Dev Blog – Origin Story

Hello!

Today is the first day I’ve decided to write a dedicated Dev Blog (sorry for the cliche) post for Virtual Athletes. It will encapsulate as neatly as possible what this project is, and how it has reached this point. As I make progress on the project, I will endeavor to add more posts.

Here is the first part of the Virtual Athletes story.

Origin

Virtual Athletes is a concept that began in November of 2003. It was inspired by my 9-month old son, Clayton, who got a huge smile on his face when he rolled a ball to me. As a father who had a passion for soccer (football… I’m not getting into it here) growing up, I was excited about the idea that my boy might share my passion for sports.

But this was 2003, not 1973, and I was open to the idea that Clay might have different passions, be they other sports or other areas of life altogether – science, cooking, drama, gardening, who knows? The one thing I knew for sure was that I wanted to support him in whatever direction he chose (exceptions: heroin, murder, etc). Naturally, I hoped he shared my passions (he shares some!), but I didn’t want to pigeon-hole him into a life of my choosing.

As a long-time gamer, I had a nostalgic love for pen-and-paper role-playing games and MUDs, and when video games started hitting home markets in the 80s, I fell for them hard. I have vivid memories of how immersed I felt when playing, say, Sierra OnLine’s Police Quest series, Gemstone III from Simutronics, or Red Baron (either the offline Dynamix game or online through the ImagiNation Network).

Very, very few of my fellow computer game nerds were into sports, however. In fact, most professed an antipathy toward any kind of organized physical activity (probably stemming from the sometimes-accurate-at-the-time trope of nerds being victimized physically by jocks – or from having fathers who were “disappointed” by their lack of interest, or from being guilty of the crime of having a vagina, and thus being barred from participating… etc, etc, the problems were endless).

So it all came together for me in my mind.

I wanted to make a video game about being a child who could play different kinds of sports or immerse themselves in other kinds of experiences.

I knew that I wanted that child to be able to grow up and potentially become the World’s Greatest Whatever, depending on what they did, but even if they didn’t become the Michael Jordan or Pele of their particular activity, they could still get joy and satisfaction from learning and growing and competing.

I knew that I didn’t like multiplayer games where everyone started out as Level 1, and everyone raced to get to Max Level as fast as possible and then waited for Max Level to increase. I wanted people to feel like they were capable during any play-through of becoming a legend, and that legendary status wasn’t based on having put the most hours in from the earliest moment.

I knew that I wanted a game that captured the immediate pleasure rush of having rolled a GREAT character. Modern games allow players to assign points to create a ‘character build’ in a universe where everyone is equal and nobody is special. I wanted players to feel like they struck gold with their character roll.

I knew that I wanted players to age. Most athletes have an arc… in the beginning, they are small, weak and stupid. We all started out small, weak and stupid, there is no getting around that. We may have been stronger or smarter than our age-peers, but relative to Usain Bolt, we were small, weak and stupid. By the time an athlete is 12, they are larger, stronger and smarter, but still small, weak and stupid relative to a professional athlete.

This arc continues. By the time an athlete is around 20, they have generally reached their peak height. Natural muscle growth is nearly finished. Mentally, some have it together and others don’t – but in most sports (gymnastics is an obvious exception), they are still considered young and naive relative to seasoned veterans.

For a basketball, football, baseball, hockey or soccer star (these are the sports that featured most heavily in my home growing up), athletes reach their career peaks somewhere between, say, 27 and 32. Their skill set is largely defined, and their bodies are in peak physical condition. This is what I think of as “The All-Star Years”.

And then things change. Somewhere in our early 30s, it starts getting harder to run as fast, jump as high, throw as far. Sure, if we really dedicate ourselves, we can stay at our physical peak a little longer – but time will catch up. Oh, believe me.

At this time, most athletes in the above sports retire. Some, though, are able to hang around for a few more years, because their experience, intelligence and skill set still allows them to compete, either in an individual sport or as a team player. They may be a shadow of their former selves, but if you happen to be the Washington Wizards, a guy like Michael Jordan can still help your franchise through his name recognition alone, even if he’d been out of the league for 3-4 years and wasn’t the dominant force he had once been. Tugging shorts, working refs, coaching younger players from the floor, luring opponents into mistakes… these are the “Cagey Vet” years. They never last long, unless your name is Gordie Howe or George Foreman.

I wanted players to experience that arc with their characters. I didn’t want a game where the player could become the Greatest Of All Time and… just stay there. I wanted them to have that window of greatness, and navigate the realities of that window closing.

If a player DID reach greatness, what would they do with it? Become a media personality? A coach? Focus on family? Buy a team? Jordan bought teams. Barkley and Shaq became media personalities. Kevin McHale went into the front office. Their success as coaches has resulted in entire generations of fans not realizing that Lenny Wilkins, Joe Torre and Phil Jackson were outstanding (in Wilkins & Torre’s cases, Hall of Fame level) players as well in their sports. I could go on and on about my childhood idol, Johann Cruyff.

I wanted players to be able to feel the pride of watching their kids do well. I wanted them to be able to build and leave legacies. I wanted the game to go on and on.

In 2003, I started designing the game on a spreadsheet. I started out with calculating growth curves, and designing systems by which players physical and mental attributes would grant them baseline abilities in a variety of skills. This structure was an homage to years of playing a wide variety of RPGs.

In the game, I wanted players to be able to train the bodies and minds of their characters, which would help them get better at a wide range of activities, or let them focus on specific skills, which would let them specialize at specific things, like throwing a curveball or jumping over a bar seven feet in the air.

In the spreadsheet, I built systems that would look at a character’s attributes, give them baseline skill abilities, and rank them at various positions on an (American) football team depending on how good they were at throwing, catching, tackling, blocking, etc.

After a while, I had the whole framework mapped out in my mind, and to some extent on a spreadsheet.

And then I decided that I would need to learn how to write code, draw art, create animations, do marketing… and I put the project down for about 16 years.