In February of this year, I undertook a journey to the other side of Australia: to Brisbane, Queensland. Brisbane is a truly extraordinary city: with its humid weather, its houses on stilts known as “Queenslanders” and its strange roads. On this magnificent trip, I was lucky enough to have lunch with Matthew Ford, Deadlock’s producer.

Matthew has lived in Australia since 2003 and has been an Australian citizen since Australia Day (January 26th) 2008. He currently works at the Queensland University of Technology as a Project Manager and where he also teaches game design.

When I first met him, he showed me the article on Deadlock from issue No. #142 of Computer Gaming World, the cover especially made for the issue was created by Ken Capelli, Deadlock’s lead artist and also one of the game’s designers. Matthew explained that at the very last minute over one weekend, Ken re-rendered the base 3D models to a very high resolution and put them together to create the eye-catching final cover. We then sat down and discussed the game itself, I told him I was primarily familiar with the Macintosh version of the game, of which he was not aware existed. Matthew related to me the history of the multiplayer portion of the game, which I am sadly less familiar with. Accolade’s in-house testers played the game against each other for many weeks and became very good at the game. The main problem with multiplayer games, he said, was keeping all computers in the game in sync over the course of long games. Once an individual game had gone on for a long time, it was common for say a troop to be on one machine, but not the other. In the shipping product, LAN games played well, but there were some problems with playing games over the internet, but to be fair: internet gaming was, at the time, fairly new.

Matthew came into the project two thirds of the way through Deadlock’s development, when the basic Alpha version was functioning and most of the dialog had been written, Deadlock was still at the time known as “XenoSphere.” Deadlock’s name was, as many of you know, an issue. In a later correspondence, Matt had this to say about the names XenoSphere and Deadlock:

“The design team did not really want to keep XenoSphere-- as I recall we all acknowledged that name was not the best fit. But no other name got the consensus of marketing and the dev team, so Deadlock won out as the marketing favourite. I would not say I was happy with the name so much as happy the discussion got concluded so we could move on, and I was the least strenuous objector to the name Deadlock. At least it sounds snappy. Some on the team think it evoked the term for a computer bug, an unfortunate association! In any case my opinion did not really matter any more than anyone else's on the team. It was ultimately the call of marketing. If we had come up with a better name, it might have swayed them, but we could not crack it.”

Matthew has not played Deadlock II, he also keeps in regular contact with Ken Capelli and Deadlock’s writer Mark Jensen.

Mr. Ford was a pleasure to talk to, he could not have been nicer. He was highly informative and interesting to talk with, I hope I can meet with him again.

Thank you Mr. Ford, it was an honour, you have done a fantastic job.

Matthew Ford’s personal website, along with his blog and life summary, is at http://www.fordfam.com/matthew/index.html.