Twenty years after the launch of the EvermoreGrandiga series Richard P. Levieux still remains a household name among gamers comics fans and anime junkies. While there remains to this day just two games in the EvermoreGrandiga Saga the rich fiction has spawned countless cross-media spinoffs. Notoriously wary of giving interviews and spectacularly good at keeping information leaks plugged little information about the latest game in the series EvermoreGrandiga: Online since the famous ‘postergate’ scandal of 2006. After cornering him at a local bookfair FFWD’s intrepid boy reporter Jeff Kubik was given the rare opportunity to interview the genius behind the EvermoreGrandiga phenomenon.
FFWD: Thanks for taking the time to sit down with us Mr. Levieux. I know you normally like to stay out of the press and we really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us.
RL : Well I–
FFWD : For many of our readers — and myself — we’ve grown up with EvermoreGrandiga but have never known much about it’s creator. Your giving an interview like this now is kind of like John Lennon coming back to life as Jesus and telling us Optimus Prime is actually real.
RL : Optimus Prime — he’s the one from that Michael Bay film right?
FFWD : I–uhg–um–
RL : I’m f***ing with you.
FFWD : OhthankGod. Ha ha! HA! HA! HA!
RL : Whenever you’re ready.
FFWD : Whew. Okay I’ll just hop right in then.
RL : Please do.
FFWD : With nearly two decades of development time for the project and an entire canon of comics novels and fan-made movies you must feel a lot of pressure on the project.
RL : Yes and no. While on one hand I’m being watched so closely by the fan community I sometimes think I can feel their hot expectant breath on the back of my neck working on a project with that level of expectation gives me a lot of room to maneuver with publishers too. They’re a lot looser with deadlines and additional funding than they might be with a more unknown commodity.
FFWD : I couldn’t help but notice that in the first gameplay trailer the Damsweedes seemed to be wearing Na’vighoe Fletching Charms. Should gamers be expecting racial fusion craft as a new skill?
RL : Well Jeff I can’t give too much away but I think you’ll be excited by the ways we’re expanding the racial subtext to suit the new mechanics.
FFWD : In the past you’ve said that you’ve had a detailed plan for the series from day one. In fact I hear you’re quite protective of the original manuscript the Grandiopedia as it’s been called on some message boards. Will fans ever have access to any of this material?
RL : Well I am quite protective of it. I recently hired a group of private military contractors a lion tamer and a woman from Pennsylvania who claims to be a Voodoo Loa to protect it. Hah! Just kidding. But I do keep it near my body at all times. But you’ll have to guess the location!
FFWD : Your desk?
RL : Close! Due to some recent office restructuring I no longer have a traditional desk. I’m a slave to fashion so I went ahead and built myself a rustic workspace out of milk crates and plywood. The Grandopedia happens to be exactly the right thickness to prevent the whole structure from wobbling when I type.
FFWD : That sounds neat! But will fans ever have access to for example copies of the material? Perhaps similar to the discoverable books in the Blangoanian Library? Personally I’ve always thought that the lore was one of the strongest parts of the game. The exacting detail given over to lineage and racial purity for example.
RL : Well you see my only worry there would be readability. The entire thing is written by hand on whatever scraps of paper I was able to find lying around at the time in a combination of Aramaic and a shorthand of my own devising. I’m not sure anyone would be very interested in a scrap of graph paper from my highschool math class with my original sketch of Grandiga City’s skyline. On the other hand we are always looking for special edition ad-ins.
FFWD : You’ve indicated in earlier previews that EvermoreGrandiga: Online would incorporate a level of customizability never before seen in an MMO. Are you going to be integrating some of the campaign creation that made the original pen and paper FPS so popular?
RL : You bet! With our new ScalaGon technology you’ll be able to sketch your character directly into the game using an iPad or optical mouse. You’ll get certain bonuses based on how good your drawing is. Draw something bad enough and you get access to a unique starting area: Olleander Twist’s Poorhouse for Mongoloid Orphans! And when you’re finally able to make good your escape all the NPCs in the game will have unique dialogue that subtly mocks your physical appearance and implies certain assumptions about your usefulness to society. As far as we know this is the most accurate simulation of being a semi-deformed invalid currently available in the medium.
FFWD : Wait you’re saying that you can make your character retarded?
RL : Exactly!
FFWD : Why would anyone want to do that?
RL : I think we’ve reached an epoch where gamers are no longer interested in just being muscle-bound space marines who do nothing but kill dragons and nail princesses. With our new engine Apotheosis R.E.X. we’re opening up the medium for more intimate personal experiences where the player can understand what it’s like to be truly desperate and impossible to love. Of course they can still be a sex-mad space marine if they want. So long as they can draw well enough.
FFWD : I think I understand. So what you’re describing is essentially about letting players add depth to the EvermoreGrandiga universe providing the verisimilutude it might have lost in the translation to the screen.
RL : While playing as retards.
FFWD : What sort of other nontraditional character choices will players be able to make? Could you for example choose to be a quadriplegic? I can see that adding all kinds of interesting dimensions to a fantasy universe in which we’re not used to seeing the disabled.
RL : While I’m sorry to say that quadriplegics will not come packaged with the vanilla game we are looking into them for expansions. You will however be able to play as a quadruped out-of-the-box.
FFWD : Well that’s certainly some out of the box thinking (laughs).
**Long silence on recording**
FFWD : Ahem. Now I feel like I’ve gotten a fairly clear idea of the game’s sandbox gameplay which you’ve described as a fusion of an MMORPG an FPS and elements of RTSs–
RL : With driving sections and a player-run economy.
FFWD : Of course. But I was hoping that for the benefit of our readers you might try to paint a picture of what it will look like once they’ve installed the program and sat down in front of their keyboards to play. From the ground up as it were.
RL : Well we’ve made an effort to make it as accessible as possible. So once you sit down and sketch out your character you’ll be asked to choose a history for your character that will determine a number of the perks and characteristics the avatar will have in the game. The "That Guy" perk for example changes dialogue options so that your character will make every conversation about his or her self even when no one has prompted them or indeed shown any interest at all. And then further to that if you make the decision to attend one of our in-game University’s — assuming you’ve chosen a character with the correct background and breeding– it will open up the "Sit at the Front of Class" and "Relate Everything That Was Just Said To An Insipid Life Story" skills. It’s the first game in existence as far as I know that lets you be "That Guy."
FFWD : And once you’ve sketched your character assuming they don’t end up in the Mongoloid Home what will their starting point be?
RL : We have a number of diverse starting locations including Winterville which is perpetually covered in a blanket of thick sparkling snow Magmatown whose massive twisted spires and dark fortresses have been moulded from igneous rock and Treehamlet which is a forest level.
FFWD : Are these starting points racially determined?
RL : Yes. The Damsweedes begin in Winterville because of their natural resistance to cold the Navighoe begin in Treehamlet because of their deep psuedo-sexual connection to nature and the Irish begin in Magmatown because of their notoriously hot tempers and firebrand women.
FFWD : It makes sense. After all the entire Wingamort subseries in the line of "GrandigaBlade" novels is predicated on the idea that mixing bloodlines carries an inherent risk of summoning Bygo the demon prince of hell. Will miscegenation be available as a method of demon summoning in the game?
RL : Absolutely. One of the key selling features of the game is our robust magic system. Personally I was getting tired of the ‘press hotkey to throw fireball’ style of casting so I set my engineers to work on something more robust. Now in order to cast spells you have to collect and arrange reagents which can be anything from mincemeat pies made with blackthorne root from the Garlish Wastes to the allantoic lining of an Irishman’s birth pod to — as you’ve said — the mixed fluids of two incompatible races.
FFWD : Super cool. Now you’ve just made an interesting point which is that you’re trying to get away from the ‘press hotkey to throw fireball’ system of combat. Describe to me a typical combat scenario and how the player would interact with it. me: Well imagine you’re fighting some rats. In real life I mean. How would you go about that?
FFWD : I’d probably grab the closest thing I could find like a bean bag chair or sandwich or something and smother it. Then I’d make sure mom knew about it because you can forget about small deaths really quickly. If there were a lot I guess I’d probably use a Gatling gun.
RL : Then that’s what you can do here!
FFWD : But what if my mom’s not playing the game?
RL : I–wait. Seriously?
FFWD : … No.
RL : …Okay.
**breathing**
RL : Anyway. Our dynamic world morphology allows you to use anything you find lying around as a potential weapon — Once you’ve properly specced your ‘improvisation’ skill of course. Which incidentally allows you to make extra money at the community theatre.
FFWD : So the game engine is capable of dynamically rendering the object itself and the chances that your character is able to use it and then determining an appropriate action?
RL : In a sense yes. It’s all quite technical but there’s an algorithm that factors your character’s base stats against his life experience then makes a decision about how they’d be most likely to use the objects in the environment. It’s all about maximum output with minimum input. So for example a level 12 fighter whose parents were slaughtered by bandits when he was a child — or in the case of the Irish a Leprechaun — when stuck in a room with a broomstick two guards and a gaslamp is likely to take the broomstick crush one of the guards’ esophagus with it then set the other aflame by smashing him with the gaslamp. Then he would laugh as they died slow painful deaths but would also be crying cursed as he is with the knowledge that he has become that which he despises. A mongoloid character however would probably try to ride the broomstick out of the room like a witch calling out ‘maaaagiiiic!’ in his shrill voice only to be stabbed several times by both guards and mourned by no one.
FFWD : Doesn’t that remove the element of choice from your interactions?
RL : Not at all! That details a single interaction using the Improv skill. All the rest of the game’s thousands of skills will still be open to all players.
FFWD : Thousands wow! Will all the skills in the "GrandigaBlade" novels be available? Readers will remember for example that Paisley Hamchops’s Corpse Massage Parlour got the series banned in Australia.
RL : I’m happy to confirm at this time that Corpse Masseuse will be a playable class.
FFWD : Christ’s Wounds! I bet more than a few fans will be thanking Ru’La’Ghul for that one.
RL : (Deep soul rattling sigh) I’m… sure they will.
FFWD : Now if I can get serious for a moment I’d like to ask about the delays in the game’s release. If I could.
RL : Of course anyone would be curious.
FFWD : When you began the project back in 1998 a lot of the technology that you’re currently describing — which sounds amazing by the way — didn’t exist. Not to mention about 85 "GrandigaBlade" novels and the grossly misunderstood anime series. How has that changed the way you’ve developed the game?
RL : Sure. I mean the whole process is a dialogue. While the original characters and universe are still very much my dearest children the writers we hired for the tie-in products all worked very hard to uphold the vision of the original game. So while the world is the same I definitely have to admit that some of them had some ideas I wanted to incorporate into the sequel. For example Mark Jeoban’s invention of the Aranys — this race of unstoppable genetically-superior fighting machines– for the animated series we found the perfect counterpoint to the world’s traditional villains the Irish.
FFWD : But are you saying that loyalists aren’t going to be seeing their favourite characters? Or at least that some of the might have been thrown into the Aranys’ magma kilns?
RL : Oh no I think everyone will be satisfied. A key component of our revolutionary character-creation software is the choice of one of twelve playable races all of which have been culled from the various iterations of the series.
FFWD : But will characters from the novels TV series radio plays and bubble gum comics be making appearances as NPCs?
RL : I can’t confirm NPC races at this time but I can give you a hint: Though this plot-centric NPC race makes up only two per cent of EverLandia’s population they make up forty per cent of its prison population.
FFWD : And I’m sure our readers don’t need to be told who those naughty folk are! Returning to the game’s long development period I’d like to ask about the fact that you haven’t released any gameplay footage in over four years except for the release poster which was a poster.
RL : Well I think you’re underestimating the importance of a poster. We put a lot of work into making that poster say everything about the game we wanted to say at that time.
FFWD : The white background with a baby in diapers staring up at the logo?
RL : Precisely dear boy.
FFWD : Well I think I follow but could you provide a little more context. For the readers?
RL : Well the baby obviously represents potential to do anything with your life and the assured look in his eye as he stares up at the logo is suggesting the infinite possibility of this universe. The fact that the baby image was made to look like — but I have to stress was not actually — an infringement on a famous Herbert and Keller Baby Formula copyright was obviously suggesting the moral flexibility available to all players of EvermoreGrandiga: Online . Be hero or criminal. Saint or villain. Chaste or trollop.
FFWD : Like a baby.
RL : Exactly.
FFWD : And when are we likely to get our first looks at the world of EvermoreGrandiga ?
RL : Well I hate to play the coy developer but it will be done when it’s done. It’s like I always tell my team: we never sacrifice quality just to boost the bottom line of some fat cat no matter how many desks they take.
FFWD : At this point what’s the size of your development team?
RL : Well we recently just hired two new engineers so we’re up to fifteen. That might seem low but since we made the decision last month to switch to an in-house engine we had to cut all our licenced-engine developers.
FFWD : Wait you just switched engines?
RL : It was the best decision for the project. And the fans.
FFWD : So you’re essentially at square one then.
RL : Well all of the philosophical/worldbuilding groundwork has been laid. We’re well on our way.
FFWD : But… but the improv. You said there would be improv and that I could finally be in a community theatre troupe in EverLandia. You… you said that I could be retarded. You promised !
RL : All those systems exist conceptually. Look son you’re not in game design so I’ll let this slide but you have to understand that engineering the code is the simple part. Now that the designs exist–now that the framework is there it’s easier than eggs in coffee to build the house around it. You’ll be retarded sooner than you think.
FFWD : And… and will I be able to befriend the Thrice Blessed Virgins of Merriment on the Applewater Shore?
RL : Of course son of course. When the game is released at an undefined point in the future you’ll be free to gallivant and hoopa-haw with whoever it is you so choose.
FFWD : Oh oh good. That’s… good.
RL : Shhh. Shh.
FFWD : Will you sing me to sleep Mr. Levieux? I want to dream about EverLandia.
RL : That depends. How much change do you have on you?
Wow! What an amazing interview with one of the most brilliant minds in the biz! If EvermoreGrandia’s last title 1994’s Escape from EvermoreCastle was any indication the series latest is going to be on every reviewers’ top 100 lists for the next 20 years!
