Dan Hess, Wes Hoffman (2026-05-28 interview)

Dan Hess Wes Hoffman
Subject Nintendo 64 Date 2026-05-28 Interviewed by CartridgeCulture

Part 1 conducted on 2026-03-25

Ashley Rojas: Hey, Dan. This is Ashley. How you doing?

Dan Hess: Hi! How are you?

Good! Doing good over here.

Dan Hess: Same. The sun just went down. I was in here earlier and I was an hour off. I thought it was earlier than I remembered. Oh shoot, you're on Pacific Time, not Mountain Time. It's all good.

I really appreciate you giving me your time today.

Dan Hess: Hey, no problem.

Yeah. Pilotwings was one of my earliest gaming memories, I think. I loved that. Your music had a big part of that.

Dan Hess: Honestly, one of the greatest joys of doing that is hearing from people years later that I've somehow positively influenced in their taste for music. You can't ask for anything more than that. That's amazing. One second, I'm going to move this light a little bit. I think it'll probably help you see me better, maybe. Tell me if this is getting better or worse. Is that better?

That looks good, yeah.

Dan Hess: Okay. Most often, that's what I get, even if they're just comments people send me on YouTube. I get emails, I get LinkedIn messages, and most often I hear that it made the game more enjoyable for them, or that somehow they found that they love jazz, funk, fusion, all these different types of music. That's really unexpected and very cool.

I bet. Do you hear that a lot?

Dan Hess: I hear that a lot. Every time, it never gets old. It's a privilege, man. You have no expectations going into something like that. We were a technical company. I did some music for Paradigm as we were building the company, but mostly there was a company called Magic Edge in California. You know about Magic Edge?

Yeah, I did a little bit of research.

Dan Hess: Okay. Magic Edge was my first opportunity to actually write music other than for trade shows and stuff we did. This was a completely different thing. I certainly never went into it thinking I'm going to create music that's going to blow kids' minds and make them listen to different types of music.

It'll go down as historically notable, which it is. Absolutely. Speaking as a historian.

Dan Hess: Thanks, Ashley. Appreciate that, man.

Absolutely. Just to get started here, could you tell us a little bit about growing up in Michigan, I believe?

Dan Hess: Sure. What do you want to know about it?

I guess your musical background and how you first got into music, and your early inspirations.

Dan Hess: I think for some people it's just in them, and it takes somebody outside of you to recognize it. In this case, I was three years old. I was at my grandmother's house, in the basement. The adults would be upstairs and us kids would be doing our thing in the basement. They had an old piano there, and I was plinking out some songs.

My mother went to call me upstairs and my grandma goes, "Who's playing piano down there?" My mom's like, "I have no idea. It must be Danny." My grandma goes, "Well, you better get that boy some lessons." My other grandparents actually bought a piano so they could have lessons there. By the time I was almost five, four and a half or something like that, I was taking piano. I think it was in me first, and then you take the lessons to bring it out.

When were you - oh, I'm sorry, go ahead.

Dan Hess: No, I was going to say, in Detroit we had a wealth of music. I grew up in a great place for music. I was born in '65. When I was a kid, Beatlemania was going on, but in Detroit we had Motown. We had Stevie Wonder and Aretha Franklin and Parliament.

Real funk.

Dan Hess: Real funk, real jazz, amazing jazz, amazing blues, amazing funk. Back in those days, every bar had live music. I feel bad for kids these days, man.

That's so cool.

Dan Hess: If you're a musician, you can't get a gig these days, not like we could. When I was 15, I was playing bars four nights a week, sometimes five. It's crazy. That doesn't exist anymore.

No, that whole world is pretty much gone.

Dan Hess: Yeah, so sad.

I always like to say that the interviews are a good way to preserve some of that.

Dan Hess: Yeah. I think the more you talk about these things, the more people learn how things were. Somebody might get a bug up their butt to make some changes.

Yeah, maybe, maybe. You hope.

Dan Hess: We hope. Yeah, Detroit was a place to grow up. It really was.

What was your first introduction to, I guess, synthesizers and/or electronic music?

Dan Hess: When I was seven - back in the elementary school days, when they have assemblies and we all sit on the floor in the gym and they do something - somebody thought it'd be cool to hire somebody to bring their ARP synthesizer in. This was a monumental day for me. Back then, the synthesizer took up about a room, and they just made sounds. I was so young, I don't remember specifics, but I remember it was mind-blowing because I was already playing piano. I'm like, "Wait a minute, there's a keyboard that sounds like that." It was about an hour, two-hour-long demonstration, but my mind was blown.

It was several years later. I was probably 13 and I thought, I want to be in a band, but I had no way to be in a band. I couldn't drag my acoustic piano around. I talked to my parents. I said, "I want to play live, but I have no way to do it." They helped me buy a Rhodes electric piano. We went and got it used. It was great. We got an amazing deal on it. I didn't know that at the time. I think we paid 800 for the Rhodes, a three-way cabinet, and a Music Man head, which, if I had it today, would probably be worth a couple grand.

It was a great Rhodes. That's another thing: I had no idea how great that Rhodes was, because I've played hundreds of Rhodes since then, and there are very few that have the touch that thing did. It was fluid, and most of them are really clunky. It sounded cool. Now we love the Rhodes, but they were almost going out at that time. This is like '78. I wouldn't say they were going out, but people were looking for the next thing.

We'd had the Rhodes. When you're a musician in the '60s and early '70s - people always wonder why there's Wurlitzers and Rhodes on everything. That's all we had. Live, you had two choices. Well, there was the RMI. They had a few other things, but primarily you either played a Wurlitzer or you played a Rhodes.

Then the synthesizers - it was the Minimoog that did it for me. I think the Minimoog came out in '69. Very privileged. The Beatles had one, but very few people did. Maybe it's earlier than that, '68, somewhere in there. I was 13 or 14 years old, and a girl in high school had one. She didn't know what to do with it. I don't even know how she got it, but she offered it to me and I had it probably over a year. I should have just bought it from her. What an idiot. I was also 14, 15 years old at that point.

That's where I really got into synthesis, because I would put it in my lap. My parents would go to bed and I'd get my old giant headphones out, plug them into the headphone thing, and I could just learn how to manipulate it. Those were knobs, really easy. When I move this, this happens. All my basics of synthesis came from that Minimoog. This probably won't mean anything to you, but I discovered resonance and resonance modulation, which every video game ever uses for sound effects, all that stuff. It was by accident, just by messing around with knobs. I'm like, whoa, what's that? Boy, that was monumental for me.

It's incredible that you're largely self-taught. You had the piano training.

Dan Hess: I was classically trained and all that, but I didn't apply myself like I should have. When I would go to the recitals, there were a couple of the guys a few years older than me that I really went, wow, just incredible. They were practicing a couple hours a day, and I wasn't practicing my lessons a couple hours a day. I was learning Elton John and Emerson, Lake & Palmer and stuff. That's what I was doing.

Yeah. What other kind of music did you listen to when you were growing up, like influences?

Dan Hess: Like I said, Motown was definitely an influence. As a kid, it's radio, and I was in Detroit, so it was a lot of soulful stuff. I lived back and forth between here and Iowa, where my wife grew up. She grew up in a town of 300 people. I grew up in a town of five million. She grew up listening to classic country, which she still has love for. I grew up listening to Sly and the Family Stone and Stevie Wonder and Motown. It's not even an effort. When you're walking around the mall with your parents, that's what's playing.

That's normal to you.

Dan Hess: Yeah, it's normal. Right, exactly. We had all the other stuff too, because AM radio back then, when I was a kid, played everything. Canada was right across the river, and the Canadian station, CKLW, was pop, but there aren't stations like that anymore. It was all pop. They played pop rock, they played pop funk, pop soul, and you got all that wrapped into one package.

Yeah, man. Radio doesn't even exist anymore. Of course it does, but nowhere near on the same scale. Obviously music is still being introduced to people, but the channels are so different and everything's so controlled. You really don't get that organic - same thing with television. Everything's on demand now, so you don't really have that curation aspect to it all.

Dan Hess: Yeah, you bring up something interesting. Radio and TV did two things other than expose us to whatever it was they were showing us. They unified us. When you went to work the next day, you talked about what you saw on TV, because there were only nine stations max, maybe. You had the majors, then you had your VHF stations, UHF stations. Maybe if you're in a big city, you had five more there, but if you had 10 stations, you were lucky. Most people were watching ABC, NBC, CBS, and there were no VCRs. You watched it live or you missed it, and everybody talked about it. They unified you.

On radio, depending on what kind of music you listened to - most of my friends were listening to rock - everybody heard the same ads. It's, "Hey, man, so-and-so's coming to the club, we should go see him tomorrow," because you all heard the same ads. It really was a unifying thing. We are so non-unified right now as a country.

Absolutely.

Dan Hess: That's part of the problem. We are splintered into all our different sources where we get our music and entertainment from. It's powerful.

Right. Yeah, the cultural zeitgeist used to be a little smaller, and everyone was on the same page about it.

Dan Hess: Yes, you had to be.

It was also regional.

Dan Hess: Oh, absolutely it was regional. Yes. I grew up in Detroit. Bob Seger was on the radio constantly. If I went outside of Michigan, anywhere south of Ohio, they're like, "Bob Seger? Never even heard of him." Now, if they were older rockers, they might remember some of his earlier stuff, but kids my age had no idea. It wasn't until Risky Business, the movie with Tom Cruise - when he was 15, they made this movie. I don't know if you know this iconic scene in that movie where he comes out in his underwear -

With the socks.

Dan Hess: It's iconic now. That put Bob Seger on the map, and then I would travel and people started to know who Bob Seger was. Regional, absolutely it was regional. Yeah, man.

Speaking of traveling, could you tell us about some of the bands that you were in? I think you were in a couple before Sonic Arts, or maybe during. Could you just tell us about the bands that you were in?

Dan Hess: My first band was just a top 40 band, because I decided I wasn't going to flip burgers. I wanted to do something musical, and I'd just gotten that Rhodes piano I was telling you about. Back in those days we didn't have the internet, so we had classified ads in your newspaper - musicians wanted for bands. There were a lot of keyboard players wanted, because there just weren't that many keyboard players that had equipment. I just started calling numbers, and this woman answered.

Now, this is the days of analog phones. In analog phones, you could actually hear things over the other line. It wasn't being compressed and digitized, so you could hear music in the background. She said, "Hey, can you play me something?" I sat at the piano and played her something. She's like, "Oh, great. Can you sing?" I sang her something. She goes, "Oh my god, this is great. Perfect. Can you make rehearsal on Sunday? I want you to come meet the band." I said, "Well, can you pick me up?" She goes, "Why, is something wrong with your car?" I went, "I don't drive." She's like, "Wait a minute, how old are you?"

Yeah.

Dan Hess: "15." I don't even know if I was 15. I was either 14 or just about to become 15. I was right in there. She said, "Screw it, I'm picking you up." The rest is history. I played in that band, and I'm really glad I did. There was no original music, it was just top 40 stuff we were learning, but I learned how to be a pro. At first it was just a couple nights a week, and then it became Wednesday through Saturday, sometimes Sunday.

My parents said, "Look, you can do this, but the first sign your grades go down, the first time we try to wake you up in the morning - if we have to wake you up and you're cranky in the morning, done." Oh man. I had to make sure I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed every morning. When you're playing until two o'clock in the morning, getting to bed at three, and your alarm goes off three hours later at six - you remember what high school was like when you just wanted to sleep all day. Last thing you wanted to do is get three hours of sleep and drag your butt to school. Anyways, I got through that.

A couple years into that - my guitar player was just a little older than me, and the rest of them were in their 20s. All we did is sit on our breaks and talk about, "Screw this, we're going to have our own band." We wanted to have an original band. Back then there was quite a scene in Detroit of original music. Sometimes we'd play a club that was attached to other clubs, and because we were playing there, the bouncers would let us into the other clubs - because we were severely underage - and we'd go watch these other bands. It was mind-blowing.

These were big. Back then in Detroit, if you go to a nice-size club, there could be a thousand people there on a Wednesday, sometimes 1,500. These are big clubs. Think of it - no internet, no VHS movies to watch, nothing. What did you do? You went out. Your friends: "What are you doing tonight? I'll meet you at the Ritz. I'll meet you at New York, New York," all these clubs. No cell phones. If you wanted to find your friends and they weren't home, you'd go to the club to see if you could find them. Everybody was going out. You're just out. It's what you did. I didn't even drink, but I was always out because I was playing most of the time.

We started to see these original bands writing their own stuff and seeing hundreds of people enjoying it. I'm like, "This is what I want to do." A year after that, we left and formed our own band. It became Second Self. I don't know if you found that. I actually left the band as they were getting signed, because I was just burned out. Second Self really officially formed in '83. We probably were playing together in '82. We started playing live in '83, and by '88, when I left the band, my firstborn was on the way. I was just tired of it. I loved a lot of it, but when you're with six guys in a van touring the country, there's a lot of fun, but it gets a little old too.

I can imagine.

Dan Hess: Yeah.

Especially at the age that you were at.

Dan Hess: Yeah. It's funny. All these guys are going on. My drummer from that band, Jeff Fowlkes - he just cut 40 songs with Dolly Parton last year. He's an amazing drummer. If you're playing for Dolly, you're pretty good. He's great. What a feel. We've played together all through the years on different projects.

My lead singer and I built a studio called the White Room Studio in Detroit. A bunch of big artists recorded there in the late '80s, early '90s, including Kid Rock and Uncle Kracker, all those guys. In the process of building the studio, he wanted to make a vintage recording studio. He was digging up all this old gear and he discovered kind of where the gold was buried - and I don't mean just in the States, I mean in the world, because this stuff is all over - and he started to make money by finding it and selling it. He thought, "I can make a living off of this." It became Vintage King Audio. They're the world's leading supplier of vintage recording equipment, and new equipment now. Yeah, they did pretty well for themselves.

I thought I was taking a break because I had a kid on the way. In '89, my son Tyler was born, and I was just enjoying not being on the road, not playing every week. You don't stop music. I'm still writing, I'm still every once in a while performing, but I'm mostly in my little basement studio writing and recording and loving it.

Some of those bands I told you about, that I was sneaking in to see when I was 15, 16 - one of them was a band called Bittersweet Alley. They were an amazing rock band in Detroit. Their singer/keyboard player had a stunning voice, like mesmerizing, soulful and powerful. He called me out of the blue. We knew each other, but not really well. He said, "Hey, we got a project going. We're writing, and I wanted to bring you in on this project." I go, "Man, Bill, I appreciate it, I'm flattered, but I'm just enjoying life right now, giving the music a little break." He goes, "I appreciate that. I just want you to know that if you don't say yes to me right now, I'm just going to call you every day until you say it."

I said, "I'll tell you what, send me something. What are you guys doing? What kind of music?" He goes, "Well, that's why I'm calling you. I'm not a big fan of the way our music's coming out. It's really more poppy than I want it to be. I always thought Second Self, your band, was anything but." He brought over a cassette, and I sat with it for a few days, and it was really poppy for me. I said, "Tell you what, why don't you guys just come over, bring your acoustic guitars, nothing electric, and let's just see if there's chemistry."

At that point, it was just three of them. They had two guitarists and the singer, Bill. They came over and sat in my music room with me, and we started singing a little bit, and I really felt the chemistry. I also really liked the songs when they weren't filled with all the stuff they had in the recordings. When they were stripped down, it was just three acoustics and voices. After about an hour, I looked at Bill, I said, "I didn't think I liked this material, but I like it the way it is." They all agreed. They're like, "Yeah, this is way better."

This is '89, this is just before the MTV Unplugged stuff became a big thing. We decided right then and there, let's try recording. I go, "I agree, let's get together and rewrite, but let's do it this way. Let's keep it acoustic guitars, acoustic piano, old-school instruments, nothing new." We didn't even have a drummer, and that band was just so much fun. We only practiced one day a week. We didn't really practice, we just got together and wrote songs, and I loved it. Cherished it. Every Wednesday night I'd go home with three new songs on a cassette. It was an amazing experience. Everybody could sing. We had four lead singers. That band was called Skeleton Crew.

Skeleton Crew. Okay, gotcha. Yeah.

Dan Hess: I don't know how much research you did, but one of the trivia notes on Skeleton Crew would be that they talked us into playing the show Star Search, which is the '80s, '90s version of American Idol. It's a longer story than you probably - just to say, we turned them down, but they were very persuasive. The persuasion was like, "Look, you think our show's hokey, right?" We're like, "Yes." "You're probably concerned that some of the record labels you're talking to might think it's a negative if you come on the show." We said, "Yes." They said, "Do your friends watch Star Search?" "No." "What are you worried about? Do you think the labels are watching Star Search?" "No."

They said, "Look, you come down here - we're filming at Disney World this year. We put you up, carte blanche, in the best resorts, and we give you carte blanche to every park here. Eat anywhere you want for free." Wow. "What's the worst thing that happens? You come down here with your whole band and wives, girlfriends, on us, and you have a five-day vacation. That's the worst thing that could happen. You lose, you come home. When's the last time you and your band and your wives all went on a vacation?" We're like, "Yeah, never." They sold us on it.

Pretty persuasive.

Dan Hess: Yeah, it was persuasive, and we had an absolute riot. It was just off-the-hook fun. You had a show day, you had basically a day off, a rehearsal day, and a show day. The thing is, we didn't count on this: we kept winning, and we were down there a long time, and we all had things going on. My bass player had a mailman position. You couldn't just be gone for that. Three of us had kids. It got a little touchy for a while. In the course of all that playing down there, we beat this young band called Girls Tyme. You know what their name was after that?

Beyoncé.

Dan Hess: Yeah, before that, though - her band.

Destiny's Child.

Dan Hess: It was Destiny's Child.

Destiny's Child. Yeah. Oh my god. Wow.

Dan Hess: I will say this - I don't know if we would've beaten them if we were allowed to choose the order of the songs that we did. Look at the way Star Search did it in the '90s compared to the '80s. In the '80s, everything was live. Apparently some act sued them because they said, "We lost because of the way you made us sound in the studio." They thought, "You know what, screw that. Here's what we're going to do from now on. You're going to record all the music except for the vocals, and then you're going to come down here and sing over it live."

The problem with that is it opened up the door for anybody who wasn't even a musician. They could just get backing tracks and come on the show and sing, like a karaoke thing. We were a real band. We had acoustics. We could sit down on the corner of a street and perform. We wouldn't even have been against many of these acts if they had to play live. That's the way they did it.

The first time we came down, we were only there for one show. It was the last show of the first half of the season, so we only had to have one song. They called us, like, "We need you sooner than we thought. Can you fly down next week? We had a cancellation, we need you to come." We recorded one song, came down and did it, and won. Then they brought us back for the second half of the season. In between, which is like a month, they're like, "Okay, record six songs you're going to perform. We need at least six songs in case you guys keep winning" - which we ended up needing them all.

We came down with these six songs. You think you know best - you almost never do. We thought, this is the order we're going to do these songs. If we win, we'll play this song, and if we win, we'll do this song, whatever. In our own minds, we had this order down.

I think it was the first week we were back to film the show. The way that the stage worked for Star Search, it rotated. You would have one act facing the audience and the other one ready to be facing. When they were done, it would just rotate and then you'd be facing the audience. We were on the back end just messing around, because something was going on out front, somebody was rehearsing whatever they were doing. We're always singing and playing. The producer of the show - I can't remember his name, he had produced many big TV shows - sat by the side of the stage and just watched us perform for a while, and he just shook his head.

He goes, "You guys are amazing to be able to do this live. I need to talk to you guys. I'm going to ask you a question, and your inclination is going to be to say no to this question, but I really need you to hear me on this. I want to choose the order of the songs that you guys perform." Immediately you're thinking, "Okay, he's thinking we're going to win. Otherwise, why would you even worry about what songs you do at a time?" Of course we were knee-jerk, like, "I don't know about that." He goes, "Guys." He looked right at us with this look and he said, "I need you to trust me, just like that." What do you say? This is the producer of the show. I said, "Okay." Thank god we did, because what he knew that we didn't know is who we would be facing if we won.

Oh, right. Yeah.

Dan Hess: We were acoustic, so our songs varied dramatically stylistically, and he chose the song that would best be matched for our opponent. When he chose for us to face the Destiny's Child, Girls Tyme band, it was a sweet ballad, big four-part harmonies. If we had done one of our rockers or something, I think the perception would've been, yeah, here's these bad boys from Detroit, and these little girls, these cute little girls, and I think we'd have lost. We ended up winning.

There are a few crazy things about it. The meet and greet that day off I told you about: every day off, the new talent would come in, and everybody would meet in a common area and they'd introduce everybody and we'd just kind of hang out, friendly. Beyoncé's father came up to us and he goes, "Y'all are Skeleton Crew?" I'm like, "Yeah." He goes, "Yeah, my girls are coming in. I think they're going to beat you." We're like, "Good, we need to go home. Please send us home, we've been here too long." He was really cool, really friendly.

Flash forward to the show. I remember, at rehearsal day, it was me and my bass player, Chris, and we were hanging out with the girls, just, "Hey, how you guys enjoying the park?" Because we're at Disney World, and let me tell you, we were enjoying it. They all said, "Oh, we're not allowed to go yet." I'm like, "What do you mean you're not allowed to go? We're living here." They're like, "No, not until we beat you." We're like, "Oh, okay." They didn't beat us.

What I remember is afterwards they were all in tears, and Beyoncé's dad came over to us and he says, "Thanks a lot, guys. Now I got to take a week off and take the girls to Disney World, because I didn't -" That was the last week. Remember, these were just girls. We didn't know they were going to be Destiny's Child and/or Beyoncé. They were just really talented performers. I lost track of them. I didn't lose track of some of the other people that we met, like Beth Hart, if you know Beth. Beth was on the show with us.

The name is familiar.

Dan Hess: Do yourself a favor and look up Beth. She's a stunning performer. If you're looking to see things she's done that are impressive, she's on the Jools Holland show, probably seven or eight years ago, I don't even know how long it was. She plays a song called "The Baddest of Blues" or something like that. You'll find it. Beth Hart, phenomenal.

"Baddest of Blues."

Dan Hess: "Baddest of Blues" on the Jools Holland show. Watch that version. Then she performs with Jeff Beck, as his lead singer, at one of the festivals - Crossroads, I think. They do a classic, "I'm going down, down, down, down." It's just a classic rock blues song. She tears it up. She's amazing. Follow Beth.

Justin Timberlake was on the show with us. He was a little kid in a cowboy hat, 10 years old, but I remembered the name. When he started to become famous, I'm like, no kidding. Dave Chappelle was on the show with us, and because we were a band and we were real, all of us kind of gravitated together. In between, on our nights, we would be out at the pools. We'd get away from the resorts as much as we could so we could jam, and all these guys would hang out with us. Dave Chappelle was one of them. He's a really shy, cool guy. He was only 18 or 19 too. Hilarious.

Oh my gosh.

Dan Hess: There were a lot of great, talented people that we met doing the show. Again, I didn't follow Beyoncé. I didn't know who she was. When they came out, I didn't put two and two together. I never realized, oh, those were those girls we beat on Star Search - until I was at a gig in 2014, I think. My phone is just in my pocket blowing up. It won't stop. I'm like, "What is going on?" Finally I tell my partner one second, and I pull my phone out and there's hundreds of texts, just crazy. Everybody's saying, "I just saw you on TMZ. I just saw you on VH1. I saw you." I'm like, "What is happening?" They kept saying something about Beyoncé, but I couldn't read it because I was performing live at the time.

It turns out Beyoncé, unannounced to the world, dropped a whole album's worth of videos right around Christmastime. This one song, "Flawless," which was a big hit for her, starts off with a montage of Ed McMahon on Star Search introducing them. It briefly shows them come on stage, and then it cuts to the video. At the end of the video, it cuts to my band standing on the Star Search stage, and the champions received four stars and the challenger three stars, blah, blah, blah, and it ends. Her whole point was, like, look, you hit these problems in life and you rise above it. That's why she said she put it in there.

It created such a stir, because every news organization - she was the biggest star in the world at that point - every news organization wanted to know who these white boys were that beat Beyoncé. We did all these interviews. It died down after about a month, but it was a thing. That's what made us aware. Holy crap, that was Beyoncé. That was Destiny's Child. We've done documentaries on it since then and stuff. Interestingly enough, just because she put the video out, Skeleton Crew got back together just long enough to record one of her songs, and we posted it. It's out there on YouTube.

Oh, no way.

Dan Hess: Of all songs, we recorded our version of "If I Were a Boy."

Man, I would love to see her react to that. I'm sure she'd have a pretty good -

Dan Hess: I would too.

Yeah, that'd be a lot of fun.

Dan Hess: We are so down here. This is her life and this is our little part of it. It's not even going to register as a blip on her radar.

Do you encounter that, where, like you said, you're kind of here, and then all of a sudden the news will hit, or you'll be included in something, and your popularity, your visibility, will shoot up to here, and then it's down here again?

Dan Hess: Yeah, in a small way. Because I've been playing music professionally since I was 14, I've played with a lot of people that have gone on to do great things. Chad Smith, drummer for the Red Hot Chili Peppers - we play together all the time. Chad was in a band called Toby Redd. I tell you what, Chad has not changed, at least not for the negative. He's the same guy he was back then. He never got cocky. I'm so proud of him. What a great person, let alone an amazing performer, amazing drummer.

There's a lot of that in my life, and I've played on a lot of big stages, with a lot of big bands. Sometimes things come around from those days. Of course the Pilotwings thing, the video game thing - no way to predict that. That didn't come back into my life till 2009-ish, or maybe even later.

Oh, interesting.

Dan Hess: It was later than that.

Was that around the rise of YouTube, when you could start sharing this music easily again, you think?

Dan Hess: Yeah. I never thought to go on YouTube and type in Pilotwings 64, Dan Hess. In fact, it was a young bass player, probably late 20s - maybe it was more like 2010 or '11, I think, when he made me aware of this. He was my bass player for a couple weeks. The second week I played with him, after the gig, he said, "Are you the Dan Hess that wrote Pilotwings?" I went, "What would make you think that?" He goes, "I just had a feeling, the way you play. I grew up on that."

That's so cool.

Dan Hess: He goes, "You need to go on YouTube and type in your name and Pilotwings 64 and see what comes up." It blew my mind. Every song I'd written on the game - at that time there were two different streams, two different hosts on YouTube, two different pages that had every single one of my songs with a hundred thousand comments on every one. That's when I learned. That's when I sat down and went, "This is mind-blowing." These kids, they got it. They dug it. When I did the game in '96 - I created it in '95, '96 - it wasn't really panned, but it wasn't well received by the 30-somethings, 40-year-olds who were reviewing it. They didn't get it.

The game magazines and stuff?

Dan Hess: All that. "Sounds like porno music" - which it kind of does, when you think about it. It wasn't recorded music, I had to do a little sample, so it's little hokey drum sounds and all this stuff. I did the best I could, but it's a little funky, a little synthy, so you could see where they would say that.

When the opportunity came up to do this soundtrack, they brought me to the office down in Dallas at Paradigm, and I got to see the artist renderings of what the game was supposedly going to look like. You remember, the game is all these stretched, crazy-looking characters. To me, they looked funky. They sent me home to come up with some music. I'm a Detroiter. I grew up on funky stuff. I think these things look funky, so I'm going to make this thing groove. If you really look at that soundtrack and the other soundtracks that were out at the same time, it stands out now that I'm looking back at it with some years between it, because it's groove-based. My two core instruments I built every song on are bass and drums.

Video games before that - because we weren't recording music, before me they were working with chips. The Nintendo 64 didn't have a chip, unfortunately. I wish it had a synth chip like the Sega did, because the Sega had a fat-sounding synth. None of that. They're like, "Oh, you want a sound? You're going to have to sample it yourself." Luckily - as you talk about Sonic Arts - I was a sound designer, and I had been for years. I knew how to make sounds. I also knew how difficult it was going to be, because we had an eight-meg cartridge for the whole entire game. Eight meg, which is, for your young folks, about the size of an MP3 or a couple MP3s.

That's like an email.

Dan Hess: One email. That's the entire game. All the graphics, all the code, all the sound effects -

Right, and to get that all sounding nice and not compress your samples into bit-crush.

Dan Hess: Which they crushed the crap out of, because they only gave me 800K.

Yeah, that's nuts.

Dan Hess: K. Nobody even talks about K anymore. To blow some smoke up my butt, they're like, "Well, actually that's after compression, so it'll probably be almost two meg." I'm like, "Oh, wow." If I was just going to pick a few instruments to do - but I'm like, "How many tracks do you need?" It was a pretty significant list. Part of the challenge of doing something back then was you had to create a sound database for your music that served all the songs. It was a palette, and you had to design that palette very carefully, because everything you wrote in the game had to use that palette.

Right. You want to make sure that you're not sounding too samey. If you have to use the same instruments, you want to try to vary it up a little bit.

Dan Hess: Exactly. It was a no-brainer for me. With Sonic Arts, my company, we had just created this Sound of the '70s sound library that was doing well for us, and it was doing well because we were going after a two-inch tape sound. We were trying to make the sample keyboards back then sound like you're listening to old records. We went to these killer studios and we crushed it. The stuff sounded like two-inch tape, and I used some of that stuff in my kick, in my bass, and my snare. The drums and the bass were right out of that library. I could only choose one or two hits, but I made it work.

Again, back to this groove thing, everything I did was groove-based, and I love that the kids responded to that. That is awesome. If you listen to all the other soundtracks of the time before that - name a game that you liked before that. There's no groove.

Right. No, they're really - as you said that, I was like, I wonder if I can think of any examples.

Dan Hess: I can think of one.

One. Yeah. What's yours?

Dan Hess: ToeJam & Earl. To this day, the best soundtrack ever. I put it there not only because of how great the music is, but because it's created on a Sega. Even without that, if I just say, here's the music -

Oh, it's great.

Dan Hess: Unbelievable in the groove. Oh my god. When you add the fact that they did that on a Sega Genesis - mind-blowing.

You later worked with Greg, right? Later on.

Dan Hess: Oh, no, I wish. I did reach out and say how much I appreciated the soundtrack, because so many people have reached out to me and I know what it meant to me. I'm like, this is not only an amazing technical achievement, your music is just freaking incredible. Every track, mind-blowing.

It's so good.

Dan Hess: Do you have some other ones you would say are groove-based that would come to mind?

Nothing popular. I could point to very specific instances. Oh god, he was a British Sega CD composer - his name is on the tip of my tongue. He did Wonder Dog on the Sega CD.

Dan Hess: Oh, I remember -

Martin Iveson.

Dan Hess: You remember his name? I don't. I'm horrible at that. That's great.

Yeah. I'm also not a musician, so anytime I use the vocabulary, it might not be 100% applicable. I remember Martin Iveson's stuff was pretty groovy for - god, that would've been '93, '94-ish. Other than that, there really wasn't anything before. A lot of the music, if it came from a Western composer, was imitating some kind of pop rock thing or heavier rock. If it came from a Japanese composer, it usually came out of the music schools, so it sounded like traditional Japanese video game music.

Dan Hess: A little "funhouse".

A little funhouse, yeah.

Dan Hess: It was so foreign to me, because it was basically atonal music, or very modal. They were also careful with melodies, because they were afraid that if they used a melody too long, it would play over and over and you'd get sick of it. When I say tonal, modal - it's certainly not based on the scales that we use most often in American pop, like the blues scales and the - oh my god, my brain just did a complete fart, the scale I use more than any other scale, I can't even think of the name. Anyways, their use of scales and chords is so different from certainly what I did on Pilotwings, almost completely opposite. I'd never heard a video game that used that, even, other than maybe ToeJam & Earl.

When I came back from Dallas after seeing these renderings, and I thought, this is going to be funky, I started creating a database. First thing I did was kick, snare, hi-hat, and bass guitar, and then added a Rhodes electric piano thing, and then a synth pad. There's a flute in there that I ended up using, because I used it in one song - basically Birdman became the showcase for all the other sounds that I had sitting around, because I was told that it was probably going to need to be the longest piece. They envisioned this to be something a kid would enjoy doing, because there's no objectives.

No objective. Yeah.

Dan Hess: What a great idea. That's Wada-san. It was great. Those guys, the Nintendo team that came down to direct us while we did Pilotwings, were brilliant.

They actually went down to Texas.

Dan Hess: They moved there.

Whoa.

Dan Hess: Oyagi, and I'm going to - I can't remember the other guy's name.

I'm sorry, can you give those two names again? You said Wada and someone else.

Dan Hess: Wada and Oyagi. Wada-san and Oyagi-san. They were crucial. Wada-san was the director. Oyagi was responsible for gameplay. We were responsible to create the visual and the audio databases, to make this thing look a certain way and perform, and all the coding. Once the landscapes were created, Oyagi would look at it and go, "Oh, I'm going to create a chicken dive in that. Shoot, I'm going to place all these rings they have to fly through." That's what he did.

What we did is, we just created an environment. They created a lot of the game. I'm not saying we didn't contribute to it - we sure did - but I saw the genius of what he would do. He made it playable. We made it pretty, and created all the physics that make it work. Paradigm was a software house. We had been doing simulation for years, that was on our bandwagon.

Actually, if I could just start at the beginning of my Pilotwings 64 questions. Were you involved in the initial discussions with Nintendo and Paradigm at all?

Dan Hess: Only because my best friends were running the company, right?

Right. That was Paradigm Simulation, that split, and then it was Paradigm.

Dan Hess: I was supposed to be the fourth that started that company, but my ex-wife, my wife at the time, didn't want to move to Dallas.

You're working remotely.

Dan Hess: Millions of dollars I didn't make. I was still in Detroit and they were down in Dallas. I certainly knew, because it was a big deal. While we were Paradigm Simulation, we established a really close relationship with SGI, Silicon Graphics. They were the game. There's nobody that compared to them in the '90s for graphics. If you were doing graphics in the '90s, you had an SGI workstation.

The purple box that cost a billion dollars.

Dan Hess: Yeah. Before that, they were the size of a refrigerator. The ones we had were basically refrigerators. The one that we used to create our first product, in '89, '90, was about the size of a small refrigerator, and they cost $300,000 or $400,000. Crazy.

Ridiculous. Then in six years they're worth $100 on eBay.

Dan Hess: Yeah. They had the Indigos, if you ever heard of the Indigos, which were their answer for an inexpensive system. I want to say they were 20 grand or something like that, but they were very powerful for the time. SGI - we had a close relationship, because SGI knew they couldn't sell hardware, but the hardware doesn't do anything without software.

The software licenses.

Dan Hess: Right. They needed somebody to create software that actually makes this thing run. Otherwise, nobody's going to spend $300,000. Because it's capable of doing these things, they needed to actually do these things. We were really good at the lowest level of creation, all the way up. We could make hardware work and then build libraries so that we could then show images on their system.

My best friend, Wes Hoffman, legend in graphics - he created this thing called Performer Town back then, which was one of the first visual databases ever created. They used it to show off their hardware. You could probably find it on YouTube, Performer Town, because at that time it was the world's most used database, because everybody used it to show off the hardware. It's the only thing there was for a while. We were in bed thick with Silicon Graphics.

Nintendo thought, "You know what, we're not going to do 32-bit like everybody else, we're going to leapfrog them and we're going to try to do 64-bit." Problem is, it's probably going to be expensive. "We got to talk to somebody who can create a chip for us that's capable of 64-bit, that's still going to be something affordable enough for a console." Who do they go to? SGI. "Hey, if we give you a purchase order for, I don't know, a million, can you do it?" They decided they could. At that point, SGI brought up an interesting point to Nintendo: "Who's going to create your games? Because we know all your developers, and not a single one of them knows anything about 3D. They're all 2D."

They're all scrolling games.

Dan Hess: They either go this way or that way, but they don't go this way. They said, "We can give you a list of simulation houses, and at the top of that list is Paradigm, because you're going to need them to help you get this chip working. We're going to give you a chip, and it's just this little piece of silicon. What are you going to do with it? You're going to need somebody to actually write the routines that tell that chip how to draw a line on a screen. It doesn't happen by magic." They suggested us.

We were in bed really thickly with SGI, and then with Nintendo, because we helped code the software that made it talk. Then we were the ones that created the software that emulated the hardware - because we're going to start creating video games and the system doesn't exist. How do you create Pilotwings for a system that doesn't exist? There had to be software created that emulated the environment. That's basically when I came in to start -

Like a development software?

Dan Hess: Yeah.

Wow. I had no idea. Sorry to take a little step back here - Paradigm was also doing code for the N64 chip and the N64 by extension.

Dan Hess: I would say specifically Mike Engeldinger and Wes Hoffman would've been - I'm not sure who else. I know early on it would've been them. At this point, Paradigm Simulation - I'm trying to think who else. God, they had a good technical team by then. I'm sure Mike Engeldinger was a part of it. Michael's one of the most brilliant people I've ever worked with. He was one of the founders of Paradigm. It was our team. Maybe Aaron Hightower would've been part of that, but they developed that software that allowed them to talk to the chip, and then eventually to create the environment that became the simulation of what the hardware was going to be.

It wasn't just audio software or audio work, it was all kinds of code for the - oh, that's crazy.

Dan Hess: Oh yeah. Paradigm was very busy with software before anybody could draw a line. I was just hanging out with Wes, my best friend, just a couple weeks ago. We talked about this, and he talked about how frustrating it was, because chip development is expensive and it never works the first time. It's really intense. You'd like to think it's going to work. When you hire a software company to make your chip talk, and they come to the conclusion, "Look, we're doing everything right, and it's not working. It's your chip" - you push back, you're like, "Oh no, it can't be the chip."

Then we would create all these reports to prove, okay, this is why it's your chip. Then, oh crap, they got to make another rendition of it, and time passes while they do it, and they come back, and here's another version. I don't know how many versions there were, because they did a bunch. I remember how excited the team was when they saw a line get drawn on it, and how relieved the Nintendo people were, because time was flying by. They wanted to have it out by '96, and we were still trying to draw lines.

In '94? Oh my gosh. Yeah, no wonder. No one would've been familiar with 3D at all.

Dan Hess: No.

'94 was super early.

Dan Hess: It was only us simulation houses that knew how to do that. They were given 10 names of companies from SGI. They called it their dream team. They hired 10 simulation houses to create launch titles for the N64. You know what happened - there were only two or three, if you were in Japan. Super Mario and Pilotwings 64, and that's only because all the other nine companies failed to create a game in time. It was not easy.

SGI built the dream team list? SGI was the one that suggested -

Dan Hess: I'm pretty sure it was SGI that was responsible for that list. Nintendo might've added to it, but SGI knew everybody. Who better to advise you than the leader in graphics?

Right. When you were going into that, did you know of, or had you heard of, the original Pilotwings on Super Nintendo, the first one?

Dan Hess: It's funny. Me and Wes were huge video game nerds. I had a Pong when I was a little kid. I had the Atari 2600 when it came out, and I was probably in sixth or seventh grade, I don't know. I had an Intellivision. I don't know, I had all those. Of course I had a Super NES. By the time the Super NES came out, I was in a band and I just didn't have - we did go to arcades. I feel bad for you that you didn't experience the excitement of going to an arcade.

Not really, no.

Dan Hess: Your quarter meant a lot. Being good at video games wasn't like, oh, I'm just good. It meant you could play longer on a quarter. It was a practicality. We became good at these games, and you felt, "Hey, I just got half an hour out of that quarter," that kind of thing. It was so exciting, and games were coming out all the time, and the technology was getting better and better in front of our eyes. We were complete video game nerds.

Back then it was mostly male-dominated. Those arcades were filled with 12-year-old boys, 12 to 17. Very few girls. When the Super NES came out, what I didn't realize is all these girls were home playing too. It was a home system, so it wasn't just the boys. I think that was the beginning of the expansion of the whole video game industry. Before that, it was nerds. You didn't even want to tell your date you played video games. They'd be like, "Oh, you're one of those." Now on a date, the couples probably go to somebody's house and play video games together. It's a complete flip. I think the Super NES is responsible for that, including my wife, who's 11 years younger than me - she was addicted to Super Mario. So many girls were playing, but we didn't know. I got sidetracked.

Original Pilotwings on Super Nintendo. Yes.

Dan Hess: I had a Super Nintendo -

That's crazy, because they're very similar.

Dan Hess: They are. Now, her music is great. It's weird when I really analyze what's going on. Like I say, it's modal, but it's also a little jazz too. It's really interesting when you listen to it and break it down from a music theory perspective, the chords and scales that are used. It's very similar to other Japanese music that was recorded at the time. What it's not is groove-based. When I did that, I knew it was a departure when I decided to do what I did, because I had been listening to video game music my whole life, and I never heard anything like that. I just did what I wanted to do based on - but I'm jumping ahead. You probably have more questions.

Oh, that's all right. All of this feeds into the same story anyways.

Dan Hess: Okay.

You were working remotely throughout the entire Pilotwings project. Is that true?

Dan Hess: No.

Oh no, you moved to Texas for the last six weeks.

Dan Hess: A lot. You had to be. You couldn't be remote effectively. You need to work with a team, and the more you were embedded in living it on a daily basis, the better it became. Everything was interrelated, and my inspiration was what they were working on. I'm looking at this, watching the storyboards, because first they're just storyboards, not even graphics. This is what we want this to be. Here's an idea, that kind of thing. I'm thinking, oh, kind of -

Sorry, were those American storyboards or Japanese storyboards? Do you remember the artist? I didn't mean to cut you off there, but I was curious about that.

Dan Hess: I know Sean Wright did stuff for F-1 World Grand Prix when I did that video game, but I don't remember who did the storyboarding for this. I probably wasn't around for that, because I was home working on creating the database and writing this music while they were storyboarding their first ideas. I think it was Miyamoto that came to Paradigm to talk to them about what this game's going to be. Remember, this is a huge investment.

They're going to go 64-bit for the first time in the history of video games, as far as consoles go. They're going to hire 10 new companies they've never worked with. They have to create chips. It's a monumental thing we're trying to do, and of course they're going to send their best.

He comes down to consult with us, to talk about what this game's going to be. We have no idea. What's Pilotwings? What are we doing? He was the one that came up with, "I'm thinking island, I think we need to have an island." A lot of this stuff happens on the US states - that came later, it wasn't part of the original plan. I know they started immediately working on this island and creating the environment for this thing while I was back up in Detroit coming up with some ideas for sounds and music.

Building your libraries.

Dan Hess: Yeah. I missed out on a lot of that part, and I got really down-focused just on what I was doing, maybe almost to a flaw. It worked out, but it might not have worked out, because I was building all these funky songs and I knew that I needed to get whatever I was doing approved by the team.

That's the difference between the people that came after me that they hired - these people didn't realize, you're not just getting hired to write music. It's not your choice. Anything you write has to be accepted and approved by the team. Your timeline is open. You're not done until you're done. I basically had to sign a contract that says I will do whatever it takes to complete this. Not in so many words, but that's what I signed, because they need you to be committed. You can't walk out in the middle of this.

Right. There's a date.

Dan Hess: Yeah. We're going to be done by here, and you're going to be done by this date, whatever that takes. I was home writing. Some of the songs I wrote made it right into the game. In fact, all the songs I came down with made it into the game, which is amazing. Hang Glider was actually inspired by a song I wrote for that Magic Edge.

Yeah. Oh, wow.

Dan Hess: Yeah, I had written this, but it was electric guitar. I went into the studio and recorded music for that. When Nintendo came down to talk to Paradigm about doing the game, they said, "Do you have anybody that you're interested in doing music?" They were like, "Yeah, we have an in-house guy." "Well, can you play me anything?" "I'll play the Magic Edge stuff." Wada-san actually brought that song up. When I met him the first time, he said, "Hey, I like that song. Can you work that into the game?" When I went back down, I made sure I put that melody in, and that became the Hang Glider theme.

Would you say Hang Glider was the earliest conceptualized track that eventually made it into Pilotwings? It was created first because it was created for Magic Edge?

Dan Hess: I want to say there was something else before that. Let me think about that. I had the groove to Rocket Belt - have you gone on my YouTube at all?

Oh, that's the Rocket Belt demo.

Dan Hess: That's the Rocket Belt demo. Yeah, I had the groove. That was before the game. It was right about the same time I was completing those demos. In fact, there's a thing that says "Funky Little Fusion Thing." It's not easy to find because they're just buried. You have to go to my channel, then go to those videos, and you'll see it. It's a sequence I created to show off my Sonic Arts sound library that me and my partner had created, and it's really rough, because I was noodling.

My partner looks over and he goes, "Tell me you recorded that." I go, "Yeah, I got the sequence going." I didn't have a click track going, so it really wasn't in time. It was just me doing it on a Rhodes. He goes, "Well, dude, you got to do something with that. We'll use it to be a demo." I started screwing around, and even though it wasn't quite in time, I forced drums onto it and a bass, doing that thing.

Years later, when people were asking me, "Hey, do you have anything you were working on during that Pilotwings period?" I went, "Oh yeah, I got those demos I did for Sonic Arts, which sound pretty similar." I pulled it up, I went, "Oh my god, yeah." You could tell, that's where my mind was then. You could listen to it and go, that could have been on Pilotwings.

I think Rocket Belt was before - there was another song too. I came down with four or five songs, and they all were funky. Rocket Belt was one, but it wasn't Rocket Belt yet, it was just a jam. I don't think I'd written Jumble Hopper yet. That's not funky. I don't know if you know that one. That's when you have the jumping shoes. It's kind of hopping, because that's what I saw. Visually, I saw that and I thought, I'm going to write a song that fits what I'm seeing.

From the initial concept art?

Dan Hess: Yeah, or from the first video I saw. At that point, once they started making the first few, they were actually making it on the system, so I could watch what they were creating. No more storyboards. They're like, "What do you think of this?" "Oh, okay." That one I know was later. Birdman was almost last. I had such a hard time with that one.

The very last thing I did was the credits, because they didn't tell me I had to do a credits score. I was literally packed up, heading to the airport, and Wada-san goes, "Where are you going?" I go, "I'm out of here, I'm done." He goes, "Oh, let's review your spreadsheet." I pull out my spreadsheet, and it's all checked off. He's got a different spreadsheet. He's like, "Well, did you do the credits? I don't see if you checked credits." There's nothing. He goes, "Oh yeah, we revised the spreadsheet, we should have revised - yeah, you should have." Wow. I got a flight booked at 6:38 AM, I got to get out of here. He's like, "Well, go write it." I'm joking. I had to unpack all my music and set it back up and all that.

That song feels festive, because it was for me. I'm going home, this is behind me. It was celebratory for me, which is why it sounds the way it does. It's really happy and joyful. I just jammed that thing. I wrote the skeleton of it and I just started jamming, and organs all over, and some horns, and it came together in about an hour.

An hour.

Dan Hess: You can't just write it, you have to install it in the game. It's a sequence, and it's all in Unix, and you got to port it and hook it up to my sound base. I had to make sure all that was right. Then I got to listen to it back and go into the game and then adjust all the panning and all the stuff to the individual tracks, which I did. Two or three hours later, I was done, packed it up and headed to the airport, made my flight. That was definitely the last track.

The track that took the longest was the fricking Birdman, because, like I said, it can't just be what I think. I kept writing songs, and Wada is like, "I like song, not for Birdman." He just kept coming. "Floaty, fluffy."

Floaty, fluffy, yeah.

Dan Hess: You do this. He'd do this to me. Floaty, fluffy. Man, okay, dang it. I thought that was floaty, fluffy. It's so subjective.

It is.

Dan Hess: Those terms are very subjective. I learned, working with the Japanese, that their terms for music are much different than ours. It's better to have them bring a cassette in of music they think it should sound like, which I didn't do. I wish I had. I learned to do that later, but -

That's smart. Was Birdman the one with something like 20 rejected drafts?

Dan Hess: Oh, at least 20. 20 is a very conservative number, dude. At one point, I was just sitting around writing songs for Birdman. Everything else was done, and I'm living in Dallas at this point, but I'm staying at my buddy's, at his house. We were working ridiculous hours. All the focus of Nintendo came down on our company, because they were like -

Because you were the only ones that could actually -

Dan Hess: You were the only one that was going to make it, and they knew it, and they didn't even know we were going to make it. They're like, "You better make it. We can't have a hundred-million-dollar system with one game." We had a lot of pressure.

Yeah, a lot of pressure, a lot of expectations, huh? Especially because, after the popularity of the Super Nintendo in the States, the N64 was the next big thing, and people were expecting Japanese games and the familiarity with that. You get that with Mario 64. If you were a Nintendo 64 kid, you probably weren't scraping by poor, you probably had a little bit of money, you might've been able to afford that second game, or a Christmas present. It calls back to what you were saying, where you had experienced games in the past and you knew what they sounded like, and you knew that if you introduced a groove-based, funk-based, jazzy thing, that would be entirely new for everyone.

Dan Hess: It might be too new, too different. In fact, I came down to Dallas with four or five songs to play them for the team and get their input, get their feedback, and hopefully their approval. I'm in the conference room, there's probably a dozen or more of us in there - the movers and shakers of Paradigm and the three from Nintendo - and I play the tracks. I got to say, I don't think any of the Paradigm crew were excited about it. They didn't dislike it. They're like, "It's all right." Wada liked it a lot. Immediately he liked it. He liked the direction. I think he probably also liked it because it was so different. He's like, "We're going to do something different here. Not only are we going to do something different with the visuals, we're going to do something with the audio."

I also know now how much the Japanese appreciate jazz and funk. It's a big thing over there. I lucked out because of that, and he greenlighted every song. I couldn't believe it. Every song I had brought down there, he didn't change a thing. He didn't say, "Okay, tone down the funk." He's like, "You're on the path." Then I got to sit down and see all the other things that they were coming up with - the Rocket Belt, Gyrocopter, all those things.

Modes?

Dan Hess: The modes of the game. Then I started to get ideas for that. That's when they started to come up with a track listing for me. Every mode had to have gameplay and - you did good, you did okay - those are the three things, three endings. More importantly, which I realized, you needed a menu select. Of course, there's the intro, which we used Soyo's. We used her intro from the original. Wada came to me and said, "Can you mock up the original Pilotwings theme? Do it your own style, but we'll use that for the intro." If you listen to hers and listen to mine, my remake - I remade hers.

Yeah, this is the same.

Dan Hess: It's the same thing. I just made a funky Latin jazz beat to it, did my own take on it. Then there was - let's see, how does it work? You click the button and - what are you seeing? There's that.

Yeah, that's the menu, I think.

Dan Hess: The real synthy thing that really pops.

Talk about that.

Dan Hess: One second, let me see. I'll find this stuff.

I'm actually going to pull up the Pilotwings soundtrack on my side.

Dan Hess: Number one.

That's the intro. It's the opening theme. Then there's the title demo, which is 20 seconds. Game menu.

Dan Hess: Game menu. Which game menu?

That's it. Yeah. Oh, because that one - yeah, that's the menu.

Dan Hess: Groove-based in a different way. It's not funky, it's synthy. It's funky, but it's not -

It is a little funky.

Dan Hess: It's not organically funky, it's synth funky. There's definitely a difference between that and the next one. I knew they could be sitting in there for a while, so I wanted it to be like, this is going to pump me up a little bit for this game. It's got a good pump-up energy. Then it goes to the bump, bump, bump, bump, bump.

Replay.

Dan Hess: The replay one. I get a lot of comments on that.

Oh, it's so good. Pilotwings is a fun game, and it controls pretty well, but so many kids - speaking from personal experience - we weren't used to 3D, so it was very tough. To be able to hear that, it was like, "Oh my god, I made it." You know what other early N64 soundtrack has that same kind of magic? The jet ski one.

Dan Hess: Wave Race.

Wave Race. Yeah. Wave Race even had that, the same thing, where you would hear three different songs depending on how well you placed in the race. I almost wondered if that was a Nintendo directive for any of their -

Dan Hess: It was Nintendo, 100%. Same thing happened when I did F-1 World Grand Prix. They wanted the same thing. I really liked Wave Race when that came out. I remember when 1080 came out, everybody's like, "Oh, listen to that." It's like, yeah, they recorded music, they looped. They could only play two songs, because they only had this much RAM. I was jealous. I'm like, I wish I could have recorded music instead of using little samples and sequences. At the same time, they were stuck with two songs for the whole game, and that just wouldn't have worked for me.

They had a long list of songs they wanted, with modes and stuff, and I knew that I was going to have to create a database that was going to support all these songs. I wasn't going to be recording any music like that. I also had to be careful, because every time I hit a note, it takes CPU power away from graphics. They wanted 30 frames a second. Nobody ever got 30 frames, but they like to tell you they did. They would touch frames, but just to stay in the upper 20s, they're like, "You're doing too much music." They kept cutting how many notes I could play at the same time.

That's what's different about Birdman. I went to them, I'm like, "Look, there's no objectives to this. I'm hearing lushness. Can I please add a couple more voices in to make this thing more beautiful?" I got the approval to do that. That's why Birdman sounds like, when it comes on, you just feel this lush - it's just filling out. That's why.

Very atmospheric, in a way. How many voices were you working on with the main tracks versus Birdman, do you remember? Was it six to eight or something?

Dan Hess: Four voices. That's four notes being held down at a given time. They said, "Okay, well, if you're doing percussion, we won't count those, we'll count that as one voice." Because I'm like, "My drums and bass are going to take out four voices." They're like, "Okay, we won't count the drums." Drums are constantly coming in and out, they're constantly getting allocated back to the system, a snare drum.

Right. They're not overlapping either, a lot of times.

Dan Hess: Right. If I hold on a synth pad, that's being played the whole time; I couldn't do that. That's why funk worked for me, because everything's short, it's moving a lot. With replay, I got a little more leeway. That's why it sounds so lush too. There's nothing going on graphically. They didn't care.

Right. You're not even playing the game at that point.

Dan Hess: No. Replay, and the one we talked about - whatever that -

Menu.

Dan Hess: They let me do a little more on that one too. It's a little lush. In fact, that pad is really lush. I doubled it. It's very stereo. If you listen to it, you're like, "Why does it sound -" It's a trick we used to do back in the '80s and '90s. If you want something to be extra lush, you double it and you detune it - I can hear it - and delay it, and you hear that on those little speakers. I couldn't do that in any of the other tracks, because I'd take up all their beloved video CPU.

Do you recall the name of the tools - this is where my lack of technical expertise when it comes to music equipment is going to show. You weren't working with a MIDI sequencer.

Dan Hess: I did the whole thing on a keyboard, a Kurzweil K2500, which I didn't have to, but it was just so easy. I could have used all the software and stuff that was out there, but what I liked about the Kurzweil K2500 is it exported to all the file formats I needed to get into the game. It didn't have a lot of tools, and I didn't want a lot of tools, I wanted to be more organic. I didn't want to get in and move all these notes around. In fact, I never used a visual editor on the game at all. I played everything straight, and I tried not to quantize. Quantization is when it moves the note right under the beat, and I didn't want it to feel like a robot. I wanted it to have a human feel.

I think that comes across. I think you can hear that.

Dan Hess: Oh, cool. Thanks, man. Yeah, I did the whole thing on the Kurzweil, and had them buy a Kurzweil K2500 down there. All I had to do was bring my little memory cards, going back and forth. It was so easy for me.

You weren't actually mailing anything, because you kept saying "came down with." You were working on your demos -

Dan Hess: Oh yeah, I would never send anything. I learned better. If you're going to sell something to somebody, you want to sell it, never send it. Show up. You need yourself.

Good point.

Dan Hess: I'll also say, I didn't just use a Kurzweil for sound. I had all my synths there. I had a Roland Super JX, which I used.

I hear that.

Dan Hess: I had my Oberheim synth - was it the Matrix-6 or 12 I had? - and one more synth. I was sampling, recording. I'd come up with the tones I wanted on those synths, and then sample it and put it into the - I used the Kurzweil because it was a sampler, and I thought, oh, I'm going to mock their system with this Kurzweil. Here's a blank palette. I'm just going to pretend it doesn't have a synth in it, and I'm going to sample everything I do and create the database first, and then trigger that to make sure I'm being realistic.

Otherwise, I could be doing all this crazy synth stuff, they love it, and then when I try to make that using that method, it would never sound anything like it. They're like, "What happened to your track? It sounds like crap. You played this, and you're giving us this." I didn't do that, but I did use my synths. For your keyboard geeks, your music geeks out there - it was a Roland Super JX, probably my Matrix-6, Oberheim Matrix-6. What was my third? I had three synths, I can't remember. Maybe my Memorymoog. I had a Memorymoog too. I still have the Memorymoog as a historic synth. Those synths made their way into Pilotwings.

That's so cool.

Dan Hess: No software. No.

I know you were working with the three Sega of Japan - wow, I do a lot of Sega interviews. Excuse me. Three Nintendo of Japan - Actually, wht were your interactions with Nintendo of America like?

Dan Hess: My first exposure to Nintendo of America would've been at the NAMM Show in '96 that I, like an absolute idiot, did not attend. The reason I didn't go is I just had spent so many months away from home. My wife was pregnant with our second child, and she did a lot of that without me, because I was in Dallas. As I said, we were doing ridiculous hours. If we worked 90 hours, that was a light week. We were rushing it. It was crazy, seven days a week, it never stopped.

My record was 116 hours in one week. It wasn't on Pilotwings though, it was on F-1 World Grand Prix - that's because we had to get a ROM out with a deadline, and we just stayed up for a couple days and did it. 48 hours of that was straight. Yeah, we were heavy hours.

I get done with this game, it's Easter-ish '96. I fly home frustrated. I can't even play my family and friends any of the songs, because I don't have a Nintendo 64. It's not even going to be out till September, October, whatever. My buddy's like, "Hey man, we're going to the NAMM Show, they're going to be promoting you, you got to be there." I'm like, "Dude, I just can't right now." He's like, "Dude, you just created a soundtrack for this launch title. I think you should be there." He was right, I should have been there.

He goes to the NAMM Show. They're all there. Nintendo of America hosted this launch in this giant auditorium room at E3, the expo. My buddy called me right after, he says, "You're such an idiot. I just watched the president of Nintendo of America stand in front of the entire room, and our game comes up, goes to Birdman, and he tells the entire room this is his favorite Nintendo soundtrack of all time, and you weren't there."

Gosh.

Dan Hess: Wow.

That's Minoru Arakawa, I'm assuming you're referencing.

Dan Hess: I don't know. I should, and I don't. Being really detached. Damn. I hadn't got panned yet. That's right, this is before the game had come out. I didn't know what to expect for reception. I got to tell you, I didn't write those songs for the video game reviewers. They told me our target audience was between five and 13 or something like that, and that's who I wrote those songs for. It was a big relief in 2010 or '11 or whatever, when I found out that they got it. Thousands of people have posted the most heartwarming things about my music. It was just like, after all those years, finding out -

By the way, this is a 30-year reunion, a 30-year anniversary. Did you know that?

Oh, wow. Really? 30 years? Yeah, 1996. Oh, wow. Okay. That's why I'm doing this interview.

Dan Hess: There you go.

It's funny that you were talking about poor reception. Maybe I've never seen it, but I'm pretty familiar with the internet and all that stuff. If you were to ask me a day ago, "Do people like the Pilotwings soundtrack?" I would say yes, universally. I only found that "porno music" critique from my research, and that surprised me, because everyone that I've grown up with, all the people that I socialize with, and the community, my associates, we all love it. There's no criticism for the soundtrack, we don't even question it. It's just a foundational Nintendo song to us.

People understand that it's Western, and that there's a funk and a smooth-jazz-ish lean. When I think of Pilotwings, I'm on the opposite side of that, where I'm like, okay, this music's incredible. I type Pilotwings into my iTunes library, and just the amount of arrangements that I have of your music -

Dan Hess: That is insane to me. I can't believe how many there are. My friends meet new ones every week. I'm like, what's this? Have you heard the guy that raps over Birdman? It's so good. We should talk about that at some point in the interview, the different - of course, the 8-Bit Big Band stands out, that's amazing. I think Charlie drew from the replay track for feel, because Birdman's more soul.

Honestly, when I first wrote it, I was in Mike's office, and I flipped off the headphones. I go, "Mike, you got to hear this." I put on the speakers, and I told him, all we need is Barry White to come on and go, "Oh, baby," something like that. It's soul, hands down, and we just laughed about it. That's how I heard it. When I listened to some of the other songs, a track like replay, that totally is a smooth jazz thing - not that I intended that, that's just what came out. I could see how he kind of extrapolated that and turned Birdman into that thing. What did we get sidetracked on? I got on another train track here. What were we talking about?

That's okay. I do want to be cautious of our time here, because it's 7:30 and I don't want to keep you past 8:00 PM, even though I appreciate all the time that you're giving me.

Dan Hess: You're very good with your questions, brother.

Yeah.

Dan Hess: What do you got?

Actually, you know what - you were interested in continuing this. Would you possibly be interested in a part two, and then we can just push both of the interviews together?

Dan Hess: Absolutely. Sure.

Okay, perfect.

Dan Hess: I never know. We're just kind of going off the cuff here.

Awesome. I wanted to ask - I think in my research you said something to the effect of you needing the Nintendo team to provide - were you provided reference songs or any kind of reference material, or was it all -

Dan Hess: I did, not during Pilotwings. I didn't come to that conclusion yet. It was from the Birdman experience that I learned. I did a ton of ad work, writing for ads, and what they do is they go, "Here's what we want for this, here's the storyboard for the ad, here's what we're thinking." They'll play three different pieces of music. "We kind of like the feel of this one, we like the sound of this one, we like the voice of this," whatever. "Here, go." Then we go and mock it. That was super helpful. Reference was everything. Otherwise you're spinning your wheels. You might create something, you come back, they're like, "That's nothing like what we're thinking." They would give us an idea of what they were thinking.

Nobody at Paradigm or Nintendo gave me any clue what they were actually hearing, via reference, for Pilotwings. I didn't have any problems until Birdman, really. I got really lucky. Wada-san and I were of the same mind musically. He just really dug it. I was blessed. I know that now, because I would write stuff - all the modes would come. I don't know initially the modes for parachute, skydiving. I don't think that was part of the original plan. I don't think Birdman was original either, but it was early.

I think skydiving was added, and I was blessed that I saw it and immediately had an idea for the feel I wanted, and was able to do it, and I didn't have to do a bunch of versions. Recorded it and brought it, and they went, "Yes." That's a coup, because the Birdman thing, like I said, it was a month of screwing around down there trying to come up with Birdman.

Why do you think he was so particular about Birdman? I'm sorry to interrupt. Was it because it was going to be the long showcase piece?

Dan Hess: It was a first ever. We did a lot of firsts. We were the first third-party developer to do a Nintendo 64 game, the first. I was the first one to create - other than, they had a head start, they started on Mario before we started, so they were creating a database as well. I really wasn't the first there. I was definitely the first groove-based composer for the 64. Sure, we were the first flights. There's some other firsts though. What was your question? That'll remind me of what the first was. What did you just ask me?

I tend to space too.

Dan Hess: Dang it. What were we talking about?

I'm sorry, that's on me. I'm the interviewer, I shouldn't - remembering where we are in the -

Dan Hess: I'm just saying that I got lucky that I was able to -

Oh yeah, all the Birdman.

Dan Hess: Why the Birdman? That's why. Birdman was important because, as far as I know, it's the only Nintendo mode at that point that had no objective and went on forever. You could play theoretically for eight hours. Mothers have written to me - this is crazy - "I used to make my son play the game to get to Birdman and leave it on so I could listen to the music." That is great. These are people all over the world - Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, a lot in South America for some reason.

I think, rightly so, Wada-san saw an opportunity to do something really special, because before that there wouldn't have been that, because there was no 3D. On a 2D game, what are you going to do, go back and forth? A 3D game - floating. He thought, wow, we've created this 3D environment, we're not letting the kids see it. They're too busy doing the chicken dive down to the canyon to look around. What if we let them just look around? Wow. What if we gave them the ability just to fly around at their own will and have this really soothing, floaty, fluffy soundtrack that gives them the feeling that they're in a little piece of heaven? That was his baby. I think that's why he was very particular about that track, because I think he had a vision, and I know he had a vision. Did you hear the story of how that was created?

Which one?

Dan Hess: Birdman?

Outside of what you already told me?

Dan Hess: Yeah, because we're on it, we'll finish this part of the story. I can't even tell you how many tracks I submitted, and Wada would always say, "I like, not for Birdman." He never said he didn't like it. He liked everything I was doing - he must be a fan of that kind of music, because there was nothing I submitted he didn't like - but it was, "not fluffy." I'm thinking, "God, I'm going to be down here forever."

I woke up one morning, I said, "You know what, I'm not going to specifically write for Birdman today. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm just going to jam. I'm going to put myself in a chill mood, because I know he wants it chill, and I'm just going to let whatever comes out, come out." In fact, they gave me this little closet of a studio to work in, no windows. Mike Engeldinger, one of my best friends and one of the principals of the company - he has a giant corner office. He knocks on my door, he's like, "You need to get out of here. Take your crap, I have a huge office, move all your music stuff in there, you can work with me." Which probably really helped, because we're on the 10th floor, beautiful view, all windows. When I think about it, I'm sure that helped inspire Birdman.

I moved my gear in there, and I'm working on headphones, and he's behind me coding, and I hit a chord, and it was the first chord of Birdman. It immediately went through me, like, "Ah, this is cool." I played around, and that progression came out to me almost immediately, just the chord progression. I go, "Oh, shoot." I recorded it on a synth pad, and I had a little quick Rhodes, and then I put that little beat to it, and I go, "It needs a bass." Once I put the bass on it and those keys, I'm like, I got to play this for Mike, this is hilarious - not even thinking Birdman, this is funny - it sounds like a very white 1970s recording.

I get Mike to listen to it, and I put it on the speaker so he could hear it, and we're just laughing about it, and it's going on for five or six minutes. Then I look over in the doorway of the office, and Wada-san's standing there with this giant smile on his face going like this. I went, "That's Birdman?" That was Birdman. I couldn't even believe it. It just came out of me without the objective to write it. Anyways, that's how Birdman was created.

That's an incredible story. The 20 or so conservative demos that were rejected - was that before that point or after that point?

Dan Hess: Before. I wrote so many songs that were rejected for Birdman. The other thing I'll say - it was so funny. We have to entertain ourselves, these are long hours, we're working. I'm in Mike's office, and Wada did say he wanted this to be a longer track, because he anticipated it was going to be played for a long time. Once I got the basic progression done - the way I envisioned it, I'm going to give this instrument a solo, I'm going to create a melody for this instrument, and then I'll create a melody for this instrument and this instrument. I kept adding instruments on. If you listen to it, that's all it's doing. It's going through the rotation - first it's a synth, then it's an electric piano, then it's a flute, and then it's an organ, or whatever it is.

I turned to Mike at one point, I said, "Don't we have a sound effect in the game that's clapping?" He goes, "Yeah, we use it when people achieve certain things." I go, "Can you code the clapping to be triggered at certain points of my music?" He goes, "Yeah, I can do that." I go, "I want you to put clapping at the end of these parts, like it's a musician that performed a solo and the audience is clapping." He thought it was hilarious. He puts it in the game.

Years later, I'm watching this YouTube video of this person who's playing Pilotwings and talking about how to get through all the levels, and they were trying to get the clap. They couldn't figure out what they did, because they thought it was something they did in the game. "Oh my god, how do I get the clap?" All the rings and everything. Of course they're never going to figure it out, because it has nothing to do with anything they're doing. I had to reach out to somebody on that website. I'm like, "Bud, you'll never figure it out, because it has nothing to do with you." Anyway, it's just a little side story of Birdman.

Do you still have any of these old demos, or any of this old material?

Dan Hess: [shakes head] I'm so mad at myself.

Oh, no.

Dan Hess: When I made the original database, it was in full bandwidth, which means it was high-quality samples at 44 kilohertz, which is CD quality. I sampled it, since they sounded great, the whole thing, and all the drums, everything was high CD quality. Then I submitted it, and it was way too big, so I compressed it, and I compressed it, and then they did the game compression. It's probably 10 to one. It's ridiculous. I had that database for years sitting on a little hard drive. I have no idea where it is. I can't find it. I could easily have created, just by hitting a few buttons, a whole full CD-quality version of that, if I had kept that. I'm so mad at myself.

However, some people - there's a guy that did a version of Hang Glider. Everybody's bugging me to make these versions. I was going to do Hang Glider next. I don't need to. This guy made it, it's as good as I would've done. It's phenomenal.

Oh, when they go and they take the sample-based systems like the Super Nintendo and N64, and they call them remasters, but it's usually finding the original instruments and recreating the track that way.

Dan Hess: He did it from scratch. He created the song like I did with Birdman. I created my own version with no use of any of the original sounds. He did that for Hang Glider, and it's phenomenal. You should listen to it. You'll find it, and it'll be obvious when you hear it. I think it's "L" something, "EL" something. Anyways, I'm not going to bother to do my version. He basically took a lot of it - that's what I would've done. I'd use real strings and all this stuff, but he did all that. Those versions are out there.

Oh yeah. Arrangements of your music have been a very integral part of my musical upbringing, really, because I was very into - especially in college, I was very into chiptune, because I was in college in 2008 to 2012, and that's when chiptune as a genre - not video game music, but people creating new music on Game Boys, or using old sequencers and stuff.

Dan Hess: Yes.

There were a lot of people covering Pilotwings, which is, again, why I was so surprised to hear that there was any kind of criticism, because Pilotwings isn't just a good soundtrack. It is a classic. It is an absolute classic. Oh, actually, that was going to be another one of my questions. There was a CD soundtrack for Pilotwings released in Japan. Were you told about that, involved in that, even given a copy?

Dan Hess: One thing I was part of, only because they asked my permission, which I couldn't give them - I go, "I give you my permission, but it means nothing, because I don't own the music." There was a group that pressed it on vinyl. You can get the vinyl. Do you have it? I have it, I could probably send you one. They sent me 10 albums - they're back in Detroit, I'm in Iowa now - and I thought it was so cool. I know that, but I didn't know there was a CD with a soundtrack. Are they all new versions of the songs?

Okay, I got it. Yeah, here it is. Yep, that's it. Isn't that funny?

Yeah, I like how they made it. It looks so vintage.

Dan Hess: It's hilarious. Let me see if there's anything I forgot. Oh my god, Cannonball. I forgot about Cannonball.

Actually, speaking of Japanese soundtrack CDs and Japanese involvement - Akito Nakatsuka is credited in-game as the music arranger, and you've been pretty clear that he didn't actually participate in the - do you know the story behind that?

Dan Hess: I found out it's because he's part of the original Soyo track. He helped arrange her track, which I did a version of in the first song. I eventually went back and corrected it. I called Martin, who did that interview, I said, "Oh my god, I found out why their names were on there." Wada asked me to do a version of her theme, and I did, and he credited it to them on that. I wish they'd have been more specific, because even that one, I did a completely different version. I arranged it completely different from hers, recorded it, and installed it in the video game, all myself. That was all me. Every track was me in there doing that. He's responsible for the original one with her, so that makes a lot of sense. I felt horrible when I found that out.

It happens.

Dan Hess: Live and learn.

Yeah. Just like the Star Search thing, I'm sure no one's actually reading - people don't read these interviews.

Dan Hess: Exactly. Exactly.

Do you recall shipping Pilotwings, or knowing that it shipped? Or was there a launch party or something?

Dan Hess: Oh yeah. You probably were too young to realize the hype. You want to talk about hype - that game system, I had already written it off. There's no way I'm going to get one, how could I? There were lines all the way down the block at Best Buys. People were trying to get them. It was September - I'm pretty sure it released in September, because it was just before my oldest son's birthday.

I get a delivery out of the blue, unannounced. Big box shows up at my doorstep, open it up - Nintendo 64, multiple controllers, both games. I couldn't believe it. My son couldn't believe it. We were the busiest house on the block, let me tell you. Nobody had a Nintendo 64. We had it. I wouldn't have had it if they hadn't sent me one, which I thought was the coolest thing. Nintendo sent me a Nintendo 64.

That's super cool.

Dan Hess: Super cool.

There was Wada directing, Oyagi doing the gameplay, and there was a third - that wasn't Miyamoto. Miyamoto just came and did his own thing. Do you remember that third name at all?

Dan Hess: No, we need to find that out, because he was great. I feel guilty, but remember, it's been 30 years.

Yamashiro. Shigeki Yamashiro.

Dan Hess: Yamashiro. Yes. There you go. It was Yamashiro, Wada-san, and Oyagi-san.

You've talked a lot about Wada. What was working with Oyagi like?

Dan Hess: These guys were very quiet. He was very positive. He had a really good aura around him. These people believed in and loved what they did, and they were excited, but they were under a lot of pressure. You know the Japanese culture, especially '80s, '90s, there was a lot of pressure. These guys were all young. Wada has gone on to great things at Nintendo. This was his first big project, and he proved his mettle, but they could have had problems. They could have fallen on their face, and they didn't want to do that. They worked very, very hard, and they put their heart and soul into it.

I was blown away by Oyagi, because I would sit and watch him create the objectives of the game. That's when I went, well, shit, everything else we're doing is just art, he's making the game. What good is this, flying around an island? If it was just Birdman, nobody would play it. Birdman's only fun because you worked your ass off on all these other things to qualify, that Oyagi created, all these challenges. By the time you get to Birdman, you're like, "Ah." If it was just that, nobody would buy it. It's only fun because Oyagi spent all that time creating all the objectives.

He described to us, "Here's what I need you to do. Okay, this is cool, but could you make this giant metal -" what's his name? - "Yes. Do we come around and shoot rockets?" "Yeah, we could do that." That's the mind of these guys. They're thinking, "How do we make this fun?" I thought that was fricking fascinating, man. I quickly learned, that is video game development.

Right. Pilotwings 64 always surprised me, in that it's very much an American-developed motion simulator, flight simulator, screwed into a Japanese Nintendo polish kind of game, but it works out. Pilotwings is not the first time that they've tried to combine Western technology and Eastern game design, and it doesn't always work. Pilotwings 64 worked really well, and I think a lot of that probably was Oyagi. I'm going to say a lot of that was your music too, because I think that helps set the soundtrack.

Dan Hess: Thanks for that. I think a lot of it was the expertise of Paradigm, because we were a badass software developer, and when it comes to making a simulator, there was nobody better in the world. There were other great companies, but nobody was better. That game - I see how many people who are pilots were playing. I've had people say, "My dad was a pilot, and that's the only game you could play," because the physics were right. It was also frustrating for that reason. It's hard. That game's fricking hard.

It is a little hard. Yeah. It doesn't let up on the simulation aspect at all.

Dan Hess: It doesn't. You have to touch down those wheels very perfectly. That analog joystick - all that's happening in about an inch and a half.

Right, good point. Yeah. If you're an actual pilot, you have a big old yoke that you can do -

Dan Hess: Yeah, you're doing this and stuff, right? [mimics driving a racecar with a steering wheel] You're doing this. [mimics holding a small Nintendo 64 analog stick]

You're like, "Ugh."

Dan Hess: It's not forgiving, man. It's not forgiving at all.

When you're a kid, you have all the energy and time in the world, so you're like, "Yeah, I can fail this 60 times." - There was failure music right?

Dan Hess: It's not listed on that thing. There are those three states - after every mode, you had, "You did good, you did okay, or you failed." Every one of those modes has those three, but it's not listed, often, in the track listing, for some reason.

Yeah, I wonder how much - you said all of the tracks that you had composed pretty much made it into the game. You don't recall any unreleased stuff, or scrapped stuff, that wasn't just a previous generation -

Dan Hess: All my hard drive songs, and I have no idea what I did with them.

Yeah, those ones.

Dan Hess: Who knows? Paradigm was eventually sold to Infogrames, France, which is Atari, and that whole thing just went away. They had all the assets, including all my music.

Oh no. Yeah. I'm sure the hard drive got shoved into the bottom of a box at some sale somewhere, and then just got tossed in a landfill. So much video game history is in a landfill right now.

Dan Hess: Absolutely.

Yeah, exactly. I'm here cleaning up the nest, being like, "Just tell me what you remember before that goes into the landfill," because we're all going to be in a landfill. We're all going to be next to the Atari cartridges one day.

Dan Hess: I could hook you up with Wes Hoffman and Mike Engeldinger. You should interview them too. They'll have all those other questions I can't answer about the interaction, the early interaction with Nintendo. Although I will say about Wes - and Wes, if you hear this, you know this is true - he's not always remembering things accurately, because he did way more. I did way less. I only did two video game soundtracks for them and then I got out. He did dozens and dozens. My memories are more focused, and I don't have that much to remember. We'll be talking together about it, and he'll bring up something, and I'm like, "Dude, that's not how it happened." Thank god Mike will go, "Yeah, dude, go with Dan. I don't know what you're thinking." I think things have been filled in his mind over the years.

That being said, he still knows way more than I do about the things that went on with Nintendo, especially when you're asking about how they got the chip to talk and all that stuff, and how they got that to work. That's all Wes and Mike, and they were day-to-day, man. They know all that stuff. If you're interested, I could - Mike is still working. He retired and then Nintendo of America sucked him up, and he's out in Seattle working for Nintendo now.

Oh, awesome. Yeah, I would absolutely love to, if you could put me in touch with them or anything. That'd be super cool to speak with them.

Dan Hess: Absolutely. We're buds. We are forever friends, us three.

It sounds like it.

Dan Hess: Yeah.

All right. That is where we will wrap this one. I actually don't have too much left, so I think the next interview will be about an hour tops. That'll just give me a little time to hit F-1 World Grand Prix, Spy Hunter, any other kind of related projects, and then your later career, and that should be everything.

Dan Hess: Awesome. Sounds great.

This was super cool. There was a moment about 20 or 30 minutes ago where we were verbalizing the songs to recognize them back and forth. I took it for granted that, god, I'm verbalizing this song to the person that actually composed it, to the original creator. Again, the Pilotwings music is part of my lexicon to such a degree that I don't even question it. It is just internally in my library forever.

Dan Hess: That's the number one thing that I think I've taken away from my experience with Pilotwings: my music has become part of people's lives. They can internalize it, they can hear my soundtrack in their head. That's mind-blowing to me.

Like every note.

Dan Hess: My buddy's like, "Well, we sold two million copies, and it was rented some ridiculous amount of times." I think of all the kids sitting there on their floor, playing for hours and hours, listening to this music over and over and over. Crazy.

God, that's another good point. I'll be here talking all night, but just the fact that traditional music has a start point and an endpoint, but with video game music, it's not only looped by default, but it's intended to be - and you have to go into the composition. Obviously Nintendo was aware of that too.

Dan Hess: Very much.

There was so much magic that went into the game, particularly sonically, musically. If they would've brought in another artist, I don't think it would've been half the quality that we eventually got with your work in it.

Dan Hess: Oh, thank you. I think part of the thing that helped me is, I'm a sound designer too. Not only could I write the music, but I could make it sound good. The musicians who interview me will often ask me, "How'd you make it sound like that? Because all the other games - there's something about your sound. Something sounds better, something good about it." It better be, because at that point I was a sound designer for probably 15 years. I had a background in that. It helped a lot.

Acoustics, and balancing, and all of that.

Dan Hess: Yeah. EQ and compression, all the things it takes to squeeze every last bit of sonic quality out of that little tiny 800K I had.

Crazy.

Dan Hess: All good stuff. Yeah, a lot of stuff talked about. I was just thinking about things we didn't talk about. We'll have a lot to talk about in the next one.

Absolutely. That'll be super fun.

I knew I was going to have a good time, but I wasn't expecting to enjoy myself quite this much. I appreciate you giving me your time again.

Dan Hess: Oh, thanks, man. It was a great time for me too. Awesome. Reach out and we'll figure it out.

All right, I will.

Dan Hess: See you, bud.

Thanks, Dan.

Part 2 conducted on 2026-03-28

Hey Dan. Sorry for being late. I just got in the door about two minutes ago.

Dan Hess: I just sat down. I get it.

Yeah, I did make time for myself, but then while I was on the way to run an errand, I got a text from Walmart saying, "Hey, thanks for picking up your order." I was like, "I'm 20 minutes away, but thanks." I had to walk in the store and wait in line, and I hate being late to my own interview.

Dan Hess: Dude, don't even worry about it. The one bad thing about this is I have no idea what we talked about. We were about to talk about something else, and we thought, no, we'll save that for the next one.

No worries. I've got all the questions in chronological order, and I marked where we left off.

Dan Hess: All right. Oh! I was on a long project making those digital drums. I think we did talk about that, and I've been off them. This is the first time in four years that I've had time free during the day. I've done a lot of landscaping and stuff at my home in Michigan, but none here in Iowa where I am now. I kept telling my wife, "Honey, I promise I'm going to address this." We have a little patio deck off the back of our house that we sit in, and there were gnats and some mosquitoes coming out. I thought we need to just plant certain plants to push them away, like lemongrass, lemon balm, and marigolds. I know those four. She goes, "That sounds great."

We went and got some planters and I planted them all up. I put them on our deck, hung them on our deck walls, and they needed a watering system. I'm on the road so much, I've always had to use automatic watering systems, but I never put one in here. I went and got what I could, ordered what I could, everything came today, went to install it, got everything run, went to check it, and I'd never used this faucet outside that was going to feed it. It turns out it leaks.

That's unfortunate. I'm very familiar with seeing a project through all the way, or having some great expectation that, okay, we're going to finish this today, and it just doesn't happen.

Dan Hess: No, I get it 100%. It's funny, as we're talking, I just saw a couple more comments on some of my tracks. I really appreciate these things. Let's see, who is this? Buster's Word 07 commented, and it was on my remake of Birdman. He said, "When I think of Pilotwings, I think of this track, and it hit me like an hour ago that I haven't listened to it since I played Pilotwings 64. It took my breath away. I haven't heard this track in almost 30 years. So nostalgic." That's crazy. The other one said, "This track is too smooth. A bit late in my reply from some years ago, but I made sure to put it on my favorite music track." People just reaching out regularly. It's interesting.

I would imagine that the impact you had was more widespread than you would imagine. I think we did talk about this last time.

Dan Hess: More than I ever imagined, yes. I think we knew it was a big deal. We knew when I saw Super Mario 64, when they showed us their demo that they were working on while we were working on ours - I told you that story, right? I think I did.

Gosh, this is the problem with doing two-hour, four-hour-long interviews. You just forget. Can you tell me about the early version of Super Mario 64 that you remember seeing?

Dan Hess: Yeah. It's an interesting thing because we were creating a game for a system that didn't exist. There was no hardware. There was no Nintendo 64. Paradigm was instrumental in helping them with the chip and in testing the chip. It was our company that was recommended to Nintendo by SGI, who created the chip for them. They told Nintendo, "You need to work with Paradigm. They do all of our intense software, our graphics. They're it."

Nintendo said, "Great, we're going to create this chip." We were the ones that literally wrote the first code that wrote to the chip that made it draw a line on a screen. It didn't work the first time - it needed an iteration. All along we knew, okay, we're going to be creating a game on emulation.

Yeah.

Dan Hess: We created the emulation software.

Do you remember the name of that?

Dan Hess: The emulation software? The engine? It was just an internal software that we created, and I think we shared it with the other companies too. I think we had to.

Interesting.

Dan Hess: Everybody needed a way to create the software. They needed the emulation. What we didn't have was any examples of what was going to be...

Possible.

Dan Hess: What was possible. The sound system was nonexistent. Hold on one second.

Franci, going in or out? You going out? Okay. It's a beautiful day here, 82 and just a spectacular evening.

It's pretty nice here too.

Dan Hess: Nice.

It's only 109 out here. We're okay.

Dan Hess: Oh, geez, dude.

No, I'm kidding, I'm kidding.

Dan Hess: It's dry heat, right?

Yeah, absolutely. Dry heat. Not a lot of wind sometimes, or too much wind.

Dan Hess: We tease all you guys out there for that. "Oh, but it's dry heat."

Yeah, right. No, trust me, I'd still take Orange County.

Dan Hess: Okay, at least you're not in Arizona, because those are the people who always talk about, "Oh, it's 116 degrees, but it's dry heat." Oh, okay.

Yeah.

Dan Hess: It really only feels like 103. Good for you.

Yeah, pretty much. You really do get used to it after a little while.

Dan Hess: I had a lab in Santa Fe for several years where we were making holograms for a 3D display system we invented.

That was another thing I was going to ask about. I'm sorry, continue.

Dan Hess: Before we get there - we're dealing with this emulation, and there was no sound. I asked first thing, "Okay, what is this box going to have for audio?" They're like, "What do you mean?" I'm like, "Well, I don't know. Sega's got that chip, the Y chip, whatever it was, the synth chip. What have you got for me? What am I doing?" They're like, "We have no audio."

Figure it out.

Dan Hess: "There's nothing." What do you mean there's no audio? "Well, we think you're just going to have to create sample databases and then trigger them with MIDI sequences." I'm like, "Ugh."

At least it's something you're familiar with.

Dan Hess: It was, but the memory - the whole cartridge - I'm sure I'm repeating myself here, but the cartridges were eight meg, the whole cartridge. The entire game is about the size of an MP3 that people listen to.

It's like origami.

Dan Hess: Yeah, right. I knew they were going to give me some fraction of this eight meg, because graphics are king. Let's face it, it's all graphics. All they cared about was graphics. None of the American team gave a shit about my soundtrack. Wada-san did. The Japanese did.

Wada-san sounds super cool.

Dan Hess: He really was. Really chill. It was my first time working really closely for multiple months with somebody directly from Japan, and their English was limited. They understood a lot more than they could say. Boy, I have some funny stories I could tell you about some of our meetings.

Oh, please. That was going to be one of my questions - just anecdotes about cross-cultural differences.

Dan Hess: Oh, yeah. The sound system - I realized, okay, they gave me 800K. Do you even know what K is?

Yeah, that's 1,000 bytes. You had to fit that in 800,000 bytes.

Dan Hess: They used to be floppy disks. It's less than a floppy disk. They said, "Oh, but that's compressed, so it's actually going to be closer to two meg almost."

Right.

Dan Hess: Okay.

That's just for fitting it in the box, guys. You still have to make it and then compress it.

Dan Hess: Yes. Wes, my buddy, was like, "What's taking you so long to start this music?" I go, "First, I have to make a palette. I have to write some songs thinking that I have to use the same sounds for them, and then figure out as I go, okay, what sounds do I absolutely need. I don't want every song to sound the same, so I want some different instruments to pull from." That took a while. I couldn't just record music. My friends were like, "Oh yeah, this is going to be great." I'm like, "I'm not going into a studio and recording songs. I'm sound designing sounds that are teeny weeny, and then triggering that with MIDI."

I wasn't initially super excited by that, but I also knew I had the talent. This is right in my wheelhouse. I was a sound designer and I'm a composer - two things you need to be. I'm familiar with something that nobody does these days - optimization. Explain to me why iTunes, before it was defunct, was a gig. It's a freaking player.

Oh my god, it's so bad now. I don't know if you still use it, but it's so bad now.

Dan Hess: Even video games, they're like 40 gig, 60 gig now. A lot of it's graphics, I get it, but come on. The whole computer we ran in 1995 ran on 264K or something - 512K or a meg, just something stupid. It was years before we had four meg, 16 meg, all this stuff, let alone a gig. When you tell me that some little MP3 player takes all that, I just laugh, like, that's ridiculous. Optimization doesn't exist. People are just really lazy and they just use all the resources up because they kind of can.

Yeah, exactly.

Dan Hess: You shouldn't take that much resource. Google Chrome takes an enormous amount of resources.

Chrome is ridiculous, yeah.

Dan Hess: It's a freaking browser.

It's running stuff in the background, and you've always got to run Google Auto Updater on your computer. It's like, man, I don't need seven processes just to check my email.

Dan Hess: Yeah, man, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Anyway, I'm full-blown into this, created all the databases, writing songs, things are going, but I had no idea what I was aspiring to. There was no benchmark. There was no bar.

Yeah, no examples.

Dan Hess: Zero. We were really cooking along, and somebody flew from Nintendo in Japan to us, and he had a briefcase handcuffed to his arm. Like a movie.

That's so cool.

Dan Hess: We're like, okay.

This is the bomb.

Dan Hess: Exactly. They said anybody who signed an NDA, or the core team. If you worked for Paradigm, you were covered by an NDA, but I was a contractor at that point. I had signed an NDA, so I got to go in the room. There's maybe 15 or 20 of us in a conference room, and there's a big TV. He pops in this cartridge. We used to have these ROMs - we'd burn ROMs all the time and plug them into these -

Development systems.

Dan Hess: Emulator development systems. Up pop the first screens for Super Mario 64. There was not a word said. We were just spellbound. I remember seeing the sequence and hearing the sounds and everything - it was magical. I thought, this is going to change the world. Kids are going to freak out all across the world. Forget the Sega Saturn, forget all those things, all those scrolling games. You're going to forget them in two seconds when you see this. There are worlds to explore. It's 3D. They had the first two levels at least, maybe three, done.

We got to really see and hear and experience what this thing was going to be about. Good for me, because I'm like, okay, that set a bar. I was also happy that I was doing nothing like their music. Their music was amazing - oh, amazing - but I was going funky.

It was solid.

Dan Hess: We were nothing alike. I wasn't like, oh, you're kind of like it but you're not as good. That would've stunk. I wasn't in the ballpark, so it didn't matter. I felt good with what I was doing, and that was good. Man, what an amazing experience. It really gave you an idea of why it was so important that we were working on this launch title. By then we knew it was important, because at that point Nintendo told us none of the other companies were on track. They didn't know for sure, but they're like, "Pretty sure you're the only company that has a chance of making the deadline." Then another few months went by and they knew we were the only ones. Then all the force of Nintendo came down on us.

Right. Give them all the support - we have only one left.

Dan Hess: They're like, "You have to come through. Otherwise we have one game in the States and two in Japan," because they had that chess game thing.

Yeah. When you first saw Mario 64, you were saying you were really impressed, and hearing it too. What was the first thing that stood out to you musically or audio-wise when it came to seeing Super Mario 64?

Dan Hess: It almost seemed interactive. I knew it wasn't, and we had plans - are you familiar with Duck Dodgers? You know, Warner Bros. We were going to do a game a couple years later for Duck Dodgers, and this is when I got out of the bidding, because it was just bull crap and I'm like, I'm not doing this. The other four of us who really started Paradigm - Wes Hoffman, who we're going to get in here pretty soon, and Mike Engeldinger - both those guys were the coders. They were the coding engineering geniuses and graphics geniuses who created Paradigm. Ron Toupal was the business guy. He was one of the managers that came over from the company they had worked at before.

Merit?

Dan Hess: Yeah, Merit Technologies, exactly. Then I was asked to be the fourth, but my ex-wife didn't want to relocate to Dallas. Still, obviously they're my friends. I invented their first product, and we worked on those things together, and it was very exciting. Flash forward four or five years, next thing you know, we're doing Nintendo games. Where was I going with that?

On why you guys co-founded Paradigm.

Dan Hess: Oh, interactive. We already talked about the Duck Dodgers game. We already had plans, and Michael goes, "I want you to make it interactive." Just like the Bugs Bunny cartoons, when he would sneak around with the little pizzicato strings.

Very dynamic.

Dan Hess: Everything they did in the cartoons had some kind of symphonic thing that accompanied it. When the action got a certain way, the music would just react - like a movie, right? It's challenging in a video game because it's not scripted.

Yes. It's very, very tough to do that.

Dan Hess: Very tough, but I had ideas. Did we talk about how I worked on soundtracks for General Motors for the big auto shows and stuff? I don't know if we did. I was doing this kind of stuff with my partner, John Vitale - he's a brilliant guy. I only bring this up because it's related to this interactive music thing. Imagine car shows. In Detroit where I'm from, they're ginormous auto shows. They're monumental. They have the press week before the public's allowed in, and in press week they do all the reveals. Imagine a giant stage, bleachers all the way around, hundreds of people sitting, and then the president will come out and announce, "Oh, this year we've done blah blah blah, and this is the new blah blah blah," and out comes this car.

The stuff that's going on in the background is crazy, because all these cars are prototypes. They may or may not run, but they have to look like they're running. I'm on the technical team, and we're up behind the risers on a really tall riser. I'm with the lighting and the director and the audio guy, me, all of us. Everybody in the crew - I don't know, there's 50 or 60 of us - all have headphones on, listening to the director and what's going on backstage, which is chaos. The audience doesn't know any of that. In my ear, I'm hearing, "Oh god, brakes aren't working, brakes up." "Hold, stall, stall, stall." Out front, it's just music playing.

Yeah, like a song, and the speech.

Dan Hess: Right. That's how it's got to look. One of the directors - different autos had different directors to do the reveal, completely different reveals for different cars - I can't remember his last name, he was English, Mark. He came to me and John and he said, "Look, this is a big ask, and I don't even know if it's possible. What really bothers me when I watch all these different auto shows, all these reveals, is the music's all been prerecorded. Somebody's sitting there, some technician playing the music. We call it a bed that plays underneath a vocal - the guy's speaking, so you have kind of light music underneath there."

A bed.

Dan Hess: Beds, and then you'll have the big reveal, some big slamming song comes on. He goes, "The problem is, literally it's jumping from song to song with no concern for where the beat hits. No beat matching. It's just like -"

Fade it out really quick.

Dan Hess: Yeah, the quick fade and then boom, or it's just right into it. You might be too young to remember records, but when a record would skip, it'd mess your brain up. Your whole body would, because the groove's going to stop for a second and then come back in. Your whole body does this thing. It's like, ow. That's where he was.

Yeah, I got to get that.

Dan Hess: Right? He goes, "Is it possible?" At this point, by the way, we'd already written a lot of the songs for the vehicles he had. "Is it possible that you could write them in a way that we could hold them in a certain part of the song until we were ready, and then change it on the beat so that nobody even knew there was a change, that it just was seamless?" We thought about it and we're like, yeah, we could write the songs in a way that they were modular - say four-bar patterns, eight-bar patterns, whatever. Hold them on that pattern, sample them, record them, so they're playing from a keyboard.

I'm triggering with my finger and holding it as long as I need it to go. When we're ready for the next one, I wait till the beat - boom, bah, boom, boom, bah, boom - and hit the next change on the beat, and it would be seamless. He's like, "Oh my god, you have to do that. We have to do that." We were like, "Okay, what's it going to cost? Because now we've got to go back and redesign these songs." "I don't care, I'll get the budget."

Back in the studio.

Dan Hess: Now, what this did to us: auto shows are multimillion-dollar, very high-pressure things, and there are three days of rehearsal, at least two full rehearsals where everybody's got to be there and we just run through the shows. They're mandatory, especially for the audio people. Were we there? No, because he made that change the day before, and we were sleeping in a studio for two days rewriting and configuring and creating all this music. We come back into the show, and I have this director, Gretchen - what was her last name? I never remember her last name. She already hated me because I was gone for the two days. I wasn't there.

You told me to. You guys had me - yeah, right.

Dan Hess: Of course. She didn't know. Now, if Mark had talked to her - "Hey, go easy on these guys, I sent them, I did a last-minute change, they had to rewrite all the songs and record them and prepare them for this whole new thing we're going to do." She was giving me and John the evil eye the whole time. I'm up there, I haven't slept in two days.

The first rehearsal - we did have one rehearsal the day before - she's mad at me, because she makes the calls for the changes. She's hearing everything, and she's like, okay, cue, she's calling all the cues off and we follow it, right? She would make the call, and she was frustrated because my music wasn't changing on the call, because I was changing on the beat. I was told to change -

To do it on the beat.

Dan Hess: Which could be immediate, or it could be three seconds later.

Yeah. Isn't that the whole point of what they asked you?

Dan Hess: He asked me, but she didn't -

Yeah, of course.

Dan Hess: Me and John did exactly what we were supposed to do, and it was flawless as far as the beat. The music sounded perfect. Finally she yelled at me, "What the hell's going on with the music? I make a call. Why aren't you jumping on that call?" I had a talk with her, and then Mark came over and talked with her, and she thought about it for a minute. She goes, "Okay, okay, I see what's going to happen here. New plan. I'm going to make the call to you, because you'll know the beat, you're going to know when the music's going to change, and then you count down to everybody else." I'm sitting there listening to music going three, two, one. I could tell them exactly when, and that's what we did. Then it worked amazing. Even she said, "That was pretty cool." Nobody had ever done that. We watched everybody else's shows and they were doing that jump-around thing.

All this is just to tell you that I'd worked on a modular interactive music thing. When Mike goes, "Hey, can you do this?" I thought, yeah, same thing. I write pieces of music, then I write little - not even music - little hits, little pizzicato strings, so that as your character was walking, they're playing to the footsteps. I was so excited to do this, and then I didn't bid on it, because - I told you the story about why I got out of video games - the kids were bidding on it and not even doing what they're supposed to do, and then they wanted me to come in and fix it. I'm like, "I ain't fixing it. I warned you that if you pay somebody that kind of money, there's no way they can do what needs to be done." The only reason I know what needs to be done is because I've done it from the ground up.

I was curious about Duck Dodgers. You said that was in planning, or you guys had planned something like that before Pilotwings had even started? How early did that come about?

Dan Hess: We just talked about it - would it be cool to do a Warner Bros. Game, whatever? Then lo and behold, they got the opportunity to do it. I don't know if it ever came out. Did they do Duck Dodgers?

I think I have a list of your guys' unreleased games right here. Hang on. An unannounced military first-person shooter, Asteroids 3D, Snoopy versus the Red Baron, Magic Carpet Skies, Adventure Racing, Harrier 2000... No, maybe it was released. Hold on, I'm sorry. Duck Dodgers. I think it was on the GameCube or something. No, I'm sorry, it was on the N64. Don't listen to me, it was on the N64. It didn't come out until 2000, which was what, four years after Pilotwings? It's just crazy to hear that.

Dan Hess: We had sold the company, I think.

Infogrames?

Right. Yeah, that was 2000. That would've either been right before or right as that sale was happening. I'd imagine that you guys probably completed it before the sale happened, but it might not have got released until then.

Dan Hess: Boy, we got diverted. I can't even remember whatever -

I asked you about the impact of seeing Super Mario 64.

Dan Hess: Right, seeing and hearing.

Yeah, the whole thing. You know what, a lot of companies and a lot of people have tried to make interactive sound engines for gameplay, and it's usually in a cartoon style. I remember LucasArts had one called the iMUSE system for their point-and-click adventure games. It did the same thing, where they would meter out every bar individually and have it be its own thing. If you were in a cutscene where you were delaying the dialogue box and then it needed to switch over to a dramatic moment or a sad moment, it would do that more intelligently, faster, as opposed to having to wait.

I've definitely seen - and I'm sure you saw the same thing - software back in the day where, if you were playing a CD track and you had to move to the next thing, a lot of times it would just let the six seconds of that CD track play out or something like that.

Dan Hess: Yeah, that's what we had to deal with, man. That was probably on a much newer system than you're talking about, right?

That was on computers, yeah. There's always been weird, odd attempts to do that. With the Sega Genesis - obviously you know - in North America, the sound driver they were using predominantly was called GEMS. It's kind of where you get the farty sound of a lot of Sega Genesis games, unfortunately. GEMS isn't a terrible system. It's just that people stuck with the default patches, and the default patches were made in 1989, and it's '96 and people are still using them.

Dan Hess: Yes. You could hear what it's capable of when you play ToeJam & Earl.

Yeah, absolutely. Sure.

Dan Hess: Unbelievable in every level - technical, creative. It's just an unbelievable accomplishment. Their sounds, wow. I was dying to have a synth chip after that. Then the N64 - I'm like, why can't you give me a synth chip? I wouldn't even touch your frame rate or anything, right?

Right. Yes, absolutely.

Dan Hess: It would do a lot more for me, but they didn't. Whatever.

The N64 doesn't have any kind of non-sample capabilities?

Dan Hess: No.

There's no PSG equivalent? Wow.

Dan Hess: That's why people always ask me, "How did you get that sound?" They listened to some of the stuff I did and it's pretty synthy. Not all of it, but - what's the one, Jumble Hopper or whatever? It's got a lot of synth stuff in it.

Those are just samples?

Dan Hess: Yeah. I had an Oberheim Matrix-6 that I sampled a lot. I had a Roland Super Jupiter. I had my Memorymoog. I had all these synths at home, and I just created my own samples and brought them in. The reason Pilotwings sounds lusher is I went to the dev team, I go, "Look, there are no objectives in this. Somebody's flying around. Give me some more availability of processing," because they really only wanted me to use four voices at a time. That's four notes.

That's interesting. I'm listening.

Dan Hess: To make it floaty-fluffy - I've told you the whole story about the floaty-fluffy thing - I wanted some beautiful lush pad to be going on, and it needed more than four notes. I had things I wanted to do, and I got the okay to do it, and I did some cheats. I sampled synths with more than just one note in them. I did some sound design cheats to get it to sound the way it did. I was pretty happy with what it became. It wasn't my version - that's more what I was hearing, but of course I couldn't do that - but I was overall happy with the way it worked out.

Did you end up writing any of the N64's audio documentation?

Dan Hess: No.

It seems like you would've been a good fit for that.

Dan Hess: John Perser probably did. There were guys on our team that were coders. Scott Gargash would've been one. Somebody just asked me, "Did you do the sound effects?" I go, "No, Scott Gargash did." The only sound effect I did on Pilotwings - he came to me, he goes, "Dude, we have a carousel in this fair. Can you make me a carousel sound?" I go, "Yeah." I created something and gave it to him and he put it in the game. Other than that, he did all the sound effects. It's the only one I did.

Was he also responsible for the sound recording for the voices?

Dan Hess: You know what? I have no idea who did that.

I'm sorry, it's just that half the time I hear a scream or an "ah" in a video game, it's the sound designer, and I'm like, "Was that you?"

Dan Hess: No, it was not me. When we did F-1 World Grand Prix, we had a producer at a studio who was Scottish. When we went to the studio, we're like, "It has to be you." He's like, "What are you talking about?" "You're doing the voiceovers." "Me? I'm just an engineer." We're like, "Nope, you're a voice talent now, my friend." We used him for that, because you needed to be - if you're a pit boss for a Formula One -

I was going to ask if that's a pit boss.

Dan Hess: Yeah, you need that. I think I told you before that out of all the things I've done in simulation and video games, I'm most proud of the pit boss on F-1 World Grand Prix - and I didn't do it alone. My partner John Vitale helped, and I brought him in specifically to help on it. Again, I think they gave me under a meg. They came to me and said, "We want to have a pit boss in your ear the whole time, which is great, it can help you through the game." I'm like, "Yeah, but how are you going to do that? How many phrases do you want this guy to be using?"

You don't want to repeat, and we have 22 possible laps and 22 drivers, and all those have to be interchangeable for every phrase we create. I go, "This is a massive matrix you're asking me to do, and you're giving me how much memory? There's a lot of problems. You've heard people try this before, and it'll sound like 'Häkkinen is six miles a lap.'"

Yeah, absolutely.

[Microsoft SAM voice] One cheese pizza, please.

Dan Hess: Yeah, exactly. Yes, all that stuff, man. I was less than enthused about trying to make it work in the small memory imprint, but they gave me a little more memory, and I had an idea, and I thought I could do it. I go, "I can't do this alone, though, because I have to do all the sound effects and all the music. There's no way I could get pulled into this pit boss thing. I can help design it, I can run the sessions, but I want to dump this off to somebody." They're like, "Well, who?" I go, "None of the team members. I need to bring a ringer in.

I need to bring my partner in from Detroit. He's the only one in the world I could trust this with." They approved it. I go, "You have a choice. You either bring him in or it doesn't get done. There's no way I can do this and all the other sound effects and all the music." Fine. They green-lit John.

Then John and I are having some drinks and talking about it. The problem with these recordings of the past is you hear all the voice inflection changes. I go, "What if we have this long list of phrases that need to be read, have him read it several times, choose the one we like, and then feed it back to him in his headphone and let him fill in the blanks as he hears the inflection he was using?" I'm giving him his own line back, the one we like, and he hears the -

Oh, I like that a lot.

Dan Hess: Then he was able to fill in the blanks. We had to choose three or four emphases, three or four modes...

Tones.

Dan Hess: Tones, yeah, emotions, right?

Like excited, bummed.

Dan Hess: Right, deadpan, whatever, and then stick with those, and then have him do all the names and all the lap numbers, which are going to be inserted into those phrases, listening to that phrase so he knows how to match it. In real time, I'm there in the studio sampling it, going, yeah, close enough. I know my partner John will take it back and pitch-correct and time-compress the samples to make them fit, to fine-tune them, but we need to get them close enough so there's none of that robotic crap. Oh my god, dude, I defy you to find anywhere in that game where you can tell that that's being done. It's amazing.

That's crazy.

Dan Hess: Yeah.

I thought they were full samples too.

Dan Hess: Right? All those names - if you'd have done the matrix of how many we would've had to create, it was ridiculous. 22 laps times 22 drivers times every phrase. I mean, it was hundreds. No way it would've worked. Not even if I had the full memory of the entire cartridge. We got it to work. It was kind of cool that we had to reduce the sample quality real low, but it worked out really good because those radios sound like crap. You know what they sound like.

Yeah, you get to hide it in the walkie-talkie.

Dan Hess: Exactly. That's what it sounded like. It worked out.

On F1, did you interact with Video System very frequently?

Dan Hess: Oh yeah.

How was working with - not about the lawsuit, because I do want to get to the lawsuit, but just in general, how did you like working with Video System?

Dan Hess: I'm way below all that stuff, but I can tell you some stories.

Oh, please, please.

Dan Hess: Video System... I think my NDAs ran out. I don't think we have to worry about anything. Nintendo versus Video System - they were night and day.

I was just going to ask.

Dan Hess: They were, because Nintendo - I was in awe of that team. They were amazing. We just created visual landscapes and audio landscapes. They created the game. Oyagi would sit there for hours. Here's this island, and he'd come up with - oh, what can we do? The obvious example is, "Oh, here's this jump off this cliff. I'm going to turn it into a hang glide, chicken-dive, put rings there and make you try to hit all the rings and fly up around this other part and land here." That stuff was just sitting there. It was his brain that turned it into a game. It was just a landscape before those guys got it.

Very interactive, very much driven to create an amazing game, and they knew how to do it, and we watched them do it. Video System, not so much. I think Video System, if I remember correctly, created a lot of arcade games leading up to that.

Shoot-'em-ups, yeah.

Dan Hess: I think this was new to them too.

I bet.

Dan Hess: Formula One - my buddy got addicted to Formula One, and then I got addicted through this game, because Wes had to travel the world to get all the data and all the tracks.

No way, really?

Dan Hess: He went to all these places, yeah.

I wish I had.

Dan Hess: Yeah.

How do you get away with a company vacation that nice? That's my next question.

Dan Hess: Isn't that great? You get to write it all off. He literally went to all those tracks. He was in Australia, he was in South America, he was in Germany, he was in France, he was in Monaco. I mean, come on. That was worth the price of admission for him right there. We didn't start out on the greatest foot with Video System. I knew before I even got down there to work on my part that Wes had had some issues. I want to say they did a horrible game with them first, Aero Fighters Assault or something like that.

Aero Fighters Assault. Oh my god, yeah, that was -

Dan Hess: Wes considers that the worst game they ever worked on.

It's pretty rough.

Dan Hess: Aero Fighters.

Were you involved in that one?

Dan Hess: No.

No, I don't think so.

Dan Hess: Nope. Different developer.

There were some rumors - actually, I was going to ask about it - that Video System -

Dan Hess: It is. It's Video System.

Video System, yeah. One of the rumors back in the day about Pilotwings 64 too, which is going to be one of my questions for Wes, was whether any of the vehicle concepts for the Pilotwings 64 sequel ended up in Aero Fighters Assault. Some people are drawing - yeah, I don't think they... I'm not sure. I'll have to ask Wes.

Dan Hess: I'll tell you some stories about Video System, and this is about why. We were under tight constraints with them too, trying to make a ROM date and get the ROM burnt, get it to market. It was a lot of work for me, because I was not just doing the music, I was doing all the sound effects too. I don't code - I mean, I do, but not to the level that I needed to put the game -

Is this for Aero Fighters Assault or something?

Dan Hess: No, god forbid, no. Don't even put my name in the same sentence.

Sorry. [laughs]

Dan Hess: It was for F-1 World Grand Prix. That was 1998 we were creating that game. It was mid-development and we were working ridiculous hours. I had 116 hours one week. In fact, this is the week I'm talking about. The only reason I had 116 hours is because every once in a while they would say, "Deadline, we have to send a ROM to Japan for a review." Whenever that happened, everybody had to stop what they were doing, check their code into the tree, make it all work so we could send an example of where we were.

Oh, like a milestone.

Dan Hess: Definitely. That's exactly what it was. They told us we had this milestone, the unannounced one - they just came, we didn't have it on our calendar. They're like, "Oh my god, we have a milestone." We're like, "Oh, crap."

How long did they give you?

Dan Hess: Oh, two days, maybe two and a half. We had two days to work, third day to deliver. We had a lot to do in that period of time. A lot of these guys have kids and stuff, they can't just lock themselves in the office. I felt bad for those guys. Me, I'm down there, my family is back in Detroit, and I'm in Dallas living with Wes, so I'm 24/7, whatever.

Plus -

Dan Hess: Plus I'm hourly, so bring it on.

Yeah, right, absolutely. Take that triple time.

Dan Hess: Absolutely. We look at this and we realize we're just going to stay up. We worked 48 hours straight. Wes went, "Guys, I'm so sorry." Was he lead on that? I think he was.

I think he was producer on that, and director, I think.

Dan Hess: There you go. He had all the pressure, and he had to deal with the team. He said, "Look, I'm sorry, this is going to be tough, but we have to get this thing out in two days. I need you guys to come together." They did. Not everybody was there overnight, but I was. Me and Wes were. Two days we never left. That morning - we'd literally been there for two days straight - he had the meeting with Video System to hand over the ROM, and it should have been a 10 or 15-minute meeting, and then we were going home to sleep, because we'd been up for two and a half days.

Half an hour goes by, and Wes isn't back yet. I'm in my little studio room. I'm like, "Hmm, I'm going to take a walk." I walk down the hall to the office that was given to them, and I'm looking through the glass that's on the side of the door - there's a door and then there's glass. I can see the Video System guys, they're facing me, and I see Wes, he's facing them, and his ears are red.

Oh no.

Dan Hess: He's my best friend, and when that happens, I know he is furious. I'm like, "Uh-oh." I boogie down the hall. 15 minutes goes by, and all of a sudden I hear Wes coming down the hall. I can hear him, not yelling but talking loudly to the team. "Just get out of here. Everybody go home." Video System is right behind him. They go, "No, no, no, no, you can't send everybody home." He's like, "Are you kidding me? I'm sending everybody home. You lied to me." There was no ROM. There was no deadline. There was no milestone.

They just wanted to push you guys?

Dan Hess: They were manipulating us. He goes, "I'll be damned if you're ever going to manipulate my team like this. They trust me, and I pushed them. These people have been sleeping on their desks for two days. No way." It was Thursday morning. He goes, "Everybody go home. I don't want to see you till Monday morning. I don't want you touching work," which is a big deal, because all of us work all the time. When you're on a video game, having three days off in the middle of a production never happens. Anybody who listens to this interview will know that's the case if they've worked in '90s video game development. God, we had a great weekend. We had an amazing time.

Except Wes. Wes wasn't having an amazing time.

Dan Hess: He wasn't then, but he did. After those three days, we made the best of it. Some of the things really hit him hard. The biggest challenge back then - and it's so funny, because AI is the buzzword now, everything's AI, but in 1998 AI was so limited - we needed to develop AI to run the races. With these drivers, you needed to feel like you're playing against another person, not a computer. Obviously you could just make the computer run perfect and they whoop your butt - they know exactly how to run that course, perfect braking, perfect acceleration, you never catch them. The goal is to make it competitive. You want some people just around you, some people ahead of you, maybe, unless you're great, then you want people just behind you that pass you if you screw up. You want to be in cars. You don't want to be by yourself driving on a track.

It was very difficult. Poor Wes, man. Every night we'd take a ROM home and play it and test it, and most of the time it was just pathetic. You're driving around, you see all the cars parked on the side of the road and up on the stands, and it's like, oh god. Or you're pretty good - oh, people around me - and then you come around a corner and there's 10 cars all clogged up in a little cluster. This went on almost to the end, till they got it.

Oh, really?

Dan Hess: Those kinds of things. My struggles with this game were really related to one guy, Jason Rice. Sorry, Jason, but I'm doxxing you on this, my friend. Interesting guy. He was really into theater, and he was actually working on a theater production in the evenings - which you can't do when you are developing a video game. You really don't have a life.

Video games - everybody used to just call us sweatshops. Not all the time, but when it came down to the last few months, yeah, we were trying to make a deadline. He would always tell me, "Okay, I'm going to run, I've got to do this rehearsal, but I'll be back, and I'll do this." I relied on him. Let's say I have sound effects for collisions. You can't play the same collision when I bump into something at five miles per hour as when I bump into something at 50 or 60 miles per hour or a hundred. These are all different sounds, and I had all these sounds I had created for all different velocities.

I'm playing the game every night with Wes, and I'm hearing the same damn - I bump into the sidewall and it sounds like I hit it doing a hundred. I'm like, "What the hell?" Wes is like, "What's up with that?" I'm like, "I gave him a whole list of different collision sounds and bumps depending on how fast you're traveling, what surface you're on, what surface you hit. Why is it playing the same one? I would love to tell you. I can't. I don't know. I don't code. I just give it to him. I give him the spec sheet - this is for this, this is for this."

Like a sound ID list or something?

Dan Hess: Yes, with all the parameters. I would have talks with him, like, "Jason, what's going on? How come?" "Oh yeah, I'm working on it. I know, I'll fix this." I had all these problems, like notes were cutting out in my music too, just disappearing. I thought it was me. Okay, maybe I'm not releasing notes, maybe I'm putting in too many, because there's a polyphony thing, maybe I'm hitting the voice limit or something. I would sit there for hours recreating these sequences and uploading them into the game, and no matter what I did, it wasn't fixed.

I'm on this guy Jason Rice every day. "Jason, my notes are disappearing, none of the collisions work, none of the surfaces sound right. Dude, you need to get on this. I'm taking the hit for this, but it's not me." "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll get to it." One day - now this kid's a moron, because my best friend is his boss. Does he think we don't talk about this stuff every day? Does he think Wes isn't aware that there are all these problems, that I'm not bitching about it?

He's literally seeing him every night.

Dan Hess: I'm literally driving home with him every day going, "I don't know what's going on, this is bullshit, he's not responding to any of my requests for code changes, blah blah." I'm in my studio one night - oh, by the way, all the nights he told me he was going to come back, he never came back. Another dumb move, because me and Wes are there waiting for him. His boss, one of the owners of the company -

Yeah, the freaking co-founder's waiting for you.

Dan Hess: You're not going to show back up when you told his best friend that you're going to be there? We're waiting around. It's 11 at night, and finally we go home at midnight because you never showed. This goes on for weeks. Finally, it's evening, maybe six in the evening, and Wes comes into my studio with Jason. He goes, "You guys need to talk." I'm like, "Great."

You already know where the conversation's going.

Dan Hess: Before I could even say anything, Jason tried to blame me.

No.

Dan Hess: He tried to turn it on me. Dude, I'm an even-keeled person in my workplace. I treasure relationships. I don't want to step on toes. I'm a patient person, way more patient in the workplace than I am outside of the workplace. You need to be a team player when you've got a full team and everybody's under stress. All of a sudden, I heard him trying to make it about me - and I know dang well, and Wes knows, it's not. Wes is kind of smirking.

Wes is behind him.

Dan Hess: He's in front of me. I saw blood, dude. I saw red.

Oh no.

Dan Hess: I freaking lost it. I yelled at him. I go, "Are you kidding me? Are you telling me, after all these months of me complaining that these things aren't getting done and giving you all the data and all the support documents you need, months of me sitting here till 11 o'clock at night waiting for you and you never come -" I yelled, and they could hear me down the hall.

Everybody's like, "Oh my god."

Dan Hess: I was so upset after I yelled at him and dumped on him, I had to leave. I was losing it. I just grabbed my keys, I left the building and got in my car, and I'm like, "Where am I going? I've got to work." I drove to a Best Buy. We used to have this term, "buy some happiness." I take my boys out - "Let's go buy some happiness." We go buy a video game or LaserDisc or something. Boy, am I dating things - LaserDisc?

We had LaserDisc. Wow.

Dan Hess: Yeah, we had LaserDisc. Anyway, I went to Best Buy and I just went on a massive spree. CDs. I bought two of those booklet things you put them in - you know what I'm talking about - and I filled them. I spent hundreds of dollars. I just got one of those big bins, and I'm like, "I want this one," because this is '98, but they came out in like '95. I hadn't built my CD library yet, you know what I mean?

Right, yeah.

Dan Hess: All my records, all the albums I wanted, I wanted those on CD, and all the new stuff too. I'm just like, "Yep, got to have it, got to have it." Holy - dude.

As you're calming down.

Dan Hess: Oh yeah, it helped me. I spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars, because I made really good money, and I made $100 a day in 1998 just for per diem, which I never spent, because the company covered all the expenses and I was living with Wes. Meals were covered, I had no lodging, so I just had money piling up. That was just weekly. I spent, I don't know, hundreds and hundreds of dollars on CDs.

Back then, hundreds of dollars was a lot more.

Dan Hess: Oh yeah, it was in '98. That's at least 2x the value from then till now. I filled that thing up, and when I came back two hours later with a whole library of music, Jason was gone, and I got back to work and I was okay. These are things you deal with when you've got a team and everybody's doing different things.

I should probably put a light on here. Hold on, bud.

That's okay.

Dan Hess: It's so nice. The crickets are chirping.

Yeah, I love the nature in the background.

Dan Hess: Can you hear it?

I did for a second there. Mostly just seeing the tree in the background is nice.

Do you know, or are you at liberty to say, what Wes and - forgive me, I did a lot of research, but I didn't actually look into the Video System lawsuit. I'm assuming that their dispute was over what would eventually turn into a lawsuit, or the lawsuit was related to that.

Dan Hess: Can we bring him in?

Yeah, absolutely.

Dan Hess: He's in Puerto Rico. He lives in Puerto Rico, so he's an hour ahead of Eastern. He's on Atlantic time, so he's four hours ahead of you.

Dan Hess: I got his voicemail. [texting] He's like, "Can I call you later?" I'm like, "No, interview time."

Hey, if he can't make it, no worries. I'm sure he'd be okay with meeting with me individually.

Dan Hess: It'd be fun having him here, though.

Yeah, I was going to say, then I can pit you guys against one another.

Dan Hess: One thing I thought we were going to talk about - I think we were going to talk about it last time but we ran out of time - is everybody always asks me what influences I had for Pilotwings and stuff. Did we end up covering the obvious ones, I think - Stevie Wonder.

Oh, we did, yes.

Dan Hess: Marvin Gaye.

You mentioned a couple other ones.

Dan Hess: Sly and the Family Stone.

Yes.

Dan Hess: One of the more obscure ones that I didn't even realize until I listened back - I'm like, "That's Bob James." I think I listened to Bob James. He did the theme from Taxi.

I've never actually seen Taxi.

Dan Hess: If you heard the song, you'd probably recognize it. You'd be like, "Oh, I've heard that." The song lived on well after the TV show was gone. Bob James is this mellow Rhodes dude. It's jazz, but it's not. It's very melodic. What's that term? I have stuff to tell you too. What's his name, for a big band - Charlie Rosen. He did a version of Pilotwings, and it was very smooth jazz. It's kind of smooth jazz, '70s Bob James, kind of the precursor to smooth jazz. Very melodic, very laid back.

It's funny that you mention that, because if you had asked me before I spoke to you what genre Pilotwings 64 is, I would probably have said smooth jazz before I would say funk. Speaking to you now, I understand it.

Dan Hess: Not my intention at all. The only one that's kind of smooth jazz is maybe the menu. That is kind of smooth. It wasn't meant to be, but it kind of came out that way. Oh, is he coming in?

Wes.

Wes Hoffman: Hey, Ashley.

Hi, nice to meet you. Thanks so much for hopping on.

Wes Hoffman: Check you out.

You're at an ourdoor plaza... Wow. Oh, I love it. Where are you?

Wes Hoffman: I'm in Puerto Rico.

Dan Hess: Yeah.

Beautiful. Gorgeous.

Dan Hess: Yeah, it's gorgeous. Hey, bud.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Wes Hoffman: What are we doing here?

Dan Hess: Questions I can't answer, my friend.

We were talking about Video System and just working with them, and the unfortunate situation that happened with Video System. Are you at liberty to share that, or is that something you can't share because of the lawsuit?

Wes Hoffman: We had worked with them on the first F1 game and the second F1 game, and then we had some continuing projects they wanted us to work on. One was called - it was Harrier... absolutely horrible.

Harrier 2000?

Wes Hoffman: Yeah. Harrier. Angus was the lead engineer on that, and I came in to help them out with the database design. It looked spectacular, and I thought it was going to blow everybody's socks off, and then they kind of quit paying us.

Oh, okay. Gotcha.

Wes Hoffman: We ended up having to stop working on it. I don't really know what happened, because I was really just on the development side. I wasn't really involved on the business side of that particular deal. Anyway, yeah, I really never followed up with Video System to see whatever happened to them.

After that, I couldn't blame you.

Wes Hoffman: They still owe me a lot of money.

Oh, geez. Yeah, that you'll never get back. I don't think Video System is around anymore.

Wes Hoffman: I don't think so.

No, I think that was around the same time they were going through financial troubles. Maybe that was it.

Yeah. The F1 games did well, so I don't know what else they were into. In any case, we were basically just a gun for hire. We had milestones, and we'd get paid, and we'd build the game.

Dan Hess: I told him about the fake milestone.

Oh gosh, that was really crappy. The fake milestone.

Dan Hess: The fake one, when you sent everybody home. You're like, "I don't want to see you till Monday," and they're right behind you. "No, no, no, no."

Wes Hoffman: Yes, yes.

Oh my god.

Wes Hoffman: This is what happens when you lie in business.

I can absolutely imagine some producers and directors being like, "Okay, fine, we'll work with you." Good for you for standing up for your staff, man.

Wes Hoffman: Everybody's killing themselves and they've got their heart and soul into it, and then to get lied to and toyed with was just rude, I thought.

Dan Hess: Rude.

Right. Could you tell us about Nintendo - or I guess SGI and Nintendo, in that order - reaching out about the N64, and just first hearing that and debating, "Okay, maybe we can get into video games"? I was just curious about your thoughts there.

Wes Hoffman: Yeah. My background - I got a degree in computer graphics from Syracuse, and this is 1987. There was only one college in the country where you could get a degree in computer graphics, and it just happened to be the most expensive college. My mom loved that. I ended up getting hired at a company down in Dallas called Merit Technologies that was a bunch of TI guys, and they'd got a bunch of VC funding, and they had their fingers in all kinds of stuff, from radars to - they were doing hardware, they were doing software, they were doing all kinds of stuff.

One of their very first projects - and you'll get a kick out of this, I don't know if it's even online - the product they sold was called Magic, and I forget what the acronym is for, but it was basically a flight simulation software. I got into the flight simulation business through these TI guys, and ended up doing military-grade flight simulators for about five years, I guess. They went out of business, so we started our own company, and at that point we already had a relationship with Silicon Graphics. Mike Engeldinger and myself were the two engineers that were going out there. I was more on the art side, he was more on the technology side. We developed a pretty close relationship with the engineers at Silicon Graphics, and we kind of positioned ourselves to be their software company that could demonstrate the performance of the hardware. No, this is Silicon Graphics.

Oh, okay, just before that was even a thing.

Wes Hoffman: Yeah, before N64 was even a thing. They were really about the only game in town when it came to doing 3D computers. These things were the size of refrigerators and cost -

Big purple ones.

Wes Hoffman: Big purple ones. Now you can probably put about six of them in your phone.

Oh my gosh. What was it, like $20,000 licensing per computer, something like that?

Wes Hoffman: Yeah, per seat for a site license, or per-seat license.

Eight years later, all that's outdated. I'm sorry, continue.

Wes Hoffman: Yeah. We basically went off and built our own 3D software toolkit. We developed an SDK that solved 90% of the 3D computer graphics problems. It didn't matter if you were flying an F-16 or jumping on mushrooms, that was just the icing on the cake. We realized that this 90% of the technology is consistent across everything. You have to have your rendering engines, your math engines, your coloring engines, and that doesn't change no matter what you're drawing.

Oh no, we worry about the sound engine last, we just kind of find a way to fit it in.

Wes Hoffman: Oh yeah. Yeah, there was some audio in there too, I think. We'll do the sound first.

Dan Hess: I got a guy. Got a guy.

Wes Hoffman: We worked very closely with Silicon Graphics on spinning up their new technologies. They would come out with a new computer and we would design a demonstration to show off the capabilities, because the computer by itself really wasn't worth anything if you didn't have software that ran on it. Because of that relationship - and Dan was involved in that very early on too, knew all the audio guys over there - when they got approached by Nintendo to develop the N64, Nintendo asked them, "Who would be a good company to help us spin up the chip set?"

Silicon Graphics referred us to Nintendo, and we got hired to basically help them spin up the N64. I was literally in the lab when we got our very first polygon drawn on the screen, and it took a month, because you just get the hardware - there's no manual.

Really? No documentation?

Wes Hoffman: You're dealing with assembly code, and there's no debugging system, there's no anything, right?

Was there a developer support line? Could you call someone at Nintendo to be like -

Wes Hoffman: No. We were the developers.

Yeah, yeah. Oh my gosh. That's terrifying.

Wes Hoffman: We literally had to develop our own font and would say line one, line two, line three, line four - okay, we died on line five. What happened on line five?

Oh my god.

Wes Hoffman: Then the chip sets ended up being deficient. Software guys and hardware guys getting in arguments all the time about whose problem it is. We're like, "Your chips are fucked up." "No, your software's fucked up." "No, we're pretty sure you're..."

Dan Hess: Wes and Mike would come to the office, SGI, in the morning, and I'm not exaggerating, with a ream of paper this thick, because they knew SGI wasn't going to believe them when they told them it was their hardware. They did extensive diagnostics and reports, like, "Here you go." All these young engineers, because they had campus-style offices there -

Wes Hoffman: It was all open. Silicon Graphics is now the Google headquarters. It's the same complex. When Silicon Graphics went out of business, Google bought them. It was very advanced, first days back in Silicon Valley, because you really had to have all the sushi bars and the amenities to attract the talent. It was a very nice campus. In any case, we had to go back and forth with the hardware guys, and of course they don't want to admit they're wrong. We had to document everything, and we finally got the chip set working, and it took about a month, and we spun our first polygon on the screen, and there was a lot of drinking that night.

Oh my god. After a month, I'd be partying too.

Wes Hoffman: We were just trying to see a polygon. One polygon. One triangle. Anything, to do something.

Dan Hess: Oh my gosh.

Wes Hoffman: We got them up and running, and then they approached us and said, "Hey, would you guys be interested in working with us on developing a launch game for the N64?" Of course we were like, "Sure." It probably took them, I don't know, six months - we were just sitting there waiting for them to come to us with some design. We tried giving them a couple ideas. We were going to do a Mayan temple, Indiana Jones kind of game.

Do you remember the name of that one? I'm sorry.

Wes Hoffman: No, it never made a difference. It took them a long time to finally get back to us. We had about six months to develop the SDK for the N64. We had to basically take all the technology we had developed for the original Silicon Graphics computers and turn it into a rendering, modeling, simulation engine that we could run on the N64. That took a while. By the time we got that up and running, they had come to us and said, "Since you were a quote-unquote flight simulation company," and they tossed us Pilotwings 64.

Dan Hess: Makes sense.

Okay. They were the ones that came to you with the idea for a flight simulator game in the first place?

Wes Hoffman: Yeah. It was basically a reboot of the original Pilotwings.

Dan Hess: Wes, did your SDK get used by all the other companies that were building their games?

Wes Hoffman: No, that was all internal.

Dan Hess: Everybody did their own SDK?

Wes Hoffman: Yeah. We didn't sell our technology.

Wow.

Wes Hoffman: For the flight simulation stuff, when we did the SDK for the flight simulators, we would get contracts with different governments around the world to build, say, an F-16 simulator for the Australian government, because they bought a bunch of F-16s from the US and we were part of the development package. We would sell them seat licenses for about 40 grand.

The military's a whole different world when it comes to scale.

Wes Hoffman: Oh yeah. That was cheap. We took out all the competition because we were like a third of their price.

Oh my god. I'm just imagining a $100,000 seat license too.

Wes Hoffman: Back then, yeah. When we did the video game SDK, that was just for internal development, because we had to be able to port it from the N64 to Xbox to PlayStation, and we had our own internal interface that was movable between all those platforms. As long as you used our software, the interface, the commands, and all the software was the same, or looked the same from the outward-facing side, but the technology behind it was different.

What was the name of that SDK? Did it have a name, the N64 SDK that you guys built? It wasn't UltraVision N64, was it?

Wes Hoffman: No, I don't even know if we actually gave it a name.

Dan Hess: The system before that was AudioWorks and VisionWorks.

Wes Hoffman: VisionWorks turned into Vega, and Vega turned into - yeah.

Oh, it wasn't Fusion 64, was it?

Wes Hoffman: No.

That was later. That was a commercial one, right?

Wes Hoffman: That was the one we used to do the commercial stuff. Yeah.

Okay. You were talking about the -

Wes Hoffman: In any case -

Yeah, continue, I'm sorry.

Wes Hoffman: To answer your question, we ended up building Pilotwings 64 because of that whole interaction with Nintendo and Silicon Graphics. Because of that relationship, we kind of made Oyagi's and Wada's careers, and now Wada is VP of Nintendo and Oyagi is VP of Nintendo of America. Yeah, they ended up doing pretty well.

Right.

Wes Hoffman: Of all the games that came up, they hired 12 companies to develop launch titles, and we were the only one that actually made it on time.

Yeah, no wonder they liked you so much.

Wes Hoffman: Yeah. That was 120 hours a week of me sleeping under my desk.

Dan Hess: Oh my god.

Wes Hoffman: Smelling like - I'm starting to smell myself. That's not good.

We have a shower in here. Oh my god. You were talking about early demos. I might have my questions a little off here, but there was, I believe, something called the Vampire Demo, which maybe became Ultra Copter 64. Those might be two different things. The Vampire Demo was on SGI, right?

Wes Hoffman: Yeah, it was an SGI demo, the original one. The original game we did that actually got Nintendo to even consider us as a software developer was called Egghead Shred. I had gone over to Europe to train the French military on how to use our software, and my minions back in Dallas - while the cat's away, the mice will play - decided to build this video game of an egg skiing down a hill with a mohawk. It was cool.

We actually got contracted out by this guy named Mick Flick, and Mick Flick is the heir to the Mercedes-Benz fortune, or BMW, one of the two. He was having a private party in New York and he'd flown all his friends over on a couple 747s, and they hired us to do this virtual reality Egghead Shred thing. I don't know how they found it.

Wow.

Wes Hoffman: When I got back to Dallas, I just pitched a fit. I'm like, "God, whenever I go away, you just bring the Egghead flying out, what the hell am I going to do?" Because of that, next thing you know, we're building video games for Nintendo.

Would that have been running on an SGI Onyx or something?

Wes Hoffman: Oh yeah. We had to have the - was it the Onyx, or wasn't it the smaller one after that?

Dan Hess: The Indigo.

Wes Hoffman: Indigo? I think it was the Onyx. I think it had to be back then.

Dan Hess: Was it the SkyWriter?

I would love to see a single screenshot of that egg with a mohawk. That sounds hilarious.

Wes Hoffman: Oh, you can find it. It's out there. You google "Egghead Shred" and I'm sure there are some images out there. It's great. If you can't find them, I've got some I can send you.

Anyway, yeah, that's kind of how we ended up doing that. With Nintendo we ended up doing - what was the other game we did? I know we did a bunch of stuff with Infogrames and EA. We kept getting pigeonholed into doing flight scenes.

Dan Hess: Beetle Adventure.

I love Beetle Adventure.

Wes Hoffman: Beetle Adventure Racing. Lego Grand Prix, Indy. Yeah, I'm sure you pulled up all the games. I don't even remember all the games we did.

Dan Hess: I just sent you the Egghead Shred link, by the way.

Oh, perfect. Oh, look, yes, they're calling it an N64 game, which I wouldn't -

Wes Hoffman: Which it definitely was not.

Okay, gotcha. Whoa. Oh my. Okay.

Wes Hoffman: 1993, maybe.

Oh my god. When you said an egg with a mohawk, I was imagining a stylized, designed character. It's like a purple orb with a -

Wes Hoffman: Yeah. We had the motion trackers on the hands, so you could kind of steer with -

Oh yeah. That's so fascinating. Those T-poses.

Wes Hoffman: They actually had the motion trackers on them, and then you just stand in front.

Oh, someone's preserved it. They've got it running. If you wanted to - ooh.

Wes Hoffman: Come on.

Gosh.

Wes Hoffman: That's got to be Aaron Hightower. Probably is.

Yeah, I'll have to look into that a little later. That's hilarious.

Wes Hoffman: That was early days. I don't know if Dan told you about working with me on the beginnings of Paradigm and the AudioWorks and CCTT and all that stuff. Back then, if you wanted to do surround sound - they didn't have surround sound in 1990. I called up Dan, because we had a contract with Ford Aerospace to develop this Close Combat Tactical Trainer, and they wanted to have surround sound. Dan hooked us up with an E-mu synthesizer, and we had to basically write our own software to do Doppler effects and volume effects and spinning, so it sounded like when a plane flew past you.

Right.

Wes Hoffman: Nobody did that back then.

Dan Hess: No, they were in mono. Fortunately, mono.

I could tell you're both from an audio company, because both of you describe sounds. Dan's been doing that all day. I'm like, yeah, okay, you guys definitely are audio people.

Wes Hoffman: Yes. I guess - oh, sorry, go ahead - this is the 30th anniversary of Pilotwings?

Dan Hess: Yes, it is.

Oh yeah. '96, yeah.

Wes Hoffman: We're not that old.

No, no, no. Not at all. You guys are young forever.

Wes Hoffman: You weren't even born when we wrote that game, were you?

Oh, do I look that young? Thank you, I appreciate that. Oh god. If I hadn't shaved, you would've seen all the gray hair at 36 years old.

Wes Hoffman: Fair enough.

You know what, Pilotwings was one of my first - I got Mario Kart 64 as one of my first N64 games, but I got Pilotwings very early on, because my parents never bought me violent games, but they didn't buy me the opposite of that either, which is the cheap shovelware stuff. They would always buy me sports and racing games. I don't like sports, but I like racing games. Getting off topic there, I'm sorry. I did want to ask about Ultra Copter.

Wes Hoffman: I think of all the games I did, the F1 game, the first F-1 World Grand Prix that Dan and I worked on, was probably my coup de grace.

Dan Hess: I think so too.

A lot of successful things, I feel, came together for - there's a lot in that game. It's very dense, in a high-quality way.

Dan Hess: I told him about all your struggles with AI, how difficult it was to get a competitive - that was everything for you - and how much effort -

The cars lining up on the road.

Wes Hoffman: Yeah, you can't have a 10-year-old kid who sucks at the game getting lapped by Michael Schumacher 10 times and coming in, "You're 10 laps behind." We had to take some creative licensing with the timing and the car speeds.

Right, right.

Wes Hoffman: I think the amount of technology we packed into that game at that time was incredible for what we had to use.

Dan Hess: I told him about Jason Rice, and I told him about -

Wes Hoffman: Oh, did you?

Oh yeah, I did hear about that. Yeah, that good story.

Wes Hoffman: He actually blew out his eyeballs, he was screaming so loud.

Oh, he did. Yeah, he was like - oh, they can hear me from down the hall.

Wes Hoffman: "I've never yelled at anybody in my life like that. He tried to blame me." 30 years later, he's still pissed off.

Dan Hess: I'm still pissed. He had the audacity to try to blame me. What an idiot.

Wes Hoffman: What an idiot.

Dan Hess: Me and Wes are literally driving home every night talking about this guy, he's messing everything up, and then he thinks his move is to blame me. I was like, wow.

No, that's rough. You've got to take responsibility for your actions.

Wes Hoffman: Did you tell him about John Vitale and all the audio?

Dan Hess: I told him about how he just came down and basically made the whole pit boss thing work, because I had an idea how to pull it off but I couldn't do it.

Wes Hoffman: If you think about how much stuff is going on vocally in that game, and it has to keep changing and moving around, and to pack that into what, 256K -

Dan Hess: Some stupid amount of memory. Yeah.

Yeah.

Dan Hess: I told him we got Gordon, the producer of the studio, to be our vocal talent.

The Scottish guy?

Dan Hess: We're like, "No, you're the guy." We talked him into it. Hey, Wes, he asked me about anecdotes from the games and dealing with Video System and stuff. I want you to tell him what it was like in those big meetings we'd have with our translator, and you'd have those offline conversations and then give us the answer.

Wes Hoffman: Yeah. We had these guys that came down from Japan and basically moved here for the duration, and they didn't speak very good English. Of course my Japanese wasn't particularly good either. We hired this girl who was a software engineer from Japan who was bilingual. She wasn't a particularly good software engineer, but she was bilingual, so it was kind of like, well, multitask.

Right, she did a double role.

Wes Hoffman: The key thing is -

Dan Hess: She worked for Paradigm.

Wes Hoffman: Yeah, she worked for us. We're paying her. We would go into these meetings and we'd be going through the design decisions that needed to be made that day. I'm like, "This isn't going to happen because of this, and we're going to have to change that, and I just want to make sure you're okay with that." They would have a 10-minute conversation, and I'd be like, "What'd he say?" "He said okay." It seemed like he said a lot more than that.

A hundred percent. "No, I'm just filtering it out for you."

Wes Hoffman: Yeah, there were definitely some issues with their concerns about my concerns about how we were actually understanding each other. Here's a funny story. When we were doing the F-1 World Grand Prix game, we had to get F1 licensing from all the different teams, and certain teams came with a license, like Ferrari, McLaren I think, and Williams maybe, at the time, and all the other teams you had to individually sign agreements with. They kept going, "Oh, we got an agreement. Oh, we don't. Nope, we got to change the helmets back. Nope, we got to make up a fake team. Now it's back to the real team. Now it's the fake team."

Things were always in flux. One of the things they actually proposed for the game was that if we wanted it to be realistic to F1, then the car should just occasionally break down.

Dan Hess: Blow the engine.

Wes Hoffman: The engine just blows up. Who the fuck is going to think that's fun? I'm winning the race, I've got to go, boom, the thing blows up.

No, I bought a video game. I didn't buy a real-life F1 car driving experience.

Wes Hoffman: Yes. That's how realistic they wanted it to be. I was like, "That's the stupidest freaking idea I've ever heard in my life." They wouldn't back down. Finally I'm like, "The two worst teams as far as engine failure in F1 this year have both been Japanese teams. We'll make sure they blow up. To be realistic, they're going to have to blow up at least every race or two."

Oh my god.

Does it actually do that in the final game?

Wes Hoffman: No, no. They decided that wasn't such a smart idea.

Dan Hess: Yeah, they backed off really quick on that one.

Right. Yeah, the second year, like, "Okay, I'll make this other company do it and then you can deal with them."

Dan Hess: They kept telling Wes, "That's F1, that's F1." When Wes presented the next day, he put it up on the board, the likelihood that this team is just less likely, and of course the Japanese - he presented all this, and Wes goes, "That's F1, that's F1." They're like, "Hmm."

Yeah. Just take the licensing money. Take the licensing money privately. Did you ever work with Nintendo of America directly, or was it all - Dan said it was mostly Nintendo Japan.

Wes Hoffman: We were working mostly with Nintendo Japan. Yeah, we were working with the home office. As far as the Pilotwings game goes, the guys they sent out to work with us were really critical to the success of that game, because we didn't know much about console video games. We could do the 3D, we could do the physics, we could do all that stuff, but as far as the gameplay, that was kind of our Achilles heel. They had this guy Oyagi come in, and he was their gameplay specialist. We just basically developed a bunch of tools for him to use to build the levels. It was like, well, we'll put these rings out there and we'll put these updrafts and Robatrons and balloons...

That sounds so fun, to be placing all that.

Wes Hoffman: He just got to go out there and design everything. My job was just to make it look pretty and give him the tools to put the gameplay together. Without that, I don't think it would've been nearly as much of a success. There really wasn't any design to the gameplay until we'd finished designing the levels. He got to go in there and use the tools to put them together into something that made sense.

Right. Those developers being in Texas, being from Japan, it must have been quite a culture shock for them. I'm just curious if you guys had any anecdotes or funny stories.

Dan Hess: Yeah. Wes.

Do you have any cowboy hats? Oh, I already know the answer. You guys have one.

Wes Hoffman: They did manage to total three cars.

Because they weren't used to driving in America?

Wes Hoffman: Driving in general, I don't know.

Gosh.

Wes Hoffman: Remember we were supposed to meet them at the sushi restaurant?

Dan Hess: Yeah, their favorite restaurant, Tokyo or whatever.

Wes Hoffman: Where are they? Yeah.

Man.

Wes Hoffman: That was challenging. Then we would take them out to go get groceries, because they basically were living here for six months. I'd ask them, "What's the one thing you miss most about Japan?" They were like, "Good rice."

Yeah, I bet. Oh my god, all the pre-washed, pre-cooked rice we have.

Wes Hoffman: Yes. This is coming from the Japanese grocery store.

Right. I love imagining - I grew up in California, and I'm imagining the mid-range apartment complexes. I just imagine a Japanese developer who's never been in America, "All right, time to go back to my little tiny Texas condo here."

Dan Hess: Yes.

Wes Hoffman: Yeah, that's pretty much what it was like. There was another project we had worked on prior to the N64 called Magic Edge. I don't know if you're familiar with that, but it was basically this guy - I forget what his background was, but he decided to do a kind of amusement park flight simulation ride, and stage it as a tournament thing where you signed up for leagues, and they had bars and restaurants. It was going to be like a Dave & Buster's for flight simulators.

Whoa.

Wes Hoffman: They hired us to do the original game, and we obviously didn't have anybody telling us what to do, we just came up with it on our own. Dan did the audio on that one too. They ended up opening up a Magic Edge in Mountain View, and then Namco in Japan actually had a fairly obscure but ridiculously hilarious amusement park called Wonder Eggs. They wanted us to come out there and do an install of this flight simulation video game. It was legit. We had hydraulic platforms and motion control and pods that you sat in, and there was a guy that controlled everything, and it actually was a pretty big hit when it first came out.

What was the name of that flight simulator?

Wes Hoffman: I think it was just called Magic Edge.

Oh, okay, it was just Magic Edge. Gotcha.

Wes Hoffman: Yeah.

That was the company that - I'm sorry, did that ever actually get put into Wonder Eggs, or was that just a proposal?

Wes Hoffman: Oh yeah. I went down to Tokyo to do the install on that. It was supposed to be three weeks, and it turned into three months, because we got out there and they hadn't poured the foundation for the building yet, and they wanted us to start building. We're like, "We really can't do a lot until we've got electricity." It took a while to get up and running, but we finally did. This was, I guess, '94-ish maybe, because it was pre-Nintendo. I could regale you with all kinds of hilarious stories about that experience.

That's so cool.

Wes Hoffman: In the Japanese business culture, you generally get promoted through the ranks at a certain rate. They end up with a glut of mid-level managers with nothing to manage.

Oh, good point.

Wes Hoffman: They stuck all these mid-level managers - each one of us had our own personal mid-level manager that followed us around for the three months we were there. I get that they were just trying to do their job, but then they started screaming at us, following us to the bathroom - "You cannot leave." It's like, it's four o'clock in the morning, dude, we're leaving. They're blocking the door. We bull-rushed them. We had to run out the door.

Wait, why were they stopping you from leaving?

Wes Hoffman: Because we weren't done yet. We'd only been working for 16 hours.

Oh, they were stopping you from leaving to go back to the hotel?

Wes Hoffman: Yes.

Oh my god. Blocking the door?

Wes Hoffman: We finally figured out that they couldn't leave if we were there. We had the hardware team that was doing all the hydraulics and the installation of the actual mechanical stuff, and then we were doing all the software stuff. We just started tag-teaming. The hydraulics guys would show up in the morning, and they'd leave at three o'clock in the afternoon. We'd show up at two o'clock in the afternoon, and we'd leave at four o'clock in the morning. These guys were just stuck there the whole time. They couldn't leave, and they would just follow us around.

These were Namco guys?

Wes Hoffman: Namco guys, yeah.

Oh my god.

Wes Hoffman: Yeah. I really feel sorry for what we did to them, because we weren't nice. They would follow us around and they would be asking us questions all the time, like, "What are you working on?" They wouldn't leave you alone.

They're probably just trying to be helpful.

Wes Hoffman: They were trying to act like they were contributing something to the equation, I guess.

Oh, true, true. Yeah, got to be useful.

Wes Hoffman: We just started messing with them. It was like, "Oh, Hoffman-san, what are you working on?" "I am jerking the gherkin." "Hoffman-san jerking the gherkin. Okay, very good, very good."

Oh my god.

Wes Hoffman: I could just see them all going back to the boardroom and doing their reports, flipping through their English-to-Japanese dictionary.

Yeah. From 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM.

Wes Hoffman: "He's pulling his pickle."

Oh my god. In some official logbook somewhere from 1994, "jerking the gherkin."

Dan Hess: Exactly. "2:30 to 3:30." When they were hanging around the development area too much and you put them in the pod.

Wes Hoffman: I don't really want to tell that story.

Dan Hess: It's my favorite thing you did to them. It's evil.

Wes Hoffman: After we sleep-deprived them for about two weeks, because they couldn't leave, the hardware guys finally got the hydraulics hooked up and working, and we had the software kind of hooked up and working. We said, "Now we need to test it all out and make sure that the software and the hardware are acting like a flight simulator. Why don't all you kids get in a pod, and we're going to turn the system on and see what happens."

These guys hadn't slept in forever, and they get in the pods, and we turn it on, and there was a little glitch in the software. The pod starts spanking up and down like a whale tail slapping on the surface of the - and we've got cameras in all the pods, right? We can see all these guys getting bounced around.

The pod's just like - I don't know what it's doing, but it ain't doing what it's supposed to be doing. "Oh, we should turn it off." I'm like, "No, give it a couple more minutes. It might come back online."

Is this a psychological test? Oh my god.

Wes Hoffman: Oh, it was, yeah. That was probably the meanest thing we did to them.

All in good fun, right? It's an amusement system, it's a ride, you're having fun.

Wes Hoffman: We got the game out on time, and it was there for the launch of the project, and it was a big hit. Yeah. There's definitely a big culture divide, business-wise, between the way Japan works and the way the US works.

Right. Is that what led to the friction with Video System, where they were just dropping something on you and being like, "Oh, your work ethic can handle it"?

Wes Hoffman: Yeah, because, I don't know, in Japanese culture there's no word for equal unless you're talking mathematics. If you got hired 10 minutes before me, you will always be my senior. I've always got to be respectful to you for the rest of my life for that 10 minutes. When you come in as a contractor, their attitude is like, "We own your ass, bitch." It doesn't really work like that.

No, no. You're dealing with Americans now. We're a meritocracy.

Wes Hoffman: I think it was the first time we dealt with Japanese, and probably the first time they dealt with Americans. We kind of had to feel each other out. At the end of the day, everybody was great, and they invited us back, and even Video System wanted me to come out to Japan for the Suzuka F1 race after all that.

What was the lawsuit about, if you don't mind? If you're not able to tell, or if you need to speak generally -

Wes Hoffman: Yeah, I probably shouldn't be talking about that.

No worries, no worries. Not going to push you. I did want to ask - was Viskit - no, Viskit was not related to Video System, it just has a VP in it.

Wes Hoffman: No, that was an SGI product. That was probably the beginning of the end of SGI, because one of the problems they had as a hardware manufacturer is you're only as good as the software. You've got your operating system, and then you've got people developing software on it. We were their lead software developer, and they basically came out and competed with us directly with Viskit.

Oh, okay.

Wes Hoffman: It's as if you were Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft came out and said, "We're going to build this thing called Excel, thanks a lot, appreciate your help, we don't need you anymore."

Right. That's a good comparison.

Wes Hoffman: At the end of the day, nobody wanted to build software for them anymore, because they thought they were losing market share because of the software, not because their computers cost $400,000.

Right. By like 1998, everyone's computers could do half of what SGI machines could anyway, and give it another 10 years.

Wes Hoffman: All the guys we were working with ended up - the VP of Silicon Graphics is now the president of NVIDIA. All the engineers we worked with when we were doing the original flight simulation stuff and the late days of Silicon Graphics, they all just moved over to NVIDIA. NVIDIA is basically like Silicon Graphics Rev 2.

Oh wow, I didn't know that. Thank you, I appreciate the insight there.

Wes Hoffman: Yeah. I probably should have invested in that company back when they started.

Yeah. Another project I wanted to ask about - I'm going to skip forward a little bit here, because I want to be considerate of our time, don't want to push you guys too much - is Skies on PC, the MMO that Paradigm was working on. Wes, would you be able to tell us about Skies, what you remember about the project?

Wes Hoffman: Skies?

Dan Hess: I don't remember Skies either. What is that?

Wes Hoffman: That might've been after we sold the company.

Actually, I think - Paradigm. Skies is an unreleased online - Michael Layne Turner, comics. No, maybe...

Dan Hess: I don't recognize that.

Wes Hoffman: Yeah, it's ringing a bell, but I mean, we sold the company to Infogrames in 2001, and that continued as an independent development lab for a couple years after that, but I wasn't keeping up with it. I don't know if they did something else, but I've never heard of that.

Maybe we have this misattributed, and if we do, I apologize, but I'll link this here for later. It was a first-person shooter that had angels and animals working beside each other. It was an MMO, moved from PC to Dreamcast, '98, '99. Yeah, that's strange. That might be misattributed, because if you guys don't remember that, then that might've been a misattribution.

Wes Hoffman: No, we got halfway through a Dreamcast game and then they shut down the Dreamcast.

Whoa, what game was that?

Wes Hoffman: Oh boy, I'd have to go look that up. That was a long time ago and a lot of brain cells ago. A lot of brain cells.

Do you know what staff member I would be able to ask more about that Dreamcast project?

Wes Hoffman: Mike might remember that, yeah.

Gotcha. Yeah, this would've been '99-ish. I'll ask Mike.

Dan Hess: You do another interview with Mike and you've done three of the founders.

Yeah, that'd be wonderful. Absolutely.

Wes Hoffman: Yeah, him or maybe Dave Gatchel.

Dave Gatchel.

Dan Hess: Yeah, Dave would know.

Wes Hoffman: We actually had a development Dreamcast, and then they ended up shutting down the hardware before our game came out.

Right, like 2001, I think. Yeah.

Wes Hoffman: Yeah.

Do you know who I could speak to about the Japanese localization process of Pilotwings 64, or was that not even touched, not handled by you guys?

Wes Hoffman: You mean - were you over there? We did a French version, a German version, a Spanish version, and a Japanese version.

Were those games - your N64 games - bug-tested by Mario Club in Japan, or did you have local Western bug testers?

Wes Hoffman: We would send the ROMs to Video System. When we did N64, it was going directly to Nintendo, and they were getting paid by the bug.

Right.

Wes Hoffman: They would've been handling that. They'd jump into the same wall 3,000 times until they could finally pop through it. Who the fuck is ever going to do that?

No one's ever going to do that.

Wes Hoffman: "I just made five bucks, and now it's a bug."

I speak to a lot of testers as well, and if you ask them, they're like, "No, we have to do that, it has to be done." These are the kinds of energies that make a good game.

Dan Hess: We couldn't do what they do now.

Wes Hoffman: I think one of the funniest bug reports we ever got - we would get these reports and they'd have A, B, C, D grade bugs, and then we'd have to whittle it down that day, fix as many as we could, send back the next ROM -

Triaging.

Wes Hoffman: Late run through testing. Then you get back these bug reports, and of course they're coming from Japan, so not always the best English. One of them was like, "Please remove Jesus from the cave." I'm like, "I don't think Jesus is in the cave."

Dude, oh, I'm so glad you brought that up.

Wes Hoffman: Do you remember this? It was the ice cave.

The ice island. As far as I understood that - people talk about that now, and people bring it up like, "Oh, they intentionally put Jesus in the game and had to remove it." It was just a texturing error.

Wes Hoffman: It was a mirror texture thing.

Yeah, just a random texture. It just happened to look like Jesus. During development they actually saw that it looked like Jesus.

Wes Hoffman: They saw Jesus. Yeah, that was one.

That Jesus is only in the Japanese version, but he's still in the American version. It sounds like they just changed the Japanese one and left Jesus in. Make room for Jesus.

Wes Hoffman: Baby Jesus.

I'm sorry, continue.

Wes Hoffman: Then when we were doing the F1 game, we were submitting it to Nintendo for approval, and they had that extra level at the end through the volcano. I don't know if you ever got to that.

No.

Wes Hoffman: There's a bonus level at the end of that F1 game where you get to do an F1 race in Hawaii and you drive through a volcano, and it's all a bunch of fantasy stuff. It was one of the Easter eggs you could get. We decided to name the track, being in Hawaii and all, "Come On, I Want to Lei Ya."

Did they catch that right away, or did that take a little while?

Wes Hoffman: No, no. It was the last bug we had to fix. We were done with everything, and we get this bug report that says, "Please rename the bonus track to something different. It sounds too much like 'Come on, I want to lay you.'" We're like, "What?"

Yeah. I want to know what Japanese guy at the bug-testing office knew just enough English. I can only imagine they'd been saying that name for weeks and weeks and not getting it.

Wes Hoffman: It sounds very Hawaiian.

Yeah, right. Oh my gosh. The volcano track and the fantasy elements - that reminded me of Beetle Adventure Racing. I wanted to ask about the planned sequel to Beetle Adventure Racing. My research said there were three maps, dynamic gameplay features, but it was canceled by EA. I think EA pulled out.

Wes Hoffman: I don't know the details behind all that. I came in on that game as kind of a last-minute consultant, so I just worked on their special effects and some of their optimizations for the database, but I don't know as far as the business side of what happened with EA. I know we did some other stuff with EA after that, but I don't think - yeah, I knew there was a sequel planned for Pilotwings that never happened.

What do you remember about that one, if you don't mind me asking?

Wes Hoffman: I just remember that it kept getting tossed around and tossed around, and we were actually ramping up the development team to do it, because it sounded like it was actually going to happen, and then at the last minute they just pulled the plug and said they didn't want to do it.

Dan Hess: They brought in an American team that time. The guy that interfaced was an American. Do you remember him? Tall guy.

Wes Hoffman: Darren?

Dan Hess: That sounds right. He had reddish hair, brownish-blond hair.

Wes Hoffman: Darren was kind of like their handler when he was in America.

Dan Hess: The guy I dealt with told me he wanted the soundtrack to be modeled after - oh god.

Guitars?

Dan Hess: No, yes and no. Who did "Ants Marching"?

"Teddy Bears' Picnic"? No.

Dan Hess: No, not that.

You said "Ants Marching," I thought "Teddy Bears' Picnic."

Dan Hess: '90s song. Huge '90s artist. He's from Australia or something.

Wes Hoffman: Dave Matthews.

Dan Hess: Dave Matthews. He gave me a reference and it was all Dave Matthews stuff. He must've been a huge Dave Matthews fan. I spent all this time trying to get a database that would be changed. I had the horns and all this stuff in it. Then they canceled the game, and I'm like, "You've got to pay me for my development, guys. This is a lot of sound design, making all this thing work." What a joke. That's what I remember.

Wes Hoffman: Hey guys, I need to get going. Do you have anything else you want to ask me real quick before I get going?

Yeah, just looking back on it, out of everything you've done in the game industry, what are you most proud of? You've done quite a lot.

Wes Hoffman: I think there was a database I called Westworld, and it came out as Performer Town, and it ended up being the de facto standard for computer graphics back in the early '90s. To this day, nobody knows any of the other stuff I did, but they know Pilotwings and they know Performer Town. That was really groundbreaking stuff back then, and it was just a lot of fun to be on the cutting edge of technology, dealing with a bunch of really smart, talented guys, and just having that whole experience. You can't replace that.

No, right. You'll never get the '90s again. It really was a special time.

Dan Hess: Absolutely.

Wes Hoffman: It was the birth of 3D, and kids these days are just spoiled rotten. They've got per-pixel shaders, and I'm talking about the database designers.

Dan Hess: Right.

Wes Hoffman: Yeah. It was just a really fun time to be in the business, because everything was new. We were inventing everything from scratch, creating that whole scene. I'm really proud of the fact that a lot of the people who worked for me have gone off and started their own video game companies and had their own success. That makes me feel pretty good.

It sounds like you treated your staff well.

Wes Hoffman: We hired good people. Yeah, they were all very talented except for one.

Very good talent. I got that story. Unless you're talking about Dan.

Wes Hoffman: All right, guys.

Hey, thank you so much. I'll be in touch with the email. Thank you so much again. It was a super pleasure meeting you.

Wes Hoffman: Yeah. You've got my email, so you know how to get a hold of me. If you have any other questions or anything, please just reach out.

Thank you so much, Wes. I appreciate it.

Wes Hoffman: Okay, Ashley, we'll see you.

Dan Hess: Bye, bud.

Wes Hoffman: Bye, bud. What do you think of my hair? It's getting kind of crazy, isn't it?

I love it. It's freaking awesome, dude.

Wes Hoffman: I'm going with everything. I'm chilling. I'm going with the Big Lebowski look.

Dan Hess: Down there it rains randomly, so you never know, right?

Wes Hoffman: I don't know if it's a Big Lebowski or more like the Einstein. It could be the Garfunkel, I don't know.

Dan Hess: Yes, yes. All right, guys, we'll talk to you soon.

Wes Hoffman: Bye, thanks so much.

Dan Hess: Oh, that was great.

Oh, that was cool. Thank you so much for bringing him on.

Dan Hess: Oh yeah, that's my brother right there. We told ourselves when we were 12 years old that we were going to build video games, and we did. A lot more, but good stuff.

No, you built a legacy for yourself. That's crazy. You were going to build a legacy anyway, but we were talking about this at the beginning of the conversation, that emotional video games carry legacy so strongly.

Dan Hess: They do. More than music.

Yeah. Something I always love when speaking to musicians is hearing their thoughts on community reaction. Music is nostalgia, and gameplay and programming are there, but music is so much more accessible. We have MP3 files and soundtracks. If you want to play an N64 game, you either buy the original console or you figure out how to do emulation, and it's not as accessible as music. I also think game music is very transplantable into our everyday lives. Think of how many people have nostalgia with Birdman alone, just from the game, but think of all the people that have nostalgia with Birdman driving somewhere, or seeing some different atmosphere.

Dan Hess: A lot of people tell me that Hang Glider played when they became pilots - on their first flights they played Hang Glider. Hang Glider has a lot of nostalgia for achievements that people have done outside in real life that are related to flying somehow. People are like, "I played Hang Glider when I had my first -"

My pilot school?

Dan Hess: All that stuff. I get hundreds of people telling me that. Literally crazy.

That's so freaking cool.

Dan Hess: Outside of video games, the really wacky things people will remember that I've done - just crazy. I did this show, I don't know if I told you, I did Star Search with my band in the '90s, which was the American Idol of its time. It was a giant network music and talent show, hosted by Ed McMahon, who used to be on Johnny Carson. It was his show, and he'd bring acts from all over the country. They talked my '90s band into doing it. We turned him down - "We're not playing Star Search" - but they pitched this as, "Come on down here, we pay for everything, we film it at Disney World, we'll pay for all your significant others, the whole band. When's the last time you had an all-expenses-paid vacation with your band?" We're like, "Yeah, never," right?

Anyway, we ended up winning seven times, so we were down there forever. In the process, we were hanging out with little JT - Justin Timberlake was on the show, he was 10 or 11 years old, hanging out with us. Dave Chappelle hung out with us - he was a 19-year-old comic, right?

Yeah. You're telling me he was a nice guy, right?

Dan Hess: Super, and super shy. Then we beat Beyoncé. My band beat Beyoncé.

Oh.

Dan Hess: It was Destiny's Child, but they weren't Destiny's Child yet. That kind of weird stuff that you just don't - just like Pilotwings, in the moment I had no idea or appreciation of it, and then years later you find out all this stuff, that the things you did were actually impactful for these other reasons that you were not aware of.

Right. Yeah, people make their own meaning. The meaning that you put into the work when you first created it is different from the meaning that they're getting out of it. It's still meaningful.

Dan Hess: Yeah, absolutely.

In my studio back in Detroit. That Magic Edge game, they hired me to do an entire soundtrack, and I went in the studio and recorded live drums, guitars, the whole thing. It was slamming. It was hard. There you go, baby. Is that the Panasonic? Which one is that? Yeah, that's a Panasonic. That's what we used. We used to use the 3700 DAT deck, but that's one after. That was the standard.

Whoa. Okay, I got the right one then.

Dan Hess: That is the standard. That chip set was used in the E-mu samplers too. They used the same chip set, which is why I was really excited when that sampler came out, because that was the standard of the industry, that Panasonic, baby. I have the whole soundtrack I created that they ended up not - they said, "Okay, we're going to do this whole soundtrack," and I went slamming guitars, heavy music, really high energy. I went in the studio and recorded all this stuff. Then they're like, "Oh, we don't have the budget to put an extra sound engine in just for music, so can you narrow it down to just two bars?"

14 songs.

Dan Hess: 14 or 15 songs, whatever. Full length, and you want just two bars of music now. It was so bad, because that same thing would play in that cockpit over and over when these people were training. I warned them, I'm like, "Guys, if you use that - I know the track you're choosing, it's got a melody in it, it's fine for about 30 seconds, but after that you're going to drive people crazy." The funny thing is, that melody - when Nintendo reached out to Paradigm and that whole thing was starting off, they're like, "Hey, do you have audio?"

No way.

Dan Hess: He goes, "Hey, do you have a music guy?" Wes was like, "Yeah, we got a guy, and he's very familiar with our system, he's helped design everything here." They're like, "Do you have any music you could play?" Wes is like, "Yeah, that Magic Edge thing." He plays them that two-bar or four-bar, whatever it was - you might recognize this melody, see if you do. It goes, "Da, da, da, da, da, da, da."

Oh, wow. You had told me about it, but I didn't know it was actually the one that got chosen, the two bars that turned into Hang Glider later.

Dan Hess: Yeah. Wada asked me in our first meeting, he goes, "I want to play something for you." He took me over to a computer and he played that, the track that I'd created. I'm like, "Oh yeah, I remember that, I like that." He goes, "Can you turn that melody into something?" It became Hang Glider.

The original demo track for that, before you had the two bars cut out and used in Magic Edge - I'm sorry, I keep getting confused with Magic Gate, I keep second-guessing myself. That demo that got the two bars pulled out of it - did that kind of sound like the final Hang Glider, or was that radically different and Hang Glider was just built off of -

Dan Hess: All guitars and big drums and pull bass. It was a big band thing. He liked that melody. Wada was talented, man. He had a good ear. He knew that melody was strong. He's like, "I'm going to use this for something in this game." Did you ever go to my YouTube page and play the other songs that are on there?

A couple. You had a few. You had Spy Hunter and -

Dan Hess: You should ask Wes about Spy Hunter. Oh my god.

Oh yeah, you did. [pulls out Dan's YouTube page] Is it Pilotwings 64 Rocket Belt Demo? No...

Dan Hess: You listened to that one? I created that as a demo of our sound library that me and John Vitale - I talked about him - had created to sell to people to make music with. I created that demo, and somebody heard it and said, "Man, you should use that for Pilotwings." It became the Rocket Belt. Way before that, it was just this -

Oh, wow.

Dan Hess: That funky little piece.

Every note.

Dan Hess: That "Funky Little Fusion Thing" that's there. I don't know if you see that. Are you in the videos that I posted? The "Funky Little Fusion Thing."

The "Funky Little Fusion Thing," yeah.

Dan Hess: I created that right when I was creating Pilotwings, and if you listen to it, you can tell. Play a little bit of that if you can.

Oh, absolutely. Right off the bat. Yeah, with the pianos and just that really funky bass.

Dan Hess: Yes.

So powering, keeping the beat going. I like that picture of you too. That's a good one.

Dan Hess: Oh, that's in the studio. "Soundcheck 313" also has a lot of Pilotwings vibes. It's harder, but it's just a jam. Halfway through, the horns come in, and it kind of reminds me of Pilotwings.

I can absolutely hear the - oh, there are photos in the background of this slideshow you're in. Some of these are black and white. Is that from back in the day? There's a black and white photo where there's a Sabian cymbal, you're in front of the Roland VK, you're in a studio. Yeah, I'll have to look into that later. That's cool. I did want to touch on the music you did for Spy Hunter. Oh, I see that one. Yeah, that black and white photo - where's that from?

Dan Hess: That's in the studio at Harmonie Park, downtown Detroit. It's me in front of the Roland VK and my Kurzweil underneath it, right, and a girl sitting on a couch behind me, right? That's what you're talking about?

Yeah.

Dan Hess: Yeah. That guy who's standing up there to the right in the lighter shirt, that's Mitch Albom. He's a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and radio personality in Detroit, and he's written several bestsellers. My buddy Brian Pastoria is next to him. He owned the studio and was just a giant in the music industry in Detroit, and he just passed unexpectedly - losing him... Then my girlfriend at the time on the couch, and her dad, a friend of mine, on the couch. Yeah, that was recording a song downtown.

I like it. That's a good photo. Spy Hunter on the PS2 - why didn't those tracks get used?

Dan Hess: Those are the demos I sent. Do you remember I told you how - I don't know if I did tell you, maybe I didn't.

Oh, maybe. I apologize, I should have had the original interview printed up next to me.

Dan Hess: What happened - I think I did tell you - the president he mentioned, Dave Gatchel, reached out to me before Spy Hunter. Wes was the director of the game, and we were very excited to do Spy Hunter, because we played that game in the arcades a lot as kids. We're like, "Oh wow, we get to make Spy Hunter 3D." We were so excited. Dave reaches out, "Hey, we're going to have a bidding process on this." I go, "Okay, fine." Then it came back cheap. That's how all that went down. I sent my demos in, but they went another direction, and then that bit them in the ass really badly.

That was one of the demos, and I have more someplace. I have all those. That was the - what is it called? It's a Mancini track. The "Peter Gunn" theme. Yeah. That was all done on my K2500. That's literally all just coming out of one board, that demo thing.

Wow. Good stuff.

Dan Hess: Back in the day, my friend.

I've only got about four more questions here, so I appreciate the patience again. You're so cool. Could you tell us about that Patreon project where you're-recording Pilotwings 64? Did we talk about that last time?

Dan Hess: I gave up on it, because as you know, to have a YouTube channel be successful, or a Patreon, you need to be active. I just didn't have the time. I was doing all these other projects, and I just thought, I'll throw it out there and see what kind of interest level there is. There was some interest, but not enough to warrant it. I said, "Okay, if this reaches however many people, then I'll trigger and do the rest of it." I lost interest. I just didn't chase it enough. Nobody's fault but my own. I just didn't have the time to invest in it and promote it to get people charged up.

I can help on the promotion side if you're ever interested in doing that again. Yeah, I have friends at five or six news organizations, and those friends can reach out to other friends.

Dan Hess: Okay, we appreciate it.

I should tell you that I reached out. I decided, now that I'm done with this drum project I've been on all these years - so many people reached out to ask me if I'd play these video game conventions, and I've always had to turn them down, because I'm also touring, doing piano shows and solo shows all over the country. I thought, this is the 30th-year anniversary, screw it. I reached out to the people who had been reaching out to me. Dak is one of them - he's one of the organizers of MAGFest.

Oh, okay. Very cool.

Dan Hess: I said, "Dak, I'm thinking of doing it." He's like, "No way, let's do it." I reached out to -

You're a legend.

Dan Hess: Charlie Rosen. Charlie is a legend. Charlie - the 8-Bit Big Band, I mean, come on. That's the pinnacle, I think, of new video game music. He is keeping that alive too. He's immortalizing all of these composers by redoing their music in a really cool format. Anyway, I reached out to Charlie, he's like, "Oh, absolutely," and he hooked me up with some people too. My original thought was, I want to go out and play the Japanese conventions.

He's got me set up to try to do MAGFest first. He goes, "I want to get you to Japan, but let's try to do the American stuff first, it'd be easier." Then he goes, "Hey, are you available October 24th?" I go, "Why?" He goes, "I want you to come out to Philadelphia. I have a concert, and I'll put a couple of your songs in the lineup. If you show up, I'll bring you up on stage." I think I'm going to do it, go to Philadelphia in October and hang out with Charlie and the 8-Bit Big Band. I'm going to be more active, and I'm going to try to go to more of these conventions this year, and if not this year, then next year. I might be a little late for this year because they already have their stuff set, but you're going to see me out there, dude, I think.

That's very cool.

Dan Hess: It's been years, and I haven't done it, so I'm going to do it.

Yeah, that'll be huge. Shoot. When is MAGFest this year?

Dan Hess: Oh god, I want to say one's in January. One of the shows was definitely in January. There's MAGFest West and MAGFest East, and the East one in Maryland is the one he wants me to go to. Do you know Ian Cowell?

The name is familiar. I don't know him personally.

Dan Hess: Yeah, hold on, he's a California guy too. Let's see, what's Ian's band? I think you know this. What is the name of his band?

What's his name? Ian?

Dan Hess: Ian Cowell, C-O-W-E-L-L. He does all remakes of video game music.

Right. Yeah, okay, yeah.

Dan Hess: He's a great guy. A ton of fun. He'd be good at it.

Very cool.

Dan Hess: He's a very cool guy. Anyway, I plan on doing some stuff with him, and just getting out there and experiencing the stuff live for a change.

Please. You'd make a lot of people happy that way.

Dan Hess: That's funny, man. That's crazy stuff. Really is.

You literally are a legend.

Dan Hess: It's nuts.

Yeah. I think I said this last interview - maybe this is just my generation, my age - but you were one of the formative composers of my childhood, in terms of not just video game music, but music in general. I never questioned it, because most of my music on this level when I was a kid was all Japanese music. I hate to say this, but oftentimes, just with experience and the way that the industry turned out, the Japanese music we were getting was sometimes better in certain aspects.

For you to blend into that so seamlessly that I never even questioned it - of course I knew it was from an American, because I was like, this would never be Japanese, but I was like, this is so good, and it's up to the same quality standards that I've expected with everything else that I've got, that Nintendo has gotten me used to. There's Nintendo polish. To hear that so much of that was - Nintendo did polish the audio, but that was largely you. It was just very impressive.

Dan Hess: Thanks, man. Thank you, I appreciate that.

Lastly, I'm going to ask the same question that I asked Wes: what are you most proud of, looking back? You've accomplished so much - actually, maybe I already know the answer, but out of everything, what stands out the most to you?

Dan Hess: The fact that my music has touched people around the world and influenced them to listen to kinds of music that they probably wouldn't have listened to as a kid. Some people never get into any kind of jazz or funk or whatever you would call the music - soul, a lot of soul stuff, my influences. To think of those seven and eight-year-old kids on the floor listening to that stuff and popping their little heads and grooving, that's major for me. I didn't even know what happened. I didn't follow the game. I didn't follow what happened after. I didn't know until 2008, 2010, whenever it was, that somebody went looking on YouTube, reading hundreds of thousands of posts of people, what it meant to them. It's overwhelming.

There's less now, because Jason Church has a website where he's posted every song I've done. His is still out there, but there was another one that also had every song I had, and that one had tons of messages that are forever gone, because he pulled everything.

It might still be on the Wayback Machine.

Dan Hess: Yeah, definitely, you're right, maybe I'll be able to find it. It might be out there someplace. I would like to see that, because that was the first one I saw, and I was blown away when I saw how many comments - there were a hundred thousand comments on Birdman alone. I'm like, what? It was insane. I would sit there for hours just scrolling down, and they were from all over the world. I had to translate many of them. So many from Central and South America, all over Europe, all over Indonesia, all over the freaking world. It's nuts to me.

You're part of this planet.

Dan Hess: That's crazy, dude. That's the one thing. Out of all the technical things I've done - I literally designed the sound system, AudioWorks, that started Paradigm Simulation, and I'm proud of that, and I'm proud of all the work I did with Wes and the team and Mike and all those guys that were brilliant. Like he said, it was like the powerhouses of brainiacs in that room, and they were so much fun to be around too. We just did some great stuff together. I'm certainly proud of me and John, how we did that in-ear pit boss for Formula One that nobody gives a shit about, because they don't appreciate it. Now you just record it. Now you go to a studio and record every damn thing.

No, there's no origami anymore.

Dan Hess: No, there's not. There's no more of this.

Yeah. Hey, you know what? Maybe with this interview, people start paying attention to the pit boss system more.

Dan Hess: I doubt it, but it's cool talking about it.

Right, right.

Dan Hess: I've got to get a Zip drive. If I find the original Pilotwings database - I recorded it on my Kurzweil first, and it was full bandwidth, 44.1, uncompressed, and all those songs were coming out of that sounding great before I had to port them over and compress the crap out of them. I might be able to find them still. I definitely have some of the Formula One stuff on there. Maybe if I find something cool, I can send it to you.

The Pilotwings 64 OST rework - I know so many N64 audio nerds who would be like, "Let's get three of us together and we could do that in a month." Obviously it would take a little more time on your end, but I just wanted to let you know, if you ever do want to do that, I have so many connections with so many talented programmers and N64 coders. I will make it happen.

Dan Hess: Speaking of that, I'll give a shout-out to one of them. If you do a search on Pilotwings 64 - I'm going to find it, I want to make sure I say this properly - she's a game developer. She worked on, god, one of those huge video games, I'm trying to think what she worked on. Anyway, she is a total amazing audio nerd. Her YouTube channel is Video Game OST HQ. She created her own software to interpolate the soundtracks coming off the ROM, because the ones that are posted are going off emulators and suck on audio.

She deep-dove and did the best renditions of any of the songs I've ever heard - not just mine, but everybody's. If you ever want to hear what it would've sounded like coming out of the Nintendo 64, go to her YouTube channel and type in the game you want to hear. She's got so many of them transferred. You can go listen to mine, and I have comments on every song as well - I did that for her. She's a badass. Just an amazing woman. L. Spiro.

I'll also lean on you for that for Mike and Dave. That'd be pretty cool.

Dan Hess: Oh yeah, for sure. You've got to get Mike for sure. He knows it all. He's got a steel-trap mind. He remembers all those little things.

Thank you so much, Dan. This was a lot of fun.

Dan Hess: Hey, whenever, whenever. All good. A pleasure, bud.

I really appreciate it.

Dan Hess: See you, man.

Have a good night.

Dan Hess: You too.