Mike Levine & Larry Ahern

“People still talk about these games for the same reason we got excited making them: they’re fully realized interactive worlds.”

At LucasArts they worked on games ranging from the original Sam & Max all the way to The Curse of Monkey Island. Now Mike Levine and Larry Ahern run their own company, Crackpot Entertainment, and they’re putting the final touches on their debut title Insecticide, a film noir-inspired action-adventure set in a world populated by bugs.

We had a chance to ask Levine and Ahern some questions about their new project as well as their past work. We discuss the hybrid nature of Insecticide‘s gameplay, the role of humor in many successful adventure games, what went wrong with the ending in The Curse of Monkey Island, and much more. Also, find out which other LucasArts (and Sierra!) veterans worked on Insecticide…

First of all, not everyone might know all the games you worked on, so please tell us about your game industry backgrounds.

ML (Mike Levine): We invented Pong. Ok, that’s a lie. We aren’t that old.

LA (Larry Ahern): We did play Pong though.

ML: Actually, I preferred “Blip” over Pong.

LA: I worked at LucasArts from 1990-2000, where I played neither Blip nor Pong (although we had a Centipede and Asteroids machine that I was quite fond of). It was actually LucasFilm Games when Mike and I both started there. Then I spent another 6 years at Microsoft Games Studios until leaving to form Crackpot.

ML: And I worked at LucasArts from 1991 through 1997, and have done other interactive projects with my company, Pileated Pictures.

 

 

LA: But, I’m guessing our LucasArts tenure is probably of more interest to your readers than any of our other projects, like my work as a bounty hunter, or Mike’s stint in the circus. And, besides having a natural talent for bounty hunting, I’ve always been artistic, so that got my foot in the door at LucasArts. I started out doing background layouts on the first incarnation of The Dig, then stumbled into animation on Monkey Island II: LeChuck’s Revenge where I collaborated a lot with Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman.

We were on the same wavelength, I think, and I ended up as lead animator on Day of the Tentacle, also designing the characters and coming up with visual gags. After that, I did some animation and character designs on Sam & Max: Hit the Road, then helped Tim develop Full Throttle, serving again as lead animator. Until I was given the reins to… Monkey Island, which was a challenge, but also a thrill. I worked with Jonathan Ackley as co-designer/writer/project leader/art director/car detailer on The Curse of Monkey Island, managing an amazingly talented team of animators, artists, writers, musicians, and other people I’ve already offended even before the end of the sentence by not mentioning them.

After that, I spent a few years developing some epic games that never got published, and working on some smaller titles until moving on to a job with Microsoft. Microsoft was good to me in a lot of ways, but things just never really clicked creatively for me there. Which, of course, left me highly susceptible to… Crackpot ideas.