Welcome to the Roughnecks
Blasting bugs and shooting the breeze with Starship Troopers’ game lead Peter Maurice and star Casper Van Dien
One of the things the team wanted to do was bring Johnny Rico back somehow.
Sometimes as a videogame journalist, you’ll be asked to interview someone only tangentially related to a release. This happens a lot during movie junkets but also when Hollywood talent gets drafted in to lend their fame to a videogame. When this happens you can’t help but pray that *they get it* – that they get videogames or they understand their role as part of the marketing to the public. Casper Van Dien *gets it*.
After meeting in a hotel lobby in LA during SGF, we find ourselves in a meeting room with just Starship Troopers: Extermination’s game lead Peter Maurice and movie star Casper Van Dien, because the PR and marketing person has to go and watch Geoff Keighley’s show. After joking about having no marketing people to supervise us, we get down to business, addressing the Helldivers 2-shaped elephant in the room. After all, reviews of the recent hit frequently likened it to the Starship Troopers films.
“Sucess in our genre is important,” Maurice tells us, “Any success, because we’re [both] horde-based shooters.” He goes on to highlight the games’ differences: Helldivers has four-player multiplayer, Extermination has 16, plus base building, and is “the official first-person shooter of Starship Troopers.”
Maurice seems to acknowledge our suspicion that Helldivers’ success is almost the best thing that could have happened while Extermination was in Early Access on PC. “What they’re doing raises us all up, and it’s important… [we’re] now seeing Starship Troopers being talked about everywhere and… I think more and more people are starting to discover our game. Especially with the big announcements we’re doing.” We could see this during our time trying the playtest servers on PC before the scheduled press event, as the first public game we loaded into had a random fan roleplaying as a member of the series’ Roughneck squad, cheering us on by saying that our bug murdering and injuries would guarantee citizenship.
It’s hard to imagine that level of awareness of the Starship Troopers lore and willingness to roleplay would have been there were it not for the success of Helldivers 2, so we ask Maurice and Casper, with Extermination inevitably being compared to Helldivers and, more importantly, film director Paul Verhoeven’s work, is the pressure on to deliver a worthy successor to the original film? Maurice tells us that one of the things the team wanted to do was bring the movie’s most iconic character, Johnny Rico, back somehow.
VERHOEVEN OR HELL
Developer Offworld Industries did this by creating a single-player mode separate from the multiplayer, focussing on “old man Rico.” While they are careful not to confirm whether you’ll be playing as Rico, Van Dien does tell us, “I think I have more lines in this than I have in Starship Troopers 1 and 3.” He goes on to explain, “It’s meaty... How [Maurice and Offworld] has brought me into this is Johnny Rico has now got an arc. So he joined up [because of] a girl in the beginning [of the first movie] and he’s the good soldier… [but] now as the general, some of the things that are more important to me are probably my troopers. And so we have that relationship, [and] there are parts of [the game] where I’m really stern and strict.”
Peter Maurice adds that Offworld doesn’t have a dedicated writer or narrative lead; when it came to crafting a story for Extermination the task fell mainly to him. He goes on to explain that while he isn’t a professional writer, he does write in his spare time and he drew on his experience of studying psychology only to wind up in the game industry when it came to getting into the perspective of Rico (who, if you’ve seen the first film, didn’t have to enlist to go to war). While this might not be the traditional way to write a script, Maurice tells us, “one of the compliments that almost made me cry was when [Casper] said, ‘You know, Ed Neumeier [the writer of RoboCop and the first three Starship Trooper movies] would be proud of that.”
Finally, we want to know if there was any fear among the team of history repeating itself. When Starship Troopers was released in 1997 a large chunk of American media labeled it “pro-fascist” and “pro-war”, seemingly not realising it was satire. Van Dien feels nowadays people get it, “I was surprised and shocked when it went over people’s heads when it first came out. But, you know, this younger audience that comes up to me now... they’re like ‘I don’t understand how people didn’t get it.‘” Well, we’ll all get it later this year.
Would you like to know more? Wait till 11 October and you can play it yourself.