Dragon Rage’s main character Cael Cyndar may not be the most renowned personality in the history of the PlayStation 2, but he was an unsung hero of an era by former console maker turned developer in 3DO that looked to bring back simple, fun and old-school gameplay. Taking place in a mystic world where dragons and sprites are being slaughtered by orcs and having their powers used against them to destroy the world, Dragon Rage was an epic journey most critics didn’t quite get and most players didn’t get a chance to experience. Simply put, Carl’s journey to bring light back into the world was a fast-paced, but retro-at-heart experience that managed to captivate in a variety of different ways.
While the developer and publisher thrived with games in the Heroes of Might and Magic and Army Men franchises, they had several other titles (Read The Minds Behind Shooter Games to find out about War Jetz) that were cut from the same mold but didn’t resonate the same way with audiences. That didn’t mean they were awful games- they were just misunderstood. This was absolutely the case for Dragon Rage, an aerial adventure that had one of the best stories on the console and accessible control and gameplay that allowed anyone and everyone to get in on the fun. According to Benjamin Johnson, one of the programmers on the game, believes the company’s new mission absolutely influenced the final product that became Dragon Rage.
“During WarJetz development, 3DO was in the process of transitioning to a strong PS2-centric focus. The company’s overall strategy was to create a category of simpler and easily accessible games for the new generation of less-hardcore gamers,” Johnson said. “At the time, there was this concept of ‘casual’ gaming that was bubbling up. Hardcore gaming was the way of the land, and anything moderately casual was seen as a curiosity or an exceptional oddity. But those were usually weird and not at all mainstream. Our full focus was on the PS2 and this strategy, and it was being put in full effect on almost every title with possibly the exception of High Heat Baseball and the Might & Magic series.
“Could we carve out this new ‘casual’ space on this new platform? With so many companies out to make so-called hardcore titles, we were literally banking the entire company on this strategy. Excitement was in the air because we could very easily be market leaders for the new era. On the other hand, we were tense, because the company simply wouldn’t survive if the strategy didn’t work out.”
Selling just 60,000 copies on the PlayStation 2, Dragon Rage was far from a commercial success. But armed with team members that went on to work on games in the Forza, Red Dead, Backyard Wrestling, Area-51 and World of Warcraft franchises, the talent was there to deliver a unique and fun adventure. Later known for his work on Red Dead Redemption and Rockstar Table Tennis, Johnson remembers the game as one that took place at a unique point in his career.
“Dragon Rage was an interesting project. It was set to follow in the footsteps of Army Men: Air Attack, but in a fantasy setting,” Johnson said. “At the time, 3DO was just getting their fast-development process on the PS2 tuned in. It was a phenomenal process of rolling people from one project to the next without missing a beat. And sometimes you would be working on multiple projects at one time. It was wild and its aspirations cannot be stressed enough. We were in the practice of making large scale games for the PS2 in development cycles as short as nine to sixteen months. That’s insane if you consider how many similar titles at other companies would take two to four years to complete. So if you were at work, you were put on an active game, and you kept the process going.”
“So after my programming run on WarJetZ (released May 2001), I was doing some internal consulting on Portal Runner (released Sep 2001), but was quickly shuffled over to Dragon Rage (released Nov 2001) and Jonny Mosely Mad Trix (released Dec 2001).”
Working on two games could have and should have been stressful, but Johnson credits a talented and veteran team for quickly getting him acclimated to the game’s goals. “Someone must have known that I had a head for design because when they wanted another level to be completed, they called on me to partner with AI programmer Lisa Ching and seasoned designer Sean Patten. That decision happened in like… a day. Amazing,” Johnson said. “While I thought it was a great experience, the team was a bit dispersed. Unlike most of the core games with more dedicated resources, Dragon Rage was more of an experimental development process. That meant that we became very resourceful and 3DO was good at that. But this was a good thing for my design and creative training. Unlike many game development situations, I was able to try out a lot of ideas quickly and get much more feedback than usual as the level developed.
“For the particular level that I’d be developing, it had been decided that I would be partnering with people I was familiar with. I had worked with them on WarJetz, so we were familiar with each other. I didn’t see a lot of the team in the normal sense. We were all very focused on making sure that our individual pieces were working according to specs. At times, we’d confer with production or more senior members of the project to make sure that we weren’t going too far in the wrong direction.
“But honestly, we weren’t screwing up, so we were largely left alone. This is where I learned to stay ahead of production and the supervisors that are concerned with current progress. I wouldn’t have been able to get Rockstar Games Presents: Table Tennis to the market without this experience.”
While those lessons learned were important ones for Johnson moving forward, other important moments in the game’s development cycle would prove pivotal for him later in his career. “Dragon Rage was great because I learned how you could leverage technology and branding to move forward in new directions. Watching the entire flow of the Army Men: Air Attack games being applied to flying dragons was interesting. They were the experts on that type of game and would advise everyone how to develop for this new version,” Johnson said. “Now that I think about it, the development could be seen as skinning a new game from an old one, but we were so concerned with speed and efficiency that the brilliance was to be found in the process more than the final design. To this day, I’ve never seen faster and more pointed development. With the right design ideals in place, 3DO could have been a major player. It boggles my mind to imagine what would have happened to the industry had their strategy worked out with quality games that had a simpler premise.”
Despite the game using gameplay elements from Army Men: Air Attack, it absolutely took on a life of its own. While the added story made sure gamers knew it wasn’t a reskin of an Army Men title, it forced the development team to make sure the world felt unique. This created situations that Johnson remembers where everyone needed to get on the same page. “In such a situation of things moving fast with so many different people, it’s often hard to check the quality of what you’re doing. Communication is extremely important and things get lost and confused all the time,” Johnson said. “For example, blue fireballs might sound cool. But did the character artist run that past the effects programmer? Because the effects system just might use blue particles to mark checkpoints. Now your dragon can’t find the blue checkpoint because the fireballs left blue fires raging all over the landscape.”
The added art and fantasy setting may have been the game’s biggest selling point, but it represented a huge sticking point as well. “We honestly thought we were doing a lot of groundbreaking things at the time,” Johnson said. “But that awe quickly turned to concern as we realized we might be over our heads in making all of this work out in the end.”
The team had bigger problems than actual development, however. Things that were far out of their hands. 3DO needed find the game an audience. That proved to be the most difficult part of the cycle and one Johnson and the rest of the team had no control over.
“We were marketing to families, first-time gamers, and whoever these “casual” gamers were supposed to be. But we were in a field of hardcore games in 2001. No one was taking 3DO or our market strategy seriously,” Johnson said. “You must consider that we were being released in the same year as Grand Theft Auto III, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3, Metal Gear Solid 2, Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec, Devil May Cry, SSX Tricky, Final Fantasy X, Twisted Metal: Black, Ico, Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, NBA Street, Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies, Silent Hill 2 and Red Faction. While these may not have been direct competitors, it made acting on our strategy that much more difficult.”
Post-release, Johnson and the rest of the team had little time to wonder how the game was faring at the market either. “We moved right on to the next thing. Most releases featured parties, get-togethers, post-mortems, etc,” Johnson said. “But those weren’t marked off on the calendar as some special holiday. They were just a part of the process and we kept going. There was always a consistent flow of work at 3DO.”
Although it garnered some praise from IGN and GameSpy, Johnson’s earlier sentiments about the game’s released at the same time echoed. It’s something he never forgot for the rest of his career. “There’s a concept that is obvious but needs to be restated. Marketers aren’t designers, artists, or engineers,” Johnson said. “Their decisions simply don’t take into account what development needs. And development usually doesn’t have a clue of what marketing/sales are trying to do. We don’t often consider how these parts all need to come together to work well. After this game, I really started thinking about how games can have the proper ingredients and still go wrong if the situation isn’t stable. So now, I often consider development stability as something important to consider.”
Regardless of the game’s lack of sales, Johnson still sees value in his time with it and believes 3DO’s attempt at casual games on the PS2 shouldn’t be forgotten. Although he admits the game is far from perfect, it’s one that served as an important reminder to him throughout the rest of his career. “A flying dragon shooter IS NOT a bad idea. It just didn’t happen the way we wanted it to. The final product just isn’t that exciting. Shooters need a lot of care, nuance and iteration to make them special,” Johnson said. “It’s hard to fully appreciate the fine details needed to make that type of game work. The same goes for other genres like sports and racing, which were ironically other areas we trying to excel in. I hope people can look back at this game as an interesting point in game history where a storied company started working to craft a last-ditch strategy to alter the future of gaming.
“But let’s be clear, the game tried to do too much and ended up being bad at a lot of things. As with many 3DO titles released in this era, I hope it would be known for innovative and interesting game development and marketing angles. Dragon Rage also serves as a warning tale for creatives that try to take shortcuts and adding more without making what you have better. Cutscenes, powerups, complex levels, etc. all could have been addressed to focus on core gameplay elements that would have set up strong building blocks for future iterations. Unfortunately, it’s hard to do that when everyone is moving so fast.
If nothing else, the work of 3DO on Dragon Rage was indicative of a new direction the industry was moving in, that no one saw yet- not even 3DO. “While something might not have worked, it doesn’t mean the idea or the concept is bad. It often just needs to be reworked, retuned, or reduced. This is true of many game ideas we had at 3DO. We came off as attempting to create cheap knockoffs, but that wasn’t the intent. They were honestly attempting to try something new in gaming and I respect that,” Johnson said. “Only a couple years later, we’d see the growth of Zynga on Facebook with Mafia Wars and Farmville. We’d see mobile and web platforms embracing a simpler gaming narrative. Were we ahead of our time? In many ways, yes. Were we foolish? Probably that too. So I look at this experience as something insiders and outsiders can both learn from.”
