Welcome to the Roughnecks

Blasting bugs and shooting the breeze with Starship Troopers game lead Peter Maurice and star Casper Van Dien

- Peter Maurice and star Casper Van Dien

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.”