The Monolith Falls

One of the great gaming studios is no more

Archer’s included but no Caleb?

I knew this was coming but it still sucks. One of the all time great gaming studios, Monolith went from an ‘is’ to ‘was’ this week. It died in the name of DEI and film franchises.

The venerable gaming giant was put to death as part of a round of mass executions at Warner Brothers, alongside Player First Games and WB Games San Diego. The final game, it was working on, was a Wonder Woman project that appears to have not gotten much farther than a tone piece trailer a couple of years ago.  

This was Warner Brothers’ failure from start to finish.

Monolith Games is… (sigh) was a gaming studio so old that one of the reasons they chose the name Monolith is because it had no more than eight letters and could therefore slip under DOS’s character restrictions on filenames. However, the studio founders, Jace Hall (Yes, the same guy who made the hit single I Play W.O.W.), Bryan Bouwman, Toby Gladwell, Brian Goble, Garrett Price, Paul Renault, and Brian Waite. Also wanted something that evoked power and mystery. 

Their first game was also the last and greatest of the holy trinity of Build Engine games, Blood. It set a tone for what the studio would achieve in the course of its thirty-year run.  It says so much about the gaming world we live in that Blood is now described as a “retro-shooter.”

“Blood, is a product of the horror genre.  It owes a lot to Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy, more in general feel than in plot or art design.   Although there are some deliberate shoutouts that are pretty easy to find.  When Caleb is attacked by a bunch of disembodied hands that are all chirping, “I’ll swallow your soul!”  Or when Caleb announces, ‘Good. Bad. I’m the one with the gun.’”

…

“In my opinion, Blood is probably the toughest of the Build engine games.  I’ve never been able to beat it on anything higher than medium difficulty and I’m not a bad player.  Critics didn’t like it because there was no Journalism Mode.  Even on easy Blood is pretty hard.  No, actually it isn’t hard.  Blood is brutal.  Brutal but fair.

The gameplay was about the best that the Build engine ever managed.  The weapons all worked just like they were supposed to, (rare in a 90s FPS).  There were even some features that were quite a bit ahead of their time. Explosions didn’t just gib opponents, they would be pushed around by the force of the blast.  Even if they didn’t die, they would still be tossed a few feet.  That was very new stuff in its day. No one had ever seen it before.  The dynamite’s physics remains superb. The explosions were great, although the Build engine was always good at those, the way the POV shakes while the lights go off is always very satisfying.”

Blood was an amazing out of the gate starter for the little studio. Sadly, the sequel Blood 2 was trainwrecked thanks to their distributor GT Interactive.

“Blood 2 was a disaster and it wasn’t one of Monolith’s making.  It began as a project on their new Lithtech engine.  Frankly, there were some teething problems but nothing you wouldn’t expect.  The project was progressing, however, it was going to be over budget.  What Monolith had so far was extremely promising.  The game wasn’t finished but it was playable.  It needed a little more work before it was ready for prime time.  More polish than anything else. It was the usual stuff of minor weapons malfunction, clipping, and the like.  They needed some professional voice actors. Nothing unfixable.

Monolith went to their publisher GT Interactive, pointed out the problems with the game, and asked for more money to finish it.

GT Interactive told them, f*** you, we’re shipping it.

GT did generously allow Monolith to finish it with their own money but they wouldn’t be compensated in any way, shape, or form for it.  Monolith considered a few things.  Shogo was basically done, they could ship it themselves with their own money or they could trust GT again (ha).  Blood II would have to be sacrificed. The Blood brand would be ruined when they shipped an unfinished game but there were no good decisions available to them. 

Blood II was awful in every way available to it, and the sad thing is, you can still see the seed of something that could have been great.”

Shogo was the Monolith game that didn’t quite become a beloved Monolith game. It was good enough for its day, but behind the scenes Monolith was deeply disappointed in the result. It was a product of ambitions that soared too close to the sun. 

A spiritual successor to Shogo was started, however, this game would be repeatedly warped and rewritten as Monolith searched desperately for a new distributor. It briefly became a paramilitary action game before settling into an amazingly retro Sixties spy parody like the Our Man Flint movies. The Operative: No One Lives Forever and its sequel are games that you must steal if you want to play them now. 

The reason for that is that the rights are nothing short of torturous.  Night Dive would absolutely love to make Source ports of all the old Monolith games but it’s never going to happen.  Monolith’s half of the rights were simply enough but the companies that owned the distribution rights have been bought, sold, mergered, gone out of business, been revived by a different businesses, bought and sold again and again until no one knows who own the rights for sure but everyone knows they will sue to maintain them. 

There were a bunch of other games that, while good enough in their day and maybe still worth a play now and then, can not be described as legendary. However, one of the ideas for No One Lives Forever that was scrapped got fished out of the garbage can and turned into the truly magnificent F.E.A.R.

F.E.A.R. once again demonstrated Monolith’s uncanny ability to key into the zeitgeist of a given time. This time for the Creepy Little Japanese Girl movies.  They also managed to turn bullet time from a mechanic that was almost out of gas and into the most exciting gimmick possible by incorporating it with John Woo style visuals. It’s honestly surprising to me nobody managed that before. 

As fun as the bullet time was, it would have been nothing without the best NPC AI of its day.

“Up to this point in FPS the bad guys were pretty predictable after a few moments of play.  The only thing that would make them challenging was the ever-present, pain-in-the-ass hit-scanner NPC. Not so with F.E.A.R.  The enemy NPCs would appear to be working as a team, performing flanking maneuvers, laying down suppressing fire, and attempting to retreat when under heavy fire. This was the first game to use Goal Oriented Action Planning.  Here is a really, really dumbed-down explanation of it:

The NPC has a goal to achieve, this goal is to shoot your ass, he accesses a plan for that. But, oh shit, the human shot me first. Is the plan still viable? If no, then access a plan to survive, usually by taking cover or maybe retreating. After that, it assesses the situation and if possible goes back to the first plan of “kill the meat bag.”  Important note, none of the enemy NPCs know collectively what is going on, they only know individually but are never deliberately acting as a team.  However, due to the restrictions of the environment, some dialog, and some very clever level design planning, it felt like they were.  This was first-generation group tactics that kind of worked if you gave it time to work.   Cautious gameplay on your part was NOT rewarded. If you fought aggressively, it would interrupt the AI’s OODA loop. The result kind of caught the machine intelligence in a fog of war and made for a much more exciting game for you.“

F.E.A.R. spawned two sequels, the last of which Monolith had to farm out to somebody else because sadly, Monolith had fallen prey to the scourge of 2000s gaming studios, the movie studio buyout.  Warner immediately shipped them to the IP mines. 

They produced the OK-I-guess Gotham City Imposters as well as Guardians of Middle Earth. But it has to be admitted the last of their great innovations came about as the result of an IP game. 

Shadow of Mordor 

Procedural generation was nothing new in gaming when Shadow came along.  Truthfully, it had been around in some variants since the start of computer gaming. It came to be a truly hated mechanic in FPS games because the maps were hard enough to navigate as it was, due to tile duplication. Now scramble the map each new game, and it felt like random sadism. 

But Monolith’s Nemesis system managed to create randomly generated stories.  Your interactions with orcs built the story.  The orc would be given a defining trait, he would spout poetry or use a whip of fire, then Nemesis would build a character in support of that trait.  The game tried to give you ways to avoid killing an orc so that it could run into you later and taunt you for having run away, or if you cut off its arm and spared it, then it would shake its prosthetic arm at you before going back into a fight with you.  Orcs would get promoted and gain powers for certain actions. Most frequently, killing you. It was an incredible and easy to patent achievement. 

After Shadow of War, Monolith thought it had enough mojo going for it that they could do what became unthinkable in Hollywood and create a brand new IP.  By 2018, this was a horror beyond all imagining to movie studio executives. 

Nonetheless, Monolith began developing a game called Legacy, (if you know anything about it leave a comment below). I think this was allowed to happen because Warner’s C-suite leadership was so utterly chaotic during this period that it was easy for a major project to slip through the cracks.  

But then Monolith presented the fruits of their labor to their corporate overlords, who promptly shit a brick and canceled the whole project in favor of a Wonder Woman game. This was at a time when people like Ann Sarnoff were doing things like turning a Batman Beyond project into the failed Batgirl movie.

Monolith’s leadership had had enough and stomped off to form Cliffhanger Games.  Warner’s bungee bosses apparently viewed this as an ideal moment to stuff Monolith full of DEI hires. 

This turned out to be a disaster because Monolith’s new B-team couldn’t figure out how to work either the latest iteration of the Lithtech engine OR the Nemesis system. In late 2023, they scrapped everything and rebooted the project using the Unreal engine, not even trying to use something as complex as Nemesis.  There was also a “Narrative Team” rewriting everything to make sure that equity, inclusivity, and Wokeness in general was well represented.  I’m sure there were body positive Amazons, trans-Amazons and a Wonder Woman who rated a six on the ten scale of attractiveness. 

The massive success of Hogwarts Legacy in 2023 was followed by a string of DEI-driven disasters like Suicide Squad Kills the Justice League.  Warner Brothers’ Quidditch game significantly underperformed, and Multiversus collapsed. On February 25 this week, Warner Brothers announced the mass executions at their gaming division, declaring they would concentrate on fewer but bigger franchises.  Meaning Batman I suppose.

While it was never as groundbreaking as id or Valve, it had a gift for pulling players in. It would take an inspiration from the movies like Evil Dead, or Seven, or Matt Helm, and then marry it to a piece of groundbreaking tech that set it head and shoulders above its competition… At least for the year it was launched. 

Flawless? Well, no.  Monolith would swing for the fences every time the ball came across the plate, which meant they struck out a lot. And truthfully, there was a lot of same-same in the background settings of office blocks, warehouses, and villages that all looked alike after a while, but the Monolith frequently overshadowed everyone. And now this legendary studio belongs to the ages. It’s very sad but any studio owned by a film company is going to eventually meet the same fate.  

Still, keep in mind, Monolith was started by seven guys with a dream and indie gaming has returned to that world. Its spirit lives on.

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