Karl Deckard
Assistant Director on Metroid Prime
Karl Deckard is an interesting fellow with a wide range of talents that he has been fortunate enough to collect over the past eleven years. Karl started out at as a graphic design artist for Nintendo Power Magazine and was in charge of its production. Among those duties, he also worked on many player's guides including Yoshis Island and Killer Instinct.
After leaving Nintendo Power, he joined Valve to help create a little known title called Half-Life. His role in the development of this historic title was that of artist and designer. For those living under a rock for the past seven years, Half-Life is a ground-braking FPS that won over fifty Game of the Year awards shortly after its release in 1998. The game follows the escape of Gordon Freeman from the Black Mesa research facility after being invaded by beings from another realm. To make matters even worse, Freeman's own government wants him and the rest of the survivors dead to keep these top-secret experiments under wraps. The interesting thing about Half-Life and Metroid Prime, are their abilities to tell the story in the game, as opposed to resorting to cut-scenes. Another similarity between these games is the almost seamless continual flow of the games story and action. Load times rarely, if ever, hamper game play and the level design gives players the illusion that the game is one continuous world. This is definitely a guy all Nintendo fans should keep their eyes on.
When he departed Valve, Karl made his way to Blizzard Entertainment in 2000 where he began work on Diablo II. It is unclear as to what Mr. Deckards role was with Diablo II (he is credited as part of Ring of a Thousand), so it wouldnt be fair to speculate on what he could bring to future Retro Studios titles. Also, considering the fact that Diablo II was in development at least a good two years before he joined Blizzard, his involvement would have been limited. Nonetheless, it is still quite noteworthy that he was involved.
On a personal level, Karl is a skateboarding fanatic. There have been well over 100 skateboarding games released since 720 in 1986, but honestly, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater (THPS) is what I play... religiously. Every installment. Period. explains Deckard. Well, its hard to ignore that kind of enthusiasm! I found this fact quite interesting for a number of reasons, but first and foremost because of the morph ball in Metroid Prime. I have to wonder whether or not Mr. Deckard used his seemingly solid knowledge of Tony Hawk titles and skateboarding to help mold the excellent game play mechanics that makeup the morph ball segments in Prime? An interesting thought to ponder over to be sure!
One final note that I would like to mention before moving on is that Mr. Deckard is well acquainted with paper-based
RPGs, war games. This may not be of much relevance to the Metroid series, but it could be interesting to see if any
original titles that come out of Retro, such as Raven Blade, may call on his expertise in this field.
Mike Wikan
Assistant Director on Metroid Prime
Mike Wikan is the second assistant director on Metroid Prime. Though N-Sider was only able to verify one game in his portfolio other than Prime, it was definitely an interesting enough project to grab our attention.
Before joining Retro Studios, Mike worked as a weapons designer for Infogrames on Slave Zero. Slave Zero is a first-person shooter released in 1999 for the PC and Sega Dreamcast. The game features an arsenal of eight unique weapons designed by Mr. Wikan. With the recently released images of Echoes, we now know that Samus will sport a new host of armaments.
Those that are not familiar with the Prime should realize that Samus visors play an important for in combat in the game. Therefore it would be a safe bet to believe that Wikan is involved with the visors as well.
David 'Zoid' Kirsch
Member of the Main Program team for Metroid Prime
Most people are probably not familiar with David 'Zoid' Kirsch, but his contributions to the team oriented games have been staggering. On October 2, 1996, Mr. Kirsch released his homebrewed Threewave Capture-the-Flag (CTF) modification for Quake, which went on to become one of the most popular mods ever created for the game. Thanks greatly in part to David Kirsch; Capture-the-Flag is essentially a standard multiplayer mode included in all first-person shooters today.
David Kirschs hard work finally paid off on July 19th, 1997, when he was contracted by id Software to develop CTF for Quake 2 and Quake World. "Id's hiring process was rather strange," Kirsch explains. "Honestly, there wasn't really an interview per se for getting my job. The majority of meetings were over the Internet. I only met John [Carmack] in person a couple of times." 'Zoid' would also go on to create CTF and Team play for Quake 3 Arena.
Prior to his stellar success with his Quake modification, David worked for a number of Internet service providers in the mid and late 1980s to help create the World Wide Web we all know and love today. I was one of the guys running it; not using it. The concept of paying for access is foreign to me," jokes Kirsch.
On February 29, 2000, David Kirsch departed from id Software after not renewing his contract and made his way to Retro Studios. At his new position, David reportedly began work on one of Retros earliest projects entitled Thunder Rally, also known as Combat Car. Between early 2001 and mid-2002, Nintendo instituted drastic changes for the Austin development house which resulted in the cancellation of Thunder Rally and relocation of David Kirsch to Metroid Prime as a main programmer.
With such an impressive track record as this, it isnt difficult to figure out what Kirsch could potentially bring to the table in future Metroid titles. For starters, gamers can expect to see a lot of Kirschs charm visible in Echoes and future Metroid's multiplayer modes. Capture-the-Flag is almost a given, which could be fairly interesting with the morph ball mechanics factored in. Second, Kirschs extensive knowledge on networking makes the likelihood of LAN and online capabilities in future Metroid titles a very real possibility! Why? On April 3, 2001, IGNcube ran an article over Combat Car that included an interesting quote from an anonymous source explaining how the team had hoped to include Internet capabilities. We never got details from Nintendo on the Internet end." Considering Zoids close involvement with Combat Car and his background in networking, it does seem plausible that he played a central role in its networking department.
Heres hoping that "Zoid" finally gets his chance to include net support for Metroid Prime 3 for the Nintendo Revolution...