Developer Spotlights:

TriXie Interviews Monolith's Joe Waters

The first thing you notice about Joe Waters is the Mohawk. It was green when I was introduced to him at Xfest in Seattle, purple at the Xbox Aqua party at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), and when I interviewed him recently, green once again for St. Patrick’s Day. I suggested he do pastel stripes for Easter, but he nixed that idea. “I don’t do pink,” he said.

Joe Waters rocks the green ‘hawk.

But you’re not really interested in his hair. Joe is a lead software engineer at Monolith Productions, a game development house here in the Seattle area. He told me he’s working on Condemned: Criminal Origins, but that’s all he could say about that until after E3.

The reason you should know Joe is that he was the lead programmer on Counter-Strike™ for Xbox, which is still one of the most-played games on Xbox Live. Before developing Xbox games, he worked onAmerican McGee’s Alice, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and Star Trek Elite Force II on the PC.

So, how does a kid in Albuquerque, N.M., wind up working on next-generation Xbox games? In between bites of the “killer burger” at Matt’s Rotisserie and Oyster Lounge, he told me all about it. As a kid, he hung out in arcades a lot. The first game he ever played was Battlezone, and he fondly remembers Space Invaders and Pac-Man as well. He spent most of the time watching other kids play because he couldn’t afford to play. So sad …

At 10-years-old, he spent recess in the classroom screwing around with the Apple 2 computer, for fear of getting his ass kicked if he went outside. The Apple didn’t have any games on it, so he tried to figure out how to make his own. He made some games and showed his friends.

Through high school he kept making games, and his mom eventually bought him a Coleco Adam computer. He read the manual and any programming books he could find in the library to learn how to program. He even sold some games to magazines. Understand, this dude is completely self-taught. The only programming class he ever took was FORTRAN 101.

You’d think that when he went off to New Mexico State University (NMSU), he’d study computer science, right? Nope. He was determined to be a fighter pilot, so he joined the Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps and majored in mechanical engineering.

So, why isn’t he over the skies of Iraq right now? Well, the summer before graduating from NMSU, he had a Kung Fu accident. He was messing around, fell over, and got a big mutha of a concussion that landed him in the hospital for two weeks and earned him a medical discharge from the ROTC program.

Since he wasn’t going to be a fighter pilot anymore, Joe took a research job at Sandia National Labs after graduating from college. As part of the job, he wrote some virtual reality software. Programming wasn’t his job at Sandia, but when he saw the guy who was doing the programming struggling with it, he took over the project.

At the same time, a friend of his started a VR Arcade in Albuquerque. It was during the time of the first Quakegame, when 3-D cards were coming out, but were still really expensive. Basically, people would go to arcades to play games on computers that were way more tricked-out and powerful than their home PCs.

Joe wrote a game just for his friend’s arcade, a unique title that no other arcade would have. Joe described it as a networked space-combat game in an asteroid field. He said, "I wanted it to be something like X-Wing versus Tie Fighter, but simple and fast-paced like Quake.”

“What was the game called?” I asked.

“Biff-riss.”

“What?”

“B.F.R.I.S., pronounced Biff-riss,” Joe said.

“Let me guess,” I said, “Big F***ing … ”

“Rocks in Space,” he finished.

What happened to B.F.R.I.S.? Well, just as Joe quit his job at Sandia to finish his game (he thought he was 90-percent done, but the final “10 percent” took a year and a half) his friend’s arcade went bust. Still, Joe powered through it, hired a couple of people to help out, and finished the game. He tookB.F.R.I.S. to GDC in 1999 and submitted it to the Independent Games Festival (IGF), where it was a finalist in the IGF Awards.

B.F.R.I.S. also caught the eye of GT Interactive, and the company released the game in Europe. Joe made back the money he’d spent making the game and decided that, from then on, he wanted to make games with other people’s money.

So, he moved to Dallas, Tex., to work as a programmer at Rogue Entertainment. There he developed the boss A.I. and special effects for American McGee’s Alice. Joe’s dog Spike even came to the office with him. “He’s a crunch dog,” Joe said. “He would just trot around the office and come up and nuzzle people. Then, they’d be happy.” So happy, in fact, that Spike ended up in the credits for Alice.

Spike, the “crunch dog."

After the PC version of Alice shipped, the PS2 version was cancelled, and Rogue went out of business.
Ten former Rogue employees, including Joe, founded Nerve Software. Joe was the technical director for a year and a half. He worked on the multiplayer gameplay for Return to Castle Wolfenstein for the PC. He left Nerve just as they were getting ready to start the Xbox version.

Joe then went to Ritual Entertainment, also in Dallas, where he was a senior programmer. At Ritual, he did 'bot code and weapons stuff for Star Trek Elite Force II. Then, for nine months he was the lead programmer on the Xbox version ofCounter-Strike.

Unfortunately, Ritual lost the contract for the game, and Microsoft Game Studios assembled a super elite task force to finish it. They brought Joe up to Redmond and snapped up dev leads from three different Microsoft Game Studios. The CSX team rarely saw the sun, working from about 10:00 A.M. to 4:00 A.M. seven days a week, but persevered and finished the game. “It turned out way better than I thought it would, given the three months we had to make it happen,” Joe said.

With Counter-Strike in final testing, Joe heard about a game project called “Condemned” at a party and checked out Monolith’s Web site. “They had a job posting for a programmer with Xbox experience for a next-generation title,” he said. He had two phone interviews and showed up for a face-to-face meeting after having worked all night and slept for only two hours. Apparently, he wasn’t too coherent, but being game developers themselves, Monolith took pity on him and gave him a fourth interview.

Joe been at Monolith for about a year and a half (though as I look over my notes, Joe either has no sense of time and so uses "a year and a half" as his default answer—or else he has an 18-month attention span). Now he has four high-speed programming minions to do his bidding and thinks Monolith is a great place to work.

But what about robot monkeys, you ask? Alright, alright, settle down. I’ll tell you about Joe Waters and the robot monkeys. See, Joe would one day like to have his own army. Why? “To kick ass,” he said. Fair enough. But, not just any army. Oh no. Mr. Waters needs a robot monkey army, which would consist of many, many robots with monkey brains. If you can make a robot army that does what you tell it, why include brains? “Brains are cool.” Of course.

“Would you have new-world or old-world monkeys?” I asked. “Prehensile tails or no?”

“Well … they would be more like gorillas, except like 2000 pounds.”

“Those aren’t monkeys. Gorillas are apes, dude.”

“I know, but ‘monkey’ is a cooler word.”

“Okay, but what do you do if the monkey robot army decides to rebel and overthrow you?”

“Turn ‘em off.”

“Cause you’d have the clicker?”

“I’d have the clicker.”

The guy has it all figured out, robot monkey-wise. Here are some other interesting Joe Waters facts for you:

Favorite Movie: Boondock Saints or Way of the Gun.
Desired Superpower: Flight.
Best Book Ever: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.
Favorite Superhero: Wonder Boy from Tenacious D.
Favorite TV Show: Robot Chicken or anything on Adult Swim.
Favorite Show That’s Not On Anymore: The A-Team or Airwolf.
Worst Celebrity Roommate: Bryan Adams. “He’d want to sing, and I’d want him to stop.”
Best Album: Rancid’s Out Come the Wolves or London Calling by the Clash. “They’re almost the same album.”
Ideal Band to Tour With: Flogging Molly.

We’ll catch up with Joe again at E3 to learn more aboutCondemned. Until then, look for him inCounter-Strike on Xbox Live. His Gamertag isgunfu, and he’s promised to play with you night owls on Wednesday, March 30, 2005, from 9:00 to 11:00 P.M. (Pacific).

Comments about this article?