DayZ creator Dean 'Rocket' Hall has over 2,000 hours in Kerbal Space Program and played the original XCOM at Mount Everest base camp: 'I think when I die, I will still be playing that game'

Dean 'Rocket' Hall, founder of New Zealand-based studio RocketWerkz, first encountered games via a Commodore 64 belonging to his cousins. "I think I played it constantly for about five hours. Then, at dinner, I looked basically green from the refresh rate of the monitor, and I ended up being very sick and throwing up everywhere. I think that's when everyone figured out I that I was really into computers."

Dean Hall

Learning to make games on the Amiga, Hall joined the games industry in the late 2010s, after spending almost a decade serving in New Zealand's military. While working at Czech developer Bohemia Interactive, Hall created the pioneering zombie survival mod DayZ. He briefly led the development of a commercial version of the game, before leaving to found RocketWerkz, where he has led the design of games like Stationeers and most recently Kitten Space Agency, a freely available spiritual successor to Kerbal Space Program.

Work continues on RocketWerkz's space survival game Icarus. After a rocky launch and years of rigorous weekly updates, Icarus has only just begun making profit for the studio. "Since the [Steam] Winter Sale, we've been making about three times as much each day as we spend," Hall says. The plan, apparently, is to "squirrel away" some of these funds for a new, ambitious project. "We're gonna make a big game, like a DayZ/ArmA-style game."

Hall took a break from overseeing RocketWerkz' many projects to take me on a bracing hike through his games library, a journey that took us from the foot of Mount Everest into the depths of space.

What game are you currently playing?

Dean Hall: I am super back in on RimWorld. I already have 1,400 hours in it, but I've put in a heap [of time], I think 140 hours in the last week or something. My chief product officer. He knew this interview was going to be happening, he actually sent me a screenshot of the amount of hours I've been playing for the last couple of weeks.

I go through a lot of games that I've loved and come back to them. And it really felt like it was time for me to give Odyssey a really good crack. And I have been just super into it.

I really like the story generator element of it. Whenever I do a Rimworld play through, I try and pick a specific setting. Before this recent playtest, I did a Dune-style setting, I actually modded the game to have a Dune-like Arrakis planet and a whole bunch of other mods, and made a few myself.

I've actually released two mods for RimWorld in the last week. Three, actually. My current mod is actually the most popular mod on the Steam workshop for RimWorld today. It's called Rocket Ranks. There's Rocket's Ranks and Rocket's Medals there too. They let you put medals [on] and give ranks to your colonists.

What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?

I did jump around a little bit, but I'm gonna go with Ostranauts. I've known about Ostranauts for a long time, and I knew their pervious game, NEO Scavenger. I ended up talking to the dev. He's big fan of Stationeers and some of the approaches we took with the studio. So it was amazing to actually talk with the dev of the game.

Basically every year I come back and look at Ostranauts, and there's something about it that each time I play it, it's like at least 150 hours that goes into it. And it was a lot of fun, and really enjoyable. It's still installed. They've just announced when the next update's coming out. I'm actually hopeful [that] it's going to be a few more months, because I want it to be around time for me to do it again.

It's got its quirks, but [there's] nothing like it. There's the Fire in the Hold update that's going to be coming out, and that basically adds ship-to-ship combat. I'm not necessarily as thrilled about that, but I'm really thrilled with the fact that they're adding fire to the game. I think that's going to change things, another internal threat that you have to deal with that burns up oxygen. I think that's very much my vibe.

What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?

This is super easy to answer. It's probably the first game that I ever really fell in love with. It's the original XCOM that we know of in New Zealand—and I believe in the UK—[as] UFO: Enemy Unknown. It's the one made by Julian Gollop, from the '90s.

Now there's actually an open remake of that—you still need to own the original XCOM, which I do to run it, and it's called OpenXcom. And there's actually a [mod] called OpenXcom Brutal. I have a thing I do, so, there's this mod called [The X-COM] Files, which, it sounds a bit corny, but it's incredible. It basically [adds] a whole bunch of extra years to the game. I've been playing on and off for the past year, and I would have put 600 hours into it, and I think I'm only like 20 or 30% through the time. It's incredible.

When I went to climb Everest. There were two games I had on my laptop. There was XCOM, the original, and OpenTTD, Transport Tycoon… I was playing it at base camp, and at base camp you're waiting. You have to wait there for weeks, basically [to] acclimatise. Then you also have to wait for the weather, so you're sitting there for a lot of time.

I was used to that from the military, because the military is like 95% waiting around and then 5% chaos and terror. Mountaineering can be a bit like that as well. So you need to be able to self-manage your time there. And video games are fantastic for that, especially games like XCOM or OpenTDD, they really keep your brain moving.

So those two games just have massive, massive staying power for me. XCOM. No competition. I think when I die, I will still be playing that game.

What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?

I end up often starting a lot of games long before they get to Steam. So that makes it a bit challenging. The game I have the most hours in is Stationeers, which we made, which released very poorly, but I've always loved it. And even though it's cost us a lot of money over the years, I just adore it. So I've got nearly 5000 hours in that.

Next highest, although a lot of these hours were off Steam, is Kerbal Space Program, so I'd probably say Kerbal Space Program. Now, I actually know Felipe [Falanghe] really well, the creator of Kerbal Space Program. And I played it so much off Steam that I actually introduced him to Steam. I still have the emails. I'd worked quite a lot with Valve, so I emailed and cc'd them in and said, 'Hey, this game is just kicking off, I really think you guys should put it on Steam'. And sure enough, there it goes.

And I think before it went onto Steam, I had 900 hours or something in it. I even had one save for Kerbal Space Program which I played over four years… I put so many hours into it. It's just incredible, and the modding scene is like you wouldn't believe. I have just over 2,000 hours in Kerbal Space Program, that I can count.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

Now this game. Things can get pretty crazy here. It's called Space Station 13… I have been addicted to [this] game. It's like a role playing game you play with hundreds of other people, pixel based. It's really weird to think about, but I love it. There's just something about it that's incredible.

I have this character. His name is Colton Murphy, and I played that same character across both regular Space Station 13 and Colonial Marines 13, and I would typically play a squad leader. In fact, I would never really play above that, because I felt that it was just like work. It felt like running a company.

Whereas a squad leader, it was kind of the job that I most enjoyed in the military, you know, you just focus on looking after people. And I think for me, the social aspect of it I just really liked. What is it you say? You missed the monkeys, not the circus? And it was the people that I played with regularly that I think I most enjoyed about it.

What's a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn't live without?

This is gonna be a bit basic but probably Rider. It's programming development environment. And I just super love it. I don't really like visual based editors for making games. So now, actually, we don't use Unity or Unreal. We use our own framework, which is called Brutal, to make games. And it's purely tech space, using C#. So that means I can just use Rider. I don't need to open up Unity or Unreal. And for me personally, I just love that. I find I'm much faster reading and writing with text than I am doing visual scripting or anything like that.

Generally, how tidy is your desktop screen?

My desktop is extremely clean. But there's a reason. For security reasons, as well as just because of what I do dev-wise, my desktops get nuked essentially every few months. So I have a work PC, I have a home-work PC, I have two laptops. I just have so many different environments that all my stuff is cloud based, and I'm just used to nuking things.

It also tangentially helps me have a new customer experience, because it means that I'm often installing our games on a fresh PC, so [there's] actually a surprising amount of bugs that can happen when you first install a game, like a settings file is not initialising correctly and stuff like that.

That means I pretty much always have the default, whatever Windows gives you for the background. And actually, I'm going to be getting a new PC soon, that's a Linux dedicated PC, so I can better support the Linux community. So I'm very clean, okay. But not because I'm a clean person. If I had a garden—I live in an apartment—if I had a garden, I would go and spray insecticide on it every three months to keep it clean. I just get a flamethrower and I torch my computer every few months.

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