You’re on a very tight schedule on a shoot like that. We built a practical set, and had a studio and a crew, and cast the roles of Roger and his father, and the various characters in the game…to my mind, the practical shoot was the most enjoyable, yet nerve wracking part of the project.
We felt that the marriage of live action and CG was just the right way to go. Stories are about people, so at the time we wanted to get people into our games. We wanted to use gaming technologies to enhance the storytelling process. We got into gaming in order to tell stories, not just make games. VC: Well, Phill and I came from film and television backgrounds, and theater was really in our DNA. What was it like working with live actors? Did you take an active role in directing them? At the time, you weren’t really able to do that, so you used live actors. It’s become easier to render characters and use voice actors. ND: Nowadays it’s pretty rare to see people working with live actors in gaming. ND: Yes, and it comes through really well in that all the puzzles are very realistic, like, say, pushing a peanut shell across some water, things like that. The puzzles had to be things the player could see in the gaming environment, or things that a cockroach could do, maybe with a bit of a stretch at times. All the puzzles in Bad Mojo had to be organic, natural, and real to the game environment. In all the adventure games at that time, the puzzles felt like really weird gating mechanisms that had nothing to do with anything. Except, and this is important, what we wanted to do with Bad Mojo, was avoid puzzles that came out of left field. VC: Well, yeah -we knew the Mill a r brothers, and we admired their work, and Myst was definitely one of the inspirations. Especially the bit about how the technical limitations drove the process. We thought about Kafka’s Metamorphosis, which in some interpretations involves the main character turning into a cockroach, and I was also really immersed in Joseph Campbell at the time, and we thought, “Okay, let’s create a mythic hero’s quest for this cockroach to take.” And that’s how Bad Mojo came about. VC: Right, and we thought, “This is cool, it will resonate with people, and a cockroach is very small on screen, but the world a cockroach lives in can still be really interesting to people.” My creative partner and I, Phill Simon, took that idea and built a story around it. I’m willing to bet you’ve got a cockroach story.
We were telling these stories in the office one day, and people started drifting over, and it seemed like everybody had a cockroach story. We were having a brainstorming session one day, and both Drew and I grew up in homes that had cockroach infestations. would be conducive to the hardware that’s available to users?” The smaller the character on screen, the better. So, we asked ourselves, “What type of environment, world, character, etc. Access speeds are slow on CD – ROM, screen refresh is slow. We’re working off of CDROM as a playback medium. You know, computers are very slow back then, right at the dawn of the Internet, hard drives are slow. We were driven by technical obstacles rather than creative, at that point in time -1993. It was Drew who came up with the concept of making a game about an insect. VC: Well, the real genius behind the idea is a guy named Drew Huffman. How did you guys come up with the idea for a game about a guy who turns into a cockroach? ND: Bad Mojo has got a really weird premise. He is now a novelist-look for his book, Serpent Box, at your favorite booksellers. Vincent Carella was a director and lead writer on Bad Mojo. VINCENT CARELLA-Interview by Jensen Toperzer and 8bits Considered