Donald & Laura Mustard – Shadow Complex Remastered

In 2009, Utah-based Chair Entertainment released Shadow Complex for the Xbox 360, and the game quickly became one of the most popular and beloved titles on Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade service. Last month, director Donald Mustard and his team brought the game to a whole new generation of players (and Xbox hardware) in Shadow Complex Remastered, an update that included improved graphics, new gameplay options, and more. Now, the studio is looking to break more ground with its side-scrolling action exploration title, as not only will Remastered be hitting Steam and other Windows services on May 3rd, but it’ll also be launching for the PlayStation 4—the first time it’s arrived for a Sony platform.

In honor of Shadow Complex Remastered‘s wider release, I had the chance to sit down and chat with Mr. Mustard, who is not only the game’s director, but also the co-founder and creative director of Chair.

Mollie: So, before I started recording, we were talking about older Epic games, and I used to be a huge Unreal Tournament player.

Donald Mustard: So tell me, as a back in the day player, if you had to distill your memories and what you loved about Unreal Tournament down to like a sentence or two, what to you was the core of UT?

Mollie: The thing for me, because I was always a Mac person—

Donald: You mean when you were growing up?

Mollie: Mac Plus was my first computer, yeah.

Donald: Gotcha.

Mollie: We got very few games, so I never got hardcore into the PC gaming side of things. And I think, for me, Unreal Tournament was the first time I played a first-person shooter where there was a team aspect to it. You had Doom or Quake or whatnot, and those were fun in the “I’m just going to go in and kill everybody that’s there” way, but as my gaming tastes matured, I became way more of a Team Deathmatch player instead of a Deathmatch player. I like that team aspect. And there we’d be, running Capture The Flag in Facing Worlds, where I could kinda hang out and be the sniper and focus on defending our flag while my teammates were going to get the other team’s flag.

Donald: You could actually kind of play a role, right?

Mollie: Yeah, I think what you just said, it was the “playing a role” aspect. I’ve found that playing a role is my favorite thing, that’s why in MMORPGs I’ll be the healer. Or even when I play a game like The Last Of Us, that has that kind of online component, I’ll spec my character to be a healer as well, so that I can kind of play that role, versus just being the mindless person who’s shooting people, and that’s the entirety of the game.

Donald: Got it.

Mollie: So I think, for me, Unreal Tournament was one of the big first experiences for getting to feel that “I’m part of a team” feeling versus just doing the lone wolf thing.

Donald: That’s interesting, that’s awesome. I think that’s funny, because I’m a big UT guy, even before we were part of Epic Games. I can remember when I was first starting out in the game industry, like 1999-2000, around when Unreal Tournament came out, and some of the guys and some of the team members that eventually became part of Chair, we had this early job in the industry. Every day, we would get to work at 6AM so we could play UT from six until eight in the morning. And it was funny, because we’d do the same as you, because it was one of the only games out there where you could specialize a little bit. You could be like, “No, I’m gonna do this, you do this.” We were playing in the same office, and it was an amazing teamwork co-op kind of thing.

Mollie: I got my start at GameFan magazine—

Donald: Oh, you did?

Mollie: Yeah, and at the end of the day, it was around when I think Quake came out, and everybody at 5 o’clock would just shut down, and the whole office would just become this kind of like Quake LAN party every single day, and I was unconvinced of the idea of using a keyboard and mouse to play first-person shooters. Because I was a console person my entire life, so I was like, “that doesn’t make sense to me.” But everybody was like, “you have to try this mouse and keyboard thing,” and I’d tell them, “that’s never gonna work, never gonna work.” Finally, though, I tried it, and was like, “all right, there’s something to this.”

Donald: Same with me, because I thought a mouse/keyboard can never be as good as a controller. Then you start playing mouse and you’re like, “oh my gosh, this is amazing.” But then, in the last couple of years or so, first-person shooters have gotten pretty damn good with a controller. Do you have a preference?

Mollie: Well, I’ve always stayed Mac.

Donald: Even now, if you game on a computer, you’re more Mac?

Mollie: This is such a girly thing to say, but I don’t want that big, gigantic rig with the neon lights and the red trim and stuff on it.

Donald: I agree. I want elegance, yea.

Mollie: It’s always been like “Okay, if I want the little Dell with the bamboo wrap on it, it’s going to cost me another thousand dollars,” and so I’ll just stick with my PlayStations and my Xboxes and things like that.

Donald: Awesome. Sorry, I’m asking all the questions.

Mollie: You’re interviewing me. We’ll just do it this way.

Donald: Anyway.

Mollie: No, so, I want to ask you, because I’ve talked to a lot of developers over time, and there’s always been this “we’re done with the game, our mentality shifts to moving on” situation. You hate to say you’re just forgetting your previous work, but you have to do that at some level because, mentally, you have to move on to the next project. You can’t be stuck on what you did previously, unless it’s a services game or something similar. So, for you to come back to Shadow Complex at this point, all these years later, what were your feelings in doing that? Was it something that you enjoyed, like seeing an old friend you haven’t seen for a long time? Or was it weird to revisit the game again at this point?

Donald: Yes. Yes to all of that. No, it’s—you’re so right. It’s like the old saying, “no art is finished, art’s only abandoned,” right? At some point, you have to shift your game. In gaming today, many games are more games of service, and they live longer. We got to have some of that experience with Infinity Blade. Even though we had released Infinity Blade 1, 2 and 3, for us it was just all this continual development with the same code base. We had to live with it, and through that process, ultimately by the end of Infinity Blade 3, we looked at it and were like, “yes, this embodies the absolute completeness of our vision and what this could be.” That was an amazing thing to go through.

With Shadow Complex, by the end of its development, I was very proud of the game. Super happy with it. But still, many things were left open by the end of it. Like, now finally, here at the end of making the game, I feel like I now actually know how to build this type of game. Now I could actually go build it for real.

We needed to abandon it, and even though we abandoned it initially to begin work on Shadow Complex 2, that quickly changed and evolved into us making Infinity Blade. So, it’s interesting you ask that, because for me, I loved Shadow Complex. I desperately wanted to return to it, but I was also so scared to do so.

To me, I’m so close to it, I can’t spend a lot of time playing my games after I’ve released them, just because they’re too hard to look at. This is my life’s work. It’s too hard for me to look back like that, and so I hadn’t really played Shadow Complex for a couple of years. I was very nervous to look back at it and go, “What will I find?” Will I find that I don’t like it? Will I find that it’s so full of mistakes and problems? Or, has my thinking evolved now, from where I was at that point? So I was scared.

When I sat down to play it again, when we were like, “Okay, let’s start bringing the code base back up,” I played through the whole game again. It’d probably been 5 years since I played it. A couple of things that happened. I never get to experience a game we made fresh, because I make it, right? I still am so intimate with Shadow Complex, it’s not like it could ever be that far from me, but it was enough that I had started to forget where some of the stuff was. I didn’t know where everything was, and it gave me just a hint of what it would be like to play one of our games without having made it.

I don’t know how to say this in a non-bad sounding way, but I was so pleased with what was there. I was playing it like, “Oh my gosh, this game is awesome, it’s so good.” And it holds up. There’s so many design ideas and choices that were so unorthodox at the time that still felt relevant, to me at least, today. Going into it, we were asking ourselves what we needed to change. But playing through it, I’m like, we have to change almost nothing. In fact, we shouldn’t, because we need to preserve some of the purity that somehow we stumbled into in making this.

It was interesting because I was able to look back at it with somewhat fresh eyes, and be happy with what we’d done, yet also experience the game kind of for the first time and be happy with that. And then, from a way more objective viewpoint, be like, “You know, we could take that, that, that, and that, and change that, and it would be even better.” It was amusing.

I hope more people get the chance to revisit their work years later.

Laura Mustard: Even to further revisit it. Gives you a whole new fresh perspective.

Donald: I think there’s a special relationship you have to have with old stuff. We tried really hard not to—like I’m a huge fan of George Lucas—

Mollie: I was going to ask you the George Lucas situation.

Donald: I’m not a huge fan though of some of the changes he made to Star Wars, right? Because I’m sure, for him, who is so close to his work, he’s like, “That thing always bothered me and I must tweak that.” It never bothered us, because all we experienced was the film that was on the screen, and so to us, it was this deep love that we’d formed for it.

With Shadow Complex, we tried desperately to have that approach. We were like, just because there might be something in there that bothers us, we don’t really get to have ownership of that anymore.

The second I released Shadow Complex in 2009, it became part of everyone’s experience. So, I don’t feel like we necessarily even have the right to change fundamental things about it. Again, looking at it like a Star Wars film, I don’t think anyone’s out there complaining if they’re like, we remixed the music to be in 7.1 surround and we re-color corrected everything to bring it to a nice digital quality. Refining those kind of edges is fine. It’s when you change the heart itself, it’s dicey and sticky. So, I don’t know, it’s a careful balance.

It’s interesting, because—I think film is even starting to see this more than we have, but we’re still so young in the game industry—how do we preserve the history of games? There are games, like ones that you probably played on your Mac when you were a kid. There was games I was playing and my friend played, and I’m gonna forget some of their names, but did you ever play Captain Goodnight on your Mac?

Mollie: Hmm. I don’t think so.

Donald: It was like this teeny little black-and-white side-scroller where you had this agent and you’re flying into little bases. It was amazing, and had a huge impact on me when I was like 8. Where’s the historical preservation of these things? I think this is going to be a huge problem for us as an industry, as how do we preserve …

Laura: Digital entertainment?

Donald: Digital entertainment in a way as formats keep changing. Maybe a hundred years from now, all the games we’re making now will be lost if we don’t do something to keep bringing them forward, and so to us this is our first attempt at that, asking how do we preserve our work?

Laura: Shadow Complex was originally released for Xbox Live Arcade. And then, with the onset of Xbox One, the Xbox 360—still as amazing as it is—was starting to age out. So was Shadow Complex, because it was the only system you could play it on. Backwards compatibility was our first step, but really, what we’re excited about is being able to bring it to not only Xbox One, but PlayStation 4, PC, Steam, our own platform, so that the game has a path to live. Because there’s so much more we want to do in that universe, that we need to continue to let people play it in order to do that.

We spend a lot of time thinking about the preservation of digital entertainment and how will we do that. I know there’s a big effort with, I think it’s UNICEF, right?

Donald: It is UNICEF.

Laura: Cataloging old, ancient games like table games.

Donald: Yeah, like what’s the historical foundation of Othello and chess and stuff like that?

Laura: And preserving it so that it lives on, it doesn’t just become something that didn’t exist because it no longer exists. So, that’s something we think a lot about with our games too, in making sure they’re preserved. Even Infinity Blade, it’s been amazing to have it on iOS. And we update it. There’s a new iOS every year, and new devices, and so we’ve been careful to update it to make sure it functions. But as those newer devices come, the older original iPhone is gone, and so you’re kind of chasing time.

Even still, I think we have many, many years, but at some point, where’s Infinity Blade going to live? Maybe it has to follow the same path as Shadow Complex, where we have to put it elsewhere.

Donald: Yeah, who knows.

Mollie: I went to an elementary school that had Apple IIs, and there was this series called Microzine that came out for students that were educational, but they had some games on them. Every volume came out on those big old-school floppy disks, and had a game or two on them. I was thinking that, if I wanted to go back to those games from my childhood, they’re just gone at this point for the most part.

Donald: Gone. Yeah.

Mollie: You saying this, it almost sounds to me like that moment when you realize, as a human being, that your life’s going to end at some point. You’ve lived through life thinking “I’m indestructible, I’m going to live forever,” and all of a sudden you wake up one day like, “Oh my God, I’m gonna die.” So was there a moment where you—

Donald: Yes, I’m going to start crying, yes. [laughs] I turned 40 this year, and yes this is my midlife crisis.

Mollie: I just mean, as a creator, was there a moment where you realized that your works could just be gone in the ether at one point, and was that a soul-searching kind of revelation for you? Or, I feel like in a lot of examples, these games come out and they make money and they’re gone, and sometimes we don’t care. What was your revelation in that?

Donald: I think you hit it right on the head. We definitely talk about it, and know we need to do something. Because we love Shadow Complex and we need to find a way to bring it to more people, but that conversation went from “yeah, yeah, yeah, someday” to “we need to act, now.”

When we did see the Xbox One came out and it’s not backwards compatible, we’re like ‘that’s it. This thing that we worked so hard on, we care so deeply about, that took years of our lives, and has entertained millions of people is gone if we do nothing about it’, and so that was a huge moment for us. We were like ‘we must act, we need to act now’ because every day we wait the code that encapsulates that is getting older and older and even more out of date even though we’re moving from Unreal Engine 3 to Unreal Engine 4 and it’s just becoming antiquated so fast by the rapid change of technology.

Yeah, I think it maybe had a little bit to do with getting older. I’m turning 40 in a few months and I am, I every day I wake up—

Laura: There’s like a whole story of when game designers are turning 40. What’s gonna happen?

Donald: It’s like, how do we preserve our work? We decided, even in the midst of Spyjinx, and all of this work we’re doing on all of these other games, we have to do it and we have to act now. We went, we’re going to Microsoft, and we have to bring this forward—and, again, they’ve just been such great partners, allowing us to do that and helping us to do that and allowing us to bring it to a wider audience, so I’m really happy we could do it.

Laura: We would die if we let any of our properties just die on a system. This taught us a lot, we will have to keep preserving our stuff, because it got really close. Especially when we found this stack of digital download cards for Shadow Complex. They don’t make them for every game that Microsoft made…

Donald: Yeah, you could buy them in a store or whatever.

Laura: We had burrowed those away for safe-keeping, and just a few weeks ago, found the whole stack. I was all “ooh, what am I going to do with these?” For posterity, I was going to hand them out to all the team, but then realized that we can’t even do anything with them at this point.

Mollie: I’m not sure if you’re familiar with them, there’s a company called Limited Run Games, and their current goal is to make physical copies of games that have only been digital.

Donald: Really?

Mollie: Yeah. They’re starting with like a thousand copies for this game, a thousand copies for that one, but they’re reaching out to all these developers who have had digital-only games, and they’re like, “Let us help you make a physical version.”

Donald: Huh.

Mollie: Would you ever want to see that for Shadow Complex? Have that security that, no matter what happens, maybe the Apocalypse comes, there’s still a thousand Shadow Complex discs out there somewhere that would still run generations from now.

Donald: I think that’s a good idea, and we would totally explore that. But even beyond that. I still have disks of Advent Rising, the first game I ever made, and even Soul Reaver and other early stuff that I worked on, and I could theoretically go and plug in my original Xbox or go plug in my PlayStation 2 or whatever and play those games. Even a hundred years from now, though, will we even still have those inputs?

We won’t have HDMI a hundred years from now, we’ll have something totally different, and those consoles won’t work. Maybe there’ll be some museum that can preserve them, but the film industry has begun to say no, we have to actually bring these films away from being physical and bring them digital so they can live forever. We need to transfer them off film, we need to restore them, we need to make it so they live. It’s an interesting problem for games, because games are not a linear file that you can just play—they require a specific input. They require certain codes, certain operating systems, and so if we’re not actively bringing that stuff forward, it’s going to be lost. Problem, right?

I absolutely want a physical preservation, but we want to try and instill practices in our code base that we can just start moving stuff along. We haven’t thought about a smarter way to do it.

Mollie: Five years from now, will I be sitting here talking to you about Shadow Complex Ultra High Definition Remastered? At what point do you think there is value in continually bringing a game back to the new platforms? Or is there a point where you’re like, “we need to just stop and not look back any more?”

Donald: Well, maybe. The truth is, I don’t know yet. I suspect it wouldn’t be Shadow Complex Ultra High Mastered, it would be more like now that we’ve brought the Shadow Complex code base up to our current code base with Spyjinx and Infinity Blade, that with minimal effort we can just keep those code bases current. There has been enough evolution now that I could, theoretically—especially on PC and Mac-type platforms—I could just keep putting out updates. A lot like Infinity Blade. As hardware changes and expands, we can just put out an update, and I’m talking code, so you can continue using those on your systems and they continue to work. I hope there would be no need to put out an ultra, uber-duber version, because the existing version is going to just keep pushing forward.

Mollie: If you have one sales pitch to give to people as to why they should play Shadow Complex if they never have, why should they play it?

Donald: Here’s why you should play Shadow Complex. There was this game that came out in 1994 called Super Metroid, and in my opinion, as a professional game designer, that game is one of the most beautifully-designed games of all time. In my opinion, along with some entries in the Zelda series, that kind of defined a genre that hasn’t been explored that much. That was a genre that, in my opinion, was completely abandoned because Super Metroid comes out in 1994 and then the next year, PlayStation comes out, and 3D becomes everything we care about. Doom comes out and Quake comes out and Unreal Tournament comes out. Awesome, right? But it kind of changed the way we looked at design for almost a decade.

Us, Chair in 2007-2008, were asking, “How come this genre has been abandoned?” This beautiful, elegant genre, and what if we created a game in that genre that was very exploration-heavy, something all about discovery. It was all about how the more you explore the world and uncover its secrets, the more empowered you’d become as a player, and it’d give you access to tools that open up this non-linear space.

I think if you’re a fan of games, you should play a non-linear, exploration-based game like Shadow Complex. If you going to play Shadow Complex, go play Super Metroid or go play Metroid way back.

For me, our real hope from Shadow Complex was to show the viability of that genre. In 2009, Shadow Complex was a huge critical success, a huge commercial success, and since then, you’ve seen several games that I would consider in that genre come out. Games like Ori and The Blind Forest, Guacamelee, Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet, Axiom Verge. There’s these other games now that were kind of in that wheelhouse that are also excellent, but I still think Shadow Complex totally holds up. If you’re a fan of games, you should be playing it because it’s awesome, and it’s only 15 dollars.

Laura: That’s true.

Donald: Like, come on.

Laura: And it’s like 10 or so hours.

Donald: That’d be my pitch. If you love games, this is a genre that you have to experience.

Mollie: Have you ever played Raiders Of The Lost Ark on 2600?

Donald: Wait, what?

Mollie: Raiders Of The Lost Ark.

Donald: On what?

Mollie: On 2600. Atari.

Donald: No. What? How do I not even know this was a thing?

Mollie: One of the things of that game when I played it, it was the early days when there was just—

Donald: It was out on 2600? I don’t even know this!

Mollie: There was no explanation of what games were. Booklets were cryptic. There was no internet, there was no hundreds of people understanding what to do. That was a game where I felt I was playing something that was much bigger than what I was seeing. I was feeling like there’s all these secrets and hidden things, and it felt like a game that I would never fully understand, and that was really compelling to me.

When I got to Metroid, a friend of mine and I figured out if you shut a door that’s open and you let a door close on you, there was this thing called the wall climb, and what you were—

Donald: You actually figured that out?

Mollie: Yeah. What you would end up doing was you were just getting into a scrambling of the ROM banks, but we felt like we were finding these entirely new sections of the game that nobody had ever seen before. Things like that come to mind for me when you’re talking about that interesting element of the genre, where it feels like you’re playing something bigger than other games.

Donald: Exactly. We tried to really emulate that in the design of Shadow Complex, and some of our hardest-core players have found a lot of that. It was interesting. Ken Lobb, who is now at Microsoft, but he was at Nintendo during the development of Super Metroid, and he would have these long conversations with the designers and with Miyamoto, and that was very deliberate on their part to allow these emergent tools, that if a player happened to do this on the wall or do this thing, that non-planned for elements could emerge from that.

Probably about 8 or 9 months before Shadow Complex came out, in talking with Ken, he gave us advice on things we could start doing. Like, especially since we already had the foam gun, and we had some of these things where you could break the world. You could do these things, and he was like, most developers nowadays would try really hard to limit that, to give limits to the tools and limits to the things. Don’t do that. In fact, bend the rules more to allow players to do crazy stuff like that.

If you look at speed runs of Shadow Complex, they’re doing these crazy, crazy techniques, and we could have easily fixed the bugs that allow that to happen. Instead, we embraced that and said no, this is part of the world for you to explore, for you to imprint yourselves upon. We’re going to give you tools and we’re going to get out of the way and let you just do it. I think it taps into that natural desire we have to explore our world.