A Visit to Pandemic Studios

Studio Tour from Matt - Friday, 12 January 2007 @ 12:00am

Over the last few years Pandemic have really made a name for themselves. The fact that this name is also a word for a widespread disease can be overlooked just for now.

Pandemic are probably best known for the contribution they’ve made to the world in the form of Destroy All Humans, and its recently released sequel, Destroy All Humans 2: The Edge of Reason.

It’s possible I’m confusing it with something else, though.

Destroy All Humans was (and continues to be) one of the few video games in recent times to be brave enough and ambitious enough to actually include humour as a major gameplay point. It's also one of the few well written enough for the humour to actually work. We’ve written before on the subject of humour being about the hardest thing to write, and with the amount of actual dialogue that needs to written for a game (and much of it never even seen) the choice to put humour in a game is a tough one.

When it works, it works well, and in Destroy All Humans it works. If we had hats we’d take them off to Pandemic. Yug has some beanie type things, and I have a beanie that I got free with my DVD of Team America, of all things. But they just didn’t seem appropriate as “hats”. So we thought it might be more helpful to simply visit them, take a look at their stuff and get you, the fine reader, all the goss about the most intimate workings of the company, as well as some exclusive and jaw dropping announcements.

Sorry. I can’t back that up. We just went and took a bunch of photos. Was a lot of fun, though.

Pandemic are in many ways the opposite of Krome or Auran. While Krome and Auran, just down the street, have a non-descript and unobtrusive offices to conceal the gaming joys that lurk within from the prying eyes of the gawking public, Pandemic’s premises is a subtle collage of tones of yellow and black.

The front of the Pandemic studio is certainly an eye catching display. The arresting visual of the bright yellow gas mask logo is certainly distinctive. And a little scary. They’re either some sort of cool visual studio, or possibly an army disposal store. Or germ warfare research.

We ventured inside, me quietly hoping we’d get some sort of celebratory gas mask, but it was not to be. The inside of Pandemic’s studio, at least the bottom, is an interesting array of tastes. Their appreciation of the success of Destroy All Humans! is evidenced as soon as you walk in and look up. Proudly hanging above the stairs is a giant and very cool looking UFO. We have it on good authority that the inside of it is lit, as well, so on dark nights (which I guess is all nights) the UFO glows green. Scaring the nearby homeless with its unearthly glow. Wooooooh!

They had a TV in the waiting room, but sadly we didn’t really get enough time to wait, and consequently were completely unable to catch up on The Young and The Restless. John Passfield (Creative Director) came down to see us, and showed us around. Then we began our Ascent Into Pandemic. Pandemic’s layout is unusual in terms of programmers, but not uncommon for games developers. The plan is very open, with lots of scattered cubicles and little in the way of walls. People sit in clustered pods of worker bees, and there are a surprising number of toys around. It’s interesting that you can often determine a person’s job by the toys and decorations that are near their computer. Designer’s PCs always have a scattering of cool toys, action figures and the like.

I took the opportunity to wander off for a little bit and have a quick chat to Kirby, a friend of mine who is a QA tester there. One of the more interesting things about Kirby is always seeing what colour his hair is today. It was pink, by the way.


We had a good look around the office, meeting various people heading individual teams, and then went “upstairs”. Yeah, that’s another upstairs. There was a lot of stairs.

Upstairs we weren’t really allowed to look at much. There were mutters of secret projects, off limits to “press” such as us, projects that are currently known as B, X, and Y. We nagged, begged, plead and cajoled, but we weren’t able to get much info out of them, except that something appears to be a little Fantasy oriented, and they also told us they weren’t going to be losing the sense of humour that has made its mark on their games. This is an excellent thing, as the humour makes Pandemic’s titles genuinely funny and enjoyable, and is a dimension to games that is often ignored. We’ve written only paragraphs ago that writing comedy is very difficult, and it’s good to see pandemic having the balls to actually do it.

We went downstairs for a little while and John and Dylan Miklashek (Bravo Team Senior Producer) showed us a bit of Destroy All Humans 2. It’s hard not to be impressed by the game. While running on an Xbox and therefore not visually arresting as such by comparison to the next-genniness that surrounds us, its still a solid looking game. But the standout is the humour and writing, as well as the brilliant voice acting.

The character of Cryptosporidium is particularly good, and his Jack Nickolson deadpan is spot on. We talked a fair bit about the character of Crypto, because when you have a character specifically intended to be constantly pushing the edge like that it can be hard to know if maybe you’ve gone a little too. John confirmed there were a LOT of Crypto lines that were cut, because they wanted to keep their teen rating, and they got a little bit… blue.

It may seem like we didn’t really do much at Pandemic, but that’s actually not true. Pandemic was awesome and the environment and vibe were great. Having previously visited Auran and Krome it was very interesting to compare the feel of the different places, and we really enjoyed our time there.

What we particularly enjoyed was talking to John and Dylan about games. It’s obvious that they are passionate, intelligent and well informed about the gaming industry and the various social aspects and issues that surround it.

We can’t really cover all of the conversation, so the best thing to do is to simply transcribe out our tape recording of some of it. Note that this took FOREVER to type out, so be grateful!