Insurgency Documentary – The Mod That Started it All | Gameumentary

It's part of who I am. It's part of who I've become It's part of my path. The experience that I had with modding Sort of enabled me in my own mind to pursue creating a game company more seriously. So if I didn't have that modding experience, there's no way I would have had the confidence to start a game company at that point in my life. So modding led me to the creation of New World, and the creation of New World led to the commercialization of Insurgency, it led to where I am today.

The origin of Insurgency sprang up after I had worked on a mod called Red Orchestra. I was the, I guess you could say the originator of that project in the sense that I built the team And I was sort of the original vision behind the project leading up to the initial release as a mod. That mod actually ended up very successful and won the Epic Games Make Something Unreal contest. And from that point forward kind of snowballed into something much bigger than a mod, and also led to the formation of the company Tripwire Interactive as well. And those guys that run that company, I actually had brought them into the mod originally. But I realized, being so young that I was, that I was not really going to be able to continue with that mod, especially in a more commercial way.

I was only, like, 16 at the time. I realized that my path was going somewhere else, and so around that time I decided to leave the Red Orchestra project and pursue something on my own, seperately. The idea was to bring a lot of the same design fundamentals that I had been a proponent of with Red Orchestra such as: realism, free aim weapons, and bring that to a more modern setting. What I did, was I was looking to bring it to a potentially new platform. I was working with Unreal before that, and decided that Half Life 2 was about to come out and it was like everybody was talking about it, and also Valve had talked about how they were gonna release an SDK. It seemed like the wise place to go when it comes to modding for the future. What I started to do, was I started to kind of browse around, like, what does a pre-Half Life 2 modding scene look like? And that's when I stumbled across another mod called Operation: Counter-Insurgency, which was run by Andrew Spearin.

I decided to approach him to basically combine our forces instead of me going off and pursuing this new project on my own. He already had a couple of people that were helping him out on the project and had a lot of ideas which were, you know, close enough to what I had in mind, so it seemed like we would be able to potentially fuse our ideas into something meaningful. And so that's sort of where Insurgency began. Back in around 2003, 2004, I saw online a team forming to build this mod called "Insurgency." It was one of the bigger mod projects going on. There was a few, but that was one I was really excited about, and something I really wanted to be a part of.

I think just the quality that they had put so far, It looked like it was alreaedy really far along, and it just really excited me to a part of something, like, that big. At the time, I was doing Half Life 2 deathmatch maps in my spare time, and so I made some posts, and I put in there, "I would someday love to work on this mod." One of the developers at the time reached out to me and said, "would you want to test and try something out, and see if we could add you to the team," so they offered me a level design spot, and then I got to meet Jeremy and the rest of the team, and a lot of friends that to this day, I still have. It was a big project for a mod. It was definitely a total conversion, which there weren't many of at the time. We took Half Life 2 and turned it into a completely contemporary game based on the war in Iraq, which at the time was, you know, a hot topic.

And for me especially, living near 9/11 in New York when that happened, a bunch of people in my school, they lost parents. I think 9/11 actually had a very big impact on, my own, like, confusion with the world. I didn't form conclusions after 9/11, but I started to realize, like, as Americans, we probably know very little, like what is really going on? And, like, when we invaded Iraq, it was kind of- it sort of brought that sort of questioning and sort of that, like- this desire that I had to understand better how our world works, and why we're fighting these wars and stuff like that. And I think I always viewed the war in Iraq as sort of this grey conflict where it wasn't just black and white, good vs. evil that George Bush, you know, preached when we were going to war.

Not to say that the insurgents or torrorists in Iraq are good guys, I don't think that we were necessarily in the right by invading this country at this time. In hindsight especially, but even at the time. That interest and that wanting to understand, and also wanting to convey that maybe it's not as black and white as maybe the media might make it seem and stuff, I think may have served as part of my artistic drive for Insurgency.

Wanting to make a game where you could play as either side and the game doesn't try to tell you that playing as an Inurgent is bad or that playing as an insurgent is good. People are just killing each other. No side is good in that. If anything, it's more about the tactics and the teamwork and the experience of it. I think I realized early on we were onto something with the mod. It was definitely different than what was out there. you had the bigger titles, like an ARMA, which leaned more into the realistic aspects, you had Counter-Strike and you had other action-oriented titles, but I think that was the first that I really felt something different in just the way that we were approaching player mechanics and our HUD.

It offered something different I don't think that was there at that moment on that scene. We were kind of constantly trying to find the right balance between what is realistic vs. what's fun. And I think that's where we get a lot of our praise with Insurgency, is that we managed to create a game that is, you know, highly lethal, highly immersive, but is also enjoyable, like it's not like you have to, you know, walk for 30 minutes somewhere, and then you get shot, and you don't know where you got shot from, you know? I was so impressed. It was so far in front of its time.

The graphics first, like, there was so much detail on screen. When I saw the screenshot, I was trying to imagine how the levels were looking in my head, like this is almost the real thing, this is how it was looking, like, like a war movie, almost. So I had all this inspiration through my head to make levels, and I was like, "okay, I'm jsut going to try to make something simple on my own." And then there was a guy who was already working for the Insurgency mod. He was like, "Well, do you want to join Insurgency?" and I was like, "Well, I'm not really that good, you know? I'm just pretty much starting," you guys are- for me it was almost professional. I was like, "Yeah I really like it, I would love to join." Even if it was to play the game, I really wanted to try the mod. And at some point, I was like, I want to do something different, most maps around the time were really pretty small, and, I dunno, it feels very like a game arena.

I then I came up with the idea to create Sinjar. Which was this really big, massive map, where everybody was telling me, like, no that's not really possible, in Half-Life 2, it's like, framerate, you know, and all kinds of stuff, and even details. I was already convinced back in the day, like, gameplay was key. You can have the best graphics, it doesn't matter if the gameplay is not good enough. I basically started just with my idea, like, I had this big hill.

And the enemy was on the hill, and you're starting down the hill, so it was really like the D-Day action kind of thing. And I think it was around 2007 where I think a few months before the mod came out, that I finished the map. we put it in and we see, because it was so different Insurgency maps and even, like, graphics-wise it was kind of behind.

And yeah, we released it for the mod, and it was like, first it was kind of like, not everyone was impressed in it, but after a couple of months, it was like, "wow this is really an awesome map," and it became one of the most popular maps in the mod. which is pretty amazing. I'm still really happy with that. There was a lot of wearing multiple hats, I guess you could say.

I was pretty much doing whatever I felt like I had to do to move the project further along. Passion was like the currency, right? If people displayed that they were passionate and interested enough, that they would contribute and just disappear, then we would be more inclined to bring them on board the team. Because we did have instances where people would, you know, kind of disappear, like, we were very much held captive to people's lives.

You know, sometimes people would just go away for a month or two and we would have to just keep going, you know? and sometimes people- life things would come up, like, people would go college and then just disappear. And there were a couple people that I was working very closely with in the original part of the project that weren't as active later on, and I did find myself in a lot of ways carrying the weight of the project on my shoulders up until the release itself. It was sometimes really hard to say you need a model done. If someone had an exam, or was busy at work then it could take, like, months before something got done.

Everybody was working for free, so you cannot really ask someone, you know, yeah, you need to finish this tomorrow. You know, you're not getting paid, you're doing this just out of, really just the love of it, and just wanting to work with your friends, so that really becomes a challenge of how do you maintain that focus, how do you maintain that drive, and how do you see something through to finally see it release? You know, I think that for a lot of the people on the team, there just was a passion that we just really wanted to finish this, we really wanted to get it out the door.

We saw people excited in websites and forums about what we were doing, and what we were putting out, and I think we just really wanted to finish what we started. The community I feel like wasn't really very involved with the mod while is being created it was really under the radar as were a lot of other Half-Life 2 mods at the time for the most part there wasn't a ton of like awareness around mods that were being developed for Half-Life 2 I think that they started to get more interest in more Community backing once they actually got released it was really after Insurgency was formally released as a mod that we saw it getting a lot of feedback and interest So the community got involved when Planet Half-Life started posting about it That was also how I found out about the mod when I saw a screenshot on a website Well ModDB one of the big platforms And of course the forums, we had our own forum and like more people were like joining and talking about the mod so then I knew like okay this is gonna be something big.

I don't think I was that surprised that it got that much attention I think a lot of us expected that and we push really hard for that but I'm very thankful that it got that much attention you know to not only finish something but I think it just made us excited to see you know people play it and people excited about it we hope for the best and I think it actually exceeded our expectations So we got a lot of downloads it's hard to say for certain what the amount was like we have some like sources that that share that like we had like a million downloads in like the first week or something like that I mean it was free right so anybody could download it and that's pretty huge but one thing that I noticed with it is, I guess just like any game like even now it is like when we’re shipping commercial games the player count like when you first launch you know it drops, right so I think I obsessed a little bit over that you know we launched to so much you know a lot of downloads, a lot of interest, but the community dwindled down very fast and I think I attributed that to a lot of like specific decisions and specific aspects of the game but overall like for a mod at a time I think it did pretty well The Mod of the Year award that we received in 2007 from moddb.com it meaned alot like it was validation, it was telling us that we created something great which we we knew we did but you know maybe the extent to which we didn't really comprehend it was amazing it was you know you're working for free and you know to see that many people excited and to vote a lot of mods do start, there are a lot of mods that people start up and they have ideas but ideas are only a small percentage of development, you know, the execution is the bigger part I'm really proud of that that we were able to finish it and see it through but obviously it is just, you know, it's an award, it's not like a concrete threshold of like we achieved this many players or you know we made money so that we could like start a company or anything like that So I think even though it was very validating and rewarding, there was still like a chip on our shoulders even after that a bit of like we still want more kind of, like we want to take this even further but around that time like after the mod released and after we won the awards for it I had to go to college and I was in college I was actually freshman I think when we released the mod but I was having a really hard time running the mod effectively while I was in college so I did step aside and put the mod into hands I thought would be able to at least keep things going there was a period like after I left where things kind of stagnated a bit there was some production with the mod, a map or two that got released and not much in terms of like new features or anything like that I dunno, I was doing a disservice to the mod by still running it at this point in my life when I had all these distractions and you know my education and different activities I was doing at the time so I did what I thought was in the best interest of the mod to hand things over after release many people kind of went to finish school, some took job opportunities A lot of the original people that I knew from that time made their way either into the industry or they went to school and found their way back I think I was personally a little bit unsure about my own future I think there was a bit of a you know fantasy with making the mod that you know we were going to get bought out by Valve or we were going to get like a big investor coming to us and wanting to work with us and you know start a company or something but part of the problem is that we got picked off like all of our best talent got picked off by the industry some of them went to Crytek to EA to Blizzard actually is where some of our guys are and like people from the mod team just got picked off from everywhere and we were left with scraps right? we didn't really have much of a team anymore, it became clear that the collective vision of of the mod and it's some possibilities- it's not what it was maybe a couple years ago when we all came together and started the thing there was like a couple of years there where I was like you know more open-minded like testing myself whether or not this path that I had already protecting myself down was the right path for me or not I also owe it to myself especially since I'm in college and I'm like you know paying for this education that I should kind of do my due diligence and you know, validate that so there was a little bit of like where can I take my skills from here and what will make me the most happy you know in life and I did like you know explore these possibilities and then I kind of came full circle and came right back, right? I kind of I just couldn't stop thinking about games again and what I wanted to create so towards the end of college I started thinking about it again and I started seeing where Insurgency was as a mod Like, who was running it at that point and if there had been any progress and if I can come back and help again when I left and I handed things off, it was under the understanding that I would be able to come back if I chose to then when I came back there was a bit of a dispute around that There was a bit of like- I felt less wanted than I expected and I felt like the people that were you know kind of running it at that point in time A: they weren't really a part of the project from the beginning and they were not a part of the team that brought it to release and B: like their vision actually was deviant from our original vision so I did actually make proactive efforts to sort of take the mod back because of that I invested so much in my life into Insurgency and you know both its conception and getting it even released and out the door and and being a thing you know that I felt some degree of responsibility for not letting it you know dwindle and turn into something that was insignificant so I think that's sort of where I kind of came back to Insurgency was trying to kind of get the IP back and take it in a different direction it was about three years after the mod had came out it, was like 2010 approximately when I started coming back to the idea of working with the mod, the idea of commercializing it it included a couple of people from the mod, in particular it included James Mansfield our former lead programmer It included Jon Hickenbottom A close friend of mine, Mark Eaton, contacted me and said hey you know Jeremy is talking about making this a retail commercial project and so it excited me and I wanted to be a part of what was happening at the time it was just talks of like what would happen and fortunately you know think it was like a year after that, they offered me a test to do level design position so obviously we needed funding to start a company in to make games I had no experience with raising money and I had no interest really in the financial aspect of running your company so I realized that I needed help there I was very lucky like my dad actually knew somebody who happened to be a corporate consultant and also like a coach to a lot of entrepreneurs and stuff like that and he decided to introduce me to him and his name is Keith Warner long story short he ended up being our CFO and he's now our president of the company I got a phone call from Jeremy's father Bruce and he invited me to help his son he knew I was consulting at that time doing sort of corporate strategy work and he said you know my kid wants to start a video game company can you help him I said sure I'll be happy to help no problem and Jeremy and I chatted on the phone a couple times and eventually he flew out here to Colorado at that time I was impressed with his confidence level, the fact that he launched a few games, I didn't know very much about the video game industry, you know I come from an era where video games were you know stand up boxes where you sitting down in front of the machine and you moving a lever and it was never something that I was big into he seemed like you knew what he was doing in gaming, he didn't have a clue about business, and that's where I fit in, And he was my good friend’s child, so I said sure I'll help you and I'll do it for free and my goal was to teach him to stand on his own feet I had never intended to be involved long-term, I was doing this as a favor and that about the three or four month mark, he kind of looked at me and says would you be my CFO and I said okay, but you have no money and playfully I said to him what do you want to do He goes, well you go get the money and then I of course said well we have no money to pay ourselves He goes, we'll figure that out will defer it at the time he functioned primarily as CFO helping me raise money and also to bring the company to sort of a more financially structured organization that was kind of lacking initially when I started things because I was very much used to kind of like the modding and the free-form hobbyist approach to what we were doing and I think I didn't really fully understand the importance of contracts and the importance of money you know in making games and things like that but I was still committed to the idea of making games no matter what it took you I knew that he was going to help me accomplish my goals and I think he was perhaps a bit excited about the possibility of what this could become You know that was sort of the beginning of a very important dynamic in our company We had different experiments we were working on but one of the ones that we wanted to do was to work on a commercial version of Insurgency to realize a fuller version of what we did for the mod I was excited to work on Insurgency again, I think it was something familiar, You know it was just something that I spent so many years working on we didn't start it knowing with 100 certainty that Insurgency was going to be our first project ultimately I knew that I wanted to make games, I had experience with FPS games, I had ideas of other FPS games as well that I would like to make but through exploring all of our options and after talking to a lot of the key people from the Insurgency mod it became clear that that was like a good starting point for our company we didn't really have a very clear picture of what the end product would be you know we were basically saying like look we're going to take this experience that already exists you could check it out you can play it and see what it's about and we're going to make it better and we're going to make it bigger and we're going to take the things that people like the most about it and push those things further and eliminate the things that you know people struggled with we started to experiment we started to try different things, we had a king of the hill-type game mode which ended up being kind of like the occupy game-mode in Insurgency You know it was a lot of fun, but the challenge with it is it was a bit too small so we ended up going further and incorporating more game modes, more larger-scale game modes, changing the level design we brought, you know, larger scale maps with different close quarters and long-range abilities and you know just trying to be authentic to what we knew from the level design and to also bring new ideas of what the game could potentially be, you know, it could be bigger than what we knew before I think like that design objective of you know having a game that both feels very immersive, realistic, tense, and fun has not been easy, and it's always been fundamental to like the design challenges that we faced you have to be honest like it was really long time ago, I can't remember the exact reason why we decided to go with Insurgency 2 I think it's because we thought that people would associate the original Insurgency as Insurgency 1 I kind of had this optimistic sense that everybody knew about Insurgency and that by bringing Insurgency back so to speak that we'd have sort of this built-in audience like people waiting for the new one but it turned out that actually like not true at all there were still people playing the mod and I latched onto that said wow there's an audience! how many? and that's what I learned about concurrent players, oh there's a hundred concurrent players and my head hung low, 100 concurrent players, I mean are you kidding? the legacy so to speak or the awareness surrounding the Insurgency mod was not as relevant as we thought that it was there a few people that sort of came into our community later on that we're like oh I played the mod You know, and they may have even like developed custom servers for the mod and stuff like that and they were so excited that we had come back but this was such a niche thing we realized this slowly over the course of the development The sort of moments we realized it the heaviest were the Kickstarter Yeah the kickstarter was- it was rough You know it’s not easy to fail like that right out of the gate It was a rude awakening that you know we had a lot of work to do and we had to find a way to excite people about this we worked with a partner, a marketing partner, they were convinced that Insurgency had weight they were actually a big proponent of the Kickstarter, they are the ones who kind of made us feel more safe doing it their confidence kind of like I think trickled into our confidence and made us feel like okay, like they believed in us, people know about Insurgency, this is going to go up on Kickstarter and people are going to, you know, give us their money because we have a track record that they know of, you know, and like it's a cool idea it was sort of a big flop they got the money back of course as works with Kickstarter You know look, as business guy and a finance guy, who doesn't want free money? if we'd have done it right would we have achieved our goal? Maybe.

But I think that the lesson for us was there really is nothing free you know things were looking very dire we decided to our own Early Access before Early Access existed on Steam where we sold keys, steam keys, on our own website in March of 2013 a month before Early Access started on Steam and we only made enough money doing that to get us one more month it was kind of like a wrench that got thrown in us you know because we were operating under the assumption that you know we at least had a bit of a following from the mod I think I made us feel like a bit more vulnerable like a bit more in the dark the Kickstarter had failed, the awareness around the mod was not going to help us at all with the game, and that we were very tight on funds I think this was the hardest moment in our company's history where it looked like things were not going to be successful, things were going downhill, things were going to fall apart If anything, I have the most confidence on the team because I had to, right? I had to be the one that saw light at the end of the tunnel and so there was definitely a tension there of you know what's going to happen I stayed with the team but I moved back and one of our programmers moved back And I'm sure that put a lot of pressure and stress on you know Jeremy and you know the rest of the team that was still there some people left, we let some people go, we actually closed an office here in Colorado and we actually dispersed we all went back to being a truly indie again and it felt like a backwards move, right? we had a small office and things felt like they were like real we were modders anymore that this was more serious than that and then all the sudden like we have to break apart and we have to cut costs wherever we can I think our team shrunk down to about maybe 12 people to just have the roles that were sort of deemed necessary to get to the next steps definitely at that moment, you know, went through the fire of like how can we keep this project alive and you know fortunately for us right around the corner Steam and Valve announce Early Access which I think was, you know, the light that we never saw coming, but it changed everything for us Early Access basically saved us actually it was kind of a miracle for us because in like April like literally a month after all that chaos and stress had occurred, we ended up being one of the first games to watch on Steam’s Early Access platform we did not make a ton of money or do extremely well but we did well enough that it gave the company and the project life It changed everything, we were able to now fund development while developing, so we didn't have to rush to get the game out in terms of release I don't know if we would be here if Early Access was not available for developers I think like the first month of the Early Access launch might have given us like three months of development or something, but then we kept making money obviously after that and we kept updating it and sales kept happening you know as we updated it we did surveys to sort of see like what people liked, what people didn't like using data to improve the experience and to make it better we got a lot of positive feedback from people, even though we also got a lot of like critical feedback, which is hard for developers, especially young developers who haven't developed like the thick skin yet, you know, to hear we all saw a lot of hope from that be back that we got combining that new hope with the money that came from it like basically paved the way for us to keep going, for us to keep moving forward, for us to get to a release having this opportunity to develop with our community who really helped change and shape what we were doing we had a lot of people in our community giving us feedback that allowed us to really shape the game that people were excited about and we could see things that we probably wouldn't have seen if we had just did it on our own in isolation away from that, and then released the game You know it’s a lot of work, there's a lot of late nights trying to like figure it out trying to get the last touches of what we wanted for release when you have something like a game on Steam, you can really update to some of the last days before it's going to be out for the consumer, so it was a lot of just us trying to be perfectionists and trying to release the best possible product we could to be truthful like we pretty much approached this as like we're trying to get this out as quickly as we can, but we also need to wait until the right moment you know, when the game feels complete I didn't do any game developer developed sense of perfectionism like where you have a hard time letting your baby go kind of, Because you know all the flaws, even if the players don't know them yet, like you know that this could be better, or that there's a small bug here or there and all you can think about are those imperfections ultimately I think you're kind of ties into like the saying that perfect is the enemy of good you could sit on a game forever developing it to perfection, but you'll never ship it if you do that it can only be as good as you can make it within this allotted time for it one of our investors pressed us a lot, Well what kind of returns will you make? How many units will you sell? and I distinctly remember not knowing the answer we got our contact at Valve on the phone, I believe his name was Mike Dunkel and I said, you know, Mike, we need some numbers He goes, okay, so if your successful you'll do 50,000, if you're great you'll do two hundred thousand, and if you knock it out of the ballpark, you'll do a million I couldn't forecast knocking it out of the ballpark I didn't know if I could even forecast 200, so what do we do? we forecast 150,000, we built our forecast on that, and I could see a runway for our investors, ooh they're going to make their money back, they're going to make 25% or 30%, whatever it was and I believe by the time we launched, we were over two hundred thousand copies and then it was like whoa this is real yeah it was exciting to see the game, you know, have that reception and people be excited and I remember the first million dollars I believe that we sold, like, Jeremy pulls me over, shows me his computer screen, and it was incredible that million was a huge celebration one of the things people don't understand is $1,000,000 top-line for a gaming company, Ooh, it’s a lot of money- not at the bottom line not when your monthly costs are now a hundred grand you go from 4 to 8 to 10 to 12 to 15 people To a location, opening up another location, oh yeah we want that new toy i.e.

That new motion-capture technology, that new middleware so that million dollars was enormous because it validated that we can build good things and now I needed to make the money real now that we had money and now that we realize that we weren't in dire straits, I guess you could say it was sort of like what's next, you know, I started to wonder like what what does the future look like? you unlike the mod, where everybody just sort of went off in different directions, that wasn't going to happen this time right like we needed a clear path so I think it forced us to kind of face the fact that this isn't just about Insurgency anymore this isn't just about being a startup anymore this is about building something sustainable and also the fact that we're going to inevitably be making new games and we need to figure out how we're going to do that and what are process looks like how we're going to accomplish those goals to be truthful there was a lot that happened over the years to come following Insurgency a lot of like trying things and not necessarily succeeding, you know, and like figuring out like what kind of works for the company I think in general, this kind of ties into one of our sort of cultural mantras which is, like, we believe as a company in evolution that, like, we are always trying to create the best possible experience for our fans and for our team and I think that we've kind of been always trying to accomplish that goal but maybe having always been successful with it and kind of take the approach of, instead of leaving it in sort of a broken state, whatever it might be that we’re committed to figuring out how we're going to take that next step and make it better.

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