The 2000’s age of monster gaming was truly a special one. We witnessed an era where monsters were playable and fought each other in 3D combat, picked up objects, hurled each other into buildings, and more. There’s a reason why fans look very fondly on that era and wish that kaiju games were like them again. It’s ever more clear with popular and lovingly made spiritual successors to these games emerging in the modern day, such as fan-favorite Gigabash.
One of our favorites at Kaiju United was 2003’s epic love letter to 1950’s Sci-Fi and Creature Features, War of the Monsters. Produced locally by Incognito Entertainment, based in Salt Lake City where KU is headquartered, we had the awesome opportunity to speak with Creative Director Kellan Hatch and talk about the game. Read on and discover his thoughts on the game, its 21-year legacy, and what he’s up to now!
KU: Hey, KU! We’re here with Kellen Hatch, one of the lead developers behind War of the Monsters!
Kellan. how did you get into the gaming industry?
KH: When I was younger, I was captivated by science fiction films and technology. I ended up going to art school, and went to New York City to start doing illustrations. Computers and early computer gaming were a passionate hobby of mine already due to the magazines I would read at the time. I wanted to work for Evans & Sutherland, who were actually based in Salt Lake City. Unfortunately, when I first attempted to get in with them, they weren’t hiring artists. Because of that, I went back to school for computer technology, something I already had knowledge and passion for.
I was persistent and I kept calling E&S. Eventually, I got in the backdoor with them thanks to a satellite we built, plus they needed graphics to keep for the promotional campaign. One year over Christmas, I made this Dungeons & Dragons virtual environment, and that turned into an entertainment department gig at Sutherland. A few years later, my boss there was talking to Sony and came to the conclusion that the company couldn’t afford our overhead. So, they asked us to form a team because we were the most experienced people in doing 3D. We ended up doing Twisted Metal & Warhawk, and then some number of years later, we got a chance to do War of the Monsters.
KU: What led to the idea of creating War of the Monsters?
KH: David Jaffe, whom you might know from directing the God of War series, was on Twisted Metal. I was walking down the street in Santa Moncia with him and had this idea for a monster game. He was like, “I was thinking about doing something like that, too!” We sold it to Sony and Dave went off and did God of War. Truthfully, he didn’t think we got the vision right, but I think he’s totally wrong about that. Owen Richardson did most of the concept art and I think he did a fantastic job of bringing it all to life.
KU: What did your role as Creative Director on War of the Monsters entail? What was a day in the life like?
KH: I was an Art Director on the game. I worked with the design team, plus handled most of the music/audio. Also, I wrote out the script and the storyboards, directed the cinematics, and so on. I worked very closely with our producer, Dylan Jobe, who was brilliant and vital to the success of our project. We also worked very closely with Mike Giam from Sony. Like a lot of projects in the gaming industry, Sony lawyers had to approve everything we did. I’m surprised we got away with Congar and some of the other monsters that are clearly inspired by copyrighted characters!
Although the day-to-day could sometimes be a hellish nightmare of stress and terror, it was equally fun and exhilarating much of the time. You write a game design document of things you want to do, and get it signed off, but now you have to find tangible and logistical ways to pull everything off. We did vehicular combat previously – this was an entirely different monster!
KU: What are some other interesting stories from development?
KH: We almost made a Godzilla game! They [Sony] wanted to make a licensed Godzilla game and have us develop it. When we found out that they wouldn’t let us change the size of anything (Godzilla had to be 400 ft high), we said no. Our monsters had to pick up a car and use it as a weapon. Godzilla can’t do that! In the end, we leaned towards Western creatures & movies and had our own style of gameplay. When the developers that ended up making the Godzilla games saw War of the Monsters at E3, they went back the to the drawing board. I had played it there, and was not impressed. It was clear when they returned next year with the finished game, that they were inspired by our game.
KU: What were those early 2000’s E3 and other gaming conferences like?
KH: Game developer conferences were the wild west at that time. It really felt like game developers versus publishers: the publishers weren’t spending a ton of money like they do now. There are exceptions – one story I recall is that Nvidia had Penn and Teller do a magic show at a conference one year. That was something different.
The funniest story I remember involves Microsoft. They had rented out a theatre for their conference for this iteration of the showcase. For some context, at the time, Microsoft was notoriously really stiff. They were all business, in stuffy suits, and did not really have fun. The guy in charge of presenting was such a stoic guy. To prank him a little bit, we all handed out cans of silly string… 500 nerds had cans of silly string. When the Microsoft suit guy came walking down the aisle, everyone hosed him down with silly string. When he got up to the podium, he was caked! (laughs)
Those days were a ton of fun and definitely not the kind of event you see now with AAA gaming companies.
Art by Owen Richardson
What were some challenges in game development at the time? Going from PS1-PS2 was an interesting transition time with 3D.
KH: Working with military image generators – ten million dollar machines. We had to go to PS1, which was so crude and barebones, it was much harder to make games and graphics for that. When the PlayStation 2 came along, it was such an improvement! It was like the aliens have landed and given us new technology.
The biggest challenge, at least in game development itself, was update rate. 30 hertz is unacceptable nowadays, but to just keep it at 30 frames per second was quite the challenge! Also, a bit of a pain point at that time – every game we began development on, we had to make a new engine. That [War of the Monsters] and the mountain bike game that we developed, we had a mature game engine to start with. That was easy street compared to making games and not knowing what the engine could do.
KU: How do you feel about the game [War of the Monsters] itself?
KH: I’ve worked on a dozen or so games, and that one was my favorite. The one that was my game. I put a lot of my personality into it. I loved monsters so much as a kid, too. That was the one game I felt like if I could make any game I wanted, that would be it! I was really proud of it and gunned for it, despite Sony almost cancelling it several times. Of course, it wasn’t just me behind the project, but a whole bunch of really amazing and talented people, such as Scott Campbell. He was the founder of Incognito, the studio lead, and the real powerhouse behind our success.
It didn’t do as well commercially as our previous title, Twisted Metal Black, but there was so much passion and love behind the game. It was always an uphill battle with the higher ups during development. Sony tried to cancel it numerous times. I remember frequently going into meetings and hearing from Scott that the game was on the chopping block and to get ready for that inevitable scenario. Despite that, we kept working our asses off to get this game done.
One of my favorite things about WOTM itself was the split screen merge. For those that don’t know what I’m referring to, in multi-player, you have your traditional split screen of two different cameras. When your two monsters get closer to each other in combat, the game creates one big screen again, like if it were in single-player mode. That was never done before; it was Dylan Jobe’s idea. It was mind bogglingly brilliant at the time, I’d say.
KU: War of the Monsters was also one of the first major games to utilize a fully destructible environment. Was it the first? Were there other games you were inspired by to create such a stage?
KH: The core of the game was about smashing a building, and using the rubble as weaponry. We were the first to have the weaponry aspect, for sure. As far as I remember, Twisted Metal 2 was the other major environmental destruction innovator. In that game, the Eiffel Tower was the famous destructible landmark. You could activate a few things in-game and watch the tower collapse, and then engage in vehicle combat within the tower rubble.
KU: What were some features that just didn’t quite make it in the game?
KH: Actually, the answer to this question is one of my biggest regrets. We had a programmer named Pierra Dufresne who did particle effects for War of the Monsters, and he was just amazing. Just before we finished the game, he figured out a way to make it 3D with the red and blue glasses. We could have made the game emulate the early 3D from those 1950’s monster movies! Sadly, it was too late, and we had to ship it! I was really hoping that there’d be a sequel, and we could ship a pair of glasses within so you could play some of the levels in true 3D.
What are YOUR memories of experiencing monster movies before developing this game?
KH: The very first time I saw something kaiju-y, I was five years old, and I’d go to the Layton theatre up in Northern Utah. I remember being mesmerized by Mothra and those two little women speaking in unison. Man, it did something to me. Mothra as the caterpillar swimming in the ocean stuck into my mind forever. War of the Gargantuas excited me too. Godzilla, of course. I watched Godzilla with my mom every Friday night on Nightmare Theatre. Also, I recall a program on television called Adventure Theatre that aired every Saturday. They showed Godzilla Vs. Mechagodzilla, another favorite of mine.
My thing is that I love Toho movies, but I REALLY love Ray Harryhausen films. Jason and the Argonauts. When Talos, the big bronze guy, first comes to life and turns his head towards the camera, chills down my spine! What more can someone say that hasn’t already been said about that iconic skeleton fight sequence? Other than that, one of my other favorite Sci-Fi films at the time was First Men to the Moon.
KU: What films did you take inspiration from in the music and visual language of War of the Monsters?
KH: In terms of overall visual design, the classic War of the Worlds was our color palette. That film is gorgeous, and the technicolor they used in the filming really pops the visuals. The iconic spaceships, too. We had to stylize our UFOs similar to those! With music choices for the soundtrack, the number 1 inspiration was Bernard Herrmann. I remember really listening to his scores, especially the stuff he did for Harryhausen. In his music, the series of minor chords that are held for a long time were extremely influential. We can’t make a homage to that era and his scores without bringing up Herrmann’s work on composing the soundtrack for The Day the Earth Stood Still, either. One of our unlockable characters is a flying monster, Raptros. That one was largely inspired by the epic Dragon featured in in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.
KU: The classic movie posters on the loading screens always spoke to me. What a fun way to have a loading screen!
KH: Oh, yes. Those posters are all real, too! Owen Richardson hand painted the posters in the loading screen. I still have one hanging in my house! It’s a full-size Agamo poster! Funny story – after completing all of those posters, Owen submitted that art to the Illustrators Annual Book. A bunch of them got in without Sony’s permission. After they got in, he got a bunch of freelance work! It was all monster stuff. He was always doing stuff like that!
Another thing Owen did – just before we launched the title, we got an emergency call from Sony legal. Owen used the real names of famous people on the posters, and they made it into the game! We pulled a couple of all-nighters switching the names out for made up names. He almost got away with it, though.
Art by Owen Richardson
KU: You have since retired from the gaming industry and have focused on archeological surveying. What led you to making that decision? Was it just time to close the book and do something else?
KH: Yes, it was kind of a time to do something else. Throughout my life, I always wanted to do something in science or academia. My son went to UPenn [University of Pennsylvania] at one point, and we used to get this magazine every month that was put together by Penn students. There was this one particular student that used drones to gather data for archeological sites and 3d model them. I was like, WOW! That’s what I should be doing! I went home and told my wife, hey, I’m gonna quit my job, and go back to school. I retired early and went up to the University of Utah and studied anthropology and archaeology. On my own, I learned how to do 3D modeling with drones. I found a professor there who was in the history department doing work in Peru and wanted to do drone stuff. I did field school in Ireland, and I went to Peru the next year. We made 3D models of all of these ancient sites. It was great because I was adding my 3D skills from gaming to this new career.
KU: How do you look back on that game development chapter of your life?
KH: It was a crazy rollercoaster ride! It’s a very, very demanding, but at the same time, rewarding industry. Plunges of terror and really good things. You can be up at the heights, then you drop over the edge again. There are so many amazing and brilliant people there. I used to look around at our studio and think man, Scott, are we wasting these people on Video Games? They could be solving world problems with all of this brain power together.
KU: What challenges do you encounter in your new position?
KH: More technical concerns. The location is cool, can you get there? Drone software updates are a headache. The problem with the logistics in this field is that it’s so tied to academia, and I knew I didn’t want to do that. It’s political and stressful in its own way. This new path is great for me because I already had a career… I’m retired! I can do this stuff and just enjoy it! I still do stuff for the Forest Service and stuff like that and occasionally freelance.
Truthfully, my early retirement was thanks to Sony’s stock that I sold. That’s okay though… because the royalties for all of these games weren’t much! Everybody gets their cut before its down to the developers. It’s like the early days of the music industry – somebody’s gonna make money, but not the essential creatives.
KU: How do you feel about the significant cult following that this game continues to have, even two decades after its release?
KH: It’s fun! I’m always surprised by who I run into that remembers that game from twenty years ago. One time, I was on a mountaintop once in Peru doing an archaeological excavation and there was another archaeologist there from back east. He was a grad student. I told him what I did in my past career, the games I worked on, and he jumped up and said “War of the Monsters?! I love that game!” That was crazy to me.
KU: In another timeline, say there’s a War of the Monsters 2. Aside from the 3D aspect discussed earlier, what new feature would you like to see implemented in the game?
KH: I’d want to somehow get onto other planets and other strange environments. I’d want the gameplay effecting the different gravitational pull of each planet or something like that. I think reaching out more to the Sci-Fi/space travel side of things would be interesting. But also, on the opposite end, maybe some dinosaur stuff from that era, like The Valley of Gwangi.
Art by Owen Richardson.
KU: On a personal level, what do these kaiju stories mean to you?
KH: That question reminds me of an interview I heard with Gahan Wilson, a famous illustrator & cartoonist. He had a teddy bear collection. The interviewer said, “I don’t get it, you draw all of this horrific stuff, why are you obsessed with these teddy bears?” Wilson replied, “It’s our childhood – the teddy bears and the monsters come from the same source, our fears and loves as children.” That really stuck out to me.
Growing up my mom actually liked scary movies. I remember her taking me to a movie called Black Sunday directed by Mario Bava when I was just three years old. It starts out with some words on the screen. When I asked my mother what it stated, she said, “Nobody under twelve can see this movie!” Glad I got to break the rules there. In the film, there’s a guy that breaks the coffin, the blood drops from his hand to the dead woman’s skull, and it brings her back to life. The eyeballs pop into her eye sockets and roll around. The guy behind me sneezed. It was raining popcorn everywhere! What a memorable and horrific experience from my youth.
KU: Thank you for taking the time to talk with Kaiju United.
KH: Thanks for having me!
War of the Monsters continues to have a dedicated and loyal cult following. I was surprised to see that the game had its own subreddit, where fans have sculpted and created their own action figures and sofubi collectibles based on the characters from this game. Even over two decades later and at a point in time where the PS2 is considered “retro” (Please don’t remind us.), this special game continues to be a small gem for those who discovered it at a younger age in the early 2000’s.
Kellan continues to enjoy retirement and passionately working in his new field. Maybe one day we’ll talk more about what day-to-day is like for a drone land surveyor and 3D modeler for archeological dig sites. Sounds like an interesting new chapter!
We leave KU readers with the epic and fantastical behind-the-scenes video made by the game’s developers.
