To introduce Mark Long as a veteran of the gaming and entertainment industry would be an understatement. The now-CEO of NEON is bringing the new game SHRAPNEL to market, and has worked in the industry for nearly three decades. He’s helped to produce many titles over the years–namely games like HAWKEN, Blacklight, Spec Ops, and more. During his career, he’s worked at companies like Zombie Studios, Meteor Entertainment, Microsoft, and HBO.
Long has much to say about the past, present, and future of the gaming industry. His vision for SHRAPNEL is a game that is meant to be modded. Long believes that games will get better with more user input and creation. His new game will enable players to create digital assets, invest in them, sell them, or lose them in battle!
The game SHRAPNEL is set in an alternate reality whose inhabitants had recently been rocked by a massive asteroid. This event caused meteorites to bombard a large stretch of Earth, leaving the area known as the Sacrifice Zone uninhabitable. In the game, the characters speculate about what is being uncovered–with rumors swirling about a mysterious material called Sigma. In SHRAPNEL, nations and corporations begin assembling their own mercenary extraction forces, and war rages to control the Sacrifice Zone and the untold secrets inside.
This new Web3 type FPS is sure to shake up the industry. So before playing, watch the full video here, and read the entire Q&A interview below…
The Interview
Ryan Gallagher:
My name is Ryan Gallagher. I’m the project manager for Treasure Hunter Media. One of the websites that I manage is called Outsidergaming.com, and it primarily focuses on console gaming. The audience is really interested in the latest sports games, new releases, as well as kinds of retro games and classic titles, as well as titles that are released every year. And we were interested in hearing your perspective about the gaming industry as it is and as it relates to you, and what you’re kind of doing inside of it. So, I guess I’ll, I’ll let you take it away. Give me a little bit about who you are and, you know, a little bit of your, what you’re working on right now and your professional background.
Mark Long
Yeah, thanks Ryan. Thanks for having me. Well, my name is Mark Long. I’m CEO of NEON, and we’re the publisher of Shrapnel. And, Shrapnel is a blockchain enabled moddable, AAA, first person extraction, shooter. That’s a mouthful, I think and, uh, we’re built on the avalanche chain. And I’m particularly excited about the novel experiences that you can generate, with blockchain in gaming. I’m a 28 year game industry veteran. I produced over 32 titles in that period of time. A lot of them are forgettable, some of them pretty good. I published HAWKEN and Spec Ops Black Light, and, uh, produced a lot of first person shooters. Actually, this is my 14th Unreal title. So I also have expertise in Unreal. I love Epic, I love to tell Tim Sweeney and Kim Leary. They make us look good every day. The Unreal Five is just, the lighting model is amazing, by the way, working in that almost everything just instantly looks good as soon as you start putting it together. Prior to Neon, I was part of a publishing team for games at HBO. And, uh, there’s a large group up here in Seattle where we’re based that make the HBO Max app. And so we had a game team within that group. We spun out in February of 2021 to do our own thing. But, uh, the team that I spun out with, the other eight people were just phenomenally experienced developers and worked on franchises like Halo, Call of Duty, Bioshock, and I’m really enjoying getting to work with such a seasoned team. All of us have done tours at Microsoft, so I was head of x Cloud at Microsoft when I was there.
And, uh, prior to that I ran media entertainment, which published Hawken, that gorgeous Mac first person shooter, if you remember it, which recently got re-released by 505. It’s not getting, it’s not the same team, the art team making it. And, uh, there’s some disappointment, but still it, I love Max and I love first version shooters. So, and then, uh, prior to that I ran Zombie Studios for 22 years, and that’s the beginning of my career.
Wow. I was checking out a little bit of, you know, press on on you and just a little of the information that I could dig up and yeah, your professional background, especially obviously in gaming, but in general entertainment is super impressive. So it’s, it’s really cool to, to talk to you about the current state of gaming. I guess we’re kind of at, what it feels like a little bit of, a juncture point. I recently had a conversation with another person in this space that’s trying to push a Web 3, I guess you would call it type game, that allows for user generated content, you know, NFTs and assets to be quote-unquote minted. Where, where do you guys, stand I guess within this? I heard the term AAA gaming, in layman’s terms, can you explain a little bit about, you know, your angle in this for Shrapnel?
ML:
Yeah. I think, you know, to address the elephant in the room, I think it’s fair to say that regular gamers are, to a degree, up in arms against blockchain and NFTs in particular. And I think they have some legitimate beefs. You know, in the last decade, you’ve seen the shift from premium games to in-app purchases. But players never really own what they’re buying in a game so they can get nerfed. Or sometimes a game just goes completely out of business. It’s a very different experience than what probably you and I grew up playing where I used to take a couple of PlayStation discs to GameStop and trade them in, maybe for 15 bucks for all of them and maybe. And then apply that to a new game, and then they would turn right around and sell each one of those discs for 20 bucks, right?
And, but I was happy with that transaction. I got some value out of what I invested in, or, you know, that the value was stored in that disc and I could do other things with it, trade with somebody else… But that’s gone out the window… That doesn’t exist anymore. So that was one of the first things that attracted me was digital ownership. The idea that the stuff that I buy in a game belongs to me and I can do what I want with it. And I believe markets will emerge where I’ll be able to take all the assets, you know, the NFTs that I got from Shrapnel, which would be like a John Wick skin that I made or a Suppressor for a Weapon… All these “Lego” parts. And like you go to a grocery store, coin machine, you know, dump them all into what they call a market maker and get some fraction of the value back, and then apply that to another game. And as a game developer, I’m happy with that, even though, you know, those guys will turn around like GameStop and sell maybe $200 worth of NFTs to somebody for $20. At least we get some fraction of revenue from it. And you get a new player who’s arrived and is all buffed up and ready to have fun in the game. But beyond that, I also saw that you could give governance to players. So, you know, as you’re well aware, all of us as gamers are super invested. It’s not just a game. I mean, it’s a lifestyle and we get upset when developers take the game in the wrong direction.
And, you know, this is part of the overreach that developer gamers are also up against. Like, when NFTs were kind of first introduced, maybe most players became aware when Ubisoft relieved a pair of pants and like a helmet that you had to do, what was it, like 160 hours of gameplay to be able to even get to buy one of these pairs of pants. People were like, what the hell are you guys doing? After buying games for a premium and then nerfing ’em so that–if I don’t buy the DLC, I can’t keep playing… And now you’re gonna do this to me. No, no. I believe they have legitimate complaints, but it’s all about the way that publishers have been trying to cram blockchain down your throat.
Also the quality of the games. Some of the play-to-earn games, which I hate (they’re really Ponzi schemes) and are a grind, they’re not actually even fun… Which is, I think, the definition of a game. This is what players have been exposed to. And to a degree, to me, it feels like the beginning of free to play in the 2011 timeframe when free to play started coming out of Asia. And developers and gamers are, to a large degree, kind of pretty dismissive. Like yeah, they’re just crappy knock offs of better games. And I don’t care that they’re free because they’re just not good enough, even if they’re free. But look at where we are now over 10 years later.
So we’re trying to make the first or one of the first AAA, web 3 games. So besides governance and digital ownership that I talked about, there’s all kinds of novel things that you can do with blockchain. Our game is designed to be modded to an unprecedented degree. I have this thesis watching, my kids grow up playing Minecraft and building their own worlds and learning to visually program when they’re, when they’re crafting, and then aging into Roblox, which is kind of like the Legos of game construction. And then when you become competitive and you move into Fortnite, well now 50% of engagement by players is made by other players. But when you turn 18 to 35, or like you and I, you become a core competitive player, there’s nothing for you to age into. And I don’t think players are suddenly gonna go, oh, yeah, I don’t wanna make games anymore. I think it’s the opposite. So not only is SHRAPNEL an extraction, first person shooter, with the right kind of production values… We’re also designed to be modded by the community at an unprecedented level. And my thesis is players are ready for us to hand them the professional version of the Unreal Editor and let him go at Maps. And in a nutshell, that’s what we’re hoping to do.
RG:
One question that comes to mind when you say that is, how does one person’s decisions or one person’s visions affect the community of that game and their experience? And then even more so, how is that any change in that experience communicated in, on, or over Shrapnel? In a best case scenario regarding any type of interactive user generated experience?
ML:
Well, you know, from our perspective, we’re communicating, and we’re doing a pretty radical experiment, definitely. Uh, which is normally games are developed in secret by a team for a couple of years. And only until it’s completely done do you start revealing the game, ta-da. And then if players don’t like it, it’s a complete disaster, right? But hopefully you’re smart and you’ve found an audience.
But, players would love to have a voice. And so we’re doing the opposite. We’re taking feedback from players at the earliest stage. And as we release the early access version in December 2023 (this year) on the Epic Game Store, we want the community to tell us, you know, what they would like to see in our roadmap. And you can use the Shrapnel token, the virtual currency of the game to vote on the roadmap. You see the same thing in, Dr. Disrespect’s, Dead Drop Game. They’re inviting the community in, they’re doing frequent play tests with them, and I’m excited to play that game. And the Off the Grid game, we’re kind of the top three, if you will, AAA FPS games that are experimenting with blockchain… The danger of course, and I worry about this for Dead Drop, is you get hardcore players that want the game to be unforgiving because they want it to be hard. And then that excludes other players. So you run the risk of designing the game for a small number of players that are super happy with it, who are hardcore and part of your core community–excluding less skilled players. So that’s a tough balance to strike, but it’s also a really interesting and novel experiment that nobody else is trying. And again, you know, blockchain makes some of that possible. Really, the way I look at blockchain is it’s a novel technology that’s free. That’s something really important to remember when players and other developers say, well you could just do this with any other database. It’s really expensive to build those kinds of databases, low latency databases. This technology is essentially free, open source, and we can build on it, and continue to improve as it improves.
RG:
Yeah. So going back just a little bit, I’m not so much of a gamer myself. I’m more of the background of journalism. I’ve played games ever since I was young, from GameCube, Playstation, PS2, PS3, and then finally now I’m more of a Nintendo Switch guy. So I’m more of a, you know, an on-the-side type gamer. I keep up with all this, but in your opinion, how would you explain a blockchain to someone like myself who likes to play games, but isn’t really super interested in putting time in and kind of building community. I’d rather kind of have something that’s just handed to me and like, is fun and I don’t have to think much. How do you kind of reason Shrapnel for the everyday gamer? Or is this product pretty much only for someone that’s much more involved?
ML:
No, it’s the opposite. It’s designed for you and me. It’s interesting to talk about blockchain, but it’s really not that important to the player experience. You know, first of all, for us to make a great AAA game, you have to have frictionless onboarding, which doesn’t exist in web three games where they’re forcing you to create a wallet and all these confusing addresses that, if you get a single letter or digit wrong, God knows what happened to the money you just blew. Right? So our approach is to make a great, extraction experience first, and then as you win and you gain more skill in extraction, you enter a level, and I don’t beat you by murdering you, and being the last one alive like a battle royale, I win by getting out with the most loot alive, so I might not even engage with you. And that’s what’s an interesting dynamic. A really fun thing about extraction is initially when you come in and our maps are gonna be really big, like a couple of kilometers across low density of players, like maybe 20 or 30 in the final version. So you don’t really actively engage with each other in the beginning. You spend a lot of time hunting around for things of value in the map, and then as extraction gets called at different intervals, you make a decision, am I gonna try and get out with what I’ve got, or am I gonna wait it out? And it produces a really interesting, exciting tempo. But as you gain skill as a player, you’re gonna start amassing stuff that you’ve taken away from me and the other players. And these happen to be NFTs, so maybe a stock, a suppressor as I described before, and/or a special skin. And we’ll start sending you push notifications, Hey, you know, you’ve got $20, $40, $60 worth of stuff now. If you would just create a wallet, we’ll give it to you. We’re holding it for you now, but we’ll give it to you and then you can do whatever you want with it. And that means even cashing it in. This is the effect we think will be really attractive… A game where you have to decide what you’re gonna take into the level because it could be taken away from you. That’s the core of an extraction shooter, where that has real value. That is kind of the reason a dude sits in front of a slot machine for two hours… It isn’t because it’s fun to push a button over and over again. It’s because there’s $20 or a hundred dollars in there.
So you have to have something really at stake. And we think those two things in combination will produce really exciting, high stakes, gameplay. At least that’s been our experience so far in play testing.
RG:
Absolutely. I mean, that definitely makes more sense the way you just explained it now. I’ve kind of, touched on these topics before and done a little bit of research, obviously no expert, but the way I’ve likened this before and tell me if, if this is right or wrong, is that I’ve likened it to social media, almost like users on social media, take Instagram, Facebook, all this stuff so seriously, and they’ll put a lot of time into it, posting photos, making customizing, you know, their profile, however different ways, but they’re only actually building the platform itself. They’re not building anything for themselves at all. Whereas what you’re trying to do and what other games of this type are trying to do is to give something back to the user and have them walk away with some reward or a return on the investment of their time.
ML:
You’ve just articulated one of the more, you know, radical values of the Web3 crowd, sovereignty, data sovereignty. Like you don’t really even own your identity on these platforms.
RG:
Yeah. It’s crazy.
ML:
If it’s for free, it’s because you are the product, not them.
RG:
Right, Exactly.
ML:
So they’re monetizing you. What about the idea that I could create a digital identity and I could take around with me, not just to games, but to social networks and the way I’ve structured permissions, and that will decide whether or not I want you to have certain information. And because it’s on blockchain, it means that I can get paid for you monetizing me, because I would take a percentage of that. I believe this is all inexorably coming. It just doesn’t need to be crammed down your throat and in the way that it has been for, ultimately it’s always about the game and whether it’s fun, and then the things that you added to it, like web three and blockchain are gonna be an added value that create novel experiences for the player that they can’t get in another game.
RG:
Very cool. So, so far, who, who is your audience right now? Where is the game in its current form and who’s playing it? And then I guess where, where does this go? Because I know you said coming in December, you’re going to release a new version or the full version.
ML:
In December. Well, you know, blockchain enthusiasts or Crypto Bros as they are sometimes called–it’s kind of that joke. How, how do you know if somebody’s a vegan? Don’t worry. They’ll let you know. [Laughs]. So Crypto Bros, they love for you to know about their passion for the technology. So there’s a core group that we have. A social reach of about 250,000 on Discord and Twitter that are really excited about the game and who follow this technology closely with the intersection of gaming. But our bigger audience comes in December when we release early access on the Epic Games store. We’re just trying to make a better version of the Escape from Tarkov game. Escape from Tarkov is a great game. It’s also, I like to say, the game that hates you for wanting to play, it’s so difficult. Unforgiving doesn’t explain it. But it’s still addictive and fun and there’s existence proof in things like the DayZ game eventually became PUBG. And you know, Dota became League of Legends. There’s often an early flawed version that somebody like us comes along and says, you know what? I gotta, I got an idea about how to make this better. And, that’s what, we are hoping we’re doing.
RG:
Yeah, I mean, all those games, you just named are, are absolutely smash hits for a lot of different crowds, and sometimes all the same crowd. So obviously if that’s, you know, those are your influences, are those the same type of people you’re targeting? Like if you have, you know, this 250,000 really devoted, into crypto web three, this kind of stuff, will you be kind of targeting those other fringe players who maybe they don’t care as much about the technology, but once they realize the sort of the funness of the game and the ROI factor, do you think that’s who your audience is going to be?
ML:
It’ll be the bigger audience. The truth is, there are less than a million Web three players today globally, and that is not enough to build any franchise on top of… A million daily actives, I should add. So we have to go after regular gamers, and as I’ve said earlier, you’re just not gonna win them over by saying, Hey, that’s got web three and blockchain. That doesn’t appeal to them at all. Matter of fact, it’s a negative from their perspective. So it’s really about making a great game, making it so players can mod it. And then that’s the intersection of what we’re trying to do. If you and I make a map and improve on the map that we created, then we can publish that map and get a rev share on whatever happens to that map. We can make scans for the game. I said, you know, a John Wick skin would be cool. We can make 3D meshes, even if you’re that skilled, you’ll be able to make objects and you could completely re-skin the game, if you want to. I think it’ll look a lot like Fortnite creator mode, though, you know, Fortnite’s creator mode is no matter what, you’re playing a battle royale session based shooter, but people are coming up with all kinds of novel looks and maps there. But ultimately you’ll be able to take it in a completely different direction as players become more sophisticated, because the Unreal engine editor that we use is the same tool they’ll have and they’ll be able to make changes to game logic and things like that. I’ve been passionate about modding myself personally for a very long time. Like even in my own studios developing games during the day, I would come home and mod games that I love, and just if I could get ’em to do anything, and even if I could get like 11 people to play my map, I was thrilled with that. There’s just something, there’s some inherent joy about taking a game that you really love and making it your own. And my thesis is players are ready to do that at a level that you’ve never given them the opportunity to manipulate.
Yeah. It’s super interesting. I mean, I think, I think you’re right, because people are inherently creative and looking to do something in a way that makes sense to them, and everyone sees something in a different perspective. So a hundred percent, I mean, everyone has a different character that they think is cool. Everyone has a different reason why they think that character’s cool. Everyone has a map, you know, it’s really an individual. Yeah, everyone, everyone’s an individual in that way, so I think you’re right. But how, right now and going into the future, how are people playing the game, on PC or console, and then how are they making these edits or changes? How, how is that done?
ML:
So, um, it’s a PC only game currently, and the early access version we’re gonna release to the public is in December on the Epic Games store. We were in Austin, Texas for a conference, and we had the first public playing where anybody could walk up and, and play session with us there, but there’ll be incremental releases of other components of the game. Like we’re making it so you can, mint your gamer tag, then you’ll be able to make decals. We’ve got a sticker maker so you can make stuff to apply to your weapon or character. Eventually you’d be able to skin your own characters. And then finally, you’ll be able to edit your own map. And I should add generative AI, which is a twist I didn’t see coming a year ago. I believe it’s gonna be a big component of our game, because if you could just type in, I want a Bob Marley AK 47 and get, you know, a cool looking, skin and then save it or eventually even be able to do text to mesh, text to 3D and describe an object and give a 3D model, I believe all that’s coming and that’s gonna revolutionize user generated content–in the same way that you can, you know, manipulate Stable Diffusion and get amazing looking stuff in mid journey.
RG:
Wow. Yeah, I mean, as soon as the Chat GPT thing came out, one of my first thoughts was like, it’s only as good as the prompt. Right? You know, the output is only gonna be as good as the prompt. So, if people lack the design skills or certain, that AI is going to be able to bring their vision into reality or into the game at least.
ML:
Yeah. I think it’s gonna be crazy.
RG:
Absolutely. I mean who knows, but I think ultimately it’s gonna make for an interesting story. I feel like the last couple years have been something out of movies we’ve watched… But I guess, going back just to the reason we’re doing these interviews on a site like OutsiderGaming.com or a site like Leaguefeed.net is to basically build community and kind of do more journalistic style content. People more easily digest videos. So that’s why we wanna have the video component, but also just having unique, community driven content where people can put a face to a name. You know, obviously it’s journalism work. We felt that a lot of the journalism stuff, it’s kind of gone over to sponsored content and, you know, that’s been happening for a while, but I mean, to kind of build that community… Tell us a little bit about, to finish the interview, where you are in your gaming career. Not professional, but just what do you have most fun with when it comes to gaming? What are some of your favorite games that are going to influence SHRAPNEL, things like that. What are your favorite things about gaming right now?
ML:
Well, you know, as a developer, to stay current, you have to kind of try everything. So I’m a bit of a dilettante, you know, I’ll download Atomic Heart and, you know, play the first four hours of, like, that thing is just gorgeous. But then there are games that you return to habitually and, you know, those are the usual suspects. Apex, Valorant, CS Go, Tarkov–if I wanna be punished. And, then I’m into story driven games and also handheld, like the Switch is terrific on a plane. It’s just a great experience. I’m really curious about the PlayStation handheld too. I was recently in Japan and in Aki Barra, you know, their electronic district and it’s always fun to go to Aki Barra because you see stuff like, holy shit, man… So they had steam decks, you know, handheld devices, but they were like $250.
RG:
Oh, wow.
ML:
Yeah. So, uh, I think handheld PC gaming is gonna, uh, emerge as a whole new category. And that’s just super fun, portable gaming’s super fun. It lends itself to a kind of console style, bigger, deeper story games. Recently with my son, I’m going back and we’re playing Cyberpunk. They’re doing a great job of fixing Cyberpunk and then creating new content for it. That game in particular is something I’m enjoying right now.
RG:
Awesome. Yeah, I think for me growing up it was, I mean, Pokemon, and then that’s what got me back into the Switch. Cause you know, I got the new Pokemon game and I was like, whoa, this is everything I wanted to do when I was 12 years old. Like, this is freaking cool. Yeah. So that, I mean, the fact that it’s come that far and I feel like that’s not even the tip of the iceberg. It impressed me, but I’m not very hard to impress with the gaming thing. I’m sure a higher level person would, would nitpick or whatever. But, yeah, I think it just seems like everything we kind of thought in terms of gaming and entertainment is now just becoming reality, which is insane. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, that’s, that’s all the questions I had. Did you have anything else you wanted to share? Is there anything going on that you’re, like, if there’s one thing a viewer or user on our website would take away from this, this is it. What, what, what would you like to finish on?
ML:
Oh, I’d just ask that you follow us on Twitter [X], play Shrapnel or, go to shrapnel.com and sign up for updates and let us bring you into the community and help us develop this game.
RG:
Very cool. Any, any dates anyone should, should watch out for if they wanna get involved after this interview? Should, should someone wait until December/January or should they come right to your website and, and see if they can, they can start playing. What’s, what’s that like?
ML:
I come now because we’re doing a bunch of community interactions. Like I said, reserve your gamer tag, which we’re calling call signs, create decals and, then, uh, sign up for updates on the game as we go forward into our launch.
RG:
Awesome. And, what’s the hard, hard launch date?
ML:
We don’t have a specific date, not yet.
RG:
Cool. All right, well, I thank you so much, Mark. I really appreciate it and I enjoyed the conversation today.
ML:
Yeah, thank you Ryan. See ya.
After the Interview with Mark Long of SHRAPNEL
If the OutsiderGaming community member has followed along this far, one might ask, “So, where’s the game!?”
SHRAPNEL’s release has been delayed a bit past the initial Christmas 2023 release date. Now that it’s 2024, the team behind the extraction, first-person-shooter game has gathered new funding to push the game forward. Today, the team is still accepting donations, and test players to provide feedback and continue shaping the game.
Since SHRAPNEL is a game that will be constantly evolving, the first players have the interesting opportunity to share feedback and shape how the game releases. So, interested individuals should heed Mark Long’s call to action, and reach out to his team for a chance to play the game now.
In the future, Long hopes that players’ real-time investment in playing SHRAPNEL will be rewarded by return on investment in the form of a real stake in the game’s success, in-game assets (uses-generated skins, maps, etc.), and in the form of digital currency. One can only wonder what this new future of gaming has in store for players like those inside the growing SHRAPNEL community.