Recently, I had the chance to visit Respawn Entertainment Studios with Paul “pappaG” Giacomotto, Dave “Mabooza” Knight and Mike “FlamesworD” Chaves. We first surprised the Respawn crew with a few boxes of incredible and delicious donuts. Which were devoured by everyone within minutes. Community Manager, Abbie Heppe led us through the fascinating studio with the entire Titanfall team focused and hard at work preparing for Titanfall on March 11th.
While Paul and Dave were interviewing key members of the Respawn team for the Limited Edition guide, Abbie set us up in a gameroom with 12 Xbox One gaming setups…six monitors on one side of the room and six on the other. We spent most of our visit gaming our minds out and learning awesome new features (unfortunately I can’t mention any of these yet!) while playing Titanfall against the QA and devs. The fun I had playing this game was never-ending.
After the many hours of fun gaming the time had come to set down our controllers and grab some lunch. Abbie took us to a burger joint called Blue Dog. As you walk through Blue Dog, you’ll notice hundred of pictures of dogs filling the walls. Anyone who send their picture of their dog in they will put it up on the wall. I’m definitely sending my pup in! First up, we dug into some giant deep fried jalapenos called “bottlecaps”! After my first jalapeno my mouth scorched with flames as I sat still holding a conversation pretending that they were not too spicy. During this time Paul recommended Flamesword try one (and Flamesword is not a spicy food fan). Flamesword gave it a shot and his face turned bright red and with a few breathes in and out the first words out of his mouth were “this is really spicy!”. After that, we grabbed some beers and had a feast of incredible burgers.
Other than gaming, we had the chance to interview some of the key people working on Titanfall. Lead Artist, Joel Emslie intrigued us with the many creative thoughts and ideas that went into creating the Titans. Some of these ideas were influenced by the incredible old-school anime movie “Appleseed” and the anime series “Ghost in the Shell.” Weapon Designer, Ryan Lastimosa gamed a bit with us and chatted to us about the many weapons in Titanfall. Later I found out this wasn’t my first encounter with Ryan, I had met him once before on the interwebs during the Titanfall Alpha, dueling it out against his team until 3am. If you pick up the Prima Games Titanfall guide you’ll be able to read much more about the behind the scene interviews!
To end the trip, we finished our last game of Titanfall on a win and packed our bags. It was awesome to meet so many of the great people and minds behind the scenes creating this incredible game. Seeing all the behind the scenes work and chatting with these talented people made me even more excited for the release of this new FPS game.
Now’s the time to pre-order your copy of the Titanfall Prima Official Game Guide and the Titanfall game.
Published: Feb 1, 2014 01:01 am