake now, and man, back in the day--going back to '88 on the Amiga--I saw that game, and it was, in my opinion, the most polished game ever. I'm excited about the remake, but haven't seen much of it. Back then, that was sort of it for me. I thought the Bitmap Brothers had quality down, back in the day when three people could make a game. Now our teams are comprised of hundreds. But that was the one for me, the one where I said, "Those guys are doing it right; I want to do it, too, and have the same type of quality that those guys have." And that's what we're shooting for.

The game that made me play video games was Pong, but everyone's going to say that.

Shack: At least we know now, when the Speedball remake comes out, what will account for Too Human's sudden halt in development.

Denis Dyack: [Laughs] No, it won't. I can't afford for Speedball to do that. You know, actually, there have been some games that I've pulled myself away from. World of Warcraft, about a year ago. I had one of the highest characters in the company, and I finally went, "It's time to stop this." I was level 58 or something.

Shack: Wow, right near the edge of the level cap, before the expansion.

Denis Dyack: Yeah, right at the edge. But man, it was insane. The game was great, I didn't want to put it down, and I just said, "This is like an addiction, I've got to put it down. There are other games to play." I think World of Warcraft was an excellent game, but fortunately, I removed myself from it.

Shack: How did Silicon Knights come about? Did you always want to form your own company?

Denis Dyack: I don't think there was ever a want to form my own company. We made our first game in 1992. It was published by SSI and a group called Millennium [Interactive] in the United Kingdom--Cyber Empires, for the Amiga, the Atari, and the PC. Back then, we just wanted to make video games. We were in Toronto, very, very different from an area like Silicon Valley on the west coast. We didn't even know if there was an industry. Because we wanted to do our own type of games, and because there was no one around [in our area] that did those types of games, we just formed our own company with two people, actually. Our first hire was an artist, and the first game we did... I designed the game, did all the art, and the programming. My partner at the time, who left about seven or eight years ago now, he did a lot of the artificial intelligence stuff. It was a really small team. You could start, literally, in your basement back then. It's a completely different world now. You can't do that anymore. We just started because we wanted to.

We called the company Silicon Knights because we wanted to be the knights in shining armor in the games industry. We wanted people to recognize that the games we were going to do would be of the utmost quality, and that every game we did, you could rely on a Silicon Knights game. It's like a Stephen King book--you know that you're going to get something good when you pick it up. Back then we thought there were a lot of bad games, and not enough good ones. Ironically, it's only gotten worse these days. Percentage-wise there are a lot more bad games than good games out there.

Shack: That's a good point you make. You look back at, for example, the Wii's growing Virtual Console library, and it's easy to see where video games re-started after the crash in the early 1980s. Some of those games are just terrible, and you'd think that, after all this time spent designing and learning how to make games, more companies would know what constitutes complete and utter crap.

Denis Dyack: I agree with you--some of the games are just so horrid. It's because they're hard to make, and there's no set of ground rules for the games industry on how to do good game design. Hopefully over the next twenty-five years or so we'll get there.

We're such an immature industry. The definition of "game designer" isn't even concrete yet. Silicon Knights, when we did Legacy of Kain... in North America, I was the lead programmer for a while, then I became a director; no one had even heard of that before. Everything was about producers. I look at it as, producers deal with money, and that can conflict with creativity, so you need a creative person. Now, there's a ton of directors out there, but jeez, Legacy of Kain, that was about nine years ago, and it's just recently that directors are really emerging. Finding a game designer these days that actually knows his stuff these days is really hard. We're actually working with a local university, creating a program called Interactive Arts & Sciences, where people can get a degree in the arts, in game design, technology, in all these different areas that explore what the role of a game designer is.

Shack: You'd think that a lot more game companies would be anxious to get to that point, because these days, games cost so much to develop that in many cases, one flop could cost someone their company.

Denis Dyack: Oh yeah, for sure. One of the things that I'm a big proponent of is, I wish there were fewer games. So, you do reviews and you report on the industry. It was last Christmas or the Christmas before, there were two hundred games released in November.

Shack: It's absurd. I think the problem was, there were so many quality titles that got outshined by bigger names, so no one ever got a chance to play them.

Denis Dyack: I totally agree. It's a shame, and at the end of the day, there's just so many out there that the market is over-saturated. I'm hoping that these games, becoming more and more expensive, I'm actually hoping that at some point, publishers will just go, "We can't make all of these any more, so we'll just make few gamers." Which I think is a good thing, because I want to play them all. I'm a big movie buff, too; I watch as many movies as I can. But you just can't get out there all the time to see everything. With a game being... it used to be around forty hours on average, but now they're around ten and fifteen, which I think is more manageable for the consumer. Still, though, there are just way too many games. Between Nintendo DS, PSP, 360, all the other consoles, you just can't play them all, and I just hope that at some point there are significantly fewer games.

Shack: In a recent interview, you said that you believed gamers do not want long games. Do you think that episodic content and its eventual spin-offs are the format that video games will be released on in the future?

Denis Dyack: I would categorize episodic content as a similar medium to television--it has its place. There are films, and then there are shows like Heroes on T.V. I think episodic fills that gap, and I think there's room for both, actually. When we created Legacy of Kain, it was upward of 60 hours to complete. No one's got time like that any more. I'm thinking that, just in general, with higher production values, I'd rather be done with a game after ten to fifteen hours, and have a tremendous experience, than have a sixty hour experience that ends up as just so-so. Not including replays, not including online and all that stuff. For example, Halo 3--if it takes between ten and fifteen hours to complete [the] single-player [campaign], I'm a happy guy.

I think episodic content is its own sort of derivative. It's just a smaller type of game.

Shack: Along those same lines, we're watching digital distribution grow quite rapidly. Do you see brick and mortar stores becoming less and less the primary means through which gamers acquire new software?

Denis Dyack: Yeah, I see that as inevitable. I think that eventually, the only way of distribution will be digital. Actually, it comes down to a very interesting philosophy. I'd like to extrapolate quite a bit, and if you'll bear with me, it's kind of a long answer, but I think it's an interesting one. If you look at technology, and if you were just to assume technology is infinite--the amount of pixels you can process is infinite, the amount of memory is more than you'd ever need, the hard drive space--imagine in the future that your [Internet] bandwidth is unlimited. Essentially what you're doing there is, you can actually hook up your controller to some audio/visual device, whatever that will be; maybe you can plug stuff into your head after a while, I don't know. You should be able to play games without downloading anything.

The reason that's so important, and why digital distribution is going to win, is because you then could set up things such as server subscribers that will limit piracy, because there's nothing to pirate. If you look at MMOs, and if you look at China where there aren't any copyright laws, essentially the only games there are MMOs because you can't pirate that experience; you've got to pay to interact with everyone else. As technology continues to explode, which I think it will, we'll get to the point where what you'll be purchasing is the game experience. There's no disc, no software to download. If the technology gets fast enough, you can probably just play games from a central server, and it doesn't mean things need to be [only] multiplayer, it just means that the technology is so good that you don't have to wait. You can enjoy the experience in ways that can't be pirated, and I think that because our medium is interactive, it does mean that it has substantially more value than old mediums that are more linear, such as television and movies. Once something gets put onto a bit torrent site, it's over; that value just decreased like MP3s in the music industry. But with these kinds of technologies in the future, digital distribution is not only the future, but it's the only answer to stopping some of these problems that we'll be facing.

Turn to page 2 to read more of Denis' thoughts on the future of gaming, as well as the inspiration that led to Eternal Darkness.