GameSlice: The Red Alert series has always taken itself to be a bit more comical than the regular Command and Conquer line -- It’s definitely very over-the-top when it comes to the units and storyline.  Did you ever toy with any units or plot points that ended up being just too weird even for a Red Alert game? 

Mark: We talked about lots and lots of units. Some felt right. Some didn’t. A few didn’t feel right at first, but then kind of the grew on us. At first, the Giant Squid was too wacky, but then in an odd way, we realized that it fit right in. It just took us some time to figure out the unique role each unit could play.

GameSlice: Red Alert II is coming out at a time when sites like GameCenter recently proclaimed the RTS genre to be “vanishing.”  I think GameCenter was trying to say that RTS games have really lacked much innovation in the past few years - it’s the same play mechanic with the same save-the-world-from-the-clutches of evil storyline.  First of all, do you agree with what GameCenter said, and second of all, do you think Red Alert II serves as an antidote to any of these criticisms frequently leveled on 2D RTS titles?

Mark: I haven’t seen the GameCenter write up, but I definitely believe that there are still some great things waiting to happen in the RTS genre. I do agree that we’ve grown out of our infancy.  Perhaps we’re getting ready to enter the rebel youth years.  But one thing is for sure: the genre is not dying.  Certainly, there are a good number of games out there that are trying to follow the RTS formula, but I think the leaders in the category will continue, as they have in the past, to create new and exciting RTS games. 

Rather than focusing on RA2 being some type of antidote for the genre, we just worked hard to create a game with broad appeal that’s really fun to play. In the end, that’s what players want, isn’t it? 

GameSlice: Red Alert II is the first C&C game to introduce some fairly major changes to the interface - the tab system on the scroll bar and the advanced unit option bar along the bottom of the screen.   How many different iterations of interface design did you go through before settling on the final changes?  Did you ever think of making even more radical changes?

Mark: Ha! Good question. We went through a pretty involved process with the interface. Our goal was to make it easy for players to get to the units they want to build and to expose some of the more advanced control features to new users. The tab interface on the side bar solved the first goal, and the advanced command bar solved the second. 

It’s hard to quantify how many revisions of these concepts we went through. You can think of it as a sort of circular process where the interface influenced the function of the game and then the game influenced the interface and so on. 

I do know that our lead artist created a large number of visual styles for the interface before we settled on the one that we have now.  Of course, there were even more radical changes that were brought up as options for the interface, but in the end we tried to go for a simple consistency that people will find powerful yet easy to use.