Interview Matt Chat 436: Colin McComb's Early Days

[Infinitron]

Tags: 3lb Games; Colin McComb; Matt Barton

The next guest on Matt Chat is none other than our old friend Colin McComb. Colin joined Larian to work on Baldur's Gate III last May, only to leave at the end of that year. These days he's doing VR stuff at his company 3lb Games and also writing novels again. That's the topic of the first twelve minutes of the interview, after which Matt circles back to the beginning of Colin's career. He was an Ultima and Gold Box fan who got lucky and managed to score a job at TSR right out of college. Colin doesn't really get into his computer game development work in this episode, though he does recount the story of how he met his wife thanks to a database crash during the development of Planescape: Torment.

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At the very end of the episode, Matt asks Colin about Baldur's Gate III as a cliffhanger. We'll have to wait for the next episode to hear his reply, but I wouldn't expect much.

 

[Curious_Tongue]

Where's the Cleve interview?

 

[MRY]

he does recount the story of how he met his wife thanks to a database crash during the development of Planescape: Torment.

Got many emails such as the following during my TTON days:

A database thread got stuck on the String Database and locked up some of
the tables. I've killed the thread and restarted the server, things
should be back to normal now [but residual issues may remain for the
writers].

Now I wonder if someone was just using OEI as a dating service based on the story of Colin's success...

 

[thesheeep]

What a lovely chad!

 

[SausageInYourFace]

I hope Matt will ask him about how it was to work together with MLMarkland.

 

[hexer]

This could be an interesting talk, Colin was around when cool things still existed - TSR and BIS.

a database crash during the development of Planescape: Torment.

We finally have the answer as to why the later parts of PST are simple trash mobs encounters.

 

[Infinitron]

It's not new information btw, he first mentioned it in RPGWatch's famous 2007 Planescape: Torment retrospective interview: https://www.rpgwatch.com/articles/tales-of-torment-part-2-56.html

RPGWatch: The farther you get into the game, the more rushed it feels, especially on the prison plane. How much rush was there behind the project and how did you pick what you wanted to cut or leave unfinished?

Chris Avellone: There was urgency toward the end of the product, and the version of Curst you played through was actually the second revision of that plane (the original felt like it needed the iteration, so Adam Heine, Colin, and Scott Warner all tackled it).

I also wanted a lot more going on in the Fortress of Regrets (I don’t like the opening map’s challenge to this day), but I'm actually impressed with the amount of companion scripted sequences that took place at the end. Hendee, Jake DeVore, and Spitzley did a lot of work to make that ending happen, and I am thankful to this day.

Of all the things that were cut, however, I feel the most sad about a quest that was supposed to occur in the Modron Cube – this quest was one where either Fall-From-Grace or Annah would get kidnapped by the evil wizard in the maze once you entered it. The cool part that amused me was aside from mocking the save-the-princess cliche, we recorded some funny dialogue for Fall-From-Grace where she's delighted and excited by the whole thing, since this is her first time being kidnapped, ever.

Annah has a slightly less-than-pleased reaction, but the Fall-From-Grace one still makes me smile.

Colin McComb: The rush in Carceri was fully intentional, if you mean in the sense of “wow, there sure is a lot happening!” If you mean, “Things sure are broken!”, well, we realized that there were certain capabilities of the scripting editor that we hadn’t tried out originally, and we wanted to see just how cool we could make things in the time we had remaining.

Funny story about the final crunch… Torment was actually responsible for me meeting my wife. See, we were supposed to go gold before Thanksgiving, but there was a database crash and we lost a few weeks’ worth of work, and Feargus asked me to cancel my Thanksgiving plans to help with getting my stuff back in. I was invited to an Orphans’ Thanksgiving, and I met this incredibly cool woman there, and… oh, we’re talking about Torment? Sorry.

Anyway, yeah, there was some rush at the end. We’d been working incredibly long hours – like, hundred-hour weeks – and we came to realize that unfinished work like dialogues, subplots, and extra coolness had to be shelved if we wanted to get the game out in time for Christmas. The day they put the freeze on new design was both chilling and liberating – but we still had over a month to go. At that point, anything that was not crucial to advancing the main story of the game was evaluated and ruthlessly slashed, unless it had a completely miniscule amount of work left. There was no “picking” involved – there was just carnage.

The harm to our hearts caused by this carnage was slightly alleviated by the Jack-and-Cokes that I poured for the team on the day we went gold.

 

[hexer]

Thanks, I forgot about that 2007. interview. It was a loooooooooong time ago!

 

[MrBuzzKill]

So, why did he leave the BG3 project so soon?

 

[CappenVarra]

fuck that loser

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

So, why did he leave the BG3 project so soon?

I guess he wasn’t up to Larian’s incredibly high writing standards.