Could you please tell us your name and just exactly what your function is on the Battlezone team?

My full name is Kenneth D. Miller III, and I was the second programmer on the team. Basically, I was responsible for almost everything in the game engine except the AI and networking code (which are a very significant and difficult-to-implement portion of the game engine, just so you know). Even there, I left a few fingerprints. I also served as designer and artist support, helping the designers when they were having crashes or things weren't working right, and I wrote or re-engineered a lot of the art asset processing tools. Before we got an actual artist, I created a lot of stub art, and I put in a lot of sound assets from Quake, I'76, and Dark Reign until we got some real sounds. Probably one of the greatest support programs I ever created was the automatic make file generator, a Perl script that builds a makefile from your asset directory, so I filled the role of asset manager until we actually got a real asset manager.

A lot of the code for Battlezone has been totally reworked. You guys started out with the I-76 engine and have basically refined and enhanced it to make it into the Battlezone we have today. Could you tell us some of the features that you personally helped bring about?

I developed the new object system architecture and most of the core object functionality, implemented almost all of the object dynamics (hovercraft, all producers, gun towers, turret tanks, howitzers, walkers, people, saucers, all powerups, and all buildings) and procedural animations (turrets turning, nacelles rotating), special effects (flames, smoke, sparks, explosions, earthquakes, lens flare, some lightning), rebuilt the weapon system from the ground up and implemented all weapons and ordnance, created most of the in-game interfaces (smart reticle, cockpit radar, mission map, command menu, target camera, targeting system, sniper scope, resource display, status display, mission timer, building template, voice system, flag display, satellite view). On the art side, I created the font (though not the international characters), key icons, radar icons, compass icons, and textures for beam weapons and smoke.

Now, we all know the Battlezone team is a sensitive bunch of guys, that are full of deep emotions and feelings. Could you please tell us the movie that brought the most tears out of you?

James Cameron's "Titanic".

Out of all your Battlezone games, which do you think is the most memorable and why?

On the day of code release, I played a several-hour deathmatch game against the designers and won. I picked a good vehicle (the American Bobcat EX) and marked the location of the SP-Stabber powerup (probably the best all-around weapon in the whole game) with a Nav beacon, and denied the other players kills by ejecting right before my vehicle was destroyed. The cries of anguish and outrage from the other room were priceless... :)

Was this just a technical thing, because of the upgrades to the I-76 engine, or were the pimps intentionally dropped from BZ? I would have loved to have had the Moon Colony with a little funk!

Well, I'm not entirely sure what you mean. We used more dramatic and serious music to fit the dramatic and serious tone of the game, and were left out the cut scenes because they weren't cost-effective.

Did you ever play the old Battlezone video game? Also, what other games did you enjoy playing when you were young?

Of course. I never played it a lot, because I wasn't allowed to play video games much at the time, but it was so distinctive that I remembered it well. I went through a Pac-Man phase (like everyone else on the planet), but I always liked shooters like R-Type. I have recently gotten into emulation, and I have the latest version of MAME with all of the ROMs, and several others.

When you were a kid did you want to grow up to be an Astronaut? I actually called your family and they told me you did... so fess up!

Ha ha. No, not really. I've wanted to write video games since fifth grade, when I got my first computer (Atari 800).

If it were up to you, what would you like to see in Battlezone 2 (if one is ever made?)

I'd like to clean up the game engine, for one thing. There's a lot of legacy code, and we did a lot of things ways that weren't exactly optimal because the design was such a fast-moving target. At the very least, I want to make the game cleaner, faster, and better looking.

I'd like to make pilots more important by allowing them to carry different weapons and equipment, and to go inside buildings. That way you could do commando-raid type missions like in Spec Ops. I think it would be nice to have weapon geometry again, so you could see what weapons a vehicle (or person) was carrying; I-76 had this feature, but we took it out to reduce polygon count and texture usage. I would also like to have a more branching storyline, more like Wing Commander, so failure wasn't the end of the game like it is now. I'd also like to see research and technological advancement as a more integral part of the game; you could discover alien artifacts and bring them back to base, or steal plans from the enemy base, or study downed enemy vehicles. I think I'd also want a more flexible vehicle creation system instead of a few fixed vehicle types and powerups.

And finally, what is the weirdest or strangest thing that you have ever seen happen at Activision?

Hmm. I really don't know. I've only been at Activision for a year and a half, and I was too busy to pay attention to what went on outside the Battlezone team. Not much strange stuff seems to go on at Activision, at least so far as I can tell.