Space Marine Developer Interview: Jerry Edsall

This last Saturday at the Games Workshop Games Day convention I had the esteemed privilege to interview the Lead Programmer for Space Marine, Jerry Edsall!  Here is the result!


TVW:  THQ and Games Workshop both seem to give you guys at Relic a lot of creative freedom and a lot of love when it comes to working with the IP.  Do you feel that the freedom and that closeness has helped you make a really great game?

Jerry: Yeah, we work really closely [with them] to make sure that everything we make is true to the IP and really faithful to being a Space Marine, or an Ork or Chaos.  So there is a lot of trust involved in that relationship.  When we ask for stuff, they are pretty considerate of it.  They also back us up so if we do something dumb, we don't really break anything about Warhammer.

TVW:  So far, what has been your favorite part about working on the game?

Jerry: Multiplayer.  I love the multiplayer.

TVW:  And having played it thoroughly I'm sure (he grinned big at this!), do you feel like it's going to be something that can stand up to other similar Sci-Fi multi-player experiences?  Do you feel like this is something that is going to have the longevity?

Jerry: Yeah, for sure.  It's a really competitive, fun and intense game.  It has kind of an old school feel to it when you play it, it's really fast and frantic.  So yeah, I think it will definitely stand up.

STEAM SUMMERCAMP: I better start making a new wallet...

Every year during the major "breaks" in the seasons, usually timed around Spring Break, the 4th of July, Halloween and Christmas, Steam gives us the joy and pleasure of destroying our bank accounts by having an immense sale.  The Summer Sale has started, and it's quite a doozy.


Every day at 10 am PST the sale changes, and they change the current slew of games for sale.  The sales are generally incredible, including price slashes on $20 games that may leave them at $5.  We're talking manly man sales, for men.  Men with biceps.  And legs.

The unique part about this sale is that Valve is offering you a little extra incentive to buy certain games every day by adding new "Summer Camp" achievements - these achievements can be unlocked at any time between now and the end of the sale (July 11th), and each achievement unlock will give you a prize ticket.  The prize tickets have two functions: each ticket gives you an entry into the Wish List contest, where 100 lucky bastards will get the Top 10 games on their Wish List gifted to them by Gabe Newell himself (I hear he also promises a fistbump).  But the tickets serve a much more immediate secondary function by being able to redeem them in a carnival style prize gallery.  The prizes are all sorts of cool DLC you can get 100% free as long as you have the tickets.

The DLC includes a pair of sweet shades in TF2, a new fully helmed Force Commander skin in Dawn of War 2: Retribution, all sorts of extra missions and content for games like Homefront, Spacechem, Magicka, Killing Floor, and much much more.  It's super easy to get the achievements, and the pay off is huge.

The best part is, most of the games are so cheap you can buy days upon weeks worth of fun for less than the price of a movie ticket.


You can find the current sale over at http://store.steampowered.com/ .  Anyone who's anyone will definitely be checking it at least once a day to see what the current deals are.  These prices are too good to be true, get them while you can!