Terminator Salvation’s Postmortem in Game Developer Magazine

I’ve been getting Game Developer Magazine for some time now – it’s not your typical game magazine since it’s made for developers in the industry and not so much the gamers. But if you hold any interest in how games are created, it’s worth your time. One type of article that often shows up is the fascinating Postmortem. Here a developer gets into the nitty-gritty of what went right and what went wrong during the development process for a certain game. Pretty much every video game made has a story like that to tell that we often never hear about and for the first time since I started getting GDM a couple of years ago, they have a postmortem for an arcade game in their August 2011 issue. That of course is for one of the biggest titles to come along in recent years, Play Mechanix/Raw Thrills Terminator Salvation.

The best my cell phone camera can do, which isn't much

The article, penned by Play Mechanixs’ Scott Matott, starts off by getting into the cabinet. Did you know that the Terminator skull is made with vacuum-molded plastic? It certainly wasn’t an easy task to get that done right and this article goes over that as well as the process of getting the guns to look and work just right, why the game was delayed several months beyond the movie’s release, both the freedom and challenge with developing arcade hardware, localizing the game for arcades in other parts of the world, particularly Japan and tweaking the software to capture the players attention and excitement in a very short period of time, and more.

It’s not up on their site yet but gdmag.com will soon post the digital version of the magazine so you can check out the article in all of it’s glorious detail, along with a postmortem for Shogun 2, Creating seamlessly tiling perlin noise for procedural generation, the Simplygon tool package, Matthew Wasteland’s always amusing Arrested Development article and more.

[Game Developer Magazine]