WARS Radio/Episode 3 transcript
Decipher WARS Radio Episode 3 (9 July 2004) carries the first part of an interview with Warren Holland on why Decipher brought back the Star Wars CCG mechanics in an original property, the game later released as WARS TCG, and on the origin of the name "Mumon Rift". Participants: Mark Tuttle (host), Warren Holland.
Source: Ep. 3 - Decipher WARS Radio (09 July, 2004): Warren Holland Interview; What's Happening in Art, Player's Council, YouTube (uploaded 15 May 2022; originally released 9 July 2004). Preserved copy: Internet Archive.
The text below is from the video's automatic captions, corrected for names and card titles; it has not yet been checked against the audio. Words that could not be made out are marked [unclear].
Transcript[edit]
[00:05] Mark Tuttle: Welcome, everyone, to episode number three of Decipher WARS Radio. This is a web radio program all about our upcoming game, the Mumon Rift WARS TCG. I am your host, Mark Tuttle. This is our third episode, and we've got a great show for you this week, folks. We are going to give you the much-delayed interview with Warren Holland. We talk a little bit about the beginnings of the Mumon Rift WARS TCG project. Also, we'll take a check in the art department, find out what's going on down there these days, some email to read for you, and we're going to give you the Big Reveal this week, which is your first chance to get a sneak peek at the [unclear]. [Music]
[00:40] Mark Tuttle: In just a couple of moments—first, though: he was supposed to be here two weeks ago, we finally have him in the studio, it's Warren Holland. Warren, welcome to Decipher WARS Radio.
[00:51] Warren Holland: Thank you, Mark.
[00:52] Mark Tuttle: Let's talk now about—you've got all the answers. You have the information on everything about this project. The backstory everybody knows: for six years we released sets for the Star Wars CCG.
[01:02] Warren Holland: Correct.
[01:03] Mark Tuttle: A lot of people say it has the best game mechanics in the industry.
[01:06] Warren Holland: Yep. You can tell that because of the loyalty of the fans, and people who are not necessarily fans of the Star Wars property but of the mechanics. I personally got thousands and thousands of emails from people that wanted us to bring back the Star Wars mechanics.
[01:20] Mark Tuttle: Right. And they weren't asking for the property; they wanted the mechanics.
[01:23] Warren Holland: Correct.
[01:24] Mark Tuttle: Why was now the time to bring back the Star Wars CCG mechanics?
[01:27] Warren Holland: Well, actually, this is a culmination of something that's been going on probably for a decade at Decipher. We have been considering doing a proprietary product for a very, very long time, and one of the interesting things about the Star Wars CCG mechanic was its power, and the player base was enormously passionate about the mechanic. There's a hole in the marketplace now. You know, we do a lot of license stuff, as you know, but we've been looking for that really strong proprietary opportunity for us, and this is the time. This is the opportunity for us to be able to marry the great gameplay base that we had with something that was really a fantastic opportunity to create a new and dynamic science fiction property.
[02:13] Mark Tuttle: When did this idea just hit you, to decide, okay, it's time, we're going to make up our own universe?
[02:20] Warren Holland: We've been batting this around probably for a year or so, and seriously for about a year or so. And then, at one of the conventions, Tim [unclear] and Scott [unclear] and I were sitting around at a table, and I said, okay, now's the time, we're going to do it. And their reply was—
[02:39] Mark Tuttle: The jaw dropped?
[02:40] Warren Holland: Yeah, well, like most people. And they were very excited about it too, you know, so we had both reactions.
[02:46] Mark Tuttle: Sure. Well, when Warren says it's time to do something, we all say, okay, sure, we'll do it. Not in front of you, anyway. When you started this process, was there something that this project must be, and then, conversely, something this project mustn't be?
[03:05] Warren Holland: Yeah, actually, a very interesting question. I think both of those are true. There is a responsibility to take a gameplay mechanic like what we had developed with Star Wars and create a property around that that was very appropriate to that mechanic. A sci-fi universe was almost dictated by that; movement in space was almost dictated by that; things like that. There were other things that we simply did not want to bring into the property, and those would be things that would compromise our ability to do game mechanics with a storyline that actually worked very well in conjunction. The dance between those two, you know, turned into a ballet.
[03:52] Warren Holland: And what we've done, and what we're in the process of doing, and what everybody's working until three or four o'clock in the morning doing now, is that dance, that merger between creating a universe that's never existed before—and it's a very dynamic process. Because if we had just started a project to go out and develop a movie on our own, or a TV series on our own, we wouldn't have the constraints of the game mechanic elements that we have to bring into the property. And what the game mechanics do is provide a base that's actually a really strong thing to work from. And what I find that we're creating, then, is stronger science fiction, because we're doing it from a faction's perspective and a game perspective, than if we just had a totally open page and were going in any direction.
[04:44] Mark Tuttle: Tell us about this universe that Decipher's creating. It's 400 years in the future.
[04:49] Warren Holland: Some of the listeners probably know a little bit about the story. It's basically 400 years in the future. It's in our solar system. There is this very dramatic event that happens in the solar system, when this rift opens up and a planet comes through, and a couple of alien races come through, into what is really already a solar system that's at war. So there's huge amounts of opportunity for drama here. And then there's other elements of what happens when the rift opens that create literally hundreds or thousands of heroes, by imparting certain powers onto them. And part of what we wanted to do in this property, from your earlier question, was we wanted this property to have an enormous amount of soul, a backing in spirituality and a backing in science, the marriage between those two, where everything made sense; everything could really happen.
[05:44] Mark Tuttle: You'll notice through the interview that we haven't really mentioned the name. We haven't talked about the Mumon Rift WARS TCG, and the reason is—and I did that very deliberately—because everything we've talked about so far has been prior to the actual selection of the name of the property.
[05:58] Warren Holland: Correct.
[05:59] Mark Tuttle: I was sitting in on a meeting a couple of months ago, it seems like now, where we were kicking around name ideas. We've got a huge whiteboard in our conference room upstairs, and we wrote out a bunch of things, and some of it got very deep and some of it got very silly, as these tend to happen. And you walked in about two hours into that meeting and sat down and looked at some things and said, well, that's okay, I don't really like that one, that one's all right. And then the next day you sent out an email of something that was completely out of left field—
[06:30] Warren Holland: Totally.
[06:31] Mark Tuttle: —and it was the Mumon Rift WARS. And we all kind of looked at it and went, what? And then you explained what that was. You didn't just make up a word, as I hear some sci-fi authors have to do. This had some specific meaning. Tell us about that.
[06:48] Warren Holland: Well, what really happened was, in this search to have a central soul and spirituality to the property—I've done a lot of personal reading on my own of a lot of science backgrounds, Stephen Hawking kinds of stuff. My girlfriend is really into yoga, and I've done a lot of reading in that area, and Zen and Buddhism and those kinds of things are interests of mine, and a lot of reading in terms of things like Joseph Campbell, hero journeys, mythology and backgrounds. And what I was really looking for was something that brought not just a name to the property, but a sense of meaning behind it, as you just said.
[07:39] Warren Holland: And there's a writing that's called The Gateless Gate, which is a Zen reference, but it's basically 48 stories, 48 koans, that was written by a man by the name of Mumon. And in that reading there were a lot of things, as I was flipping through that again, that gave me references that felt very, very similar to exactly what we were trying to create in the universe of the WARS property and the story of the property. It just clicked for me that we wanted to do this. And I knew this name would kind of be out there on the edge and not really one of the things that people would expect, but over time I think what's going to happen is that the purpose of this and the underlying structure of the names are going to have an enormous benefit to customers. It's not just in the property name; it's in the names of ships, it's in the names of planets, in the names of characters, in the names of powers and events and things that happen to them, all having underlying meaning. And I think that provides a more dramatic story.
[08:44] Mark Tuttle: Speaking of the story, what will make the Mumon Rift as a property stand out from other sci-fi properties?
[08:50] Warren Holland: I think—actually, there's a [unclear] quote that I'm using in the beginning of our style guide now, and it says, "This is a matter of life and death." The story that we're creating actually has that dynamic. It has great heroes, it has great villains, it has the potential for us to literally create thousands of heroes, all with different kinds of powers. As a property develops, what you really want to be able to do is not just tell an interesting sci-fi story but also tell it in a context where people care about the characters. If you walk out of a movie and the story was okay but you didn't really care about the characters, then you're not going to recommend that film to anybody. And the same thing here: if you play the game and you get a sense that what Decipher has created is a very strong story behind the gameplay that everybody really loves already, then we're going to have an enormously successful property.
[09:46] Mark Tuttle: Now, we've talked a lot about the spirituality aspect of the background behind the Mumon Rift and things like that, but a lot of research has been done here at Decipher, and by the guys that are providing some of the backstory, about the science content of it. How important is science fact in the Mumon Rift?
[10:07] Warren Holland: Actually, it's very important. We want to have an underlying fundamental universe that operates on principles that are based on science, and this particular story has a lot of that in terms of quantum mechanics, and string theory—string theory's kind of coming in and out of favor now—but we have done a lot of background research in terms of how to create events, this kind of dramatic opening of a rift in our galaxy, that is based in science realities. And then of course we extend those realities in terms of creating powers and dynamics of the story that impart themselves to the characters. But the background science is very strong. We have not had an opportunity to do this yet, but one of the plans that we have is that we're going to end up hiring some university-type consultants to examine all the background stuff that we've created so far, and make sure that we're fitting in the line of everything that we would know as of today in terms of science, in terms of quantum mechanics.
[11:11] Mark Tuttle: Now, a couple of weeks ago we had several members of the media in here for a media weekend, and we did have an individual who has a little bit of background in that.
[11:18] Warren Holland: Yes, we did, and he was very excited about it. He read what you wrote and he gave us the thumbs up. He said we were apparently onto something there.
[11:28] Mark Tuttle: Now, something that you somewhat alluded to—one of the questions that I have seen frequently is about the powers in the game. Of course, the spiritual aspect of Star Wars was a game mechanic, the whole use of the Force and the Jedi and things like that. And this whole quantum foam does play a part of that in the Mumon [Rift].
[11:56] Warren Holland: Well, yeah. And the truth is, all of us are really energy beings, in our own way. And when you start getting into quantum mechanics, in terms of what energy means and how it impacts the universe, and how it impacts even our thought processes and mental processes, it's very, very interesting. I mean, you can't create anything in science fiction that is more dramatic than what is actually happening in terms of science, and the nature of science and the discovery of that. It's just fascinating stuff. I mean, two particles can exist in different places at the same time—science fact. It's fascinating to be exploring those edges of how can that really happen, when we walk around day to day looking at our desk and our telephone and thinking, particles in two places at once, how does that really happen? But we're building elements of all of that into our story in a way that gives it credibility, and then we're building on top of that these very dramatic elements of energy and war and conflict that give the story its power.
[13:02] Mark Tuttle: And that is part one of our interview with Decipher Chairman and CEO Warren Holland. Warren, thank you very much. We'll have the second part of that interview, as we get more into how the universe was created, what the actual five factions represent and all that stuff, coming up for you on Decipher WARS Radio next week.
[13:20] Mark Tuttle: All right, some news of the week to pass along to you. These are some of the things that are happening here at Decipher as we get closer to that October 6th release date for the Mumon Rift WARS TCG. I walked out of the art department two days ago, and they literally have everything papered. The walls are just papered with numbered sheets of paper. There's a small conference room as you walk into our art department, not a large room, and literally there are 330-some sheets of paper hanging on the wall, some with numbers, a lot with pictures, and it only took me a couple of seconds to realize what they're doing: they're actually starting to build the premiere set for WARS TCG. It was so cool to be standing down there, folks. I got a chance to peek at some of the pictures that they haven't shown us around the building yet, so things are really starting to come together nicely. And I've got to say that the outside artists that we're contracting are submitting some fantastic pieces. You are going to be so blown away by the art you see in the Mumon Rift WARS TCG. So that's going on down in art; they're working hard down there.
[14:20] Mark Tuttle: Also, the playtesters are coming back to Decipher on July 16th and 17th. We're holding our in-house playtest. Now, this is something we've traditionally done for all of our games. We pick a small group of people out of our satellite playtesters, we fly them into Norfolk, and we have an in-house playtest. Now, I participated in these myself, going all the way back to Star Wars CCG Premiere, when we used to do this at the Omni down on the Waterside here in Norfolk. It's a lot of fun, but let me tell you, folks, playtesting is very, very hard. It's a grueling weekend. You wouldn't think that just playing cards all weekend long would be tough, but it is; it's really a difficult task. So the folks that they're bringing in for this playtest have their work cut out for them, but it should be a lot of fun. We will have reports from that coming up in two weeks here on Decipher WARS Radio, so we'll interview some of the guys and see what they think about the WARS TCG mechanics.
[15:09] Mark Tuttle: Also, we announced this week that the first demos for WARS TCG will take place at DecipherCon 2004, which is going to happen at Gen Con Indy, August 19th through the 22nd. So stop by the Decipher booth; you will have your chance to test-drive the game system yourself. Plus, also check out the details on decipher.com about the DecipherCon 2004 convention kit, your chance to pick up the 2004 DecipherCon T-shirt, which is WARS TCG–themed. So, very cool stuff. Running long—let's check some emails. [Music]
[15:46] Mark Tuttle: All right, here we go. This first one is from Jonathan Rudder from Granite City, Illinois. He says: "In the month prior to the release of WARS TCG, will there be promotional materials available, particularly demo decks that can be purchased by tournament directors or retailers?" Well, good question. I like this question because he's thinking about his retailer. We're actually planning a retail kit that will go out to our Platinum retailers at the end of August, which will contain a bunch of sales and marketing materials for WARS TCG. Demo decks won't be part of that kit, but we are planning on doing demo decks a little bit later, after that, just to give the retailer some stuff to help promote WARS TCG. So, good question there, Jonathan.
[16:28] Mark Tuttle: My email of the week asks some really good questions. This is from Jeff Sakamano [unclear]—I hope I pronounced that right. Jeff doesn't say where he's from, but he asks some good questions. Here we go. Number one: "With five competing factions to choose from, how many factions will be feasible to include in a competitive deck?" The way they're structuring this right now is that you're going to want to play two factions in a deck. Say you're going to have Earth and you're going to have Quay, perhaps, or maybe the Gongen and the Shi will team up. That's the kind of thing you're looking for, rather than just a single-faction deck. We wanted to have a little more flavor to it, to be a little more unique.
[17:05] Mark Tuttle: Which leads right into this: "Will the factions always be in conflict with each other, or will there be some benefit to having an alliance of two or more factions in your deck?" Well, the answer to that is yes, there will be a benefit, because again, you'll be able to pull the relative strengths from each faction. The way that the Mumon Rift WARS storyline is set up, everybody has their own agendas, everybody has their own ideas of how things should be, everybody's protecting their own piece of turf. So you're going to have situations where, for example, maybe Earth and Gongen might join together to fight the common enemy of the Shi, or perhaps the Quay might come to Earth and say, hey, we need help knocking off the Shi that's trying to knock you guys off. So yeah, there'll definitely be a lot of that cooperation going on in your WARS TCG deck.
[17:52] Mark Tuttle: Next question that Jeff asks: "With four potential preconstructed starter decks available at release, which faction gets the shaft and doesn't have their own starter?" The answer to that is none. The faction starter decks will have two factions in each, so everybody is going to get their representation in the starter decks. Last question: "Hollywood is increasingly supporting major films with direct-to-DVD animated features. Do you foresee this kind of media as an avenue to increase awareness of the WARS TCG brand?" You never know. We've been saying this week after week: you just never know where we could go with this. We would hope it would come to something like that, certainly, but I think right now we're just more concerned about getting a great game onto the market. All right, folks, that's it for email this week. Jeff was our email of the week; we'll set him up with some great prizes.
[18:35] Mark Tuttle: Now, the Big Reveal for this week. Here you go, folks, write this down. This is a kind of hidden little place on our website where we're going to show you our first piece of conceptual art from the Mumon Rift WARS TCG. Write this down: warstcg.com/Articles/Article.aspx?ID=340. You'd think they would make that easier for me, but they're not going to. All right, again: warstcg.com, forward slash, Articles with a capital A, forward slash, Article with a capital A, dot aspx, question mark, capital I, capital D, equals three four zero. You'll see one of the first conceptual pieces we got from John Howe, who of course did the conceptual artwork for the Lord of the Rings films. That is what the Quay are going to look like, folks, and trust me, they've only gotten cooler since that first piece of conceptual art came in to us.
[19:33] Mark Tuttle: All right, there you go. That's WARS Radio for this week, folks. Enjoy that. Oh, and please don't post the URL for that. We want people to listen to WARS Radio to get it for themselves. So if you're on the message board, no, no, no—make people go get it themselves. All right, next week: part two of the interview with Warren Holland, also a playtest report, Big Reveal—we're going to have some art from the Gongen faction, cool stuff, very, very nice—and we're also going to talk about WARS TCG in the media, where you're going to see some very special and very cool WARS TCG coverage this summer. That's coming up next week on Decipher WARS Radio. Have a great one, folks. We'll see you then. [Music]