Casper Van Dien, Starship Troopers: Extermination Devs Talk Staying Faithful to the Franchise

Starship Troopers: Extermination seeks to deliver the game that every Starship Troopers fan has hoped for since 1997: gunning down hordes of arachnids, riding atop hulking tanker bugs, and defending fortifications against endless waves of alien insects. Although Offworld Industries has already largely achieved this goal with the game’s current Early Access content, the 1.0 launch later this fall will take this game’s franchise authenticity further thanks to a single-player mode featuring Casper Van Dien himself as the now general Johnny Rico.

In an interview with Game Rant, Casper Van Dien along with game lead Peter Maurice, lead game designer Chaz Barker, and head of marketing Gareth Woods spoke about how they worked together to bring this fully voiced single-player story experience to Starship Troopers: Extermination. They also weighed in on why Starship Troopers has remained relevant for so many years, how player feedback has helped shape the game, and how this new single-player story is just the first of many the game plans to tell in the next few years. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

How Casper Van Dien Has Grown With Johnny Rico

Q: How does it feel to return to Johnny Rico?

Van Dien: I love being Johnny Rico. I’ve always loved being Johnny Rico. It was awesome going up there, meeting the team, seeing all their enthusiasm, and their love of all the movies. It’s amazing to me that they get that kind of appreciation because that’s not always the case. The first one yes, usually that one gets a lot of love and deservedly so, but not the others.

Johnny Rico first joins up to be in the military because of a girl and becomes really good at it. He knows how to be a good soldier. He knows how to fight. I loved playing that, nut now they’ve given Johnny Rico the arc he deserves. He’s now a General. He’s a seasoned battle-worn guy but he also wants to get the job done. He cares about his troops. He cares about the mobile infantry, his Vanguard, and the Roughnecks. He loves them all. They’re the reason why he’s still doing it, and he wants everybody to pull through. I love having that kind of arc, it’s thrilling. When I read the dialogue and everything, I thought, “Ed Neumeier would be proud of this. He would love it.” And Verhoeven would love this.

I have people come up to me all the time talking about Starship Troopers, yelling different quotes at me, or saying “I joined the military for this,” “I became a writer for this,” or “I became an actor because of this.” “This was one of the last movies I saw with my dad.” “It was the first movie I saw naked people in.” I get all these different things, whatever it is, that inspires them. If it’s me naked, that’s okay! The bugs, that’s another thing. To each his own.

I love being Johnny Rico, and I love that it means something to people. It’s important to me and it’s a big part of my life, and I’m thrilled to still be doing it 28 years later.

Q: What’s the biggest difference between playing Johnny Rico on film versus playing him in the game?

Van Dien: I’ve grown with him the whole time. Now I’m an old man, I’m 55, and he’s an old man and he’s probably 55. He’s got one eye. It feels like I’m in the movie when I’m playing the game. I hope that’s going to be the experience everybody else has as well, so that it feels like you get to be in the movie, but the movie is now 10 times bigger or 1000 times bigger.

There are more bugs, there are different bugs, there are more details, there are cool troopers, all these different characters you can be, and I get to yell at them and try to encourage them to do better in a very loving, fatherly way–which I’m really good at apparently, thanks to my resting murder face.

Q: Could you comment a bit on the timeline in terms of Johnny’s development and the story of the game?

Maurice: We’re not sharing a whole lot until later this summer, but first of all, it’s very important for us as an official Starship Troopersfirst-person shooter game to make sure we’re not only grounded in the universe with the 16-player co-op, the base building, and all the stuff that makes our game special, but we also want players at the 1.0 launch for their first experience to be with the one character that matters in the universe.

The first experience of every new Deep Space Vanguard coming to the game is they’ll be introduced to Rico in the solo experiences, and they’ll have an opportunity to go on missions. I won’t say much more there, but they can also go into the game’s 16-player mode better-trained, have a better chance at surviving and killing the bugs, and can come back at any time and re-engage in their campaign. Our game is 23 years into the future roughly from the first movie. He was almost executed once in the movies. He got demoted to colonel, we’ve got him back through some things going on as a general where he belongs, and his voice matters in the universe. You’ll get to experience that come this fall.

Q: You mentioned how the single-player mode helps people get into the multiplayer mode. Could you talk about how the modes feed into each other?

Maurice: Our game is very accessible by its nature. It’s built that way, and we want to make sure anybody can come in and play, whether it’s emptying a clip into a bug and feeling good about it. You don’t have to be the best sharpshooter, but then we have a weak point system that we’re introducing later this month, where a skilled shooter can take that bug down in three shots and move on and there’s fun for everyone.

We have a tutorial in our game, and it teaches some of the core components, but we want to–I don’t want to spoil much experience with the general–get you to a place where early on, you’re more than competent enough to go out and do your part. But also, there’s a reason why you’re in that solo experience, and it’s a setup and a payoff and a journey. It’s a hero’s journey that we’re putting the players on so that they can have that full experience in that mode. If they feel they want to go out into the real world and contribute, they have the empowerment to do it. We’re not just done with Year One. There are going to be multiple arcs within that journey as the game progresses into the years to come.

Woods: We have multiple stories to tell in the universe. This one’s centered around Casper’s character, but other stories are happening on other planets that we obviously want to investigate through future chapters.

One of my favorite scenes from the first movie is when Rico blows up the Tanker bug. Being able to call the shots and do those kinds of things sounds just like that.

Van Dien: The bugs in this are a lot of familiar ones, a lot of new ones, and a lot of ones from the other movies. They just engineered them in a way that they’re scarier and they’re cooler, and there are hordes of them. Nobody’s going to be disappointed. If you love Starship Troopers, if you love any of the games that were tributes to Starship Troopers, now you can be in the world and fight the bugs.

Woods: One of our key marketing pillars was always “This needs to be the authentic Starship Troopers experience.” It needs to be as if you were an extra on the set, and now you get to continue that journey that we’ve all wanted to do in 1997 but didn’t have the technology to. The best we had was some RTS games and some mobile stuff. This is the first time we’ve got the technology to be able to play in first-person with hordes and hordes of bugs with 15 other troopers and relive the experience. It’s so great to hear Casper see our homework and go “Yeah, this is what it was like. In fact, it’s more real, because there were green screens and tennis balls and we’re shooting dirt.”

You mentioned some of the bugs and some of the experiences. The movie has become like a checklist for us. “Can the player do the things that the movie said you would be able to do?” That’s been our checklist and our roadmap to make sure everyone gets to have that experience.

Van Dien: They far exceeded my expectations going up there and seeing what I got to play and watch and witness. It’s absolutely brilliant what their team has done. They were asking questions. They’re very enthusiastic. They asked me questions, and I’d give them details about little things that I did. They’d go, “Oh, we’re adding that in.”

I think that, when people play the game, they’re going to see there’s an attention to detail that–I don’t know if this is what normally happens in games because I haven’t gotten to witness it–but to see that kind of attention to detail!

Q: Some original NPC allies will take part in this single-player experience. Can you talk about their relationship in broad terms with Johnny or how they operate or anything like that?

Maurice: I can’t really go into details about it. They’re new to the universe. I can tell you that the hero of the experience is you, the player, and everyone else in the experience is adding to that narrative fabric. We want it so the NPC characters that are involved in it are there to enhance the experience and to make the world feel lived in and vibrant.

The dialogue from Casper, I believe, is more than he spoke in the first Starship Troopers movie, so it’s really sizeable.

Van Dien: It’s more than I did in the first and the third movie put together, let’s be honest.

Maurice: There’s other dialogue from not only the player character but also the NPCs that is very sizeable and well over 500 lines of complete dialogue right now. There’s a lot of humor and respect for the characters and the IP.

Van Dien: We got the movie and then some. It was so much fun recording. Sometimes I’d adlib something, and they’d say “Oh, that’s great, but try like this, Casper!” We were trying all these different things. We’d improv lines, and I’m like “I don’t know if this one works” or I struggle and they’d say “Well why don’t we try this.” We did so many different things and in different ways. We did me being an asshole, and me being more encouraging, and me being nice, and me just being me.

Q: Is there anything that stands out to you from the performances or behind-the-scenes working on this?

Woods: Getting to show Casper the trailer. Having an eight-year-old kid, it was like watching a kid see the commercials for Christmas toys and be like “That one!”

I respect you as an actor Casper, but I really felt you weren’t acting in that environment. That was an honest reaction of someone seeing this thing that I think has been a huge part of his life now reimagined on the screen for the first time. A lot of love went into that trailer and to see Casper’s face was one of those behind-the-scenes moments that really spoke to me.

Van Dien: They get me. They had me at “Hello.”

How Starship Troopers Has Remained a Cultural Icon

Q: Starship Troopers seems to constantly show up in pop culture. Every year, there’s a moment when Starship Troopers is suddenly everywhere. What are your thoughts on this phenomenon? Why do you think Starship Troopers is still on people’s minds so many years later?

Van Dien: It’s amazing to me that Starship Troopers was ever missed. Today’s audience really seems to get it. I think it’s because of the older generation that did get it. They kept it going, “No, wait a minute, I think you missed something.”Other countries really got it, but for some reason, I think maybe it wasn’t promoted correctly or it just seemed to miss on some level.

A lot of people now–the young audience of today–they’ll go “How did anybody miss this satire?” I mean, it’s obvious! My whole thought process back when I read the script was “This satire is amazing!” I was a huge fan of Paul Verhoeven and then Neumeier and John Davison and Phil Tippett, the same team that did Robocop, and I thought, “They hit that one over the head.” And I thought they did it again on this one, but it didn’t.

I think the longevity is because Verhoeven and Neumeier are geniuses. They have genius IQs. That’s just what they have. They really understand political satire. Unfortunately, it’s prevalent today–maybe even more so in today’s political climate–but people need to have a sense of humor about it. Sometimes it helps you get through some of that bullsh*t, and then also helps people talk and you can get to the other side.

Starship Troopers has been accepted by the left and the right, and it’s been accepted by pacifists and military members. They all seem to get it and claim it as their own. I’ve experienced it in different places. I went to a Green Party screening once, and they’re like, “This is our movie.” But I’ve also been told that Clinton loved it, and I was also told that Bush loved it and they would play it in the War Room.

I’ve been told that by different people. Karl Rove told me that at one point. It’s so interesting that this movie is beloved by opposites, but I think what it does is it gets people to talk. When you get people to talk, then there’s a chance. I think that this movie brings up discussions with humor, and people get to laugh, and that’s the best way to do it. I think that’s why it keeps coming up.

Then all these games have been inspired by it, and I’ve always wondered when they were going to actually do it, and I finally found the team that did it right. I’m just so proud to be a part of it, and they let me in. I feel honored beyond belief.

Woods: Every time I’ve watched Starship Troopers, I’ve noticed something different. I think that’s what makes a classic a classic. Every time you listen to a great song, you hear something different. You interpret the lyrics in a different way. I always try to find someone who hasn’t watched it. That’s an excuse for me to watch this for the 23rd time. And if it’s their first time, I’m staring at them wondering how they are interpreting this movie.

It’s been famously misinterpreted. Is it fascist? Is it satire? Is it pro-war? Is it anti-war? As Casper was saying, I think that is a credit to Ed and Paul that they’ve managed to find that balance. Like a good art piece, you can interpret it in multiple different ways. I think this is why it stood the test of time and why it keeps coming back for reinterpretation.

Barker: I get the same thing when I introduce people to the game. They just get this chuckle, like, “Oh, I get it. It’s absurd.” It’s crazy what the game is doing, and it’s a delight to give that experience to people. It’s something that not many other games even try to replicate, right? I always think of it as this different type of fun of being overwhelmed, but just on the cusp of wrestling it back. It’s not frustrating. It’s okay to die. It’s satisfying to shoot and it’s just crazy with all the gadgets and the new weapons you can use.

It takes what the film did and just extends it. We’re telling you stories in the same world and we’re trying to keep the same spirit alive, but it’s a multifaceted, crazy cornucopia of different ideas, improvisation, and art. Any good art reflects what people are bringing to it, right? That’s what I loved about the first movie.

When the opportunity to work on this game came out, I was just like, “Yeah, as long as they’re doing it right.” And yeah, it’s amazing. If I can just show it to anyone off the street and they play for a while, and they’re like “Great!” then I’ve done my job.

Woods: That’s important. To a lot of people, the IP actually doesn’t mean anything to them because they never saw it for the first time, so we couldn’t lean on the IP entirely. You can’t make a bad game and slap a good IP on it, and suddenly it’s a good game. We still have to make sure the game is fun and it’s accessible so that people go, “Oh, wait, it’s a 16-player, co-op shooter, and it’s amazing!” The fact that it means nothing to them doesn’t matter. They’re still having fun.

Van Dien: And if they go and see the movie afterward, all the more power to them. I think they’ll go “Oh, my God,” and then they’ll come back and play the game even more. Everybody that I know that I worked with in Starship Troopers in all the different worlds–animated as well–I know they’re all going to want to play this game. I already know they all will. I still see all the actors and everybody. It’s going to be funny as hell, and I’m going to play it. I know my daughter wants to play, and she’s a gamer and a streamer. We’re going to have so much fun playing and she always goes, “I’m going to be Johnny Rico, dad.”

How Offworld Industries Captures the Soul of Starship Troopers

Q: Earlier you mentioned going through the movie as a checklist. Can you talk more about how you try to capture the soul of Starship Troopers in gameplay?

Barker: That’s my job. Every day is trying to recapture that and be really true to that experience. One of the greatest challenges of my career is creating emergent gameplay that allows you to relive these moments from the film. In AAA terms, they would spend a crap-ton of money, make it incredible, and it would be scripted, but it happens once and then that’s it.

My approach is that I want to empower the players to have a moment where they’re riding a tanker bug, they’re part of the team that catches the brain bug. They’re fighting through these areas of the map that are filled with dead bodies and “I can’t get to my team and they need me because I’m a medic.” And you know, I’m using this healing aura, and then suddenly there’s a bloody bug grenade that flies out of the air and lands in my healing aura and blows everyone up. It’s about this push-pull, risk-reward.

It’s also about keeping the right number of bugs on the players, which makes it almost overwhelming, but there’s that little ray of hope that you can push through. It’s a delicate dance with a lot of different game mechanics and we’re throwing six different classes, a whole career’s worth of progression, new bugs, new technology, and changing the gameplay mechanics all at the same time and trying to playtest with 16 players all the time, which takes development time. It is bonkers.

Barker: But that is one of the greatest things about Offworld: we’ll never do anything half-assed, we’ll do it all the way, and we’ll wear that on our sleeve. 1.0 is going to be presented with that, but it’s one hump of many.

I can’t wait to share it with everyone, and I’m really just putting a tentpole in the sand being like, “This is where I’m putting it. What do you guys think?” Because we’re going to 2.0, we’re going to 3.0. It’s going to keep going and going.

Maurice: There’s no shortage of moments that are still to come, and what Chaz is speaking to is the passion of our team. We’re a small studio, but our team is like 30 passionate people in Canada and the US and in Europe, who are not just uber fans of Starship Troopers, we’re fans of the entire franchise, and so respectful of it, and the passion is coming through in every feature.

Working with the community is key with us because we’ve been working with the community for over a year and getting their feedback, adjusting some of the features, and moving things around the roadmap. We’re going to continue to do that past 1.0. But like Chaz was saying, we’ve easily got plans for five years of content just to realize the vision of where this game is going, so we’re really excited.

Woods: The thing that struck me the most working here is that there’s very much this mantra of like, “Good ideas don’t have a job title.” You can be the janitor, the person who makes the coffee, it doesn’t matter. It’s not a case of only the people in leadership having the ideas and the willingness to share those ideas. It’s people having the confidence no matter where they are in the company to bring those ideas to the people who can make a difference and implement them. I think this speaks to how passionate people are about the games we make. Not just Starship Troopers, but all the games we make.

Barker: To give you an example, the lure grenade as an idea and a feature. I was watching it develop over Slack. Our composer was like, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we had a hologram of a trooper saluting and saying stuff and the bugs rushing it?”

Maurice: Somebody comes over to my desk and says, “Pete, can we use holograms?” And I’m like, “Why not?” Holograms is a tech that you don’t necessarily see a lot in the movies, right? But it was just an easy conversation talking to Sony. Saying, “This is something that’s good for the game, good for the franchise, and a whole lot of fun.” All they said was, “Make it this color.”

Van Dien: I watched them do it. I would just be up there and they’d go around to their different tables, and they treat everybody like this. They’re genuinely like this with all their people and it was so cool to see. It’s like a great family. It’s beautiful to see that, to witness it, and now be a part of it.

Barker: We also have Discord, a beta team, Facebook, and Steam, and we get a lot of great feedback from the community. We just don’t have enough hours in the day to execute it, so half my job is just prioritizing the right stuff at the right time. I have to say the class redesign that we did was a lot of stuff coming from the community and regular feedback on ideas and stuff like that. People say “Early Access is a scam” or whatever, and I’m like, “No. Not if you take it seriously.”

It’s meant to be a new way of developing games that isn’t quite as obtuse or difficult to see as Kickstarter might be where you’ve given sh*tload of money to someone, and you have no idea if I’m going to deliver it. This is what real development is really like. You’re delivering working software to an audience, and you go, “How’s it going?” And they go, “Could be better that way.” Alright, cool. That’s what development is and what it should be. When development goes wrong, it’s when that doesn’t happen for six months and everyone’s standing around being like, “This game is terrible.”

I don’t think there’s a better community than Starship Troopers for Early Access.

Maurice: They’re amazing. They’re role-playing in Discord, they’re empowering. They don’t take guff from anyone. We want to make sure when you come into our communities, it’s a safe place for everybody. We want criticism, we want fair criticism, and we want it to be done in a respectful way.

We’re gamers, too. I play so many different games across all genres. We know how hard it is to find a good game to buy, but we also know how hard it is to make a good game. That’s why I’m in Discord more than I should be. I love talking to the community all the time and just hearing what they think, and it’s like I spoil my own secrets all the time in there. I’ve said three things in Discord over the last month that spoil potentially three things coming to the game within the next year and nobody has caught on yet.

I’ll give you an example of that: There’s a new bug we put in our game a while ago called the bombardier bug in 0.7. I teased that in November of last year by saying, “Wouldn’t it be cool to have a Timbit bug?” Nobody caught on. Timbit is a famous donut hole in Canada, and nobody caught on. All of a sudden, it released and members started giving me guff saying, “Oh, now we know what you meant.” Things like that. You need to have that engagement with the community. It makes it fun for them and fun for us.

Earlier you were talking about your passion and I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve heard someone say they’ve liked the entire Starship Troopers franchise, including Starship Troopers 2.

Maurice: Think about what Starship Troopers 2 did, though. It introduced a different dynamic into the game and to the movies. It’s dark, it’s got a horror theme, there’s a lot of mistrust going on, and it introduces a lot of interesting themes. We have a mutator called Pitch Dark in our game which was a direct influence from that, and the community loves or hates that which is great, right? If you’re hitting it 50/50 you’re probably doing something right. But also there are the hero characters in there like Dax, the hero of the Federation.

Van Dien: Richard Burgi!

Maurice: Some other things were introduced like the fence with the bolts of lightning that discharge. We have things like that in our game. That has allowed us to introduce those really easily into the franchise because it was established in lore, and we can now build on that stuff like Traitor to the Federation. As much as a lot of people have probably never seen those four other movies or dismissed them, it sets the table. Because we have friendly fire, if you shoot someone you become a traitor, and then your people who you shot now can hunt you down and shoot you. It’s our way of dealing with griefing in a very soft way. You get kicked out of that one match and can’t rejoin that match and be a team killer anymore. Yeah, I love them all. I love them all for different reasons.

Van Dien: It’s kind of cool. It’s refreshing. I have had people say to me that they’ve liked the different movies, and I’ve always been intrigued by that, but they always say it’s nothing compared to the first one. I always get that, but I love that they’ve embraced everything and because they’re making no exceptions, good or bad. They mix it all in, and it’s turned out really good and turned out better than anything. They’ve added bugs from the other movies.

Barker: And there’s more to come from the other movies!

Q: Any final thoughts you’d like to share?

Van Dien: I want to say, “Welcome to the Roughnecks! You know what to do. You’re it until you’re dead or I find someone better.”

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