[Interview] Jim Lee vs. DC UNIVERSE ONLINE
Jim Lee sat down with us and answered a few questions about DC Universe Online.
Published: October 12, 2010
The most important thing in an MMO is that the world that you're in has to feel real. But the DCU has very different environments. Gotham is very different from Smallville in the same way that it's different from Metropolis. How did you tie all these together to make it feel like a cohesive universe?
Jim Lee: That's the trick. I get this title of being executive creative director, but there's so many art directors that worked on the game, from Jared Carr – who is no longer with the company – Mark Anderson, Matt [audio garbled], from Sony in San Diego to all the different artists at Wildstorm. I was probably doing more art directing then drawing. It's a huge undertaking. Everything you see in the game was concepted or drawn out of a design by someone. There was no one book of the DC Universe that you could go to and say, "This is Gotham. This is what every street looks like. This is what the buildings look like." All that stuff had to be pulled from all these disparate references. Not just from comics, but from other videogames, from TV shows, from cartoon shows, from movies, obviously, and made to mesh into one [world] and have everything be instantly recognizable as something existing in the DC Universe.
So, an example is the Daily Planet [building]. The Daily Planet looks different in every comic book, every videogame, every TV show, every movie that it exists. Yet it all has to look like the Daily Planet. So we went in there and took all these different references, and we actually created our own version of the DC Universe that ties into a lot of these different source materials. Even when we did designs on the Teen Titans - the Teen Titans TV show probably reached more kids then the comic book ever did. Right? So do we go and just do Teen Titans that just like the cartoon? Or do we do something that is true to the comic book origin material? Or do we do something that is entirely new all together? We ultimately decided that we're going to do a mash-up of all these different things and still have it feel and look like the Teen Titans, but have something that is recognizable to a kid that maybe watched the cartoon, buys this game as a teenager, and is drawn into it because they were a huge Teen Titans fan.
Is there a particular character's representation in the game that you're particularly proud of - that shines through out of anyone?
Jim Lee: Hmmmm... good question. There's a lot. Narrowing it down to one... I spent a lot of time actually in the beta when they opened it up wider so you could do more missions just running up to characters and looking at them. Which I assume most players won't do, but I go up and circle around them. I'm like this creepy stalker online MMO player, and I try to get in there and look up their noses. 'Cause I saw them all as they were being built and they're all in these static poses. Then they get optimized for the platforms they're on, and you start seeing the art changes and the proportion changes and things like that. So I was pretty critical, but I'll tell you that a lot of them turned out great. The ones that really stood out - Gorilla Grodd was awesome, Wonder Woman looked great. A lot of the characters Sony actually said, "Look - we know that by the end of the game, the end of the development cycle, our ability to produce really nice models and assets will exceed what we had at the beginning." So they actually went back in and recreated or remodeled Wonder Woman, Batman was remodeled, Superman was remodeled in the middle, and stuff like that. So those characters are pretty nice because they got the extra pass and love and care to them. Green Lantern looks awesome. They all look great. Let me tell you - there isn't another game that has all these DC characters in there, so the DC Comics fanboy inside of me is happy that these characters can finally exist in virtual space for the first time. On that level, I'm just happy that they're around. But I think they turned out really nice, and it's a real testament to the artists that Sony Online had at Austin who built all these 3D assets.
Jim Lee: That's the trick. I get this title of being executive creative director, but there's so many art directors that worked on the game, from Jared Carr – who is no longer with the company – Mark Anderson, Matt [audio garbled], from Sony in San Diego to all the different artists at Wildstorm. I was probably doing more art directing then drawing. It's a huge undertaking. Everything you see in the game was concepted or drawn out of a design by someone. There was no one book of the DC Universe that you could go to and say, "This is Gotham. This is what every street looks like. This is what the buildings look like." All that stuff had to be pulled from all these disparate references. Not just from comics, but from other videogames, from TV shows, from cartoon shows, from movies, obviously, and made to mesh into one [world] and have everything be instantly recognizable as something existing in the DC Universe.
So, an example is the Daily Planet [building]. The Daily Planet looks different in every comic book, every videogame, every TV show, every movie that it exists. Yet it all has to look like the Daily Planet. So we went in there and took all these different references, and we actually created our own version of the DC Universe that ties into a lot of these different source materials. Even when we did designs on the Teen Titans - the Teen Titans TV show probably reached more kids then the comic book ever did. Right? So do we go and just do Teen Titans that just like the cartoon? Or do we do something that is true to the comic book origin material? Or do we do something that is entirely new all together? We ultimately decided that we're going to do a mash-up of all these different things and still have it feel and look like the Teen Titans, but have something that is recognizable to a kid that maybe watched the cartoon, buys this game as a teenager, and is drawn into it because they were a huge Teen Titans fan.
Is there a particular character's representation in the game that you're particularly proud of - that shines through out of anyone?
Jim Lee: Hmmmm... good question. There's a lot. Narrowing it down to one... I spent a lot of time actually in the beta when they opened it up wider so you could do more missions just running up to characters and looking at them. Which I assume most players won't do, but I go up and circle around them. I'm like this creepy stalker online MMO player, and I try to get in there and look up their noses. 'Cause I saw them all as they were being built and they're all in these static poses. Then they get optimized for the platforms they're on, and you start seeing the art changes and the proportion changes and things like that. So I was pretty critical, but I'll tell you that a lot of them turned out great. The ones that really stood out - Gorilla Grodd was awesome, Wonder Woman looked great. A lot of the characters Sony actually said, "Look - we know that by the end of the game, the end of the development cycle, our ability to produce really nice models and assets will exceed what we had at the beginning." So they actually went back in and recreated or remodeled Wonder Woman, Batman was remodeled, Superman was remodeled in the middle, and stuff like that. So those characters are pretty nice because they got the extra pass and love and care to them. Green Lantern looks awesome. They all look great. Let me tell you - there isn't another game that has all these DC characters in there, so the DC Comics fanboy inside of me is happy that these characters can finally exist in virtual space for the first time. On that level, I'm just happy that they're around. But I think they turned out really nice, and it's a real testament to the artists that Sony Online had at Austin who built all these 3D assets.
