Interview: Supergiant's Kasavin On How Lifelong Game Love Led To Bastion

[GameSpot veteran Greg Kasavin describes how a lifelong love of games and dreams of making them brought him from writing through development -- now going indie with Supergiant Games, creator of the intriguing Bastion.] Greg Kasavin describes himself as "the sort of person who was struck by games from a very young age." From eight years old, it was his dream to make them -- and now he's part of the indie Supergiant team, which just showed its intriguing new Bastion at PAX. Hands-on impressions from press heavyweights have been positive so far. It's hardly been a direct route for Kasavin, whom most came to know as one of those press heavyweights. The former executive editor and director of GameSpot's iconic editorial team worked his way in one hard-earned step at a time. "I dabbled in some programming in the mid-90s -- I felt like that was the obvious way to get into the industry -- but I didn't take to it," he reflects. "The language arts came more naturally to me." And by the time he was in high school, Kasavin found himself reasoning that a career in writing about games would be a great way to justify the enormous volume of them he was playing. He made a fanzine to get into his first CES, and that led to small magazine work. Such an entry into game journalism "wasn't uncommon at the time, in the sense that I was a big fan of Next Gen and EGM and all that stuff -- it's the same advice I give to people now," he says. "You just start doing it." So when he found himself living just a few blocks away from GameSpot's Bay Area headquarters, the staff there found in Kasavin an eager and excited intern who was ready to do whatever it took to be part of the team. When he finished college, he joined GameSpot part time in 1996, went full-time there in 1999, and eventually rose to the top, where he'd remain until 2007. "I don't know how to put this in a way that doesn't sound disparaging, but what was originally imagined as a stepping-stone turned into something I really loved," he says of putting his industry dreams on hold. "Suddenly, I wake up and it's been ten years." He says that was in part because the GameSpot editorial team aimed very strictly not to network personally with game developers, and drew that line quite clearly -- there was never an appropriate time, naturally, to ask for a job during a press interview or a hands-on game preview. "I never saw myself as a 'journalist'," says Kasavin. "I was a critic and I was an editor, and I also worked on a website. My focus, on the content side, was always on game reviews in addition to supervising the team as a whole, so I had a very insular view on [the industry]. It dawned on me that even though I'd been at GameSpot for 10 years, I was no closer to getting into the industry, and it was like a conflict of interest to even try." Breaking Out It turns out no matter what sphere one comes from, "who you know" still plays a major role in development work. It wasn't until 2006 that Kasavin would get his first chance, when a colleague and friend who had left GameSpot for Electronic Arts Los Angeles remembered Kasavin's long-term goal and invited him to interview for a producer role. After being insulated from the business for so long, did he know what to expect? "I had an idea of it," he says. "In my mind, I was very prepared to make the leap, because I was working behind the scenes on GameSpot, on the actual site itself, quite a bit in my later years." The work of managing a team and its resources seemed like it would translate well to a producer role at EALA, and Kasavin found himself working with the Command and Conquer team at the beginning of 2007. "I went into EA with eyes wide open, I felt like," he reflects. "I loved C&C as a franchise, and I wanted to leave my mark on it... I wasn't, like, deluding myself into thinking I was going to achieve it, but the goal was high." When he arrived, Kasavin was surprised that the LA team within EA, an even bigger corporation than CNet, was at the time less regimented -- "a delta force-style team of guys who don't have to do the regulation thing because they do such a good job that they give themselves certain allowances." But mostly, he says the job was what he expected. "I knew it wasn't going to be a bed of roses, and it wasn't. I knew it was going to be long hours, and it was -- GameSpot was really good preparation for that,because when the time came to start crunching, that was comfortable-feeling for me." He saw the role as his big chance -- "I've been waiting for this for a very long time, and I need to make the most of it," he thought at the time. "I was deadly serious about trying to do a good job over there." "In the end, we did the best we could in the time we had. So it was a typical story in that regard, but the great news for me in hindsight is I met some really good people, and several of those people... we all ended up leaving all together." He says following C&C Red Alert 3, the group was assigned to a slower-paced project: "The joke that we made was that we might be the only people in the history of game development who quit their jobs because we stopped crunching," he laughs. And Kasavin and his allies learned they wanted to care more about their own problems than those of a parent company. So when his next producer job at 2K Games turned out to have more of a project manager function than the general leadership role it was at EA, Kasavin quickly tracked down his old friends from EALA, who had just formed Supergiant Games and put their project into the PAX 10. Going Indie "I felt a real attachment to what they were doing," he says, and so he was happy to join them as creative director. It's a five-person studio, where each has a specialized discipline: "One cofounder is essentially the level designer, one cofounder is the engineer who built the engine and codes the game." "We have an artist and we have an audio director who composes the music, voice-directs the narration and creates all the sound effects, and myself as the writer, game world designer and narrative designer." He describes Bastion as "definitely a game in the action RPG genre, and it does owe to the classics. We wanted to make a 2D game specifically, and we wanted to make a game in that genre because we loved it, and also felt it was really under-explored. We look back to the classics and what I consider the golden age -- 16-bit era, the early to mid-90s or so." Bastion's design, then, aims to accumulate what team members like Kasavin learned from and loved in an entire lifetime of gaming: "Those games, they just felt really good," he reflects. "I don't think it's just the nostalgia talking." And one new innovation the team's aiming for with Bastion is what Kasavin calls "real-time narration": "Someone is basically telling the story of the game as you play it; the story's unfolding at your own pace," he describes. "Of all the many things that made us really happy coming out of PAX, it was awesome to see a positive reaction to that." "People responded really well to it, but it's something that is absolutely an example of the team working within its means, where we wanted to tell story in a conservative way. Not only did we not want elaborate cutscenes, we just can't even do them," he says. New Ground For Bastion After plenty of time prototyping, Bastion is full steam ahead into production. They aim to release in the summer of 2011, "so we'll show it again at least once more in a public capacity, and I think that's fine," says Kasavin. "And we hope to be on Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network and eventually PC, but we don't know... those are things that we can't directly control." So for now, Kasavin joins his colleagues in evangelizing the title to many of his old friends and contacts in the press -- media connections that are a big benefit he can bring to his new team. "I think people would have every right to be skeptical of my ability to do this stuff... as far as they're concerned I'm a game critic," he says. But he hopes that with his contribution, he can help prove that he's making the most of the chance he's always wanted. "I think the field of writing for games is something new," he points out. A writing background in other fields, whether that's game journalism or screenwriting, helps, but it's a new frontier for anybody. "It's all still evolving, so the only way to keep up with it is to start doing it," he says. Which was exactly the same mentality with which he approached game writing from the beginning: "Start doing it and be very, very active in it. For me to work in this capacity, it's not a fulfillment yet but it's finally a chance for me to do the thing that I can say with a straight face that... I've been looking for pretty much my entire life, in a manner that is only possible through the medium of games. "My parents used to pressure me, 'why don't you write a book?' And I said, 'I want to write a game.'"