Amen: The Awakening

by Stephen Poole
design by Ethan O'Brien

When co-project lead and lead designer Greg MacMartin began work on Amen: The Awakening for Cavedog Entertainment in late 1996, he had but one goal: to make the ultimate computer game. MacMartin's vision was to combine the best elements of several genres - adventure, role-playing, and first-person action - with a compelling, fully realized storyline and the latest in computer technology to put you in the midst of an epic, cinematic experience.

MacMartin's dream wasn't unique, of course. It's the goal of any game developer, especially one who manages to find a way to get the wheels rolling on such a project. And MacMartin couldn't have asked for a better setup than the one he found at Cavedog. The company was cofounded by Ron Gilbert, an industry veteran whose batting record at both LucasArts and Humongous Entertainment was highly respected. Cavedog had just been bought by GT Interactive, whose deep pockets ensured that resources wouldn't be a problem. When Cavedog's debut game, Total Annihilation, rolled out to rave reviews at the end of summer 1997, things couldn't have looked rosier.

But over the following three years, MacMartin came to realize the irony of the title of his labor of love. In that time, he experienced his own awakening - a slow, steady realization that perhaps things weren't quite right, despite the complete freedom Cavedog had given him and his team and the steady stream of press accolades his game received whenever it was put on display.

Nevertheless, it's understandable how easily those worries might have been put to rest. Someone with MacMartin's game experience could allay any worries about falling behind schedule by simply citing the great action games - Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, Unreal, and others - that had been completed far past their original release date. Those games were hits because their creators believed in the credo "It's not done until it's done and done right." MacMartin could afford to take the same approach because Cavedog believed its development teams should have total control over their games. And any doubts he might have had about that philosophy were surely put to rest when Total Annihilation came out of the gates to challenge the Command & Conquer series as the king of real-time strategy games.

Backing all this up was a game design so ambitious that it, if done right, would have probably propelled Amen to the head of the first-person action-adventure genre. But before going into what happened during the course of Amen: The Awakening's development, we should look back at what it was about this game that made the press babble with glee and that helped its development team remain convinced of the game's greatness even as the walls began to crumble around them.

Next: What was Amen?