Dark Future: Blood Red States - Interview @ WWW

Wheels, Weapons and the Wasteland asked Tomas Rawlings of Auroch Digital quite a few questions about Dark Future: Blood Red States:

Community Manager Jake Connor of Auroch Digital, Ltd., the company producing Dark Future: Blood Red States, graciously asked if Wheels, Weapons and the Wasteland (WWW) was interested in an interview to discuss Dark Future: Blood Red States and car combat gaming. Auroch Digital, Ltd. Production Director Tomas Rawlings, Ph.D. (TR) kindly answered several questions provided by this blog.

WWW: What was your first experience with Dark Future? How long have you played the game?

TR: I started playing GW games when I was about 12 and I read White Dwarf avidly so came across it then. So this picture is from my own copy of White Dwarf that announced the upcoming game. Then one of my school friends got a copy we used to play game together on weekends and I played it soon after it came out. I loved the art, the setting so really enjoyed playing the game.

WWW: Why did you and Auroch Digital, Ltd. decide to develop an electronic game based on Dark Future, an out of print, car combat miniatures game from 1988, a title no longer supported by Games Workshop?

TR: After doing Chainsaw Warrior: Lords of the Night, we had developed a good relationship with Games Workshop and so talked about a number of possible projects. In was in part because nobody else was doing anything that attracted me to seeing if we could get the Dark Future licence. It meant that we’d get define how that space became digital, which gives us more scope to play with the concepts and the game. Plus; chaos, meets highway warriors meets cyberpunk what’s not to love?

WWW: What are some of the aspects of Dark Future that attracted you to play the miniatures game?

TR: For me it’s the setting. I’m a huge strategy game fan and a game that has momentum as part of the gameplay adds a really cool aspect to how you play I also really like Battlefleet Gothic for similar reasons. The TL; DR would be ‘Speed’.

WWW: What are some of the aspects of Dark Future that attracted you to create an electronic version of the game?

TR: Going back though my copy of the game when we were chatting to Games Workshop I could see that there was so much promise in this game when converted to a digital format. The core problem of any boardgame game with real-world physics modeled in it is; how to make the game give you that feeling of speed, motion and space while not bogging the player down in charts and tables so much they need a degree in physics to play. I saw that we could get the computer to do all the hard things the calculations freeing the player to, well, play.

WWW: How was the name Dark Future: Blood Red States created?

TR: The main setting in the game is the middle bit of this alternative America that has become a wasteland. So I was thinking of this area as being roughly where the ‘Red States’ (a term for the geographic ‘middle’ bit of America) when you think what else is red and fits the theme of Dark Future Blood. Hence the title was born. It has other references in the story too, which players will discover.

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