Anthony Litton

I had been try­ing un­suc­cess­ful­ly to estab­lish myself as a sound ed­itor in New York for about 9 months when I heard from a form­er room­mate that Rock­s­tar Games needed anoth­er dia­log ed­itor for Grand Theft Auto: San An­dreas. I was delight­ed. Not only was the job, although short, go­ing to pay enough to keep me in the city for anoth­er month, but I had ac­tually bought a PS2 sole­ly in or­der to play Vice City a cou­ple of years earlier. I was a fan!

A two week job turned into a three week job, then a month... I was on San An­dreas until the end, and I was hired back a cou­ple of months ‖La­ter to or­ganize and su­pervise the dia­log and cutscene audio for The War­ri­ors. This led into Bul­ly, then Man­hunt 2. I free­lanced for anoth­er 9 months until I was even­tually hired full time as Produc­tion Audio As­set Man­ager, a ti­tle which alread­y didn't cov­er all of the re­spon­si­bil­i­ties I had ac­crued.

I start­ed writ­ing dia­log for back­ground char­ac­ters on GTA4, and start­ed di­rect­ing on The Lost and Damned. On Mid­night Club: Los An­ge­les I was tasked with co-or­d­i­nat­ing with the de­vel­op­ers and lead writ­er about cre­at­ing the dia­log struc­ture. On Red Dead Re­demp­tion I was giv­en the respon­sibil­ity of work­ing with the de­vel­op­ers and lead writ­er to devel­op the entire struc­ture of the AI audio. All non-mis­sion-specif­ic dia­log in that game was gen­er­at­ed by writ­ers work­ing from tem­plates I cre­at­ed. I also wrote, and I was flown out to LA on a cou­ple of oc­ca­sions to direct. I directed all the pain grunts for the game, in­clud­ing for the main char­acter. As well as all this I kept up with or­ganiz­ing all the edit­ing, cutscene fa­cial an­ima­tion data crea­tion and cutscene sync for the game, which was enor­mous - one of the largest games ever made in terms of produc­tion content. I am very proud of my work on Red Dead Re­demp­tion. I don't claim to have made any great crea­tive con­tri­bu­tions, but I had more in­put into that game than any oth­er.

Red Dead Re­demp­tion was the last game I saw to comple­tion at Rock­s­tar. Aft­er 6 years of work­ing at Rock­s­tar and learn­ing all about AAA video game produc­tion at one of the greatest stu­dios in the world I decid­ed it was time to move on and try some­thing dif­ferent.

Aft­er leav­ing Rock­s­tar Games in May, 2010 I start­ed talk­ing to Eli Weiss­man about col­lab­o­rat­ing. Eli had hired me at Rock­s­tar and was my su­pervis­or until he left in 2008. We had become good friends and stayed in touch. He was do­ing some consultant work for Britt My­ers at his com­pany Great City Pro­duc­tions, and Britt was in­terested in start­ing a cas­ual games busi­ness. The three of us formed High­line Games in the first half of 2011.

W.E.L.D.E.R. is our first proj­ect. It's a word game - a cross between Scrab­ble and Be­jew­elled. I took the lead in cre­at­ing the ini­tial design doc­ument as at that time I had the most expe­rience communicating with coders. We hired Guy Hun­dere to code and we start­ed to devel­op a pro­totype.

I felt it was very impor­tant that the game not have an ab­stract design - that the look and feel some­how tied into the game log­ic with some kind of phys­ical real­ity, that there was some kind of sto­ry that tied it all togeth­er. Why do the tiles fall? Why do the words form? What hap­pens to them? Todd My­ers came up with the con­cept of a machine with met­al tiles that weld­ed and we hired Jon Brzys­ki to create all the art as­sets based on that con­cept.

We devel­oped the game by test­ing pro­totypes, get­ting togeth­er in a small room to hash out changes and ideas to take it fur­ther, communicating these to Guy then do­ing it again. We very quick­ly re­al­ized we had some­thing very ad­dic­tive on our hands and also that this was a much larg­er proj­ect than we had first en­vi­sioned.

As we neared the fin­ish line we teamed up with Ay­o­pa Games to pub­lish and gen­erally rep­resent us to the world. We were cho­sen as iPhone Game of the Week on release in Novem­ber 2010, and have been for­tunate to have been fea­tured by Ap­ple in the iTunes store on a num­ber of oc­ca­sions since. We were brief­ly the num­ber 1 game on the iPad, and when we re­leased the Mac App ver­sion in July 2011 we were that week's Ed­itor's Pick and made num­ber 1 in the Mac App store.

Since then the game has only grown in scale. We have added new fea­tures, new lev­els, bo­nus modes and a 2 play­er mode. We've worked with many more coders and artists, chief among them Aman­da Wixt­ed, for­merly of Zyn­ga.

It's been quite a ride, and an intense learn­ing expe­rience. My fon­d­est wish is to take this expe­rience and create some­thing even bet­ter.