Fighting Spirits: The Men Behind the Combos

Any 2D fighting game vet worth his or her salt knows what a cross-up is when he or she sees it. It's the idea that you can hurl yourself at another character to land behind them, but launch a mid-air attack that can be rendered unblockable. It's a textbook tactic, but in the days of laggy dial-up, a poor defense against a cross-up could define the momentum of a match. It was exploited nearly as much as resetting the console or pulling the phone cord out of the modem mid-match.

Since both Winstead and Goddard were both heavy tournament players, they wanted to design and execute a fighting game that could hold up to hardcore players. Goddard describes the tweaking process. "Because we had about five months to spare before launch, we did a little reverse engineering and planned for a few things to make sure that the timing and lag would feel good. Unfortunately, back then, that was all new territory, and we didn't realize that we should've gone asynchronous code on that, but I don't even think that was an option on that system back then." Because the advancements of communication in online gaming were more primitive back then, the Weaponlord team played with the animation itself. He calibrated the timing so that parry animations were just as short as the ideal lag time for modem communication from San Francisco to New York. It ensured that there would be no element of surprise and no phantom attacks, which he refers to as "f-ing time travel."


The team also refined the delay time for players to change direction. That meant that if someone tried to cross you up, the game would defer to the defending player and give you time to block the oncoming attack. "We designed it that way, because we were hoping to have hardcore tournaments, and we were really uptight about making sure people wouldn't get screwed on stuff like that, says Goddard, "Good thing too, because we were playing [former Tips & Tricks editor and Capcom employee] Jason Wilson, who used to rank as one of the best Hyper Fighting players around and this guy Battlechaser on the SNES version. They were crossing the shit out of us, and it was still working with the protection. So that ended up being a good choice. Now, that's the only time playing online that I saw it, because Weaponlord wasn't exactly the smash hit we were hoping for, but at least it was there. That's a tip for anyone thinking of making a game: make sure it's there, because even if you encounter at least one person who will try to exploit it, you have it in there. Just don't spend months doing it; that's not worth it."

Although Weaponlord wasn't a big success --Goddard's online portfolio attributes part of the failure to the rise of the PlayStation and the death of 16-bit-- both men believe that its sword-and-shield combat was a blueprint that Namco adopted effectively. Winstead, who's a big Soulcalibur IV fan, says that Namco told the Weaponlord team that it wouldn't be doing a sequel, "since the original Tekken team had split off to make a medieval 3D fighter with weapons." Goddard explains that the team had shown Namco their weapon and parry systems, which the publisher adapted. "There were some other similarities (Rock aka Bane)," he explains, "but overall they frankly did a much better job at making an epic, mass-market weapon fighter than we did. So our hats-off to that team and series!"

Aftermath

It's been over 13 years since Weaponlord came and went, and nearly 12 since XBAND's online service folded. Goddard and Winstead moved on to other endeavors, such as Atari's cancelled fighter Tenth Degree and several other projects, such as Marc Ecko's Getting Up and Buffy the Vampire Slayer with the Collective (now Double Helix). In 2003, Goddard founded CrunchTime Games and in 2005, converted a section of his Arizona ranch into a game studio. Winstead joined CrunchTime in 2007, and the eight-person team (three industry vets, five game design students) put together Shred Nebula.